"'m fine -" he glances around, figures out where they are. "- yeah, I'm fine," with more conviction. "Maybe we can guilt Fazil into un-retiring if we bleed on his carpet." He sits up.  

"He'd probably just make a reproachful face at me till I Prestidigitated it." She begins to Prestidigitate the carpet.

"And then offer us biscuits. And show us the baby." Sigh. He stands up so as to aid in or at least not further hinder the prestidigitation of the carpet. 

"Let's team up with a different cleric next time. Maybe that little guy with the Iomedae symbol on his face if he's still itinerant around the Worldwound. I wanna ask him why on his face. If we go back at all. I think we should take at least a week off though. Mom won't mind if you want to crash on the couch."

"Niss, your boyfriend there almost died, I think now you have to let him sleep in your bed," coos Sovi.

"Please be warned not to cast Speak with Animals," says Belmarniss to Hagan, "lest you become able to understand anything my sister might have to say."

"I nearly die four times a day," he says to Sovi, "that's how often a cleric can patch me up if he's passable at his job. If I got to sleep in Belmarniss's bed every time I'm not sure I'd have time to do anything else.... we could animate the bed like a floating carpet, and I could shoot things from there and get shot in there. It'd be very efficient."

"Well, you don't have to sleep," says Sovi.

"Sovi."

"Oh come on."

"Don't you have exactly two cantrips to practice or something."

"Girls," sighs Chal.

"In Osirion boys only marry girls once the girls are ready to stay home and raise children, and Belmarniss isn't going to be ready to do that until she has battled all the elder gods, so we've got a ways to go."

"I'm hoping me and the elder gods can come to a peaceful resolution," says Belmarniss lightly.

"In Osirion aren't you not even allowed to be in a room together," says Sovi. "Also aren't you chaotic?"

"We're allowed to be in the room together because you are here supervising and making sure we will not be remotely in the mood to snuggle. ...also I might conceivably break that rule sometimes, because I am chaotic."

"Oh, is that why she's so uptight, is it a tragic snuggle deficit," says Sovi. Belmarniss groans and flops herself onto the couch and Sovi giggles her way out of the room. Chal pats Belmarniss on the knee and then goes to answer the doorbell; he can be heard up the stairs murmuring about the neighbors' missing package he didn't get.

"Figure we should head back north? I won't pretend I'm having fun but we're making pretty good time on the levelling front. And - I'm not gonna find the thing I miss anywhere else, I wouldn't expect."

"I do think we should take at least a week off but Sovi presents a compelling case for doing it anywhere but here."

"We could swing by Sothis. Be introduced to relevant and irrelevant babies. - the pharaoh finally has some, reportedly."

"Do you want to introduce me to royal grubs?"

"You make the best faces at peoples' babies but I will not inflict them on you. I do want to see Fazil and Mahdi and say congratulations in person and so on."

"Sure. We can take our week off there. Tomorrow when I can teleport again."

"Are you sure you can't teleport again if you try very hard and believe in yourself, I hear that works sometimes for sorcerers."

"What if I can and I'm off by four hundred miles, do you want to camp in the desert?"

"Can't scare me with camping in deserts, I've camped in all the deserts. - this is admittedly comfier, at least when sisterless."

"She'll probably go out once the sun sets."

"Hmm. Guess if we camp in a desert you can't go look at the Starstone like other girls windowshop at jewelry stores."

"It's terribly positioned for window-shopping, what with the lack of windows, I feel very cheated."

"Very rude of Aroden. Maybe someday someone will stab him in the face about it."

"I don't feel it deserves a face-stabbing. Does he even have a face, do gods leave corpses -"

"The Starstone is itself in one telling the corpse of the gods who died slowing the asteroid at Earthfall? Also in Tian Xia they have a rat-god who they say ate the corpse of one of their other gods -- while an ordinary rat, mind -- and ascended. Of course this does not mean that gods have a face."

"I did not know about the rat god. If I find Aroden's face I will eat it."

"No one here knows about the rat god! To be fair she does not have any worshippers unless you count rats and does not do very many human-legible things. I support you in eating Aroden's face, if you happen to find it."

"I bet gods're yummy."

"Can't be that hard, at least, if even a rat can do it."

"Hmm, I don't know, there are a lot of rats, maybe a billion rats try to eat a god every year and only one has ever gotten very far."

"I guess. Maybe Aroden's Starstone precautions are really mostly against ascending lots and lots of random cockroaches."

This earns him a cackle. "All hail the roach god! Burn offerings of random crumbs! Oh no, he saw the burnt offering's light and hid under the cupboard!"

"If you want to stop the afterlives from being overrun by ascended spiders you gotta put your Starstone in a death castle with a moat around it. No other option."

