followup belmarniss thread
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"He wasn't trying to impress her," Hagan says indignantly.

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"It could work but it'd be complicated. Basic ingredients are there, though, they have stuff you'd pay for and vice versa."

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"What'd be complicated?"

 

(Hagan looks longingly at the exit.)

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"Go sell our boat, dude," she tells Hagan. "I don't wanna pay the crew for an extra day. They're a chaotic evil matriarchy, that's fairly complicated."

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He flees.

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"Will they keep a trade deal if they make one? Is there anyone to negotiate it with?"

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"Sometimes but not as well as you might hope, and yes. I don't know who's under you but I can narrow it down to three countries any of which will have a queen and also businesswomen who don't necessarily find it important to clear their economic activities with the queen."

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"How do people contact them?"

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"...I don't know how it's normally done. My native country had relations with your downstairs neighbors but I don't have a way to piggyback on that from here. I guess I'd be up for trying to find them and make overtures for you if you're paying enough to get me back with all my spell slots intact should they object."

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" - I can think about it."

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"I don't think that's the most likely result but it could happen. You'd probably want to think more about how much investment and risk you wanna frontload to import silk and mushrooms."

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"I don't think it's really about the goods, it's about the principle. I don't know what they'd charge for insurance, though, it might make it infeasible..."

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"Not just for me, for anybody trading with them. They are not predictable pacifist types downstairs."

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"That I've heard. People do trade with other countries even though they're mostly lawless."

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"I don't think, uh, Absalom or whatever is the right comparison here."

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"Can you describe the differences?"

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"...bearing in mind that I have never been to any of the three countries that might be below you and am from the other side of the sea, sure. I do think that drow countries are less different than human ones if only because the generations are longer so we've had less time to differentiate.

"The prevailing understanding among drow is that Pharasma doesn't care what we do and will send us all to the Abyss regardless and that the Abyss is more survivable if you're in good with a demon lord and more comfortable if you have committed appetizing evils in life to distinguish you from the rest of the writhing larvae. - I'm not confident that's false about drow who don't die as infants, though it is false about the infants. People vary in how far they take this but you should expect about half the total population to be non-drow kept as explicit slaves, half the drow to be men and not explicitly called slaves only because they think it doesn't require specification to be clear that men are chattel, and every adult woman you meet to have murdered about half her children. We're still elves, it's not that people can't just not have them, it's very deliberate. Politics is expressly conducted as a matter of timing one's betrayals correctly. Many people hold it to be the case as a philosophical matter that drow are superior and everybody else is slave labor waiting to happen.

"This doesn't actually mean they can't conduct trade. They do. We can if we're lucky lead long lives and don't have to be in a terrific hurry about doing anything in particular with them including the bad stuff, so once you get anything set up it could run smoothly for decades, set up a pulley system and send a sack of wheat down and get a sack of dried mushrooms up, whatever. Trading's less effort than stealing all your stuff. But you won't be dealing with people who'd, in the main, actually object to stealing your stuff, or be thought less of by their friends if they stole your stuff. Also the sexism goes the opposite way up here and I'm not sure how well that can be diplomacized away."

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"We don't treat women as slaves," he says indignantly. 

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"I said opposite way, not identical magnitude."

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"Huh. Will they talk to men, or will that cause problems all by itself?"

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"They'll talk to you, they don't have the chaperoning custom - again, unless this drow country is unlike mine."

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"Well, all of that is very discouraging but Abadar seemed to approve of our attempting it so maybe it really can all be priced in."

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"Abadar's been consulted? I guess that's encouraging if he likes the idea."

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"I think so. Would you want to be involved in coordinating it?"

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"...sounds fun. Not on a long term basis, but between adventures, sure, why not."

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