"I'm aware of a mission attempt with some orcs. It didn't go well," says Cuoco. "I believe the missionaries who didn't escape were eaten."

"If you are specifically attached to not being eaten you shouldn't minister to drow either."

"Doesn't that produce a terrible ghoul problem...?"

Belmarniss shrugs. "You need meat on your bones to be a ghoul, so I don't think so especially. Could be we're throwing a lot of ghouls compared to you from people who die alone? But we eat each other too."

"I see."

Tanya already knew the drow attack strangers, and that the drow eat even their own dead (because they live underground in conditions of terrible food scarcity), and so it's not particularly surprising that they might kill someone in order to eat them. It's not actually any worse than killing someone to rob their corpse. Except for the thing with the ghouls, but it sounds like they've got that handled for better or worse?

"They can't grow any food underground other than mushrooms. They don't have wood for furniture so they have to use bones. When we got to the surface Belmarniss was so excited about eating bread! They've managed to thrive in objectively terrible conditions and I wish we could help them not have to do that anymore. That people would trade them grain and wood for - spider silk or something. Or that they would move up if they understandably didn't want to depend on recently-hostile outsiders for their food, but moving would also be dangerous... Maybe none of this matters compared to helping them not all go to Evil afterlives, but - I hope helping with that would eventually allow progress on the other problems too."

"Most of the silk is not from spiders, you have to feed spiders and keep them from attacking each other. You can keep a permanent Web going a long time if not too many people know where you keep it," clarifies Belmarniss. "But you could go a fair ways if you were lucky about who you met, with goodwill gifts consisting of dried fruit - tree fruit, there's some strawberry plants down there for special occasions - and nuts and crackers, on top of the positive channels. You can accumulate a lot of goodwill from people who think you're a sucker, as long as you aren't going to get indignant that they think you're a sucker, you can be their very favorite sucker who's worth protecting in case you sprout more tasty fruit. It's just that you would have to be lucky in who you met, because they could always decide to rob you instead of listening to you talk about Shelyn."

"And they wouldn't want to hear it?"

"If you put on a concert people'll listen, if, again, they do not instead decide to rob you more or less violently. Getting 'em to believe you is the sticking point. Shelyn's historical observable level of interest in anything going on downstairs is nil. The intervention budget thing is a very pretty excuse but it does not sound like not an excuse, you see?"

"This does come up with human parishoners."

"But human parishoners have had the positive channels available for some time, generally, haven't they."

"Yes."

"Do you think it's worth trying, with sufficient security and so on? I don't know what other things it'd be trading off against. I also wondered if other drow ever came up in search of something better in the past and how they fared. Belmarniss hasn't heard of any so far, but we've only been to this city."

"I haven't heard anything - or at least not anything credible, I've heard drow exist before and people can make things up about anyone," says Cuoco. "I'm not sure what we'd want to do in the way of security - it seems like it could backfire -"

"It absolutely could," says Belmarniss. "Tanya flying around everywhere struck an excellent balance between being obviously able to defend herself versus being threatening, she was still pretty lucky, and I'm not getting the sense that your mission would come with fifth-circle support to kit you all out with an Overland Flight every day anyway."

"It would not."

"People are going to worry you're there to take their slaves, which to be clear is not solely a question of their convenience regarding chores, this is also how every drow feeds their children. - speaking of children you might be able to get ahold of some babies whose mothers want to get rid of them, especially if you'll take them without knowing who they belong to so they don't have to worry about their long-lost kids showing up with complaints. If you have anything to be done with those."

"...goodness. There are... orphanages... it'd be an undertaking to get the babies to the orphanages from underground..."

"How much spare capacity do the orphanages have? Are local babies ever turned away and left to die?" Tanya doesn't want to assume Taldor is necessarily much better than Noctimar. "If it's only a matter of getting the children to the surface, maybe we could do something... How many babies are we talking about, Belmarniss? Humans who aren't deliberately restricting themselves can have a baby every couple of years." People thought Tanya might be Evil because of a single abortion! If drow kill a baby every few years for centuries on end, leaving Belmarniss with a single sister, no wonder Pharasma judges them all Evil once they're married!

"...when you say drow use slaves to feed their children, do you mean the slaves breastfeed them?" Surely feeding slaves to children isn't sustainable, or in any event less sustainable than eating pigs?

"We're not at the point of turning away babies to die but when the orphanages are overstretched sometimes we can't be as picky about situations to release the children into - apprenticeships and jobs and such," says Cuoco mournfully. "Because the money has to go to hiring wetnurses and keeping goats."

"Drow can do that but usually don't," says Belmarniss, "we can be infertile with an annoying but not, like, expensive or anything, process, and then stay that way till we're done. The infanticide's of children who don't look as healthy or aren't the sex their mom wants or something like that. And yes, usually one'd get an orc to breastfeed them, halflings can do it if you feed them enough but orcs are way better for it especially if you want them doing any other baby care in the dark."

