"I met them I think two years after that? Mahdi was recommended to me, his father knew my mentor in the church. Hagan hung around the foreign inns, like me."

"Cool. I'm glad you have a team that works well together. - man, the one really annoying thing about this place is that I can't talk to people without spells. I'm lucky the spells even exist. But I guess if we work together for a while I'll have plenty of time to ask the others how they ended up here, too. Eventually."

"If we make a ton of money you can get tongues permanently. - I think it's something like seven thousand gold, though."

"Woah. Stretch goals, maybe, though we are on a bit of a schedule. - I guess if you're eventually able to travel back and forth I might be able to do more adventuring after we finished saving the world, maybe I could get it then. It'd be neat. Obviously the possibility of being off by five hundred miles makes transportation pretty far from trivial, but it's not, like, impossible."

"Once Mahdi has teleport it'll be more straightfoward."

"Woah, yeah, that sounds awesome."

"He's right at the point where wizards start to get incredibly useful to have around, yeah."

"Well, I look forward to that. It's great how much more accessible magic is around here, in addition to how much more it does. I can't tell if that's that you have more mages or if they're better trained, or what. - I guess your magic must be a totally different system than ours, actually, or at least be calling on a different place, since Draconis says we can't access the Fade at all here."

"There are different sources of magical power. But many of them are pretty well understood, yeah, and you can go to school for them - or at least in the case of being granted spells by a god you know what spells you'll get later if you keep being worthy of it, and so on."

"I guess the gods thing helps, too. We've got one God and he's not much for granting people magic powers, not these days."

"Huh. Yeah, if a god stopped making clerics then probably he'd lose worshippers to gods that kept making clerics, over time. It's - obviously it's a virtue to have faith without direct personal daily communion but it helps to know some people are getting that, so you have - lights to steer by."

"He talks to people, sometimes. - actually there's some debate about that, but where I come from people are pretty sure he does. Just, not very many reliable God-given magic powers, not until we've shown him we're worthy of them again. We do have mages, but they're different than miracles, they work by pulling things out of the Fade and using them on the other side of the veil."

"Mahdi's kind of magic is different than mine but not like that. And Hagan's is probably a third kind, though some people think that some nature gods just make sort-of-clerics of people who don't worship them but live the right kind of way."

"Huh. I think most of our magic is the same basic kind of thing, though of course people specialize different ways. Like, one of the people I have back home is mostly a healer, and another one of them specializes in shapeshifting, that kind of thing. And I guess you could count enchanting differently, that's a kind of magic you don't have to be a mage to do. Can't do it safely if you're a mage, actually, though I'm not sure I could give a good explanation of why. I think it's 'cause mages can't safely handle the necessary materials."

"Huh! You should tell us more about your world, at some point. If we're going to go visit it."

"Gladly! Maybe after we finish up for the day I can tell you guys about the whole mess we're in. Or some of it, anyway, it's quite the mess."

"Sounds good!"

They finish dismantling the place and chopping up the bodies and head out later in the afternoon. Hagan shoots some doru at a very impressive distance on the way back but they don't otherwise encounter any signs of trouble. 

"I have a leftover spell," Mahdi says over dinner, "so how about if we can actually talk to Aria for the evening?"

Everyone agrees this is a good use of his leftover spell, whatever that means.

"What do you guys wanna hear about?"

" - your world!" says Fazil. "What's it, uh, like, aside from the neglectful god and the impending apocalypse?"

"Well, let's see. Honestly I hadn't seen much of any of it until last year, since, elf. We live in these walled alienages and don't get out much. It's better in Ferelden than in other places, though, to the north in Tevinter they still keep all the elves in slavery. Anyway, hm. I got conscripted by the Gray Wardens and taken to Ostagar, this huge ancient ruined fort left over from when Tevinter ruled the whole continent. That's where we met the darkspawn horde. They killed our king, killed almost my entire order, killed lots of our military. Very nearly killed me and Draconis and Alistair. After the battle we figured we were most of what the Gray Wardens had left, and happened to be the only people in possession of copies of certain ancient treaties. First we headed to the dwarves, who were also having a succession crisis, so we had to solve that for them, and clean out this criminal gang that had taken over half their city, and track down this lost paragon who had gone way down into the caves and gone totally insane, we're talking feeding her entire extended family and followers to the darkspawn. - have I told you guys anything about darkspawn? Darkspawn suck. Dwarves are cool, though, they all live underground and fight the darkspawn all the time, even when there aren't any surface hordes. Unfortunately the blights are giving them fertility problems, long-term exposure to darkspawn is pretty bad. And they have this weird caste system - stop me if you have any questions about any of this - "

