"...Moderately awkward, but if you'd be more comfortable that way, feel free."

"I don't want to make you uncomfortable and I'm not even sure how much it'd help but..."

"I'm perpetually covered in darkspawn blood. Mere social awkwardness is barely going to register on my discomfort scale."

"Blind and deaf, language thing that overrides the deafness, extra sense, regeneration, spider fileting, uncomfortable warmth all the time, the thing where I randomly fell in love with you, and whatever landed me here. Which is at least four pairs of things... some technical advantages aren't super advantageous... and more likely I've noticed three good things and five bad ones and I'm missing at least two good things."

"Language thing, extra sense, and regeneration seem like advantages. Spider fileting could go either way. Randomly falling in love and being transported into terrible danger seem like probable disadvantages that might technically be advantages under some circumstances. Blindness and deafness seem like obvious disadvantages. How's your sense of smell doing? If you don't smell a perpetual horrible stench that's probably gone too, which seems to raise the odds that the blindness and deafness are one problem taking out multiple senses...?"

"So, three solid advantages, one questionable advantage, two probable disadvantages, two solid disadvantages counting the sense losses as a package but the uncomfortable warmth separately?"

"Seems like."

"Any idea of roughly how many artifacts you touched...?"

"I would be very surprised if a freak accident even with the most irresponsibly packed vehicle of all time managed to put me in contact with more than ten, but I was a little busy being deprived of my primary senses and hit by a van to count them."

"Valid."

"But there could honestly be any number of very secretive other effects, of either valence. I might have a phobia of something weird which just doesn't happen to be down here, say. There's one that turns you invisible but makes you afraid of shoelaces. Made the incipient crime wave pretty easy to handle."

"Shoelaces." He shakes his head in amazement. "What a world that must be."

"Most people aren't touched. ...But I'm sure you'd find it weird in other ways. I'm getting the impression we may have more technology, even though I assume this monsterful cave is not the highest pinnacle of engineering achievement here."

"Yeah. You are not seeing the best Thedas has to offer down here, but I have no reason to doubt your intuitions about technology given that acknowledged assumption."

"I guess the simplest example is electricity? Which is, um, tame lightning... I guess lightning might be hard to come by underground."

"Lightning runes exist...?"

"They do? What do they do?"

"I'm not personally an enchanter so this is a sloppy summary rather than a technical explanation, but if you work lyrium into a weapon in a certain pattern it'll spark when you hit things with it, and if you work lyrium into armour in a certain different but related pattern it'll provide more protection against lightning from enchanted weapons, hostile mages, and ordinary sources of lightning."

"Huh. Okay, so the sparks, we've got a way without any runes of making a lot of spark and sending it along wires or into storage compartments called batteries, where it does things I do not understand because I am not an engineer and it powers lights and ovens and stuff like that."

"Useful."

"It is. Um, and a non-electrical thing we have are bicycles, although the one I had before the van presumably reduced it to mangled gears and pipes, was called a tricycle because it had three wheels - they took surprisingly long to invent even though they don't technically require really high tech? I might be able to replicate the design, actually, I knew the parts of my trike okay."

"What is a bicycle?"