"I would be very surprised if a freak accident even with the most irresponsibly packed vehicle of all time managed to put me in contact with more than ten, but I was a little busy being deprived of my primary senses and hit by a van to count them."

"Valid."

"But there could honestly be any number of very secretive other effects, of either valence. I might have a phobia of something weird which just doesn't happen to be down here, say. There's one that turns you invisible but makes you afraid of shoelaces. Made the incipient crime wave pretty easy to handle."

"Shoelaces." He shakes his head in amazement. "What a world that must be."

"Most people aren't touched. ...But I'm sure you'd find it weird in other ways. I'm getting the impression we may have more technology, even though I assume this monsterful cave is not the highest pinnacle of engineering achievement here."

"Yeah. You are not seeing the best Thedas has to offer down here, but I have no reason to doubt your intuitions about technology given that acknowledged assumption."

"I guess the simplest example is electricity? Which is, um, tame lightning... I guess lightning might be hard to come by underground."

"Lightning runes exist...?"

"They do? What do they do?"

"I'm not personally an enchanter so this is a sloppy summary rather than a technical explanation, but if you work lyrium into a weapon in a certain pattern it'll spark when you hit things with it, and if you work lyrium into armour in a certain different but related pattern it'll provide more protection against lightning from enchanted weapons, hostile mages, and ordinary sources of lightning."

"Huh. Okay, so the sparks, we've got a way without any runes of making a lot of spark and sending it along wires or into storage compartments called batteries, where it does things I do not understand because I am not an engineer and it powers lights and ovens and stuff like that."

"Useful."

"It is. Um, and a non-electrical thing we have are bicycles, although the one I had before the van presumably reduced it to mangled gears and pipes, was called a tricycle because it had three wheels - they took surprisingly long to invent even though they don't technically require really high tech? I might be able to replicate the design, actually, I knew the parts of my trike okay."

"What is a bicycle?"

"It's a two-wheeled vehicle that requires some balance to keep upright - which is why I didn't have one of those - but on even moderately friendly terrain it can let a person go about three times faster than walking pace without working too much harder, much more so if they're racing and the ground's really flat."

"Oh. Sounds very... surface-ish."

"Yeah, not really designed to work in a cave system."

"But useful, on the surface."

"Very."

"Well, then, while I'm imagining that we survive the Deep Roads and bring back the Anvil of the Void and reverse my exile and remove my traitorous brother from the line of succession, I will also imagine that we get some engineers to put together a tricycle for you."

"...Are we imagining that I go live somewhere... elsewhere."

"We're imagining that you can live wherever you like, but I wouldn't expect you to prefer to spend literally the entire rest of your life underground without exception, and once they've got the design worked out we can also begin exporting them to the surface, where I'm sure lots of people would like more wheels than they've got."

"Okay."

"While I'm at it," he adds wistfully, "I am definitely also imagining being able to get a bath. Ancestors, I miss being clean."

"...Well, if we don't find water eventually I'm in trouble, but I suppose you might not want to rinse off darkspawn blood into running water."