"That doesn't sound very much like how I got this," he says. "So maybe the resemblance is just a coincidence."

"How'd you get it, then?"

After a moment's thought, a pair of glasses appears on her face, and she blinks decisively at his clothes. A card appears in midair; she stabs it, and it vanishes into her inventory. She crushes the glasses in her fist, and they, too, disappear. "I'm alchemizing myself some of that bullshit magic fabric in red," she "explains".

"...You're doing what to it?"

"Alchemizing. It's... I'm going to make myself clothes out of that stuff. With weird magic."

"I wonder if that will work," he says. "To answer your earlier question, I got it by physically entering the Fade, which is supposed to be impossible. And there do seem to be interesting powers and a destined role attached."

"If it doesn't work I'll bully Ari's human kid into doing it for me," she shrugs. "And that sounds about right, actually. Guess you're playing the Game. Let me know if you've figured out the Ultimate Riddle, I've got a bet going with Alaine that it's actually just a knock-knock joke."

"I haven't encountered an Ultimate Riddle so far," he says. "Maybe that comes later."

"Eh. It's bullshit anyway. You're well rid of it."

She finishes her soda. "That's strong, man. Could I get a chaser?" A bottle of eye-wateringly powerful alcohol appears, and she swigs some. "Ta."

He spares a curious glance at the drinks, but doesn't ask for any.

"You want some Faygo? Or rum? Or rum and Faygo? Or to get your own drink?"

"No, thank you."

She shrugs. "Suit yourself."

After a moment, she asks "What's your world like? I'm nosy and our humans are all boring. D'you have trolls?"

"I don't think so," he says. "We have humans, dwarves, elves, qunari, spirits, demons, and darkspawn. And maybe other things that I don't know about or am forgetting."

Zan sniffs disapprovingly. "That right there is entirely too many species. Two should be enough for any reasonable world to be getting on with."

"I've never minded."

"I'm sure you haven't."

He doesn't appear to have anything to say to that.

"I didn't realize you were so impatient," Stalas says dryly.

Sefton frowns slightly in confusion.

"Whoa. Shiny human. Nice wings."

He flutters his own wings semi-consciously as he trots over to the bar. "So, like, anybody know what's up with this place?"

"He isn't a human," Katrin interjects before Stalas can get any angrier. "He's a dwarf. And we were just wondering that very thing ourselves. Sefton? You got here first...?"

"I'm not sure," he says. "But in the time between coming in the door and opening it again, I met another person and had an entire conversation with her, and it seemed like you didn't think there had been enough time for that to happen in. I'm not sure whether that's a Fade thing or a this place thing, though."

"I wonder what you'd make of a qunari," snorts Stalas.

After entirely too long, Ari notices the particulars of Stalas' outfit. "Hey, that's Hope! Are you playing the Game too?"

"What Game?" says Stalas.

"I think we might be," says Sefton.

"Cool! Good luck making a universe; we kind of fucked up ours, but I think we were destined to anyway, so it's whatever. Unless it's a different quest every time? That'd be pretty weird." He considers this question, turning philosophically to his crazy straw.

"...Making a universe?"

"Well, that's what everybody said. I wasn't really sure how we were supposed to do it either, tell the truth. Apparently frogs were involved? Anyway, Alaine's in charge of making the universe, I just kill stuff."

"I see."

"What sort of stuff, specifically?"

"Imps, ogres, basilisks, assorted other jerks? The Black King that one time? Ionno."

"So, if this isn't the Fade, I have to wonder: where is it instead? Katrin, care to weigh in?"

Katrin shakes her head slowly. "I am not at all sure."

"Is there a way from here back to - hm. No, on second thought, I would rather confront the nightmare demon," says Katrin. "No shortcuts."

"Agreed."

"Agreed."

"Want a hand with that? I punch good."

Sefton looks at the other two.

"Why, what's your fated role?"

