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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
keep_busy
first-and-final
"Productive! I should be ready to appear in public as myself again soon. Depending how it turns out, I might need to fight an honour Proving to clear my name, but Bhelen won't push for it and there can't be many people who seriously think I'd lose one."
first-and-final
"Whoever decided they just couldn't believe I didn't kill my brother, or that person's champion or champions."
first-and-final
Shrug. "It's not ideal, but it's convenient for me at the moment. Something to deal with later."
keep_busy
Food. ...Annie is going to sell a lot of bicycles to humans and make her own money so she doesn't feel weird about eating so much imported surface food, but she's so sick of cave meat and mushrooms so she's taking an advance on her bicycle profits. "...I can think of a rune that means 'light'. Does it not work for growing plants underground?"
first-and-final
"...I conclude that it doesn't because nearly all our plant-based foods are imported and it's frequently expensive and we wouldn't do that if we could grow our own," says Stalas. "Most of the lamps in the Diamond Quarter are rune-based these days, I think they still use torches in a lot of other places..."
keep_busy
"Maybe it's to do with the frequency of the light, or something... can the rune lamps be different colors?"
first-and-final
"You've exhausted my expertise, I'm afraid, I don't remember whether I've seen coloured rune lamps and wouldn't have paid enough attention to tell whether they were making coloured light or just putting it through coloured glass anyway... unless coloured glass would work just as well? What do you mean by frequency?"
keep_busy
"I don't think colored glass would do it. Um, I'm absolutely not an expert on this and the explanation is going to be hopelessly mangled and probably wrong. But light is kind of a spectrum, and the visible colors are part of it but then there's heat off on the red end and ultraviolet off on the purple end - ultraviolet causes sunburns, if you've ever heard of those - and maybe there's more stuff in there too that I don't know about. White light has all the colors in it. If light runes make, say, yellow light, that might not be good enough for plants? Or it might just not be bright enough, or plants are allergic to magic light, I don't know."
first-and-final
That is good. It is important that Annie be happy. He still feels that deep and resonant satisfaction, the everything-is-going-right feeling, every time she smiles this much.