The room is currently mostly deserted, except for a woman sitting at a table off to the left, wearing complicated goggles and peering at some squares of old weathered metal. Occasionally she fiddles with the goggles to swing an old lens out of the way and a new one into place.

"I'm wondering if you know why a tenderless bar has replaced my office's teleport room door."

"Oh. I have no idea," she says. "It's very confusing and also really interesting but I was in the middle of something when I found it and there are tables here so I just sat down and kept working."

"What's that?" she asks, pushing the goggles up onto her forehead so she can peer at him without her specialized lenses in the way.

"K-1200 series thaumoscope." He twists two knobs on it and waves it around again. "This place's mana field is odd."

"What's a thaumoscope? What's a mana field, for that matter?"

"Detects and characterizes magic, respectively. I'm mostly confused that the dimensionality scan is coming back null. Not zero, even, null. Which would imply that this place is not a location. What."

"That's really interesting!"

"I suppose it is, but I'm a bit less excited about it because I've already spent hours today untangling dimensional nonsense."

"I haen't dealt with any dimensional nonsense recently," she says cheerfully. "Not since we closed the hole in the sky a few months ago. Anyway, hello! I'm Dagna. What dimensional nonsense have you been untangling? Where are you from? Your clothes and stuff are all really weird, I've never seen anything like it."

"Yours are likewise strange to me. I just came from an office where I work as a senior thaumic architect specialized in communication and transportation. Which is a fancy way of saying I keep the phones and roads working, despite my colleagues' best efforts to disrupt them through lack of common sense. Hole in the sky, you say? Well, at least you fixed it."

"I'm not sure what a phone is, either. Are we even speaking the same language? I think maybe we aren't! This is one of the most interesting things that's ever happened to me!"

"I do admit it's in the top ten strangest things I've seen this month." A different device comes out, this one looks more like a hand-sized crystal with strange patterns of metal set into it. Tap tap tap. "This is a phone. It talks to other phones. Well, technically it's a link crystal, but phone is the colloquial term."

"Talks how?" She pulls her goggles back down and arranges some lenses, then hops out of her chair and peers at the link crystal from several feet away. "Well, that's definitely not any kind of lyrium I've ever met..."

"You speak into it, and it relays the sound of your voice to far away. Lyrium's fuel?"

"Lyrium isn't primarily fuel," she says. "But at least with the kind of magic I'm used to, something that looked like that and did magic stuff would either be made of lyrium or have lyrium in it, and that doesn't. So I guess you have an entirely new way of doing magic. And here I thought all I'd be finding out about today was what the deal was with these ancient runestones. Neat!"

"I think we are each missing a great amount of context about the other's world. I know of hundreds of kinds of magic. Would you mind if I investigated yours with my scanners?"

"As long as your scanners aren't going to mess with anything, go right ahead! The runestones are pretty safe, and so am I. I don't have anything on me today that's likely to explode, or even dangerous for humans to handle."

"Everything you have on or in you depends on subtly different varieties of Lyrium and I won't pretend to know what the Fade is. I'm guessing that Lyrium is alive in a sense?"

"Yes!" she says, beaming. "Lyrium is alive! It took us ages to figure that out, and it explained so much once we finally got it!"

"Those numbers sound impressive, should I be impressed? What can you buy for four or five thousand MTU?"

"Stop me if I name something you don't understand. Very fancy phone-book-calculator type things and a contract to keep them working for two years for, oh, sixty people of your choice. Emergency medical evacuation artifacts and one year's promise to keep them working and have the best healers in a dozen worlds on standby at the other end, for ten people. Three or four floating platforms that can lift a dozen people and fly fairly quickly, or one slower one that can lift a small house. A great quantity of luck or mental and physical boosts, though those are strictly temporary. With more Lyrium you'd be in the market for divine intervention."

"Those sound pretty impressive to me! Assuming I'm not permanently stranded in this weird magic bar, which I probably should've started worrying about before now, I wonder if I should try to get your mana-buying people in touch with someone from Orzammar who could sell them some lyrium..."

"I can sell you a link crystal no problem, it should be able to contact me even from a universe previously unknown to us, and I'll arrange a visit assuming the scriers don't come back complaining that your world is irretrievably dangerous."

"...My world can be dangerous. How dangerous is too dangerous? We fixed the hole in the sky, but on the other hand, someone did manage to put it there in the first place..."

"I don't know much about the risk levels, sorry. What were the hole in the sky's effects?"

"Rifts to the Fade opened up all over the place and started spitting demons everywhere, and turned some spirits sort of inside-out so they became demons too," she says. "It was a big mess. But we got it all cleaned up eventually. Oh, that reminds me! I have a simple way to test if I'm still in contact with the rest of my world!" Blink. "Yep, looks like Prince Stalas is okay, and I can still tell, which means that my silver lyrium and his silver lyrium can still talk to each other. That's one of the less well-studied applications of silver lyrium, is that any two people who have it can check up on each other, as quick as a thought. But it's not very precise as a communication tool, not nearly as good as one of your link crystal phones."

