"I know." There is a small flash of a sort of lovesick expression she's been suppressing and then it promptly goes back to being suppressed.

"Anyway. Any darkspawn in that direction?" He points.

"Nnnnot as such but there are some in the connecting cave that way -" Point.

"Hmm. That connection's a dead end, though. How many?"

"I count six but the cave doesn't end within range."

"Tempted to risk it. Thoughts? Six darkspawn won't give me appreciably more trouble than those spiders; up to a dozen and it could get dicey."

"...They're sort of clustered, it's probably just six."

"All right. Let's try sneaking past them and if that doesn't work I can just kill them all."

Hooray!

When they're well past the darkspawn: "All right, good for us. Clear thataway?"

"Looks like. ...I'm just going to stop correcting myself for visual metaphors."

"Um, it's not very interesting in the context of my own world but I guess it might be out of that context. My parents got divorced when I was a baby and I live most of the time in a big city with my mother, who teaches school for five-year-olds. My father's a police officer in a much smaller town. I recently got out of compulsory education and enrolled in university and I hadn't decided what I was going to specialize in, because I originally wanted to work on studying artifacts but they make you get your mind read and I'm very much not willing to have my mind read. I was only willing to even go to the school with the mind-reading artifact because people who touch it constantly swear at the top of their lungs and I could tell from farther away than their mindreading range if one were around."

"The way you describe these artifacts sounds completely insane to me, but I guess 'horrible monsters appeared deep underground hundreds of years ago and started trying to kill everyone' probably sounds about equally insane to you," says Stalas.

"They appeared? I was imagining they'd just sort of always been around."

"Legend has it some nosy humans tried to break into the house of their god and came back as darkspawn, but no one actually knows if that's true. It rings a little hollow if, unlike most humans, you're not sure their god even exists."

"All the humans here can agree on one god? Wow."

"The major division seems to be between a bunch of humans who think their god is best represented by a female high priest and a different bunch of humans whose competing high priest is male. I mean, it's more complicated than that, and I think there are a few much smaller competing traditions that I don't know much about because I've never been to the surface, but most humans you meet are going to worship the Maker. Some dwarves, too, if they've been on the surface long enough."

"There's a lot more than one and a half religions in my world. I never went in for any of them."

"I like dwarven religion, personally. It's comfortingly concrete. There's no arguing with the existence and properties of the Stone, and it doesn't fight wars or fall in love or demand tribute. Your ancestors were still your ancestors regardless of whether you personally believe they're hanging around in the walls cheering you on and swearing at you when you fuck up."

"The more popular religions at home like to claim both that their god of choice created the universe and that they have a monopoly on ethics, and I find this contradictory."

"Yeah, the Maker has that problem. The Stone doesn't."

Annie pats a tunnel wall.