Spelunky!

"Shared thoughts.... and butts."

It looked like Orion was actually writing that into his notes if his continued, unceasing typing was any indication. Dori might have been trying to derail the conversation, but Orion was not the least bit swerved. Just yet. The prospect of learning about new things trumped nearly everything else in his mind. Though it was pertinent to note that "trumping" did not mean the same thing as "displacing". Those other thoughts were still buzzing about. They were just being overshadowed by curiosity and inquisition.

As Dori went on to take over the exchange, pushing her sister out of it, Orion began to take more notice of Chee's exasperated and flustered state. He compared it to the blushing and stuttering he saw before, and wondered.

"Can I backtrack for a second...?"

He stopped typing, but left the recording toggled on.

"About the shared thoughts. I assume it's like a psychic link, correct? And it seems very seamless and ever present. So that makes me wonder... How do you keep your minds seperate? Or are there times where, for example..."

Orion stood next to Chee and put a hand on her shoulder, and pointed to Dori with the other hand. He spoke with just the slightest hint that he was finally starting to play along with Dori's game, hidden beneath a mostly genuine desire to have his questions answered.

"... Her thoughts and feelings become a bit intertwined with yours? Like, do you feel the same things she does? Could she influence you just by feeling hard enough...?"

Chee's reactions to both his shoulder touch and the input from Dori did not--could not go unnoticed by Orion. He was standing right next to her after all. If the the massive amount of fidgeting did not get his attention, either through looking at her or just feeling the movements through his hand, her overt stuttering would have caught his attention. So Orion knew that he was exacerbating the problem, but he might have miscalculated the nature of the "problem". Looking down, he saw that Chee's looked less "nervous" and more "anxiously expectant". The grin and the blush is what tipped him off.

Aside from the jitters from Chee and Dori's chuckling, the explanation of their shared mental link proved even more fascinating to Orion. His eyes lit up and he was overtaken by authentic interest for a moment. He nodded as he processed the idea of a separate, shared mind space between individuals.

"I gotchya. I gotchya. That's really cool actually. I could only imagine what could be done if there was some way to replicate that for other people. Imagine what a research group could do if they could seamlessly share information and knowledge..."

The whole idea was like a literalized form of shared social consciousness.

"... Although... It looks like some kind of compartmentalizing would need to be implemented to ensure that the shared space doesn't leak into the individual space..."

The inquisitive look he was tracing between Dori and Chee indicated the example he was going off of.

"... Like... What's going on here? Between you two? Or just Chee here?"

Orion let his hand linger in the air for a moment, free of Chee's shoulder, before letting it fall casually to his side. He hardly bought her assertion that nothing was going on, as he follow up clearly indicated something was going on and its point of origin was some mischief on Dori's end. Orion did not have to take too much time deducing the general field the mischief was taking place in.

There was a pull in Orion's mind as he crossed his arms and watched the two sisters exchange more meaningful looks. He got an idea of what he wanted to ask of the two of them next: something about goblin biology and physiology. They were humanoid in shape, and possibly in make up, but there were some very obvious differences that could have warranted investigation. For example, was their short stature due to something unique to goblins, or could it be analogous to height-challenged humans like dwarves?

The more suggestive aspect of Dori's meddling, however, butted up against something else in Orion's head: the thrall that Delise the succubus had placed on him. It was present and prevented most of Dori's prodding on that specific front. Orion had recently taken his dosage of the Devil's Adieu, so the thrall was only partially powered. But it was still enough to stymie Dori's efforts. Not completely, just preventing smaller pushes in to his head.

"Yes. It would be pretty dumb of me to not at least ask about goblins themselves. Alright."

Placing a hand on his hip and extending his gloved hand outward to them like a microphone, he leaned forward and smiled at the two of them.

"In terms of structure and make up, what makes goblins different from humans? Body-wise. Bones, organs, and such. Like, is there a physiological reason for your short stature?"

Looking up at the changing light, Orion realized that he had nearly forgotten that they had been in a tunnel the entire time. The light ball-turned-disk did wonders to illuminate the area and give it a more homey vibe. The tunnel itself was quite clean, if dusty and obviously very old, so that helped make him forget that they were underground the entire time. Chuckling, he thought that, with a little fixing up, a cool little secret base could be established down there.

Chee's explanation of their short stature made Orion chastise himself with a light bonk to the head and a mildly embarrassed smile at Chee.

"Gah. I should have guessed that, Chee. Of course that's why you would be smaller than humans. Your environment."

Drawing his glove back while Chee lost some of her color due to her's sister reply, Orion tapped a few buttons on his wrist screen. From his palm came a shimmer green scanning laser, which looked like a transparent triangle than continuously waved up and down.

"I don't think there's any need for probing. Besides, getting biopsy of your pituitary gland would be more than invasive. That thing is deep in your head."

He held his palm out, pointing the scanning laser in their direction.

"But a good diagnostic scan should suffice for now. Just gotta wave this up and down ya to get some basic information and a 3D image of you! Whaddya say?"

"Well..."

Orion tried to clarify his point, but the sisters had too good of a back-and-forth going for him to get a word in edgewise. The shared mind connection power thing they had apparently had an unintended side effect of making them a perfectly synchronized double act. It was cute enough to get him to chuckle at the two of them.

"Stripping down would be ideal. But I won't force you. Oh! How about this?"

Stepping forward, Orion held the palm in front of Chee's face for a moment.

"Hold still and close your eyes."

The scan swept up and down her face several times, humming quietly as it build an image of her head. As it scanned, he walked slowly and evenly around her to get all the angles possible. When he got back around to the front, he had a nicely constructed model of her head and the scanning laser blinked off.

"There. Your head will be enough for now. Just let me upload it... There! Now! I came down here for magical treasure. I say we stop lolly-gagging and find at least one cool magical artifact! Then maybe we can talk about scanning again or something.

Besides, I can ask more questions along the way. Like... How and where do we start looking?"