"What the fuck?!" exclaims said witness. "Where'd you come from?"

"...it's the common tongue of Thedas?" he says. "What language were you expecting?"

"Noregrsk. I don't know how I - I can't see - I - oh god where am I -"

"You're in the Deep Roads, somewhere under the Frostback Mountains. I'm afraid the best thing I can say for your current location is that we are not being attacked by darkspawn at this very moment."

"I-I don't know where that is or what darkspawn are and I can't see or, or I don't think I can actually hear either, am - am I healing? I got hit by a van I don't know how many artifacts it was carrying they should have been wrapped up -!"

"...Yes, you are healing," he says. "It's very disconcerting to watch, actually. Also, I can't imagine how you can have failed to hear of darkspawn, and I suspect you'll have a similar reaction if I ask what sort of artifact you mean."

"At least - at least two, one to heal me and one for the languages... three, I can sort of... not see, or hear, but... I have a different sense... I haven't counted all the drawbacks yet... blind and deaf could be one or two... landing here is one... is it... um, is it really way too warm in here, or is that... just me?"

"It's just you," he says. "The Deep Roads are actually kind of chilly when you're not near a lava pit."

"Three or four... four or five," wince. "um."

"Um?"

"Um, I think, oh god, let me start at the beginning. So. Artifacts. Are things that belong to people who die, which were the person's favorite thing. If you touch one, you get a benefit and a drawback. A popular one lets you find artifacts but makes you have to tell all your secrets to your favorite person. There's one that lets you identify artifacts but you have to sleep twenty hours a day. Most of them aren't that appealing. And I just got hit with a bunch of them and I think one of them might - have - done a thing where I - fall in love with the first person I see well not see but UGH," and now she's crying.

"Um!" he says. "I'm - I'm sorry? I'd offer to hug you if I weren't covered in darkspawn blood... you shouldn't touch me, it's horribly toxic."

"Well I've apparently gone and been touched for regeneration but I don't know if it handles toxins," she says miserably.

"The darkspawn taint isn't just toxic, either, it turns you into a ghoul eventually. I just happen to be immune for complicated reasons. Good thing, too, or I'd be twitching and raving by now. Ancestors, what am I going to feed you... I would love to be able to say being blind and deaf and magically in love with a strange dwarf was your biggest problem, but unfortunately you're also deep underground in a network of caves and tunnels abandoned by all civilized people and infested with darkspawn. I've only survived this long because for complicated reasons I don't need to eat or sleep as long as I keep sniffing magic rocks."

"Well, for all I know I have that too, I could have anything, at least if somebody had dumped the entire university collection on me I'd know to brace myself if I needed a bath... Unless I got something that handles balance and I don't feel like I did I can't walk very well. I'm probably a liability in here for you."

"Yes, well, it's almost inconceivable that I'll survive down here even without you, so if I stay by your side and try to keep you alive I don't lose anything, whereas if I abandon you I lose all self-respect. Doesn't seem like a difficult choice to me."

She dips her head, blushes, and smiles a very very little bit.

"My name is Stalas Aeducan," he adds. "Formerly a prince of Orzammar, now exiled for a false charge of kinslaying."

"I'm Annabelline Merry Swan. Annie for short. University of Noregr student up until I got hit by a van just now."

"And I'm just going to guess you're as blank about Orzammar as I am about Noregr."

"Completely."

"Well. Would you like to trade personal and worldly histories while we sit here waiting for the darkspawn to notice us and attack, or would you prefer to try moving around and see if we can get you a source of food?"

"I, um." She pats the nastiest injury, on her leg. "I can probably walk as long as there's no cliff faces to fall off of."

"Not around here, anyway. I can warn you well before we approach any lava pits. But if you'd rather wait until your - artifactual healing - finishes fixing you up, that's perfectly understandable."

"I don't know how long it'll take and I don't fancy getting eaten." She gets unsteadily to her feet. "This not seeing thing I do now is very weird."

"What's it like?"

"There's no colors or directionality... I can not-see behind me just fine. It goes through stuff. About - a hundred feet, two hundred? If my estimate's any good and it might not be. And fading out from there. I can't concentrate on it all at once though. I can just tell where stuff is in that radius and sort of its - texture and density?"