"Well, I'm Bard of Rage, right? So according to my brother - he understands shit, that's his deal - I've got one of three paths I can go down. Invite destruction through hatred, allow hatred to be destroyed, or allow myself to be destroyed by hatred. For obvious reasons, I try to stick to the second of those, except when something really needs destroyed. But, uh, 'turned into a horrible monster that wants to kill everything' kind of sounds like being destroyed by hatred to me. Or close enough that you're better safe than sorry."

"Our explanations haven't been nearly that precise," says Stalas. "For the most part, our explanations haven't been."

Ari shakes his head sympathetically. "Sucks. If I could call Elisha in here I would, he'd be glad to help out, but he's on the other side of the meteor trying to keep an angry human teenager from burning her planet to the ground."

"That doesn't sound good..."

"I mean, she'd only be killing a bunch of tiny pastel dragons, but it's the principle of the thing. We've got to guide them through their quests, and her smashing every puzzle she comes across into bitty pieces is not the most helpful thing she could be doing."

"Tiny... pastel... dragons."

"Yeah, her consorts are dragons. It's adorable. She's pissed off about the pastel, though. Says that something in charge is making fun of her?" He shakes his head. "She's kind of touchy."

"If I had to deal with tiny pastel dragons in order to save the world, the thought that I was being mocked by fate would certainly occur to me," says Stalas.

"See, I don't get that! I'd just think, 'hey, these are adorable and I love them,' and get on with my quest. And probably keep like half a dozen of them in my sylladex so I could hug them at random times."

Stalas glances at Sefton, who seems to keep knowing things.

Sefton gives a nope-no-idea sort of shrug.

"In your what?"

"...Yeah, our world doesn't have those."

"In... bags...?"

"But- what if you need to carry a piano, or a dragon, or ten tons of highly flammable shaving cream?"

"...Wagons?"

Ari shudders. "That sounds awful. Do you want some wallets to take back to your inconvenient universe? I've got like five of them in my wallet."

"And by a wallet, you mean...?"

"Wallet modus. It's a kind of sylladex, except you carry it around instead of just... having it. It can carry anything up to and including a small planet." He takes out his own wallet to show off. (It has a little dinosaur on it.)

"How do they... work?"

"...you captchalogue something, and it goes into your wallet. It's- here, see for yourself." He tosses Stalas a wallet. "Try to take a barstool."

"Try to... again, how?"

Ari wracks his brain. "Try... seeing it as a card? Instead of an object? Everything can be either an object or a card, that's basic object duality. Feel the card in the chair."

Sefton catches the wallet, dutifully tries to take the chair, fails, and hands the wallet to Katrin.

"Thank you," says Katrin.

"Let me know if there's anything else helpful I can give you, too. I've got a ton of weapons tucked away. And if you're all playing the Game you can use all the help you can get."

"What kind of weapons?"

"Uh. Take your pick, really. Swords, hammers, axes, double tridents, a couple of Fancy Santas? Other junk probably? What do you use?"

"I'm a mage," she says, with a gesture to the staff she is wearing on her back. "Stalas and Sefton both prefer daggers, I think."

"Well, I might not say no to a sword, depending on the sword. But I'm still somewhat unclear on what this Game is and whether or not we are in fact playing it. On the other hand, we might need all the help we can get regardless."

"That's the spirit!"

Ari goes over to a table, which is suddenly covered with swords. Most of the swords look patently ridiculous. Another table gets a pile of equally ridiculous knives. As an afterthought, yet a third table is covered with ridiculous wands.

"...Why are they all so..." Stalas gestures vaguely at the ridiculousness.

"I made them by taking random shit and throwing it into an alchemizer? They're still deadly weapons, though!" He picks up a sword emblazoned with the face of some mildly distressing middle-aged action hero and swings it through the air.

Sefton looks through the knives.

Katrin approaches the wands with a dubious fascination.