"That does sound fairly nasty. We'll have to see what the vegamancers make of it, I suppose."

"Vegamancers?"

"Magic-users who specialize in making things that do divination. Which is finding things out and-slash-or predicting the future."

"Predicting the future? I didn't even know you could do that!" says Dagna. "And here I thought I might run out of new things to learn about magic eventually. Silly me."

"Divination is far from perfectly reliable, I'll warn you. Magic is indeed fascinatingly complicated, isn't it?"

"It's the best! How hard is it to learn how to use all your magic-sensing tools? I probably can't be spared for an entire apprenticeship or even a three-year course of study right now, there's too much to do, but I really want to see if they can help me figure out the nature of the Fade."

"That may be a problem. For all my education... I spent eleven years in various schools, and another fifteen working, which is not all that different as a learning experience. I could try to go over the basics and give you a basic 'scope in exchange for a few chunks of Lyrium?"

"I don't have any raw lyrium on hand but it should be easy enough to find some back at Skyhold... that sounds like a good deal to me!"

"Assuming the door even lets you out..." He walks over and opens it to reveal a bland hallway, walls painted blue and lights in the ceiling. "Fairly sure it reacts to who's opening it."

He points a device out the door. "Not inherently hostile, good. I'd enjoy a tour if you don't mind. Just let me drop a return beacon in my world first."

"Sure!"

Door close. Door open. He pokes at something that looks a bit like a smith's tool and sets it down just outside the magic bar. Door close again.

"It's fair beautiful, at least these windows. No substitute for art. I probably won't recall these names... I don't think I've heard yours. I'm Terence Mills."

"Worry not, prettiness is only one of several factors influencing where I wish to visit." He hands Dagna a thaumoscope and shows her the basic operation - how to look through it and adjust what it sees. Mana type, frequency filtering, squelch and gain, and half a dozen other things. Of course, interpreting the various lines and colors and shapes it displays is the hard part.

Dagna follows along readily with his explanations. When they reach her workshop at the bottom of the stairs, she puts some assorted chunks of lyrium in a leather bag, cautions him not to light them on fire, handle them unprotected, or eat them, and gives him the bag.

"Actually, please hold on." He levitates the Lyrium samples out of the bag and wraps them in what Dagna's shiny new thaumoscope indicates is very... Shieldy... Mostly-clear fabric of some kind? "There we go."

"Huh," says Dagna, checking the thaumoscope. "That stuff looks handy."

"It is handy. It's not perfect, I'd go fetch a proper sample container if it was dangerous enough, but you were going to just put it in a bag so this should be good. I bet you're going to end up wanting to buy lots of stuff MTU or our subsidiaries can sell."

"Seems likely!" she agrees. "This thaumoscope is going to be a big help already."

"Glad to be of assistance. I'll want to go home and sleep in a few hours, but there's time, and we'll be able to talk through the link crystals, later."

"Plenty of time!" beams Dagna. "So, do you want a tour of the castle? A tour of my workshop? Both?"

"Workshop first. New magic systems are always fun."

"Sure!" she says agreeably. "So that was my workshop, and I think that way is the wine cellar but I've never been, and if we go back up the stairs," she starts back up the stairs, "I can show you the throne room, which is very pretty."

He follows. "I've never much liked wine, but new places are fun. Is it possible we'll encounter anybody important and if so are they likely to object to me?"

"Oh, we might, but I'm sure they won't, all this otherwordly stuff is very exciting news."

"I wouldn't want to have caused a diplomatic incident, is all."

He takes pictures, and recordings of the thaumoscope's output. "It's a less technological aesthetic than I'm used to, you can see how much effort went into it all. The lights, I bet they'll keep shining just about forever, right?"

"If I made them right, they should!"

"Built to last. I like when people do that. So much neater."

"It's more satisfying than making something that's going to break."

"Not as profitable, though. I detest the concept of planned obsolescence. It's a giant scam that accounts for fully a quarter of my work."

"Planned obsolescence?"

"They design things so that they will almost definitely break in however many years. So whoever bought it has to buy a new one, and the company makes more money. Especially if it's something relatively cheap, and not a fancy expensive tool like thaumoscopes. I'm not actually sure how extensive this strategy is, but I'm pretty sure it happens at least a little."

"That's terrible," she says indignantly.

"I know. The Higher Ups are much more willing to do terrible things if non-terrible things aren't making enough money. And then they get yelled at and boycotted for doing terrible things and shape up. And then they decide they aren't making enough money again. It's sort of cyclic."