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She's on her way home from Taniquetil, sitting on the train reading a logic paper, singing idly along with the tune a kid three rows down started up, when there's suddenly a creature in her train car and it lunges at her.
She and her bench and her newsreader are abruptly all elsewhere.
At least she and Rúmil waited on children?
"I grew up underground. The first time I set foot under the open sky was a month ago and I have not yet fully adjusted. For the first few days I felt like I was falling all the time, because I couldn't feel the Stone above me - the sensation isn't exactly like falling but it's the closest comparison I can make - but now it's just when I look up for too long."
"How does Stonesense work - how far does it go, do you know what you sense it with, what counts as stone -"
"If we were underground right now I could sense about as far as that hill," he says, pointing at a hilltop somewhat less than half a mile away. "It's harder aboveground, although I don't think I'm as badly affected as most dwarves. Some people say that Stonesense is hearing the song of lyrium, but I don't think that can be the whole story because most kinds of stone don't have any lyrium in them - at least not that I know of - and we can still sense them just fine. It is true that lyrium is much, much more obvious to Stonesense than anything else. It's like it's... brighter, or louder, to put it in terms of other senses. Although if I had to pick another sense that Stonesense was most like, I'd go with touch. Touch combined with the thing where you know where all the parts of your own body are without looking."
"Yes, I imagine you would. Anyway, regarding your other questions - I'm not sure how to describe what counts as stone, and I'm not sure what it would mean to know what we were sensing it with."
"Well, we don't have any extra parts that humans and elves and qunari don't, or at least if we do no one's found them yet. Maybe we sense it with our souls, which must be distinct from the other three kinds because they aren't naturally connected to the Fade...? And in fact are said to be connected to the Stone instead, somehow. Or maybe to lyrium."
"It sounds interesting. I wonder if there's a way to make a chip blessing for it, but probably not..."
"From my extremely limited understanding of how chips work at all, it seems like there wouldn't be... you'd need something to serve whatever function a dwarf's soul-or-whatever is serving in actually perceiving the stone around them, right? And it would be very hard to come up with something like that when we have no idea how Stonesense works in the first place."
"Not something to work exactly like yours, but something to sense stone - or maybe material in general - around us. Blessings can do some odd things - there's one that my friend Tyelcormo has that lets him talk to animals, although that took a lot of practice."
"...how does that work? I wouldn't have thought animals were the sort of thing that could talk - it'd seem like you'd need to do something to the animal, more than to the person trying to talk to them, to change that..."
"He doesn't talk to them in words. It took a lot of practice but he can get across some concepts by building up to them from basic things animals understand."
"It's useful but Dwarves think it's overrated - I'm not sure what orcs think of it, it doesn't work for them."
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