The suite's common room is pretty, nicely (if strangely) decorated, with four enormous windows looking out on a wide assortment of different views. There's a probably-vaguely-human girl with long curly dark hair sitting on a couch, playing fascinatedly with some sort of primitive-looking computing device as though she has never encountered the concept of a handheld screen before in her life.

"Hi hi hi," Diki chitters as he approaches (not too close). "Friend friend?"

"Hi." She looks up from her device and smiles, friendly and curious. "What sort of a creature are you?"

"Diki is jawa. Tynan is human," Diki says, waving Tynan's hand. "Diki student here, Tynan Diki's ward. What species friend?"

"Elf," she says. "Mostly." She holds up her mysterious device. "Do you have these where you come from? It's fascinating."

"Yes yes yes! Computer, yes - hmmm, difficult to explain - Eserik help?"

A translucent gentleman appears over Diki's shoulder and bows. "With sufficient effort and lightning, you can trick a special rock into thinking. With sufficient refinement, you need less and less of the rock. This is the science known as computation."

Diki sighs heavily. "Eserik very helpful yes yes."

"I live to serve."

"Oh, and hello to you too," she says, smiling at the apparition. "Are you a spirit?"

"I am a Force ghost," Eserik says with another bow. "Once, like Diki, I was a Jedi, a warrior-monk serving the universal Force; now, I exist only in the perception of others. And whatever impact I can have on the world with my powers, I suppose."

"Not a spirit," she concludes. "What's the universal Force?"

"Force is omnipresent energy field connecting all things. Living things more. Use for telekinesis, mental effects, precognition, many many many things."

Diki lifts Tynan into the air and spins him demonstratively. Tynan burbles with delight.

"Oh! Interesting. That is not at all how I'm used to hearing magic described."

"It's not usually referred to as magic - it's thought a bit provincial, really. Though if you are in fact from a pre-computational society then that's probably to be expected."

"Did someone say pre-computational society?" asks the blue alien woman hauling her suitcase through the door. "I'm an archaeologist! Sort of. Mostly I'm a mercenary. Who's pre-computational?"

"Me," says Isaure. "Which is apparently very provincial of me."

"Oh!" The alien turns to the ghost. "Don't be an asshole."

"Oh, very nice. I wasn't saying it was provincial to be pre-computational, just that some faux pas are to be expected when someone is operating at a technological disadvantage."

"Eserik always asshole," Diki apologizes. "Side effect of be old ghost."

She raises her eyebrows at Eserik. "I am, literally and figuratively, provincial. I was born in a tiny village that doesn't appear on maps. When I open my mouth to speak, merchants instinctively raise their prices and fine ladies cross the street to escape the smell of my breath, which they imagine will reek of fish. If you think I should be ashamed of this, that is your problem and not mine."

"Oh, for the love of - fine, fine, I'm an asshole, I'm going back in the jawa's head."

Eserik vanishes. There is not an indignant puff of smoke, much as he might like there to be.

Arela turns to Isaure. "Cool! I'm from a center of galactic culture, but it's mostly pirates pretending to be civilized, so I don't think it really counts. Fishing, really - do you trade with your neighbors to balance out your diets?"

She smiles. "I suppose so. There's farmers up the river. It's nice to have a little variety, but it sounds like you mean something else?"

"Oh, it turns out that humans actually need a lot of different kinds of food to really be as healthy as they can be. And avoid lead. Avoiding lead is very important. But so is having meat and vegetables and fish and lots of other kinds of food. Or, you know, concentrated micronutrient paste. Most species where I come from aren't from planets as biodiverse as Earth, so they don't need as much variety or supplementation. Part of why humans are so interesting to me is that - you had such an odd path to sapience, and you've got all these interdependencies, and it all adds up so that if you get a human just right they're really incredible but the slightest disruption can have all of these atrocious cascading failure states!"

"Hmm! I wonder if humans where I'm from are like that—or elves, for that matter, I haven't noticed much of a difference in what we like to eat but I also didn't know there were issues besides boredom with eating nothing but fish."

