artifact annie has really terrible timing
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Dwarves can't get the languages one. 

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...well there goes some of their trade goods. Uh, do they want to try the healing one?

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Dwarves can get the healing one. And they know some humans who'd want the languages one.

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And they'd be happy to get an estimate of how much hazard pay people would want for hosting a contingent of Elves and part-Elves and a human, but it'll probably be pretty high, given the reputation for mass murder?

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Do they happen to have a guess of whether it is likely too high for Annie to cover by poking people.

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Probably. 

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Annie's world has also gotten pretty far with technology?

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They are interested in hearing about that.

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Well, she doesn't know how to make any of it. Except bicycles, she could explain bicycles. But she can vaguely describe planes and phones and electricity and stuff.

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There are people who might be able to turn vague descriptions of stuff into stuff. The Dwarves go off to get an estimate.

 


The Dwarves come back a few days later with bids for healing and transfer-of-healing-powers and translations if she's willing to scribe translations and descriptions of planes and phones and electricity and stuff and a couple people heard about Tumunzahar and are happy to loan the Elves the difference.

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Annie will poke people and write things and describe stuff all day every day if that will help.

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It will definitely help. The Elves all swear that they are not servants of the Enemy. The twins refuse to swear anything and the Dwarves commend their good sense (they would still relax somewhat to hear it from everybody with less strongly-held principles, though) and then they are shown to a door in the rock that only becomes apparent at all when it opens.

 

Khazad-Dûm is astonishing, some parts like adjoining oversized cathedrals and some parts like dense vertical cities. It's dark, which does not affect anyone present. They can rent some rooms for an amount of money that is negligible compared to the hazard pay from being favored targets of the evil god and also mass murderers. The city is lively. The twins are fascinated.

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Annie likes it here.

Can she be roomed out of earshot of Elves conveniently?

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She can! Dwarves sing too sometimes (a lot less often, though) but she can find a very well insulated room that is not right adjacent to Elves. 

 

And Dwarves make appointments to quiz her about things from her world: electricity, what materials are used, what does she know about how it works, what can it be used to do...

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Which questions she will answer as best she can. Electrons are a thing. Conductivity varies between materials and she thinks at home copper is the usual sweet spot between available and conductive but that gold is technically better maybe. Magnets are involved and... spinning them? She thinks spinning them. It is the same thing as static electricity like if you shuffle on a carpet but that can't be usefully captured that she knows of. Batteries involve... acid? and various kinds of metal? and positive and negative terminals? It does lightbulbs and kitchen appliances and industrial motors and heating and things.

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This is more than enough to go off. A week later someone is gleeful about having successfully generated a current through a wire; a few weeks after that there are contracts piling up at her door for license to do various things with electricity. 

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...she gets licensing privileges over the entire concept of electricity? Really?

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...yes, of course, she came up with it. The automatic licensing fees decline gradually over time and to nothing after fifteen years but coming up with stuff is really important, it should make people rich.

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...they know she didn't invent it, right, she just remembers it from home.

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This does not have any effect on how much electricity improves peoples' lives and it seems strange to try to think of incentives specifically for interworld travellers because it doesn't come up much so they're going to just use their standard framework. Unless she's saying that electricity was licensed by someone else back home?

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Nope, at home everybody has the basic concepts she's able to relay, she doesn't have nearly enough information to give them anything that's covered by IP law from her world. She stops arguing about whether she invented electricity.

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They have a in-that-case-hypothetical debate about how to respect IP law from other worlds and amend all of their own IP law to say that any world whose IP law contains a similar reciprocity clause to this one will be respected by Khazad-dûm if interworld exchange is in fact possible and held in trust in case it becomes possible. 

 

They get lightbulbs working. They string them up everywhere, it's a new fad. 

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Annie can't see the lightbulbs but they amuse her anyway. Uh, internal combustion? Germ theory? The concept of plastic, which she is pretty sure is refined from petroleum... somehow...?

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