Tell me about Dirge's days working customer service at the funeral parlor.
GLADLY
i say. as i then take. MULTIPLE DAYS to answer 😭 IM SORRYYY i got super busy and also didnt feel well ;w; 💜💜💜
but yes my annual reminder that THIS 👇 freak
worked retail. for years.
You KNOW he ran that damn store like the navy.
Now, the coffin shop canonically didn't get many customers, but "did not get many" is not "got zero". Notes from a Baldurian investigator show it wasn't taking in nearly enough customers to make its rent, but that it WAS still paying it's rent. Its tucked away near the back of the city and also, pointedly, a stone's throw away from another, more respectable funeral parlor djsmdnsnd
So, obviously it changed management when Dirge got a hole punched in his skull, but! I still use a lot of that info as a basis for how he used to run it.
So the coffin shop is serving as a front, to help move the Deathstalkers in and out of the Undercity, and to serve as an entry point for initiates to access their training. The shop is how the cult of Bhaal is cooking the books for their income, so in addition to the many other more heinous crimes committed in the Gate, we can also add money laundering to Dirge's rap sheet. Yahoo!
As such, in his Bhaalist years, Dirge was fastidious about that damn shop. The cult needed to operate as smoothly as possible, and a core aspect of that was managing finances. The cult of Bhaal basically bleeds money if you think about it for longer than 30 seconds. Theres maintaining an underground temple, ensuring its properly adorned and decorated, making sure your paths in and out of the city don't collapse, any barracks for cultists and assassins you're maintaining, theres training and arming acolytes and initiates, theres maintaining the system of bribes throughout the city, to pay off the Flaming Fist, to negotiate with the Guild, to spring any clumsy or unlucky cultists (even if its just so they can be sacrificed as penance). The list of expenses for an underground cult of assassins is uhhh. High. We're saving money with our austerity measures (asceticism is the move rn Orin), but the cult bleeds money like a stuck pig and thats BEFORE we get intertwined with the weapons smuggling situation. The LAST thing we need is to get audited.
So. Dirge files his taxes, thoroughly, and files them on time, and maintains a dense backlog of paperwork to have a consistent trail of finances, both in AND out of the temple. Every last coin is carefully taken note of, and then Dirge squeezes it for all its worth, because the alternative is filing bankruptcy with the counting house, and if it came to that, Dirge would kill himself if he was capable of suicide. Payroll is documented, and timestamped. Every contract is documented, and accounted down to the last copper. And that goddam coffin shop is what provides the thinnest possible veneer of legitimacy to ensure that when those taxes ARE filed, the discrepancies are ignorable with a well placed yearly bribe. That coffin shop is what ensures the tax collectors dont sniff around any longer than absolutely necessary, so while it gets very little business, that business has to be acceptable. That means if someone walks in as a customer, you stop salivating over tanned human leather and you do your damn job. Aim for adequate customer service, at the VERY least.
Nobody uhh. Actually liked having to work the retail shift. We joined up for the ecstasy of murder not the murderous aggravation of retail. Especially when the High Primate is such a cunt about details :// Like does it realllyyyyy matter if I fucked up the details on this coffin order? A box is a box 😭 (it matters IMMENSELY because gossip is ACTIVELY DETRIMENTAL. do you KNOW how much hinges on this location being a hole in the wall nobody ever notices or thinks about?????)
So. Like any good cult leader who chugs his own koolaid, Dirge puts his money where his mouth is. Your local Bhaalspawn serial killer heading a nihilist death cult can in fact be found working the cash register of a dingy, rundown little funeral parlor that gets fuck all for business, because if you want something done right, you do it yourself. His customer service is stellar, btw. MF was rockin a 20+ in Charisma and it shows. Perfect service, no notes, your in and out with zero complications AND a receipt! So few places actually use receipts out here, waow!
Most of this is before his warlock pact too so he doesn't even have the ominous glowing demon eye, he's just a nice young man helping you have one less thing to worry about in wake of your terrible tragedy 💜 Now leave.
Its so fuckign funny to me, its one of my fave Dirge details. Neurotic cult leader cant trust his followers not to fuck up basic customer interactions and works retail himself a solid 60% of the time, has to balance a closing shift (that he scheduled, for himself) against religious rites celebrating and appeasing the lord of murder dnskfjsnf. If anything would make you lose faith in the capacity for mortalkind to amount to anything beyond eternal suffering, it'd be a shift where you're the only employee left in the store cuz you're also the manager and a middle aged PTA mom has just walked in with a chip on her shoulder and an invalid coupon from your fuckup of a coworker that you are going to have to negotiate with for the better part of the next 90 minutes. No breaks. You don't even smoke. And if your customer service smile breaks, the entire phone tree is hearing about it and by tomorrow, half the Gate will know.
