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.
"I'm not sure it's fast enough to be obviously a good risk during a fight, but I can patch you up after..." Pause. "There's no darkspawn blood on your hand anymore."
"That... seems likely to get really awkward without actually leaving me clean enough to feel comfortable again."
"...Should we discuss the potential ramifications of you being magically in love with me, or continue avoiding the subject?"
"Um." She averts her eyes, although they weren't actually properly focused on him in the first place. "...whichever you'd rather. Maybe with a bias in favor if you're going to want to try out more magical powers. And a bias against if discussing it means I will have to tromp through a stressful survival situation having confronted particularly distressing relevant possibilities."
"...well," he says. "I am frankly not capable of entertaining romantic thoughts while crusted in weeks-old darkspawn blood. But I haven't observed anything that disqualifies you out of hand. So if particularly distressing relevant possibilities are going to come up, it will be after I have saved the world and had a bath. I hope that's more reassuring than otherwise."
"Good. As for the bias in favour if I'm going to want to try out more magical powers... yeah, I see the logic. And I can imagine wanting to try out the ability to disintegrate darkspawn on contact, for example. So - what can you tell me about the experience of being magically in love?"
Nod nod nod. "Um, more or less as soon as I could orient myself enough to identify your existence via a combination of language thing and weird sense thing you were suddenly intensely important. I can... think around it, pretty much, but I have to try, and I can get some mileage by observing that you do not seem to be a particularly selfish person and would therefore not endorse various ludicrous tradeoffs I can imagine feeling emotionally compelled to make in your favor, but again I have to try. I'm not actually sure what would happen to me if you died and don't want to find out. Um, it's sort of hard to regulate my attention - I can do it, especially looking out for darkspawn that we need to know about because those are dangerous, but if we were somewhere safer I could probably just - kind of - not think about anything else for hours on end."
"That sounds really inconvenient on a number of levels," he says. "Especially under the circumstances."
"You have correctly observed that I'm not a particularly selfish person," he adds, "and whatever ludicrous tradeoffs you find yourself contemplating, it's safe to assume I don't endorse them."
"Which actually makes me really worried about risking this, because if I started contemplating ludicrous tradeoffs it could get us both killed. Might be best if I stuck to the healing power for now, however tempted I am to disintegrate some darkspawn."
"That makes sense. Also one of the drawbacks does seem to have been interdimensional transport and I'd definitely have trouble in here on my own even with my disintegrating ability, to say nothing of where you could wind up."
"Yeah. No more experimenting with magical powers unless it's another situation like this," he shrugs his shoulder and the second crossbow bolt falls out of it, "where we're both vastly more likely to die if we don't try it."