"Yeah I see that. I suppose I should restrain my enthusiasm for Abadar a little bit more, too. I've also never been a fan of the strict focus on traditionalism he's got going on here in Osirion even if it's not a core tenet or anything. The gender thing is particularly irritating, personally."

"You find the gender thing irritating, huh."

"I was born female. I use a spruced up version of Alter Self every now and then to turn female again, because sometimes it feels more accurate than this. It was a euphemism."

"Oh, huh. I withdraw, uh, twenty percent of my sarcasm."

"I'm still pretty sure Axis is a really great project and given the ratios of 'a few decades over here' to 'the rest of eternity over there'—the gender thing doesn't extend to the afterlife, as far as Osirian theology is concerned once you lose the ability to bear children you lose all the responsibilities so everyone has no genders over there—well, it was a nightmare growing up and I hate it with a passion and I would love to have a plan to burn the whole idea with fire but on balance I think it's still probably not a great idea to... actually try... to do anything about it on this life."

"Drow've got it the other way around and slightly worse, though I'm not actually positive you could get drow boys to agree they have it worse."

"Maybe I could pretend to be a drow boy, do some science to it and figure out if it was worse, having both perspectives."

"Oh, I think if you are a random drow boy with no drow family and you manage to avoid getting murdered or kidnapped it's actually definitely better, most of the - stuff - doesn't affect an isolated tourist much."

"Oh? What is the stuff?"

"If I wanted to get married to a drow boy I'd go pay some guy's mom for him and - 'legally' is a squirrely concept downstairs but insofar as it is one I would legally own the guy. But if you don't in fact have a mom or a wife or an interested aunt or anything, and look like you know where you're going, a drow boy can go around without a chaperone and do business and sleep around and stuff."

"Huh. That is in fact nicer than being a woman here. Part of the reason why I wear this is to make people double-take when I'm female-presenting instead of assuming I must be doing something wrong."

"Does that work?"

"Most of the time! People at least wonder. But it is pretty remarkable how much they change depending on what I'm presenting as even with the robes."

"I get a wide variety of reactions varying in racism and sexism. I used to sometimes put on my other color palette but I've stopped, it's a third level slot and doesn't help that much."

"I would imagine it must help more elsewhere?"

"I haven't tried it in every town on the planet but while it does help with the sun it doesn't make me look that much less foreign and doesn't make me know anything about surface elf customs besides 'going extinct'."

"That makes sense. I have personally met very few elves but in general you do seem to want children a lot less than, well, at least humans."

"It's not 'don't want children' it's 'don't like babies'. Surface elves address this by going extinct. Drow address it with slavery."

"Is birth as horrible for you all, or is it better but the babies themselves very uninteresting? I think if humans didn't have a drive for babies we would be very hard-pressed to want to go through birthing them."

"Second thing I think, but I haven't had any personally, I just hear it's not that bad if you go through a bottle of wine while you're laboring."

"Yeah that makes sense. Do you also not have any instincts or cultural institutions around... raising a family? Passing on your legacy, et cetera?"

"Drow can be real parental in I think a fairly conventional range of ways! With kids that, like, talk. If they're just kind of oozy grubs we are not keen."

"Still, it doesn't feel like that much of a sacrifice to have a couple of—oh. They're babies for much longer than humans, aren't they."

"Bout six times as long, yeah."

"Okay I can see how that would be a pretty big deterrent."