"No, hy iz from Mechanicsburg, don´t tink hy haf effer heard ov Belka. Und hyu need permeeshun to follow pipple vot hyu iz huntink? Dot sounds like a pain een de arse."
Oh no. Fuck, Leah was awful at comforting people. "You'll find them, definitely." Did that work? God, she hoped that was right.
"Well, yes, usually you do need to ask the local government nicely, especially if they're not sure if they're fond of your government yet either. And the Bureau's not wild about us going beyond the range of administered worlds, but since the start and endpoints were on TSAB planets it couldn't be helped," Almera explained. "And yes, it is a pain in the ass. Wonders of bureacracy."
"Yeah. I'm going to keep looking. The city is only so big, and I know they're still in it. So I'll find them."
"Actually, I don't think here is anywhere." No, that doesn't make any sense. But... "Everyone here seems to be from a different place. If you think the people in here are weird - I don't think we're from the same city. Maybe....maybe not even the same world? Wait..."
"Okay, you know what? That makes more sense. I was going with 'this is all a dream,' but I like this explanation much better." That would explain the general weirdness. "You're right about everyone here being weird. Fuck, sorry. That sounded dickish."
"Darkspawn are very dangerous creatures that come up from underground. Ugly, corrupted things with poisonous blood. Whole armies of them sometimes emerge at once - a Blight - and that's when the Wardens are most necessary. And the Dalish are ... well, as far as I know we don't have underground elves, so they are, technically, surface elves, but they're better known for living on their own, outside of human cities."
"Nope, my ship just got into the station. Technically my permanent residence is on Vaizen," Almera said to Leah.
"You don't have your own cities?" Riaa asked curiously. "And huh. I guess your elves managed to not break the surface so thoroughly as we did, then."
"It's not really any weirder than where I'm from. I mean, a decent amount of people are abhumans. It's hard to tell how many, since we're not legally people and that's...hard. But there are a lot of us."
Wow, okay, new person. She definitely didn't jump a little, absolutely not. "...by ship, do you mean, like, space ship? Because that would be cool." "Huh. My city doesn't, well, that's not true. We've got a bunch of supernatural stuff running around. It just all hides in the shadows. I've never seen any big groups like this." Not entirely true, but no one needed to know about that mess. It was safe to talk about weird supernatural stuff with the girl from an alternate dimension, right?
"Well, technically the Apsara travels through the Dimensional Sea. We can do space travel, though, it'd just take a while to get anywhere interesting," Almera explained.
"My world has always known, it's just that after the thing with the gods, it's not really safe to be abhuman. People hunt you down. Or I guess they worship you, in a new way, like they do the heroes. But mostly you just end up dead really fast.
Berit shakes her head. "The elves in human cities live in alienages, in.. subpar conditions. And the Dalish are nomadic. What do you mean, 'break the surface'?"
"Dimensional Sea? What's that?" Okay, she was definitely interested now. Briefly, she wondered if it was possibly to just head to an entirely different dimension, and then decided against it. She had to keep an eye on her little brother, Jake sure as hell wouldn't and neither would their parents. "That sounds like a huge fucking mess, I'm sorry."
"We-ell, back when the elves in my world still lived on the surface, there were a ton of clans and kingdoms and queendoms. And they fought a lot. And - well, no one's really around who remembers it, but someone eventually figured out how to summon demons to fight, which," Riaa gestured. "Is a terrible idea for a lot of reasons, even if you've got the best control over them, but they ended up opening so many gates to different planes and summoning so many demons that the surface and the - the barriers between the worlds - got sort of shredded. To the point where there wasn't nearly enough mana on the surface to make it liveable. So nearly everyone packed up, took whatever they could carry, and headed down to the caverns. There's still people on the surface, I mean - there's a few colonies that got started recently, and traders, and I think the Kyorls have an outpost temple up there, but nearly everyone lives underground."
"Urgh, papervork" Mina looked sympathetic. "Fonny, pipple sey dot about us sumtimes. Depends on der century. Sumtimes ve iz chust barberiensz."
"Don't be sorry, you weren't even there. It was just a big mess, we spend like three years on it in history classes. They don't talk about the modern stuff, though. Just how great it was that humanity rid itself of gods. And it's not like no one even worships them anymore, they just all claim that their god was real and the others weren't. I don't even know anymore how much of what I know actually happened."