"Alchemizer's this machine that takes things and combines them into other things if you feed it grist - grist comes out of dead monsters, it's a thing. Anyway, it's handy for making random cool shit, but it's really good at weapons. Like, you can toss a weapon in there with pretty much any other object and it'll come out ready to massacre things. It's kind of a hobby of mine. As you might be able to tell."

"Yes. I'm beginning to wonder if your world even has mages of a kind I would recognize..."

"Well, we've got a mage. She's the planet-burny one. But that's just her Fated Role. Is it like... a species for you guys?"

"Not exactly. Some people are mages, and some aren't. The only relationship with species is that dwarves don't produce mages at all. But we three are the only people with fated roles I know of and there are many more mages than that. And mine is not Mage."

"Huh. Neat!"

She inspects some more wands, looking for one she would be willing to pick up even if the fate of the world were not at stake.

Acceptable. She picks that one up and looks over to see how Stalas and Sefton are doing.

Methodically sorting through sharp objects! Why do so many of them have faces. They are watching him. It is no good.

Stalas is being slightly less methodical about his search, but is equally disconcerted by the faces. The face-emblazoned swords are getting piled on a separate table so he doesn't have to look at them.

"...Is there lyrium in this one?" wonders Stalas, picking it up for a closer look.

Ari comes over to look. "Nope. That's the Bloodsword. What's lyrium?"

"...Well, among other things lyrium is technically in my blood... under ordinary circumstances, it's a magical substance which most people are well advised to keep out of their circulatory systems."

"Ooh! What kind of magic? How well advised? Can I have some?"

"Um, most kinds of magic, really, in our world's terms... I'm an outrageous fluke, most people with this much lyrium in them are either dead or well on their way. There are mostly-safe ways for mages like Katrin to power spells with it, and mostly-safe ways for dwarves or magically deadened non-dwarves to enchant weapons with it, and supposedly-safe ways for humans to use it to get special powers, but apparently the special powers come with an addiction that eventually destroys your mind, and all they seem to be good for is disrupting other magic of the same kind."

"Cool! Can I have some? I wanna alchemize a lyriumsword so I can stab people with deadly magic poison!"

"...That's really the least of what a sword made with lyrium could do, and I'm not sure I want to give up my only source of it for this purpose."

"You might not have to give it up," says Sefton from where he is still sorting daggers. (He took the ones with the red stuff for himself and the Hope one for Stalas, but he's not about to just assume that's the best he can do.)

"Well, that's... fascinating," says Stalas, putting away his lyrium. "Is that pure lyrium...? Can I borrow it for a moment?"

"Sure!" He hands it over. "Also, d'you want some more lyrium, I can duplicate some for you if you like. It's apparently kind of expensive, but 'expensive' is a word that applies to people who don't have six planets' worth of build grist at their disposal."

"Nice."

Ari fiddles with the controls a while longer. "Hm... how about..."

A pair of daggers appear! They're like lyrium, but red. Some kind of... red... lyrium? "Hell yeah! Zan's gonna love these."

All three of them react with immediate alarm, but Stalas is the first to act. "Don't touch those," he says sharply, moving to put himself between Ari and the daggers.

"Aw." Ari obediently folds his hands behind his back.

"It's roughly the same kind of potential hazard as entering the Fade, but much more so and much more widely verified," Stalas explains. "If this is in fact red lyrium and not merely lyrium that happens to be red. You might be safest just leaving the room while we figure out how to dispose of it... the trouble is, there really isn't a way to dispose of it as such, the best we can do so far is break it into very small pieces and seal it in a warded container and lock it up. And we don't currently have access to any of the appropriate equipment." He contemplates the ominously glowing daggers unhappily.

"...Can you draw the equipment? I've got a Modus that can work with that."

"I'm not totally sure I trust this result!" says Stalas.

"Try bleeding on it some more," suggests Sefton.

