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.
Those items she's using are plainly magic of some kind, but she is not currently in the tech support queue, so instead he asks, "Do you know what this place is?"
"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 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."
"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!"
"There mostly only seems to be one or at most two kinds of magic in my world, although it manifests very differently in different contexts," she says while he's busy scanning. "And you could mistake it for being lots of different things, and for thousands of years people did, even when they really should've known better. But one way or another it all comes back to lyrium and the Fade. And one day I'll figure out how those relate."
He starts listing off what he can tell or guess about Lyrium, comparing it to other magics he knows and trying to see how well his outside investigation stacks up to her knowledge.
Lyrium is a crystalline substance found primarily as veins laced through miscellaneous other types of rock underground. It is normally blue, and used for a wide range of magical applications, frequently but not exclusively as a power source for mages. Silver lyrium, which is the variant in Dagna's blood, was discovered only in the last year, as a result of some bizarre circumstances that she doesn't elaborate on immediately. That and red lyrium were the keys to discovering that lyrium is alive; red lyrium is a parasitic variant, of which Dagna didn't bring any with her today because it's only studied under strictly controlled circumstances. Dwarves, of which Dagna is one, have a special relationship with the blue standard variant, which is also the variant most strongly linked to the Fade, although the Fade is a whole different story and she hasn't been able to study it nearly as well - "humans go there when they dream, but dwarves don't. Dream, that is."
Scans show that Lyrium is a strong potential power source. "Based on my estimates a solid chunk of blue Lyrium would output something almost 3 MNA per hour per kilogram. It will probably fetch an excellent price if our research department approves it, four or five thousand MTU per kilo."
"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..."
"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."
"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?"
She leads him through the door and turns around and closes it and opens it again. Stairs ensue.
"My workshop is down here, I should put these runestones away, and find you some lyrium... it's not the prettiest part of Skyhold, though, that would be the throne room. Or maybe the smithy. No, the throne room is prettier."
"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.
Ancient runestones, which she is analyzing to try to reverse-engineer the manufacturing process in case she can derive any useful techniques. And over here is the equipment she designed and built for refining, purifying, and stabilizing silver lyrium, starting with blood samples from a carrier of the symbiote; the tiny, luminous silver-white crystals produced by the apparatus are approximately ten times as magically powerful as an equivalent mass of ordinary blue lyrium. Don't open that barrel, it's got red lyrium in it, has to be lined with lead to keep the song from leaking out...
Good, proper investigation about something that he hasn't seen before and doesn't have a deadline about. This is... Fun. Who knew.
If he's right about how the purifying apparatus works it could be greatly improved with some of his potions gear. Which is clean, efficient, and best of all automated. He'll have to fetch it and visit again tomorrow.
She happily goes into detail about the theory behind the purifying apparatus; this part works like this and that part works like that and his potions gear sounds like it might really help her out, he should totally bring it by sometime, what a great idea.
This is rather outside his field of expertise, though, and sooner or later he runs into the limit of his patience for figuring it out. At least for today. He'll be sure to give the Research department a copy of all these notes and see what they can make of the Lyrium samples, but shouldn't we tour around a little more for now?
Back at the top of these stairs, down the short hall, and through a door into... yep, that's a throne, and this is a throne room. The throne is currently empty, however, as is the rest of the room.
Huge stained glass windows behind the throne paint its surface in coloured lights. Banners hung from the high ceiling depict unfamiliar heraldry. There is an interior balcony at the opposite end of the room, overhanging the entrance, and the chandeliers glimmer with lyrium-based light-stones. It's all very medieval, but still gorgeous.
Dagna shuts the door they came in, off to one side of the imposingly large throne, and beams proudly at the chandeliers.
"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."
"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."