This van labeled HAZARDOUS MATERIALS is also on its way to school.
The van hits a patch of black ice. It goes spinning, it turns over, it slices itself open on a wrought-iron fence with spikes, and it disgorges boxes which smash open on the pavement. Some of them skitter clear into the slush.
Some of them - along with most of the van - land on Annie.
There is a whirl of bewildering pain and confusion -
- and she falls to the ground, injured and in more kinds of discomfort beyond that and moaning.
She slowly starts to heal before the eyes of her sole witness.
"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?"
"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."
"I'm an unbelievably skinny little weed compared to any healthy dwarf, and I bruise very easily."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."