"Huh. I guess that's both more and less frustrating. How do you tell who people worshipped or whether they did it hard enough?"

"It is part of my function that such things are visible to me; the facts that you are Chaotic Good and that you pray to Eilistraee are as obvious to me as the color of your skin or your magical aura. I do not know what you pray to her about, or the contents of your mind in any more generality."

"Huh. Does alignment switch abruptly when it switches?"

"It does not shift abruptly. There are infinite shades of grey between white and black, but my sight is fine enough to know where good turns to neutral turns to evil, and I judge accordingly."

"Huh. No discretion?"

"The division is objective. If the Lord of the Dead found that I had chosen to 'fudge the numbers', as it were... the consequences would be dire."

"Having you do this job seems gratuitious, then, it doesn't really need a person doing it. I guess if somebody's terrible it might have seemed like a simple way to get a sorting spell which also reported back and stuff?"

"Indeed," the Reaper says, "though the god who made that decision now lies dead, and I believe that like so many other things, the current Lord of the Dead retains me mostly out of inertia."

"Ugh. It'd be fun to swap you and Pharasma."

There's the faintest suggestion of a smile in his voice. "I doubt she would like it."

"Yeah, well, she has lots of discretion and uses it to suck."

"I am... familiar with the type," the Reaper says in a tone of ancient loathing. "Myrkul had a great deal of discretion as well. He used it mostly to design inventive punishments for those who strayed from the gods. Then he came up with the Wall of the Faithless. The one great regret I am permitted to voice is that I was not involved with his death."

"Are the gods even a really coherent bloc here?"

He pauses. "No, but... each god was either installed in their position or at the very least allowed to retain their position by the Overdeity Ao. When they fight... it often seems more like the squabbling of siblings than the wars of mortals."

"Has Eilistraee got a great line about this, because I have this streak of being pleasantly surprised about her that I'm enjoying."

"As a lesser deity, she does not have the power or freedom to act with impunity, and nearly all of her energy is focused on countering assaults by her mother and the other Dark Seldarine gods. In truth, powerful though she is compared to you, she is a small light against a great darkness."

Nod.

The Reaper does not break the silence.

"Thank you very much. I'm ready to go back now."

"You are always welcome here, Belmarniss," he says, and-

-she's back in the Underdark.

Jojo is still watching her somewhat anxiously, as he was, from her perspective, forty days ago.

"All better!"

He blinks.

"I- good! Just like that?"

"I was there for forty subjective days but yeah, on this end just like that."

"Oh."

He considers.

"That must be rather disorienting, but I'm glad you're free of the geas?"