This is not a complicated decision. Drink the tea, or don't drink it. Flip a coin if you're ambivalent. Just do it quickly.

"You don't have to drink it, detective," he says, upon being met with a blank stare for ten seconds.

That is strictly true – nothing is forcing you to drink tea – but would he be offended by your refusal? Leaving aside the rudeness of explicitly declining after tacitly accepting, tea ceremony is sacred in most cultures. This will affect your relationship with Merlus Ragar, should you choose to cultivate it.

It'll take a few days of effort to butter him up, but once Merlus is positively disposed towards your quest you can recruit him! Then you'll have a wizard, a cleric, yourself as the leader, and a flex position. Remember, it's never too early to start thinking about the optimal party composition.

What a flagrantly terrible idea. He's retired, ideologically opposed to the watch, and by his own admission a better fighter than a cleric. No amount of currying favor will help when you ask for the moon.

Why is it so difficult to focus? Urgh. Tea is supposed to taste good, irrespective of whether it quenches thirst or facilitates speculative alliances, and that's good enough for her. She lifts the teapot and drinks.

It ought to be delicious. Absalom stands hip-deep in the river of trade flowing between the Obari Ocean and the Inner Sea, with attendant access to fine tea leaves harvested from the slopes of Vudran mountains at prices low enough for casual consumption. If you'd let it sit for another minute or two you'd really be enjoying it – as it stands, the taste is a thin veneer of pleasure over the experience of a scalded tongue.

Is Merlus sanguine about the detective's failure to use a teacup? Going by his facial expression, you'd never suspect he was even the slightest bit perturbed by the sight of a grown woman drinking directly out of a teapot.

"Tha's really goo'," she burbles. "Take care, Merlu'h."

She leaves first, this time.

"I apologize," Gwen says quietly, once her partner is outside.

"Don't. You're not responsible for what she gets up to."

"Not that. The auditory illusion. I couldn't think of a way to covertly screen her without impressing you first. If I were half as good at magical improvisation as she claimed I was, there would've been no need."

"Don't pretend to be humble, kid. If I'd had a dozen men who could think like you on the battlefield… things would've been different. You did the right thing. Now get out of my house."

Outside once more! Now that she knows what to look for, the staircases between the layers of Escadar stand out like shining rivets hammered into seasoned timber. Other signs of adaptation to a somewhat vertical environment are evident in the construction: tiered buildings with terraced roofs, windows with ladders hanging from the sills down to the level below, mysterious stone runways too narrow for human traffic that wind between the gaps. There's an intentionality to the design that appeals to her, hidden in the arrangement of streets and green spaces. It should be easy to navigate, once she gets the lay of the land.

"So, are we not trusting the wand anymore?" she says when she hears the door open behind her.

"There are platitudes about the value of paranoia," she says sullenly (mostly because she was looking forward to a nice cup of tea). "Detect Magic thwarts spur-of-the-moment attempts to evade Abadar's Truthtelling. I don't have a good answer for a song-sorcerer under Mask Dweomer cast by a nearby undetectable witch, or someone wearing a perfectly concealed pair of lead-jacketed Seducer's Bane bracelets, or someone immune to truth magic for no easily discernible reason, all of whom I'm sure exist. But, since we know a murder took place, we ought to proceed under the assumption that we're not matching wits with a well-resourced master criminal. I considered something like that while testing you for enchantments, but anyone who could disguise their work so carefully would be better off attacking me the moment they realized what I was doing."

"Is your Dispel not a good answer for those kinds of things?"

"For some of them, if only we could afford to be profligate. I don't have enough spell slots to Dispel everyone who comes under suspicion. I signed out some scrolls from the Craft Vaults along with the wand, one of which has another Dispel on it, but I only have the one extra use. We need to be conservative with magic, other than the wand. Starwatch orders those from the bankers by the crate."

There's also some fairly onerous paperwork she'll have to fill out if she doesn't bring those scrolls back unused, but that's neither here nor there. She's not going to cast the Dispel from the scroll unless lives depend on it.

"Spell scrolls! Did you bring all the divine magic we need, or should we go back and deputize Merlus? Anything we're missing below third circle, we ask him to pray for it tomorrow morning…"

"I brought Speak with Dead in case neither of us had it, so we won't need Ragar to prepare it. If you can use the wand I'd be surprised if you couldn't use the scroll."

Abadar's Truthtelling expires.

"My original plan for an unlikely situation was to hire a local cleric, but even if it comes to that we're still not going to Ragar. Milani is the patron goddess of bloody revolution against tyranny. Helping enforce state power, even legitimate and Good state power, cuts against Her grain. We are extremely fortunate that he agreed to help us at all; most of Milani's adherents wouldn't piss on a watchman if they were engulfed in flames."

That devotion sounds like something one shouldn't admit to a cop, but Merlus mentioned Milani before you even bothered to ask. Why did he volunteer that information?

Because he's proud to be chosen by Her, and believed that telling you was socially acceptable. Some pantheons are unapologetic about their black sheep.

Ascended gods lived on these islands before they stamped their legends into the stars. They created Absalom, championed Absalom, called Absalom home. The city is a celebration of the heights people can reach – we would never turn our backs on Them.

The fact that people can ascend to godhood, as if humans were the larval form of deities and apotheosis was just their final metamorphosis into adulthood, does not strike her as a revelation. It feels like a background consideration, dredged up from some forgotten recess in her mind because it happens to be relevant. It's good to know that's a thing she's still capable of doing, assuming she hasn't feverishly imagined it.

"Was Milani a human who lived here before She was a goddess? Is that why he retired to Escadar?"

"Half-elf, but yes. Milani is neither well-known nor often welcome outside of— he said he was born near here, that's probably why he knew of Her in the first place."