"... Okay, sure," he says. "Explain all your weird magic powers."

"...There is actually one I don't much want to explain, but I will explain five of them and why I have them, if that will still count."

"Sure."

"So, I'm from another world. It's really different in a bunch of ways but the relevant one is that all the magic we have is artifacts. Artifacts happen sometimes when somebody dies; their favorite possession might become an artifact. And if you touch one you get a benefit and a drawback. I was in an accident and six of them - or maybe seven one of which is really discreet, that's still possible - fell on me. One of them sent me here and let me copy to other people any pair of effects, touch to put on and touch to take off. One of them killed all my senses that work at range so I'm blind and deaf and anosmic and gave me a different one, which is sort of a where-stuff-is-and-what-it-is which works for a couple hundred feet in all directions. One of them lets me speak and understand and read and write all languages and fortunately it overrides the deafness and blindness - for language only; and if I could see, I'd be unable to distinguish faces visually. One of them lets me disintegrate spiders and darkspawn and darkspawn substances on contact, maybe other things too, haven't lined up a lot of unpleasant creatures and patted them all on the head or anything; and it makes me really warm, hence the frost amulet. One of them lets me regenerate and makes it incapacitatingly painful to be around music even though I'm deaf. And there's an advantage I haven't discovered to match a drawback I don't want to discuss."

"...Okay," says Tev. "Well, one day I was grabbed off the street by some crazy blood mages who were trying to make a golem-person or something, and they killed a few dozen people and infused me with lyrium, and now everyone I meet wants to tell me I'm tall for an elf, like I somehow haven't noticed."

"...A mage, who... does stuff... with blood...?"

"Don't look at me, I've never even been to the surface," says Stalas.

"Fair enough. I don't know, I'm no expert, I couldn't have even told you they were blood mages if they hadn't made it obvious by flinging blood everywhere."

"Does the blood... do... something?"

"Something about power?" He shrugs helplessly. "I'm not the one to ask."

"Oh. Well. Thank you for explaining."

"You're welcome."

"Do you sleep?"

"... Yes ...?"

"I mostly don't, anymore."

"Anyway, if Grey Wardens need the dose of taint for reasons I guess the disintegration power won't do you as much good as it's doing the Legion. But the regeneration one's good too if you can avoid music."

"It is really important to avoid music," says Stalas. "You might not want to risk it, if you're going to be traveling a lot."

"Yeah... I might not," he agrees. "But I might know some people who aren't strictly speaking Grey Wardens who could use the disintegrating thing without a problem. Unless it might disintegrate me if they touched me, or something. That would be bad."

"...I don't think so, I didn't disintegrate Stalas when I gave him the regeneration thing alone the first time... That didn't wreck your darkspawn sensing, did it?" she asks Stalas.

"No, wrecking my darkspawn sensing came with the disintegration thing and that's also when I started glowing white instead of blue."

"You glow?"

"Well, not constantly."

"I have the misfortune of not being able to detect him glowing. I bet it's something."