His interest seems different, somehow, from even the more curios people she's encountered in Thedas. More urgent. (She squashes the thought of Maris, applying pressure to her fractured arm while asking about peptide chains.)

"Okay, well, I don't know what your baseline understanding of biological functions are, exactly, so stop me if I'm explaining something you already know. But cells are small units of living things, usually invisible to the naked eye." If you want to get pedantic, chicken eggs are technically cells, but that's a detour she's not going to take just now.

"My work, in particular, focuses on reproduction. It's easy to understand intuitively that a lizard is more like a snake than it's like a person, but scientist in my world have also figured out that it's more like a bird than it is like a dog. That's because, we're pretty sure, the lizard and the bird had a common ancestor more recently than the lizard and the dog did."

She's watching his reaction, evaluating. Even with non-scientists in her own world, she usually doesn't make it as far as her actual dissertation topic. "Epigentic influence on clone cells" is enough to make most people's eyes glaze unless she really takes the trouble.