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Annie is on her trike on her way to school.
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.
six artifact pileup annie in thedas
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keep_busy
time-goes-on
"That... might or might not suggest a useful level of detail. We would have to make further tests. Sometime after House Ortan has provided me with a forge, perhaps, which they said they would do by tomorrow."
time-goes-on
Caridin nods.
Someone knocks on the front door. Pell answers it. It's a delivery of several books for Caridin's human guest!
Someone knocks on the front door. Pell answers it. It's a delivery of several books for Caridin's human guest!
There's a bunch of dwarven history in there, a couple of publications from the surface about magic, the memoir of Paragon Aeducan, and a few works of fiction.
keep_busy
Yay! These will help distract Annie while she waits for Stalas to be done experimenting. She thanks Cairidin for his time and goes to sit in her room and read. Dwarven history first.
Once, long ago, dwarven civilization was a continent-spanning marvel of social and mechanical engineering.
Then the darkspawn showed up.
The Deep Roads went from the beating heart of trade and traffic in Thedas to a place of death and terror. Eventually, with Aeducan's help, the dwarves fought back; but the darkspawn still pushed them farther and farther toward the surface, until today Orzammar is the only city left in its kingdom. (Recently, a lost city called Kal-Sharok was rediscovered, still full of dwarves and very angry about being abandoned to the darkspawn centuries earlier. No one is quite sure what to do about this, but Kal-Sharok is very much disinclined to accept Orzammar's rule again.)
Then the darkspawn showed up.
The Deep Roads went from the beating heart of trade and traffic in Thedas to a place of death and terror. Eventually, with Aeducan's help, the dwarves fought back; but the darkspawn still pushed them farther and farther toward the surface, until today Orzammar is the only city left in its kingdom. (Recently, a lost city called Kal-Sharok was rediscovered, still full of dwarves and very angry about being abandoned to the darkspawn centuries earlier. No one is quite sure what to do about this, but Kal-Sharok is very much disinclined to accept Orzammar's rule again.)
There is actually some speculation, based on census data over time, that the dwarven fertility problem is partly caused by long-term exposure to the taint. But even before the darkspawn arrived, dwarves didn't tend to have huge numbers of children. Noble hunting has been a tacitly condoned practice for a very long time.
keep_busy
Well. If it's taint SHE WILL JUST HAVE TO POKE A LOT OF PEOPLE AND THEY WILL HAVE TO BE VERY WARM FOR A LITTLE WHILE.
first-and-final
And now: Stalas is back! He seems to be exactly as fine as he predicted.
"I see the books arrived," he says when he steps into her room.
keep_busy
"They did. And I'm not sitting on the engineering revolution I thought I might be but I may have a different one if my sense thing is fine enough; I'll know tomorrow. Are you okay?"
first-and-final
"Completely. And I'm keeping the healing power. Humming, singing, musical instruments, anything you could broadly call a musical note has the effect, but I don't care much about it in brief jolts and when I walked up to the tavern I could still leave under my own power even when it got bad. The jump from nothing to unpleasantness is pretty fast as you approach music, but there's enough of a lead-in that I think most people could turn around and go the other way if they were walking slowly and paying attention. It seemed to correspond pretty closely to whether or not I could hear music even though we know it doesn't strictly depend on hearing."
keep_busy
Snuggle! "History. Apparently there's a hypothesis that the fertility problems are at least partly about low levels of taint. So I might wind up wanting to poke people a lot."
first-and-final
"Oh, yeah, I've heard that somewhere. No idea how true it is. I'm sure plenty of people will be happy to feel oddly warm for a few seconds if it gives them a chance at having children more easily."
keep_busy
Hug! "That was what I was going to do if I'd been able to go into artifact studies - statistics stuff. Artifacts seem to have things - weird things, but things - to do with the traits of the people who leave them when they die. If there were more information about who leaves artifacts, and which things they are, and what about them matters, it might be possible to control the generation process in some way."
first-and-final
"Ooh, nice." He kisses her on the cheek. "I recommend Aeducan's memoir particularly, by the way, I admire him deeply."
keep_busy
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee "I can read that one next. I wanted context before I tried anything that might be relying particularly heavily on it."
keep_busy
"So um," she says, "you have been kissing me and I would like to know if there is some - guideline you are following and if I should have a copy."