It would be great if they could do something about the slavery situation, but a large majority of Noctimar's population is enslaved including all the drow males (or at least the married ones?). They can't solve it just by helping individuals move to the surface. They need to make the drow understand they can get to a Good afterlife, give them some good examples to emulate and hope they'll do the rest out of rational self-interest.

"Anyway I don't know if it's a good deal all things considered to offer to take excess sons, and babies who get the runs too often, or whatever, but they're plausibly on offer if it would be. The 'everybody's favorite sucker' thing would probably work fine as long as nobody powerful thought you were encroaching too much on their turf, that'd be like, demon churches, variously fancy warlord types, major houses of commerce. You might want to start out in the farm belt rather than trying the city for that reason but I've always been a city kid so I know less what it's like."

Cuoco nods thoughtfully.

Gender-selective infanticide is a very hard social problem to solve! (*)

"I don't suppose there's a promising line of research into letting drow choose the sex of their babies. Given local technology, it would have to be magic..."

(*) Since Earth hasn't solved it.

"Don't know of anything like that, no. They'll kill girls, too, just they wait longer to see if they turn out to be promising, it works out to be the same number of murders of each I think."

Ultimately Belmarniss provides Cuoco with directions to the aperture on the firm understanding that this information is for, speculatively, sending an expedition of optimistic Shelynites who want to go let random drow take advantage of their healing powers and charitable nature in case that helps with anything, and is not for sharing with anyone who wants to show up with swords and start stealing slaves or stabbing demon priests, and she shares more random drow sociological facts that might help, and implies that she has a dead twin brother, and ultimately concludes the meeting without any very firm plans but something that could grow into same.

That's good progress for a first meeting!

It's terrible news about the dead potential twin Buddha. But it also makes Tanya finally realize something which might be good news in a way, because - "I haven't properly met any drow besides you, Belmarniss. And I've kept thinking about how exceptional you are, and maybe your mother if she raised you this way, and wondering how rare that is, but I somehow failed to make the obvious next inference until now. You're a woman, a mage, from a" - high socioeconomic status - "I assume at least fairly wealthy family. Someone born without your advantages couldn't realistically plan to go to the surface and live here comfortably and safely, and maybe they'd be Good but we wouldn't know it by waiting for more drow to come to Taldor."

"You told me drow worship demon lords because they think they're going to the Abyss anyway and the worship can put them in a better position there, but most people in Noctimar might not think that. Most people in Noctimar are slaves, even half the drow are slaves, and they won't expect things to be any different in the Abyss. Unless the demon lords' clerics tell them otherwise, I guess. They're the ones who'd leap at a chance to be Good, if they can be convinced it's real, because they have nothing to lose and no comforting illusions to discard. I might have thought about this before and concluded it wouldn't work, because the powerful would punish them for - disrespecting or disbelieving in their religion - but maybe they simply won't care? They'll have an incentive to let their slaves and farm-workers go to the sermons, that's where the channels are and they want them to be healthy. And the slaves, the drow males and orcs and halflings, won't find it any easier or more necessary to rebel, they'd just need to wait for their afterlives to be free."

A society of Good people ruled by a mostly Evil elite sounds unstable, but that's only true on Earth. The goal isn't to have a social revolution! If you can get 90% of the population out of the Abyss you're practically done, never mind that they're enslaved in life!

Even something as apparently despicable as 'embrace slave morality and stay slaves' can be justified if the promise of Heaven and the threat of Hell are real. It's a conclusion that feels very uncomfortable but it's rational! (Which is why Tanya should rely on local people more and stop trying to reinvent morality! How did she get stuck trying to reinvent morality? Curse Pharasma for incentivizing that, probably)

"...I think that I spend more time contemplating what it would be like for things not to suck and whether I have leverage to achieve that, than most people. I don't know how weird I am exactly, or whether the advantages help me not only live on the surface but also be weird in the first place. I wouldn't be inclined to give Rynaeri credit for any of it beyond that she indulged me but that's - about her relationship to me, not about her being inclined to Good herself particularly... Also we're not really rich as drow go, we have comfortable income but weird spending habits and stuff. Also as a matter of practical power in their lives drow men are slaves but they tend not to think of themselves that way and would have some reason to want to be more culturally aligned with their wives and daughters than would be trivial if they converted and their wives and daughters didn't."

...yes, one obvious problem with Tanya's plan wishful thinking is that, if the drow men become Good, they'll feel moved to do something about their wives and mothers being Evil and going to the Abyss. That conflict wouldn't simply end with the women ordering them to cut it out and the men complying. Shelyn is the goddess of love and if drow men come to love their women, not just in the ordinary way but as part of their new-found identity of being Good, that might be - volatile.

"You're right. I don't know if the scenario I imagined could work, but even if it could Shelyn might be a particularly poor fit for asking people to live with the thought of half their families going to the Abyss. ...do you think different Good gods, with different concerns and emphases, might be a better match for the drow? A mission could have representatives of different faiths, right, even if it might not have clerics of all of them?"