"Not necessarily a bad idea," says Katrin. "It's hard to imagine how turning white could make it significantly worse, and 'Dawn of Hope' does... thematically suggest a tendency to improve things."

"A noticeable lack of... evil, as you put it."

Sefton nods tentatively.

"D'you want to try poking yourself with them again? Unless there's a less stabby litmus. Preferably one you can draw."

"Nice! Can you, like... channel Hope through it, or something?"

"Good question. I'm more wondering if I can get out of having to bleed on all the red lyrium in existence. I mean, I'd do it, I've done worse for less reward, but I am really hoping I won't need to."

"I can have Arcanist Dagna look into it," says Katrin.

"I mean. I could, instead, alchemize a few gallons of your blood. Or, like, a lot of gallons."

"Would alchemized blood even work? ...Do we dare test it?"

"Personally, I dare test just about anything. And I've already got the codes for the knives set up, so we can try it out and if it fails you can just do some more bleeding."

Stalas glances over at Sefton and Katrin.

Sefton shrugs slightly.

"Go ahead," says Katrin.

"...Well, that was... effective," says Stalas.

"Yep!"

"Anyway. Now you know what to do if you see red lyrium: throw my blood at it until it turns silver," says Stalas. "And if you can get some in... containers of some kind, then we can take it home and have extra."

"...Potentially we would like that a lot, but how exactly does the vehicle... go? Because if it can't fly or something—I'm imagining trying to take even an extremely well-designed wagon through the Fade and out the rift and through the fortress, and the imaginary wagon isn't holding up terribly well."

"It can totally fly!"

He punches in a code, and a holographic image appears of a ROCKET CAR. It is covered with flame decals, and it looks tacky as all fuck.

"That's... certainly something. Does it come in... stealthier versions? Many of the places we're going to need to deliver a lot of my blood to are hostile territory."

"It actually doesn't. We've tried."

"Well, good enough, then. Maybe we can paint it or something."

"Thank you, that will be convenient. All right... I have these fancy silver lyrium daggers and this interesting sword; Sefton's found a few things; Katrin, are you satisfied with that wand?"

"Well, now I'm wondering what would happen if you combined my staff with silver lyrium," she says. "In the spirit of experimentation."

"Your wish is my command," Ari says with an elaborate bow. He takes a picture of the staff and heads back to the alchemizer, then pauses. "D'you want to incorporate the wand as well?"

"Hm. No, I think the wand is a separate experiment."

"That doesn't seem to be at all what I was looking for."

"They're a bit bulky; I don't usually carry more than one. Unfortunately. ...What would happen if we did include the wand? Or some other ingredient?"

"That could work! Combining multiple items increases the risk of collision, but since the one-to-one already hits a Johnny coordinate, there's no harm in trying it, right? So, just the wand, or do you have something else you'd like to throw in there?

"Righty-oh."

Buttons buttons buttons STICK! Magic stick. Specifically, magic staff. The haft is an oddly organic combination of fluted glass and silver; at its base is a gently curving blade, and its cap is a clouded sapphire with the faint impression of a skull.

"Niiiiice."

"I approve," says Katrin. She picks up the new staff; her eyes widen slightly. "I definitely approve."

"I'm not sure that would be a good idea. Although you can if you like."

"What caliber of bad idea, like, red lyrium bad or just 'it'd break' bad?"

"It will probably break eventually, and I'm not sure whether it might do mildly inconvenient magical things like become very cold unexpectedly, and it seems like an inefficient use of resources to take it from a world where it's a high-quality magical staff to a world where it is a good hitting-people stick."

Katrin shrugs. She returns her old staff to its holder on her back and keeps the new one in her hand. (It's so pretty. And roughly twice as powerful as the original.)

Meanwhile, Stalas is playing with his silver lyrium daggers.

This question is greeted with a puzzled and slightly awkward silence by all three adventurers, but Stalas is the one who recovers almost immediately and says, "No, thank you."