"Elves? Is that -" Arela gestures to where her ears would be if she had ears. "You look more like a human subspecies than anything else, though admittedly humans are already kind of implausibly similar to asari and that's posed some significant questions to xenobiologists through the years - irrelevant, sorry, I get distracted. Are you considered a different species? Are you interfertile? Am I being horribly invasive?"

"You're being a little invasive but I don't mind a bit," Isaure assures her. "So, the situation as I understand it: the four peoples of Thedas are elves, humans, dwarves, and qunari. Elves are like so," she indicates herself. "Humans are closer to your height and build than mine, closer to my colour palette than yours, and have, as you guessed, rounder ears. Dwarves are shorter than elves and better-muscled than just about anyone and I've heard they can do strange things but I've never met one. Qunari come from a different continent and they're enormously tall and grey and have horns and keep trying to conquer everyone. Mostly you can only make children with your own kind, but it's not impossible, I know someone who's managed it. An elf and a human, and their daughter came out looking so human you couldn't have known otherwise without her telling you."

"Huh! Parapatric speciation, maybe? I can't imagine the evolutionary pressures that would give you narrower ears, though. Do you also hear better than humans, it could be a spandrel..."

"We might hear a little better, but not so much that it's obvious. We do see in the dark better, and we turn up mages more often, not that that's necessarily a good thing."

"Oh, I forgot about the magic I was so excited about biology - magic! My home universe only has Mass Effect manipulation, which is pretty cool but not as cool as actual magic! Um, the Mass Effect lets you manipulate how much things effectively weigh and apply force to them, which amounts to some pretty effective telekinesis plus a couple of other lesser effects. In addition to that, as an asari I can interface with alien nervous systems and manipulate them in various ways, usually purely communicative, but I guess that's enough to net me an invitation to MCU."

She chuckles. "Yes, magic. I want to say it's less exciting than it sounds but I suppose I don't know how exciting you find it."

"Extremely!"

"Magic," says the girl stepping daintily over the threshold, "is stupid. I really wanted to be a wizard, but I studied for two semesters and all I learned was that without a mutant trait, you're basically fucked. Unless you lived in bronze age Greece and had nothing better to do for three thousand years, in which case you're Circe."

"I don't know what a mutant trait is but I don't think my world has magic that can be learned without a born talent either," says Isaure. "Sorry. Apparently there's magic lessons here that will work regardless, though. I wonder how that works?"

"I'll bet it's still not cool enough to spend a significant amount of effort on it when we've all got our own more specific talents."

Diki raises Tynan's hand and waves it at the new arrival. "Everybody introduce? Diki is Diki, jawa, Jedi with Force powers. Tynan is Tynan, baby human, also with force powers but not good at them yet."

"Oh, cool, a baby. Love not being informed I'm going to be rooming with a baby. I'm Tessa, Tessa Argyris. I'm a mutant - specifically a package-deal psychic. That means at any given time I can be telekinetic, or psychic, or a Gadgeteer, which is a kind of ESP that lets me instinctively understand technology."

"I'm Arela K'Bael. I'm an asari, which is a kind of sexy blue alien that wants to fuck your wife, and that means I'm also a biotic - telekinetic - and able to meld with other species' nervous systems for communicative and reproductive purposes. I can't do anything particularly fucked-up while I'm in there, though."

"I'm Isaure and I am an elf. I was hoping to dodge the question of whether I'm a mage, but apparently we're all sharing, so yes, I am."

"Why dodge the question? Just general inclination to hide your capabilities?"

"Habit. At home it's not wise to admit to it."

"Ah. I'd say 'what kind of dystopia are you from' but I'm pretty sure we'd all have been burned for witchcraft where I'm from a few centuries ago, so." She shrugs. "Apparently a relatively common kind."

"In defense of the Templars, unsupervised mages do turn up full of demons pretty often and it's a problem. I just don't want to be dragged off to prison and forced to spend my life in other people's service just because I had the misfortune to be born with powers they fear."

"Oh, that's significantly more dystopian than I was imagining actually."

"Damn," Arela agrees.

Diki hefts Tynan, patting him rapidly on the back. "Tynan needing nap. Okay if Diki go to settle in yes?"

"Of course!"

"Yeah, go right ahead. Might take a nap myself, see if I can outrun the jet lag."