"Well, Law's a hard sell down there, Sarenrae is a sun goddess, Desna's got the stellar navigation theme - which is very attached to the sky but at least not to the daytime? Alcohol is hard to come by downstairs because you can't do it without sugar and Cayden's also the god of adventurers-who-hate-slavery-and-show-up-to-stab-you-about-it, or at least that's how his initial reception might look. I wouldn't be surprised if there were somebody obscure who'd be a better fit but - drow have and are not reflexively suspicious of close personal relationships and things being pretty, and the representatives of obscure ones are less likely to be able to cover any massive success that might be in the offing and harder to find in the first place."

Cuoco is frowning thoughtfully.

Well Tanya isn't about to suggest a Good god neither of them have heard about! Although - "what about Neutral gods? I don't know if that would promote or sabotage the whole project of not having drow go to the Abyss, but they'd at least be an improvement on worshipping Evil ones, and also do channels. Would the drow listen if a cleric of, say, Nethys told them they can get a better afterlife?" Who else is Neutral besides Abadar? Tanya hadn't tried to learn about all the gods who don't have local establishments. 

What they need is a Good god of building civilization from scratch in a hostile environment. A god of rejecting society's faults while still trying to improve it without walking away. A god of not being Lawful because you weren't raised to it, not because you'd rather be a defector and a criminal. Maybe that's just Tanya's biases showing. 

"Nethys might work! However, Evil clerics of Neutral gods channel negative," says Belmarniss. "So converts would not be as effective per. It also might wind up - making wizards look threateningly organized, to other power blocs? That's probably not the dominant probability but it crossed my mind. Calistria and Gorum might work too but like, in a way where I'm not sure it's an improvement. I'm not sure if Gozrehn theology is very attached to trees and rain and stuff, might work if it isn't."

"I don't know either," Cuoco apologizes.

"And the Nethysians don't really have much of a motive to send missionaries. Because they aren't Good."

"Pharasma?" says Cuoco.

"Fuck Pharasma. ...more seriously, the project here is to convince everybody they have not been, by Pharasma, pre-judged for the Abyss. You'd have to find a mighty specific Pharasmin."

"...is that something the Pharasmins believe? Wouldn't they know better, since it isn't true? I hate Pharasma as much as anyone but if a delegation of Pharasmins comes down to tell everyone they're wrong, that's - probably a good thing?"

(Cuoco looks a little uncomfortable with hating Pharasma that much.)

"Yeah, if anyone listens," says Belmarniss. "It's a more uphill start. Also don't they have a whole thing about burying the dead?"

"And also about protecting babies," winces Cuoco.

"So it's not a very harmonious set of priorities to be harping on even if it turns out Pharasmins are actually great once you get to know them, because we've got to eat, and nobody wants to invest fifty years in a kid only for the kid to prove too disease-prone to live to be fifty-one and right now they are addressing that by killing babies, and also even if Pharasma isn't sending all drow to the Abyss no matter what she's certainly not above sending most of us for these heinous crimes."

"Obviously I wouldn't ask you to permanently welcome people who sincerely worship Pharasma. I was thinking about something like a one-time proclamation, but you're probably right that it wouldn't work. ...what does one do if there isn't a Good god specialized in a project one cares about?"

"Well, most people aren't... clerics..." says Cuoco. "People do things without particularly involving churches at times. And clerics are generally allowed to have other interests, or take on other work."

...obviously the answer is that you just do it yourself. If Iomedae happens to fit Tanya even slightly, that's a luxury that not everyone has.

"You're right. I'm sorry."

"I want to write some letters and pray on this," Cuoco says.

"Sure," says Belmarniss. "I've been hanging out with the Nethysians and you can probably leave a message for me there more reliably than at the inn, which we might switch away from at some point."

Tanya has, she hopes, done a little Good by arranging for this meeting. That was her intent, anyway.

But did she do the most Good she could have? No. Almost certainly not. Even just among the options she's actually thought of, the Iomedaeans are the self-proclaimed experts in doing the most Good and she hasn't joined them. ...she should ask Cuoco her opinion on that, a second opinion is always good.

Assuming the Iomedaeans (or Iomedae herself) are as competent as anyone else to identify the greatest Good, and are more invested than the Shelynites in dedicating themselves to achieving it... Tanya knows the problems she's been having with that. Cuoco would presumably say that - it's Good and human and perhaps even necessary to love others and want to help them, others whom you know personally and not the great amorphous mass of everyone out there. That Tanya deserves to, and should, care about herself and her wants too. All fine things that Good people can live by, that might get her out of Hell in time. Things that would mostly solve the problems in the world if everyone did them. People would still be in Hell and the Abyss, but stopping any more people from going there isn't exactly unambitious.

But Tanya doesn't know how to serve two masters at once. She can follow her own (Good) desires, or she can follow the greater Good for everyone else. To try to trade off between the two is to deny the crushing enormity of everyone else's problems compared to your own. You can't keep people from going to Hell as a day job and then go home to your family. It would be saying that time with your family matters more than one more person sent to Hell, that you're working for money or the personal reward of reaching Heaven and not for the sake of actually helping people. And intent matters.