Since the contact doesn't seem unwelcome, she leaves her hand where it is. "It's a thing people do, it wasn't like ... what I set out to specialize in. I ended up teaching myself a lot because even if I wasn't an expert, all my sisters knew less." A wry smile. "Sort of good prep for Thedas, I guess, in a way."

A little shrug, and she adds, "What I was actually studying was more looking at the past than looking at the future. Evolutionary developmental biology, it's like ... You look at how an organism develops for clues about questions we have about how it evolved. It turns out that there are only, like, a few genes that control building an organism, whether it's a fly or a giraffe or a human. Before I got sidetracked into not dying, I was studying how the environment affected identical cells, to see if affected their development." You know, no big deal.

Then she says, almost abrutply, "Also, oh my god, I've been talking about myself for a really long time, sorry. It's just ... it's good. It's nice, to have someone interested."