"...that sounds amazingly useful for noticing darkspawn - if your magic is translating units of distance accurately I think that's farther than I can sense them," he says. "Although it stops short of Stone-sense, so I'm still the better navigator."

"I'll let you know if anything moves. Is Stone-sense like not seeing for rock?"

"Yeah. Dwarf thing."

"...Yes?"

"Oh. We don't have those. Do I look like a recognizable species to you?"

"You look human, if I had to guess. My understanding of humans is much more theoretical than practical."

"Yeah, I'm a human. We only have humans. I mean, and nonsapient animals and plants."

"Humans, dwarves, elves, qunari. Darkspawn," he says. "It's arguable whether darkspawn belong to the category 'people'. You seem to be a human so I guess you know what those are like, I'm outrageously skinny for a dwarf and a little taller than normal but otherwise a reasonable example, elves tend to be between my height and yours and have long pointed ears and fragile builds, qunari are tall and have short pointed ears and horns. Darkspawn are mostly vaguely people-shaped but vary in which people they're shaped vaguely like."

"I'll... do my best to learn to tell the difference."

"The question's pretty academic down here anyway. You'll be encountering me, darkspawn, and maybe the Legion of the Dead, who are all dwarves. And I suppose if I succeed in finding the lost Paragon you will meet her too, but she and her retinue are also all dwarves."

"Okay, so what's the shape difference between a dwarf-resembling darkspawn and an actual dwarf?"

"Okay. I mean, I don't think I have a death ray, but I have no idea. I'll try to be conservative and wait for you to tell me either way on some examples."

"...If you did have a death ray and didn't know it, how would you find out?"

"I don't know it would depend on the artifact and whether it was a good effect or a bad one," she says, unutterably frustrated. "I don't recognize anything I've noticed so far, I think these must have been new ones on their way to the university for the Dean to figure out. I am, obviously, not fatal to be near, small mercy, I - I need you to be alive."

"That sounds terrifying on multiple levels," he says. "I'm sorry you're in such an awful situation."

"Yeah." Sigh. "I may - have some side effects sort of lying in wait, some of them are contingent, the university has one that makes it really painful to touch water. So if I'm suddenly incapacitated or catch fire or something then I would appreciate if you removed me from whatever thing was novel in my environment, at least until and unless it turns out that's just going to happen every certain number of hours or something..."

"Sure," he says. They are making slow progress along the tunnel; he pauses again and says, "And here's a vein of lyrium. I'm not actually sure what the fumes do to humans, so don't do what I'm about to do." And he goes up to it and inhales.

She stands back.

He steps back after a few breaths. "...I'm sort of curious what your not-seeing can tell about the difference between me right before and right after lyrium," he says, emitting small clouds of glowing blue smoke with every exhalation.

"Your breath is different? There's some changing density. I'm not very good at figuring out what everything I'm - sensing - actually is. It's... it's pretty?"

"It makes my breath and eyes glow blue and the one time I caught my reflection right after a lyrium vein I thought I looked very creepy, so, I guess I'm glad you like the look better than I do," he says.

"It's weird that I don't know what you look like," she sighs.

"Why didn't it work?"

"They don't give you a map when you're exiled to the Deep Roads for murder."

"Oh. And your Stonesense range doesn't get you all the way to an exit?"

"If it did, exile to the Deep Roads wouldn't make a very effective death sentence."

"Well, it is still full of monsters, but, yeah. ...This would be a great time for me to discover a really, really convenient artifact effect and just, I don't know, teleport us out of here. No luck. The one that makes water hurt does teleportation but I don't think those touched can take passengers, anyway..."

"Well, at least you could get out of here alive... anyway, the reason I bring up my crazy plan is that it's still the closest thing I've got to a long-term survival strategy, but will definitely involve taking insane risks that I would not normally consider, and I feel like you should have the chance to make an informed decision about whether you prefer the crazy plan or the more conservative but approximately equally doomed 'stay as far away from darkspawn as possible and try to find a route to the surface' strategy."

"...You know more about the situation than I do and I might, like, quietly freak out if you take insane risks but I'll still vote in favor of long term survival with possible incidental side benefits to third parties."

