hazmats | Glowfic Constellation

keep_busy

"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."

first-and-final

"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.

keep_busy

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

first-and-final

"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."

keep_busy

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

first-and-final

"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."

keep_busy

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

first-and-final

"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."

keep_busy

"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."

first-and-final

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

keep_busy

Annie pats a tunnel wall.

first-and-final

Stalas laughs and does the same. The tunnel walls remain solid and rocklike.

"I personally have no idea whether the Paragon Aeducan, founder of my House, is still watching over his descendants from within the Stone. But I am certain that if he is, he has no direct and obvious power to act in the world, or he would've collapsed a tunnel on Bhelen by now. I've read his autobiography. He was not the type to sit back and let things go to shit without him."

keep_busy

"Sounds frustrating, watching the world go on without any way to do anything about it."

first-and-final

"Yeah. Not looking forward to that part of being dead. Hopefully I can find Branka and the Anvil and won't have to worry about it for years."

keep_busy

"...What does the Anvil do?"

first-and-final

"So, about a thousand years ago, a smith called Caridin created an object called the Anvil of the Void, which can make golems - warriors made of stone or metal that fight tirelessly until something smashes them to pieces. Things were looking pretty good in the war against the darkspawn for a while, but then something happened to Caridin and the Anvil, and nobody else could make a golem, and now the supply is steadily dwindling."

keep_busy

"And this isn't my world so there's not something horrible that will happen to anyone who interacts with the anvil as a corresponding tradeoff?"

first-and-final

"I haven't heard any indication that that's the case, and this isn't your world; things don't normally work that way. There's enchanted weapons and armour that just work somewhat better than normal weapons and armour and don't fuck with your senses or cause you to uncontrollably filet anything you touch or whatever."

keep_busy

"...I will definitely need to, like, pick up a nug, at some point, to see if I filet everything or only spiders or what. I don't even know if that's supposed to be a drawback or an advantage, the fileting, which makes a difference in how convenient to expect it to be."

first-and-final

"I encourage you to pick up a nug at the first available opportunity."

keep_busy

"With as many artifacts as I appear to have been hit with I'm impressed I'm still sane and mobile."

first-and-final

"The way you describe artifacts, so am I."

keep_busy

"I am however really, really too warm. I don't know if this is an illusion or if I'm, say, actually magically empowered to go stand in the snow without gloves for hours without getting frostbite, or I would have dropped my coat instead of just taking it off, but it's kind of hard to believe that it's supposed to be chilly in here. Like, how chilly? I come from a really cold place..."

first-and-final

"Outside the front gate of Orzammar is a perpetually snowy mountaintop, and I've heard from those who've been both places that it's consistently colder out there than it is in the deep tunnels, but the deep tunnels are still uncomfortably chilly for most people."

keep_busy