"Yes I am, did you hear about the side effect? And the short version is buying food from some dwarves and selling it to other ones."

"Ellie's going around telling everybody, she can't recognize faces anymore or something. Didn't seem to slow her down. What's the long version, then?"

"The long version is that dwarves have a caste system, but some of them are casteless and those aren't allowed to sell things legally to other dwarves. Those laws don't apply to non-dwarves, so to give them an alternative to organized crime it would be useful to have a few down there to sort of relay things, especially now since I invented a thing that lets them grow plants underground and they'll have those to sell."

"Clever," she says approvingly. "Sounds like the dwarves are getting a lot of use out of you. How many people do you want for this?"

"Shouldn't take more than two or three, and that'll probably make the dwarves in general more comfortable with it if there's not a massive immigration. Dwarves are doing the farming, dwarves could do the actual retail work and hauling the potatoes around, the non-dwarves would be present almost entirely symbolically."

"I might be interested," she says.

"The job might not last very long, if the casteless are allowed to sell things themselves at some point, is that okay?"

She shrugs. "Wasn't expecting it to last forever."

"Cool. I'll want to talk to my fiancé" (eee) "about whether you need to go with escort or if he can just write you a letter. What's your name?"

"Danyla."

Annie writes that down. "What's a good way to find you when I find out about how to get you into Orzammar?"

"Depends how long that takes you."

"Not more than a day, likely less."

"Then you can go to our encampment and ask around for me."

"Okay. Thanks!"

Well, Annie can hand out the language property. She makes sure they all know about the side effect and says she'll probably be around the encampment tomorrow if they decide they don't like it.

"Well, nobody warned me in advance that it's not a good idea to put Elvish on a sign intended to address elves, so that had to be explained to me."

... Stalas hugs her.

Hug. "Um, but they're kind of collectively excited about the languages thing so I've been handing that out and I have one taker on the job but I need to know how she'd be getting into Orzammar, can you just write her a letter or do we have to swing by and pick her up whenever we go back or what?"

"It'll probably go easier for her if I escort her into Orzammar personally, but a letter might do. It's just that if the gate guards argue with the letter, the result is that she stays outside, and if the gate guards argue with me, the result is that she comes in."

"So I guess it depends on how she feels loitering around the entrance for - how long are we expecting to be up here?"

"Might be as long as a month or two, but any more than that and the archdemon will have caused us to miss our wedding, which is unacceptable."