"If we actually find the Paragon Branka and she actually found the Anvil of the Void, it's conceivable that the side benefits to third parties will involve a complete turnaround of the entire war against the darkspawn from a holding action against the eventual destruction of the world to something actually winnable," he adds. "I mean, it's a long shot, but so was me surviving the past month, so."

"That. Sounds good, yeah."

"I thought so."

"So... let me know if there's anything I can do to help with my inadequately catalogued magical powers and the balance of a drunk toddler. Besides keeping a lookout for anything moving."

"Will do," he says. "And please let me know if you notice any more magical powers."

"I will."

"Anyway, in the absence of nearby darkspawn to hide from, what should we talk about while we walk...?"

"Um - story of your life?"

"Sure," he says cheerfully. "So, my father is a king and my mother was a noble hunter - do you need either of those concepts explained before I go on?"

"I know what kings are, noble hunter sounds out of context like some kind of extremely specialized assassin."

He snickers softly. "No. Uh, the condensed version: Orzammar has a mostly inflexible caste system and an increasingly desperate population problem. Mixed-caste couples are mostly frowned upon except that any child of such a couple takes the same caste as its corresponding parent, sons from fathers and daughters from mothers, so a woman of a lower caste who manages to produce a noble's son finds herself elevated to the station of her child, and the rest of her immediate family can come with. Noble hunting is therefore a very popular sport. The reverse, a lower-caste man getting with a higher-caste woman, is much rarer because she can always claim she got the baby somewhere else; whereas an heir is too precious a commodity for a nobleman to look at his bastard's mother and say 'I don't know what you're talking about, I never bedded that woman'. With me so far?"

"Approximately."

"So - because of the part where her close family also gets ennobled - a woman of low caste and childbearing age will sometimes be sponsored by a rich person also of low caste who covers all the bribes and the fancy outfits and so forth, then pretends to be her uncle or whatever if she succeeds. Since you don't get rich while casteless unless you're some flavour of criminal, the rivalries among these sponsors can get pretty nasty. My mother had a sponsor, her sponsor had a rival, he poisoned her when she got pregnant, she pursued some very sketchy treatments to try to stay alive long enough to have her child, and now here I am with some unfortunate health problems and the recently discovered ability to survive indefinitely off lyrium fumes."

"Health problems?"

"I'm an unbelievably skinny little weed compared to any healthy dwarf, and I bruise very easily."

"Oh."

"Anyway. I also grew up with two brothers, both legitimate, one older, one younger. Half-brothers technically, but the distinction isn't important. My older brother Trian was one of the most annoying people I've ever met and would've made a terrible king, and my younger brother Bhelen is a scheming little shit who had Trian killed and then convinced everyone I'd done it so he could have me exiled for the crime, presumably with an eye to becoming Father's heir once we were both out of the way."

"Eugh."

"Yes, my sentiments exactly. The night before it happened, I was talking to Bhelen and I told him what I thought of Trian as a candidate for the throne, and that if he wanted to make an open bid to replace Trian as heir I'd support him. We could have done it. If he wanted to be king, he did not need to resort to kinslaying. And yet here we are."

"That's -" Pause. "Something's moving, that way, past the nearest aperture beyond this wall, the next one after that. Several somethings but they're passing in and out of my range."

"Shape?"

"Humanoid... assorted sizes. Um. Vaguely horrible. Probably darkspawn. I've counted eight so f- nine. Ten."

"Mm. If there's only ten I want to kill them; if there's significantly more than ten I want to flee in an orderly fashion."

"Fleeing it is. This way."

"I can't run," she reminds him anxiously, following at a walk. "This is about it and then I start falling, it'd be slower but I can find the unevennesses in the ground better with the new sense..."

"I've fought my way past large concentrations of darkspawn before, when they cornered me unexpectedly. All is not lost even if they catch us. I just don't want to fuck with them if I can avoid it, not while I have someone to protect."

Nod. "Okay. But if you do have to run away, I mean - I don't know that I can do anything about your self-respect but your companion cannot run and we're being chased by monsters and if you have to leave me behind you won't lose my respect."

"I am unfortunately a bit of an overachiever. Even if I'm doomed anyway - in fact, especially if I'm doomed anyway - I'd never forgive myself for abandoning you while there was still a chance you could be saved. See also my doomed quest to save the lost Paragon and by extension hopefully the world."