"Some spiders can fly. Or, well, get over moats, anyway, they have web things that help them."

"Well, probably there are air defenses against flying spiders."

"I will be sure to take this into account when considering whether to attempt the Starstone in the form of a spider."

"Have you looked into - all the successes have been human, right, and people styled Aroden the god of humanity - it'd be kind of stupid if that were literally a criterion and probably ninety percent of attempts have been humans just because most adventurers are, but -"

"Yeah, I don't know about that part. Most adventurers are human by a long shot and he had a handful of elf clerics. Surface elves, but."

"Well. Shall we go do some windowshopping?"

They can go look at the castle and speculate about how she'll get in when the time comes.

The next day he can mask up and they can show up in Sothis, go bother Fazil.

Fazil takes tour groups to Axis and teaches a class on Law aimed at adventurers; he looks delighted to see them, and hugs Hagan for a long time. His wife is named Hamida and she is quiet and very slightly wary of all his adventurer friends; she sits in a rocking chair in their parlor, watching Hagan with their baby Nasim like he might forget the baby isn't a greatsword or something.

Hagan does not even use a greatsword and is not confused about this at all! He kisses each of the baby's knuckles and then declares that she is perfect, "which is very silly of you, if you have the best one first then all the rest are slightly disappointing."

"Somehow I do not expect to have that problem."

"Congratulations on... that," says Belmarniss, trying not to make too much of a face. "Hagan, she's drooling on your hair."

"She is. I think she has your jawline," he adds to Fazil.

"I think you went blind at the Worldwound."

"Oh, I did. It's all the fashion at the Worldwound, you level faster."

"Their clerics are cut rate so Fy had to lead him everywhere for several days, but kept slipping accidentally out of the leash."

Fy hisses indignantly. 

"She says she did it on purpose."

        "Is it safe for the baby," Hamida says. 

"Being around Fy? Yeah, Fy won't hug her if I don't tell her to. She's the safest baby in Sothis, really, all these adventurers here."

"I won't hug her either," mutters Belmarniss under her breath. "When will Nasim, like, talk?"

"Probably when she is one or two." He looks wholly relaxed about Hagan holding his baby and the snake. "By then maybe she will have a baby sister or brother."

"Do tiny human children also like babies?"

"Most of them do! Also they fight and get jealous and steal food from each other and declare they hate each other, but - I think mostly they're glad of each other, and I bet they fight less if there's enough food."

"Heh. I remember when Sovi started talking, but we have a thirty five year age gap."

"I resented my baby sister but that's because my mother was sick, I think, and we are very nearly immune to that problem."

"I noticed the rings of sustenance."

"Best magic item for everyday life."

"Must help a lot with the thing where babies don't pop out knowing how to sleep."

"They'll usually give you two hours! I don't know what you do if you need eight. I mean, you hire people."

"One assumes! So you're teaching a class, what do we need to know about Law that you didn't manage to impart while we were wandering around together?"

"You are both hopeless cases. Hopeless."

"Belmarniss still thinks maybe neutral good'd be fun."

"I think halfassedly trying to be lawful is not actually the thing that gets you to neutral, though I admit I see why people think it works that way."

"What do you think would get me to neutral?"

"Stop by Nirvana, maybe? Get a sense of how they think about the world? Or - think of some things you specifically dislike about being chaotic that aren't purely instrumental and then steer away from those."

"I guess going to Nirvana could be fun."

"I'm down."

"They don't have a hopping tourist destination, though - what exactly might eat you in Nirvana, I suppose is the question, but still -"

"I think there's plenty that could eat you if startled or whatever but I bet we'll be okay, we're pretty tough."

"And it'll be a change from being eaten by demons."

"Thank you for the spiritual guidance," he says to Fazil.

He looks very slightly jealous. "Have fun."

"You don't want to take us yourself?"

"I'm booked for the next month."

"I think when that happens you're supposed to raise your prices!"

- snort. "I like being booked out for a month! Steady work, no hassle, no unpredictability. Just lots of Osirian families on pilgrimage."

"Is it fun work? Wait, you don't care about fun. Is it, uh, rewarding and fulfilling work."

"It is! Aktun is beautiful. All the tourists returning seem so much healthier than when they left."

"Does it have a healing aura?"

"Nah, it's - deeper than that, it's about believing in the thing you're supposed to aspire to."

"Huh. It's that nice? I guess if it weren't then the tourism wouldn't be so big."

"It's really nice. I don't know how much of that is that everyone is Lawful and not evil and how much is just that they have more time, they won't starve...some of both, presumably, but it's really nice."

"I'll take a tremendous lot of notes on Nirvana for you."

"Thanks. I hear good things. Though I bet it doesn't have trolleys like Aktun."

"Maybe it does, how would you know?"