"Lots but let's get the whole outline first -"

"Okay, cool. So we hung out underground with the dwarves for a kind of excessive amount of time, because the dwarves had a lot of problems for us to solve before they'd think about helping anybody else. Eventually we traveled far enough into the deep roads to find this ancient dwarven king named Caridan who'd been turned into a living stone golem. He was great, we really wanted him to come back with us and help rule, but instead he committed suicide by jumping in lava. He did leave us a crown to bestow on the rightful ruler of Orzammar, though, so we were able to fix their succession, and of course after that the king owed us, and was totally willing to make good on the treaty his ancestors had made.

"We picked up a dwarf fighter on the way, too. At this point it was me, the two other Gray Wardens, North, this Qunari we conscripted after finding out he'd been sentenced to death, this rogue-turned-religious-sister who said she'd gotten a vision from the Maker about us, and oh yeah, Morrigan, this apostate mage who saved our lives after the battle of Ostagar. Oh, and Shale! Shale's great, but she's been stuck as a golem for centuries. And on the way out of Orzammar we picked up Zevran, who - actually he was an assassin who was hired to kill us, since the noble who seized control after the king died is trying to kill us for reasons I don't completely understand. Anyway, fortunately for us, Zev was suicidal, and was mostly taking the job to get himself killed, and when we didn't want to kill him he figured he'd die fighting the darkspawn. He's not as bad as he sounds. Got sold to assassins when he was seven. Never really had a shot at anything else. And that's everyone we have, then, apart from Wynne, who we picked up last week at the Circle of Magi.

"So let's see, then we headed to Redcliffe, which is where Alistair grew up, and that's when he told us he was actually the son of the late king Maric. He's a bastard, so normally he wouldn't be in line to inherit anything, but it happens we're completely out of more legitimate heirs, so suddenly his parentage matters. Anyway, Redcliffe had been taken over by this demon-possessed little boy, and it turns out there's only one way to un-demon-possess someone, and it requires a whole lot more powerful mages than we had. But the Circle of Magi was only, like, one day away by boat, so we figured we'd just grab some mages from there and do the ritual. Except when we got there we found out the tower had been taken over by a sloth demon, and most of the mages had been killed or turned into abominations. It actually pulled us into the fade, which would normally be a game over, but we managed to find each other again and kill it first. There's some neat stuff about the different dream worlds people got stuck in, but it's a little less neat if you don't know the people. Anyway, we freed the tower and got the mages to pledge to honor their alliance, and we also got them to come over to Redcliffe and help us free the kid. And it worked, he's fine now and the town's safe.

"Anyway, we were in Redcliffe when me and Draconis got pulled over to this world. The next thing on the agenda is tracking down this mystical artifact that we think might cure the Arl of Redcliffe of his deathly illness, because he might have enough political clout to get people to quit it with the civil war stuff and focus on fighting the darkspawn. After that the only other people we need to contact are the Dalish elves, and that'll be pretty much the all the forces the country has to offer, which might be enough to defeat the darkspawn before the Archdemon reaches the capital."

" - I know that's a lot, even summarized. Like I said, it's a mess."

"What you need is a bard," says Fazil. "To straighten it out a bit and add supporting detail, in the ridiculous parts. - also a chosen cleric who can cast restoration and cure most deadly illnesses, which, hi."

" - woah, yeah, maybe you can get him to stop being in a coma. That'd be pretty great, our next best option is pretty much chasing legends."

"Are we in, then?" asks Hagan.

"I am," says Fazil. "You two can stay at home and wait for me to come back a highest cleric, if you'd like."

"Good parties," grumbles Mahdi, "this is exactly what they warn you about," but he's smiling.