"Okay. I'll walk as fast as I can and cross my fingers and hope for useful magic powers."

"You do that."

So she walks as fast as she can, although she doesn't literally cross her fingers.

And Stalas leads her through the dimly lit and often almost totally dark tunnels. At least the light doesn't matter to either of their perception of the terrain.

And she points out darkspawn when she notices them. A handful over that way. More than a handful up ahead.

"Oh my god those spiders are so big spiders aren't supposed to be that big. Are darkspawn worse than giant spiders."

"Darkspawn are worse than giant spiders. Giant spiders are trivial. Which way to the giant spiders?"

"That way. They are too big how do they hold themselves up that's supposed to be physically impossible."

"It's... strictly better than them not being edible... what are my other menu options likely to be?"

"If we're lucky we'll find edible mushrooms. If we're really lucky we'll find nugs, which are small mammals and can be legitimately tasty when cooked. If we're only a little bit lucky we'll find deep stalkers, which are lizards and taste kind of horrible but by all accounts still better than giant spiders."

"Can the spiders be preserved edibly in some way so I can discard them if we find nugs and mushrooms or are my options eat spider now or don't eat spider now?"

"Eat spider now or don't eat spider now. And at that, getting at the edible spider parts is going to be a bit messy if you don't want to risk me cutting them up with tainted daggers, which you probably shouldn't risk because if your magic healing can't deal with the taint it will be a big problem."

"...You did," says Stalas. "That just happened."

"That's weird. What the hell kind of artifacts fell on me? Okay. How does one prepare filet of spider."

He peers at the filet of spider. "I'm unfortunately a bit lacking in the necessary supplies to cook them, but as far as I know they're safe to eat raw..."

"...for humans?"

"Humans, dwarves, and elves have mostly identical dietary needs and only differ in preferences. I can't say for sure about qunari but I've never heard differently."

"Sorry," says Stalas. "If I had anything better to offer you, I would."

"I know." There is a small flash of a sort of lovesick expression she's been suppressing and then it promptly goes back to being suppressed.

"Anyway. Any darkspawn in that direction?" He points.

"Nnnnot as such but there are some in the connecting cave that way -" Point.

"Hmm. That connection's a dead end, though. How many?"

"I count six but the cave doesn't end within range."

"Tempted to risk it. Thoughts? Six darkspawn won't give me appreciably more trouble than those spiders; up to a dozen and it could get dicey."

"...They're sort of clustered, it's probably just six."

"All right. Let's try sneaking past them and if that doesn't work I can just kill them all."

Hooray!

When they're well past the darkspawn: "All right, good for us. Clear thataway?"

"Looks like. ...I'm just going to stop correcting myself for visual metaphors."

"Um, it's not very interesting in the context of my own world but I guess it might be out of that context. My parents got divorced when I was a baby and I live most of the time in a big city with my mother, who teaches school for five-year-olds. My father's a police officer in a much smaller town. I recently got out of compulsory education and enrolled in university and I hadn't decided what I was going to specialize in, because I originally wanted to work on studying artifacts but they make you get your mind read and I'm very much not willing to have my mind read. I was only willing to even go to the school with the mind-reading artifact because people who touch it constantly swear at the top of their lungs and I could tell from farther away than their mindreading range if one were around."

"The way you describe these artifacts sounds completely insane to me, but I guess 'horrible monsters appeared deep underground hundreds of years ago and started trying to kill everyone' probably sounds about equally insane to you," says Stalas.

"They appeared? I was imagining they'd just sort of always been around."

"Legend has it some nosy humans tried to break into the house of their god and came back as darkspawn, but no one actually knows if that's true. It rings a little hollow if, unlike most humans, you're not sure their god even exists."

"All the humans here can agree on one god? Wow."

"The major division seems to be between a bunch of humans who think their god is best represented by a female high priest and a different bunch of humans whose competing high priest is male. I mean, it's more complicated than that, and I think there are a few much smaller competing traditions that I don't know much about because I've never been to the surface, but most humans you meet are going to worship the Maker. Some dwarves, too, if they've been on the surface long enough."

"There's a lot more than one and a half religions in my world. I never went in for any of them."