"I think you need Law for trolleys. It's just how the universe works."

"Just because you said that I'm gonna build a trolley in Elysium."

"Correction, you need Law for running trolleys, Elysium has many many spite-trolleys none of which move people from stop to stop on a schedule for a fare."

"Well of course it won't do that, why would I want it to do that."

"I abstractly imagine that there are people who would enjoy running trolleys on a schedule for a fee but I am not myself among them."

"I mean, they don't do it out of the goodness of their hearts, they get rich."

"What's even the point of getting rich if you no longer need to eat or sleep."

"Many of them eat anyway! Recreationally. And have apartments even though they do not need to sleep in them. And go to theatres and want magic items and take the trolleys and do all the other things that people do that require money."

"Seems kind of - tragic."

"It really isn't."

"I don't think it's tragic but it does seem... I don't know, I'd get used to it if I woke up in Axis and was stuck there, but I would have to be stuck there."

The baby fusses. Hagan hands him back to his mother. "Anyway, if you can't squeeze us in know anyone who can?"

"I'll ask around at work. Some people take more days off than I do."

"..do you not take any days off."

"I only teach classes Oathdays and Sundays. I do the Plane Shifts every day but that's, what, two minutes of work, it'd be ridiculous not to."

"You don't tour them around yourself?"

"I have a couple of times but not regularly. The tours last two weeks - I'd miss so much -" He gazes adoringly at the baby. "We mostly hire locals for them anyway."

"Wow, I didn't know they were that long!"

"If you save up for it for twenty years you don't want it to last one day! They tour the city and tour some other districts of Axis and meet dead relatives and there's lots of time for prayer and contemplation at important landmarks. Petitioning Abadar works better there, it's - less costly for him to pay attention in his own divine domain."

"Huh. Is there a good way to let dead relatives know you're coming so they can take the day off from running trolleys on schedule? Mail system? It wouldn't cost much extra to have a bundle of letters under one arm as you plane shift."

"Yep! Axis has its own mail system so we can send them a couple weeks in advance. Most people don't work every day and with notice they can swap some days around."

"Huh, what's the usual work schedule?"

"Every other day, every third, a week on a week off..."

"Neat. I wonder what people do in Nirvana. Some of them have jobs. Like 'trial lawyer'."

"This is true. Also the ones who provide healing and comfort to the recently-dead though I don't know if anyone pays them for that."

"I think in a way all the work being on a volunteer basis would be relaxing! Though becoming filthy rich has its own advantages."

"It seems like all the work being on a volunteer basis would make it hard to tell which of it was most important. If you have a lot more people than work maybe it works."

"Rumor has it they have enough lawyers."

"I have heard that."

"It'll be a fun vacation after Hagan is done watching me make faces at people's babies."

"We should also drop in on Mahdi."

"I'm sure he'll be delighted."

"Are you sure of that."

"Does he have a baby now too?"

"He does! A beautiful little boy. ...less beautiful than Nasim."

"We mustn't take any sides on that question," he warns Belmarniss. 

"No? They don't have contests? Beribbon them and line them up and have them do tricks like drooling on command?"

"It would be bad for the self-esteem of all the other babies because Nasim would always win."

"Well, the advantage of baby contests is that no one can hold the winning title long."

"They get steadily cuter for a couple years. Though I can't actually think how she'd get cuter."

"I think it's that they start having opinions and getting excited and interacting."

"Well, you can come back and check that out. When you're sixth circle or whatever."

"I think she'll be cute once she can have opinions!"

"They have opinions really early! Mostly about whether you should feed them grapes and whether you should hold them, but opinions are a very early baby development."

"I mean slightly more interesting and coherently expressed opinions. I can't tell if she wants grapes."

"I wonder if it's sort of self-reinforcing, they're not interesting so you can't tell what they're communicating so they're not interesting..."

"Maybe? I think it'd be less of a species universal if it were simple to interrupt the feedback loop though."

"I'm sure someone tried meditating on the merits of babies at least once in surface elves's thousands-of-years-long population decline."

"We met a surface elf at the Worldwound who figures he can design babycare golems, save the elves. I hope he's wrong, though, because he was a jerk and I bet his golems would be jerks too."

"They'd have to be configurable to work at all though!"

"Well, I hope someone else figures it out first, who isn't a jerk."

"And then Osirion can sell 'em to Shazeuni drow - how is that going?"

"Mostly all right. Kicked off a debate about the curfews, because the drow prefer to shop at night, so more stores are staying open, so it's more inconvenient that women can't go out."

"Especially since the drow who want to shop are themselves going to be mostly women, though I guess they could be sending errandboys."

"They mostly get the exception for casters but at some point it's awkward having a rule with that many exceptions, you know. Better to just stop it."

"Well, I'm glad that's working out."