"I like dwarven religion, personally. It's comfortingly concrete. There's no arguing with the existence and properties of the Stone, and it doesn't fight wars or fall in love or demand tribute. Your ancestors were still your ancestors regardless of whether you personally believe they're hanging around in the walls cheering you on and swearing at you when you fuck up."

"The more popular religions at home like to claim both that their god of choice created the universe and that they have a monopoly on ethics, and I find this contradictory."

"Yeah, the Maker has that problem. The Stone doesn't."

Annie pats a tunnel wall.

"Sounds frustrating, watching the world go on without any way to do anything about it."

"Yeah. Not looking forward to that part of being dead. Hopefully I can find Branka and the Anvil and won't have to worry about it for years."

"...What does the Anvil do?"

"So, about a thousand years ago, a smith called Caridin created an object called the Anvil of the Void, which can make golems - warriors made of stone or metal that fight tirelessly until something smashes them to pieces. Things were looking pretty good in the war against the darkspawn for a while, but then something happened to Caridin and the Anvil, and nobody else could make a golem, and now the supply is steadily dwindling."

"And this isn't my world so there's not something horrible that will happen to anyone who interacts with the anvil as a corresponding tradeoff?"

"I haven't heard any indication that that's the case, and this isn't your world; things don't normally work that way. There's enchanted weapons and armour that just work somewhat better than normal weapons and armour and don't fuck with your senses or cause you to uncontrollably filet anything you touch or whatever."

"...I will definitely need to, like, pick up a nug, at some point, to see if I filet everything or only spiders or what. I don't even know if that's supposed to be a drawback or an advantage, the fileting, which makes a difference in how convenient to expect it to be."

"I encourage you to pick up a nug at the first available opportunity."

"With as many artifacts as I appear to have been hit with I'm impressed I'm still sane and mobile."

"The way you describe artifacts, so am I."

"Outside the front gate of Orzammar is a perpetually snowy mountaintop, and I've heard from those who've been both places that it's consistently colder out there than it is in the deep tunnels, but the deep tunnels are still uncomfortably chilly for most people."

"Okay. So I'm definitely magically warm, and this might be masking actual symptoms of being too cold or it might actually just be heating me up, I'll pay attention to if I shiver or get weirdly sleepy or numb, but either way um. How awkward would it be if I took off my shirt."

"...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?"

"It's a two-wheeled vehicle that requires some balance to keep upright - which is why I didn't have one of those - but on even moderately friendly terrain it can let a person go about three times faster than walking pace without working too much harder, much more so if they're racing and the ground's really flat."

"Oh. Sounds very... surface-ish."

"Yeah, not really designed to work in a cave system."

"But useful, on the surface."

"Very."

"Well, then, while I'm imagining that we survive the Deep Roads and bring back the Anvil of the Void and reverse my exile and remove my traitorous brother from the line of succession, I will also imagine that we get some engineers to put together a tricycle for you."

"...Are we imagining that I go live somewhere... elsewhere."

"We're imagining that you can live wherever you like, but I wouldn't expect you to prefer to spend literally the entire rest of your life underground without exception, and once they've got the design worked out we can also begin exporting them to the surface, where I'm sure lots of people would like more wheels than they've got."

"Okay."

"While I'm at it," he adds wistfully, "I am definitely also imagining being able to get a bath. Ancestors, I miss being clean."

"...Well, if we don't find water eventually I'm in trouble, but I suppose you might not want to rinse off darkspawn blood into running water."

"Ideally not."

"Is water common in the caves?"

"Common enough that I don't expect you to die of thirst, not common enough that I've been able to wash."

"Great," he sighs. Time to backtrack!

Backtrack backtrack.

"Wow," says Annie, not exactly looking around but pausing to appreciate the place.

"Yeah. Unfortunately if there are darkspawn here we're going to have to deal with them, because I need to figure out how to get to Ortan Thaig from here and then go that way regardless of how many darkspawn are between me and it."

"Um - there's five that way, only five."

"Five is a good number." He goes that way. "Any of them enormous with horns? Those are ogres. I like to be warned about ogres specifically in advance."

"No, they're all closer to your height, no horns."

"That one has a dagger. I think it's sharper than yours." She points. "On its leg."

She follows.

"So many. ...At least twenty. Thirty. Ogres."

"We don't have room to run," calculates Stalas. He keeps his voice to a low murmur. "They'd still see us when they came around the corner. You turn back and get as far as you can as fast as you can without falling, find some rubble to hide behind if there's any available; I'll wait here and surprise them."

She swallows. "Okay." And she goes. Because clearly she can't stop him from worrying about her and if he doesn't have to do it as much maybe he'll be able to live through this.

Annie will be over here curled up in a pocket of rubble and being 5% enthralled 95% terrified that he is about to die.

Shitshitshitshit she couldn't run even if she could run she's cornered -

Annie gets to her feet, disintegrating targets of opportunity while they're tangled.

She drops to her knees next to him, catching her breath. "Are you going to be okay? Can I help - what do I do - I don't disintegrate you is there anything I can do? I - there might have been something but I barely touched you and I only noticed it when I touched you -"

"...What did you notice when you touched me, exactly?"

"I don't know it was only for a moment -" She holds out her hand tentatively.

So Stalas touches her hand.

"I will take your regen," he says. "It seems preferable to continuing to go around with a wrecked shoulder indefinitely. - Do you know which drawback is attached to it?"

Headshake. "No idea. Um, if it makes you blind and deaf should I give you the languages thing and/or the extra sense, too, while you can't understand the question?"

"Languages thing. I'll probably want the extra sense too but the languages thing is the minimum required to discuss the problem."

"Okay. Ready?"

"Yeah."

"Regeneration comes with... no discernible complement," he reports. "Okay... after it's all done with these crossbow bolts, we can find out whether you can undo it. In case the answer is 'yes, but then you can't do it again'."

"Right. So there's at least one more horrible thing of some kind waiting for us to stumble across it, I suppose. Do you want me to pull the bolts out...?"

"The magic seems to be taking care of that by itself, and they're awkwardly placed for that sort of thing; too much messing around in that area and I might end up bleeding more than I'd like."

"Okay. ...The good news is that if I can undo it and redo it it's almost certainly consistent, you could try out any of the magic I've got and not have to live with the effects forever, but it'd probably be good to save for emergencies in case you got 'suddenly transported to a random location' or 'magically in love with me' which might... not undo as easily."

Fidget.

"If you can turn it off and back on again... I'm wondering whether I prefer to keep it indefinitely or not. It would make fighting darkspawn a whole lot easier, but I don't want both of us to be simultaneously incapacitated by the lurking drawback. Maybe I should refrain from going around with it on habitually, but take it up before any fights we get into."

"I'm not sure it's fast enough to be obviously a good risk during a fight, but I can patch you up after..." Pause. "There's no darkspawn blood on your hand anymore."

"Huh," he says, looking at his hand. "I suppose you disintegrated it."

"Do, um. Do you want me to disintegrate the rest of it."

"That... seems likely to get really awkward without actually leaving me clean enough to feel comfortable again."

"Okay."

"...Should we discuss the potential ramifications of you being magically in love with me, or continue avoiding the subject?"

"Um." She averts her eyes, although they weren't actually properly focused on him in the first place. "...whichever you'd rather. Maybe with a bias in favor if you're going to want to try out more magical powers. And a bias against if discussing it means I will have to tromp through a stressful survival situation having confronted particularly distressing relevant possibilities."

"...well," he says. "I am frankly not capable of entertaining romantic thoughts while crusted in weeks-old darkspawn blood. But I haven't observed anything that disqualifies you out of hand. So if particularly distressing relevant possibilities are going to come up, it will be after I have saved the world and had a bath. I hope that's more reassuring than otherwise."

"Yeah."

"Good. As for the bias in favour if I'm going to want to try out more magical powers... yeah, I see the logic. And I can imagine wanting to try out the ability to disintegrate darkspawn on contact, for example. So - what can you tell me about the experience of being magically in love?"

"It's, um." Fidget. "How much detail do you want."

"...um... I'm not entirely sure what you mean..."

"Because I could see it being awkward? And we've been mostly avoiding awkward."

"...okay, let's leave out the exceptionally awkward parts for now."

Nod nod nod. "Um, more or less as soon as I could orient myself enough to identify your existence via a combination of language thing and weird sense thing you were suddenly intensely important. I can... think around it, pretty much, but I have to try, and I can get some mileage by observing that you do not seem to be a particularly selfish person and would therefore not endorse various ludicrous tradeoffs I can imagine feeling emotionally compelled to make in your favor, but again I have to try. I'm not actually sure what would happen to me if you died and don't want to find out. Um, it's sort of hard to regulate my attention - I can do it, especially looking out for darkspawn that we need to know about because those are dangerous, but if we were somewhere safer I could probably just - kind of - not think about anything else for hours on end."

"That sounds really inconvenient on a number of levels," he says. "Especially under the circumstances."

Nod.

"You have correctly observed that I'm not a particularly selfish person," he adds, "and whatever ludicrous tradeoffs you find yourself contemplating, it's safe to assume I don't endorse them."

"Okay."

"Which actually makes me really worried about risking this, because if I started contemplating ludicrous tradeoffs it could get us both killed. Might be best if I stuck to the healing power for now, however tempted I am to disintegrate some darkspawn."

"That makes sense. Also one of the drawbacks does seem to have been interdimensional transport and I'd definitely have trouble in here on my own even with my disintegrating ability, to say nothing of where you could wind up."

"Yeah. No more experimenting with magical powers unless it's another situation like this," he shrugs his shoulder and the second crossbow bolt falls out of it, "where we're both vastly more likely to die if we don't try it."

Nod.

He considers, then says, "I think it's safe to try revoking the healing power."

She holds out her hand again.

Touch.

And the healing stops. Presumably along with whatever pitfall accompanied it.

"Okay, checking..." He pinches his arm and observes the resulting bruise. "Successfully revoked. Give it to me again for a moment, to confirm it wasn't a one-off?"

She returns it.

No more bruise. "Okay, good. I don't want to walk around with it on all the time but I'm confident it'll be there if I need it. Thank you."

"You're welcome." She takes it off again.

"I'm worried it'd make me worse at moving around than I already am. Do you think it wouldn't? ...Also warmer. It would make me warmer."

"Yes, it would unavoidably make you warmer, but it's not inconceivable that we'll get shot at again and you're not currently very well protected against crossbow bolts, which, let me tell you, are really uncomfortable. Up to you. If I were in your place I'd wear what I've got on regardless of the heat, but you do have that healing thing on all the time and I suppose there are tactical advantages to being underdressed when you disintegrate darkspawn at a touch. Maybe just a helmet? In case the healing thing would give up if it had to handle a serious head injury."

"That seems like a reasonable compromise," she nods, and she finds the least bad-fitting helmet and disintegrates all the darkspawn gunk in it she can and puts it on.

"All right... any more sharp daggers you can point me at in this bunch?"

She identifies the best daggers available in the loot.

She will disintegrate blood on daggers if that will help, and then follow along.

"Ooh. ...There's enough of a lost civilization here there might be a bathtub if you wanted to haul enough water. Maybe even a reasonable place for me to sleep. I'm going to need to sleep in a while."

"Spiders, just a couple, they're not moving around." She points. "I can do a circuit of the place before either of us becomes more vulnerable than usual."

"Yeah, good plan. Let's."

Walk walk walk. Annie investigates for not only moving things but also shapes that might be beds or baths or beyond.

"There's... some... one... in there," she says, adjusting the angle of her hand that was previously pointing at a promising bedded and bathed house. "I don't... think it's a darkspawn. Quite. Can something be part darkspawn...?"

"...The word you're looking for may be 'ghoul'. Um. If there's only one I sort of want to go talk to them, or at least determine whether they are able to be talked to."

Nod. "And that house has a bed and a bath both."

"Hello," echoes Annie uncertainly. "I'm Annie."

"I - maybe." She nibbles her lip, then says, "I can share a healing power, Ruck. It might help you. Do you want it?"

"Um, it's also possible you will... disintegrate... I don't know exactly how that works yet... but you can try if you want to." She holds out her hand.

"I didn't disintegrate," offers Stalas, when Ruck looks uncertain. This seems to be sufficiently cheering. Ruck very tentatively touches Annie's hand.

And he doesn't disintegrate! And Annie gives him the healing power.

"It has some kind of side effect we don't know about," Annie mentions. "So once you're done fixing you might not want to have it any more. I can take it back when you're done."

"We don't know which drawback goes with that one..." Unspoken: He might spontaneously fall in love with one of us.

"You could wind up blind and deaf, or be really warm all the time... but if you want to leave I can just try everything on you one by one and see what goes with which?"

"Let me know when you're all better and I can try another one."

"Do - do you need me to take one of the powers back...?"

Nod.

And Annie collapses in agony too.

Annie sits up, shivering and definitely not lurching Stalasward for a hug. "Humming. Oh, god, I kind of need to know if it's just humming and I really don't want to test it."

"Give it to me and I'll go off to an isolated corner and attempt to quietly sing," says Stalas. "I mean, if it just hurts and isn't some unrelated horrible sensation."

"It - it hurts a lot and that's all, but, um."

"I guarantee I have a much higher pain tolerance than either of you."

"Yes, but I have that thing where I'm in love with you and I'm not sure I can argue my brain into letting you test a thing that hurts that much to spare me temporary discomfort."

"Not even if I don't mind? I really don't. I regard the prospect of testing this with approximately the same attitude I have toward killing giant spiders. It's not my idea of fun but it's not hard and it's not really worth making a big fuss to avoid."

"You could have maybe talked me into it if I hadn't just tried it. I'll - think about it and see if I get anywhere. Annnnnd if you need the power for other reasons and then run away and test it I won't be mad at you or anything but it makes my skin crawl thinking about it."

"Should I take back those two or would you like to keep them in case they're useful if you land somewhere else?"

"Okay. I've also got... a weird sense, sort of like Stonesense but for things besides stone too... and a language thing... and that's all I know about that's good besides the thing that's letting me share these in the first place, which won't do you any good."

Tap.

Annie undoes it.

Well, if he's sure. Language thing.

"You can't faces? What do you mean?"

"Can you... tell what color my eyes are?" tries Annie.

"I think some people just have that normally, actually," says Annie. "That artifact's going to be so popular, you'd just have to get all your friends to wear nametags... and I haven't noticed because I'm actually blind."

"Yep. And we don't know the pairmate for the love thing but do know that you won't wind up with it or the disappearing one if I give you any of the known useful features."

"Yeah. In particular, I can safely take 'disintegrate darkspawn on contact' before a fight if I want it, although I'm not sure I do. The way I fight when I'm up against large numbers of darkspawn is pretty heavily adapted to them not vanishing as soon as I touch them."

"Yeah, you kept jumping on them. It was amazing."

He grins.

"I don't. Ruck might," he says, going over to check Ruck's heap of miscellaneous items.

"Oh... yeah." She scans the things anxiously.

There is indeed some miscellaneous paper and a few writing utensils, of which the graphite stick is still in usable shape. Stalas sits down on the floor of the cave and starts writing.

"Oh thank god," breathes Annie when he's written the first word, and then she's crying.

"Um?" says Stalas, looking up. "Are you all right...?" It doesn't look like definitely unhappy crying, but he isn't sure.

"I can read, I wasn't sure I was going to be able to read, it could have been different for spoken and written," she manages. She's still carrying her shirt; she dabs at her eyes with it.

• Healing power - pain around humming
  
• Disintegrate darkspawn (filet spiders?) - uncomfortably warm
  
• Extra sense - blind, deaf, can't smell, can't Stone-sense
  
• Language thing - can't recognize faces
  
• Give and revoke pairs of magic - vanish to another world
  
• (unknown) - magic love thing

"Thank you."

"No trouble. You want to carry it? Runs less risk of getting darkspawn blood all over it that way."

She laughs and tucks it into her pocket.

"All right, time for you to sleep and me to have the world's most laborious and ineffective bath."

"Uh, maybe not simultaneously, in case something attacks while one of those things is happening. I'm not exhausted, I can stand around being ready to disintegrate darkspawn for a while."

"It'll take long enough to draw my bath that you could probably get a good solid nap in before I'm done with it. Alternately, you could lend me the disintegration power before you go to sleep, which will also make me less unhappy about water temperatures."

"Fair enough. I'd offer to help haul the water but I'd probably spill half of it." She holds out her hand to offer the disintegration power.

Touch.

And now he is REALLY WAY TOO WARM. THE ARMOR IS NOT HELPING.