"Stay strong," she encourages, in a stage whisper.

"Okay, let's see." She dutifully reads the plot summary of the relevant part of Guild Wars 2. "Uh, I'm going to skip over a lot of the minutiae, because a lot of that doesn't really give us much, it's just. You run around, you save some people, standard hero fare. Marjory's sister dies, but that'll be averted, so, yay for that." Read, read, read. "You learn about the sylvari being Mordremoth's creations while chasing after Caithe, the Pale Tree informs you that you are destined to care for the egg she stole, which makes it super weird that she stole it, you catch up to her and she refuses to hand over the egg, blah blah, Mordy chooses that moment to attack, Caithe escapes in the chaos, standard plot contrivance to stretch out the climax, blah blah."

"Standard plot contrivance."

"The whole... 'confrontation with person is interrupted by another thing' is a standard plot contrivance. Not necessarily a bad one, I'm a big believer in good writing being more about how you use something instead of what you use, but. Standard plot contrivance."

"It remains an—interesting lens to see my life through."

Snort. "I bet. So, being practical, you and the rest of the Pact decide to try to take out Mordremoth before he fully wakes up." Wince. "Unfortunately, this doesn't go very well. Mordy drags down your airship armada with vines, and an impressive portion of the fleet is lost. Trahearne and the whole of Destiny's Edge disappears in the chaos. ... Rytlock not included, since he's still in the Mists. Poor guy."

"Wait, still in the Mists? What was he doing there?"

"Oh." Blink. "I suppose that hasn't happened yet, then. Whoops. For our discerning viewers, I'll give a bit of background." She clears her throat, thematically. "So once upon a time, there were three main kingdoms in this section of the world. Kryta, Ascalon, and Orr. They all failed to get along, and spent a lot of their time fighting among themselves. Since they were busy, the charr took the opportunity to invade. This is when the Flame Legion were in full power, and they used it accordingly. They blasted Ascalon to cinders in an event known as the Searing, then marched right on through the ashes to attack the other two nations. Kryta tossed them out by finding religion in the form of a group called the White Mantle, who were ultimately bad news, but were powerful enough to expel the charr. Orr, meanwhile, blew itself up rather than let themselves be taken, and took out quite a large portion of the charr force in doing so.

"So the charr certainly made an impression, but only really took Ascalon. With the attacks on Orr and Kryta, they'd overextended themselves and failed to cement their victory there. Ascalon had several insurrections, and a number of places held out. The capital of Ascalon held out for years against the charr, until eventually the defenses began to falter. The king of Ascalon then took a route rather like what Orr did. Rather than surrender, he blew his city up. Worse, every human soul in the city was bound to defend it as an unstoppable army of ghosts. And so Ascalon denied the charr their ultimate victory, and its capital never precisely fell."

She pauses. "Hundreds of years later, a charr named Rytlock thinks that's stupid. A place shouldn't be haunted for hundreds of years by murderous bound ghosts. It's not fair to the ghosts, it's not fair to the living to have old grudges they were never involved in to impress themselves upon them constantly, and frankly, he was not having it. So, he looks for a way to dispell it. He finds a magic sword that can potentially dispell the curse, and does a test run. This small test run works for the area it's in, but not entirely, because it was just a test run. Then the sword falls into the Mists, because this is Tyria and therefore something has to go horribly wrong, and Rytlock jumps in after it rather than lose the way to end the curse entirely."

"...huh. He has been fairly secretive lately..."

"Well, that's what he's been doing. And so he jumped into the Mists, because that's a smart thing to do. I mean, I get it, don't want the sword to be lost forever, but." She grimaces and shakes her head.

"At least he finds his way out?" James says, dubiously.

"You're getting better at predicting what will happen based on the narrative!" she says, pleased. "Yes, he does. With some new skills he picked up from the Mists, which is basically entirely to show off to the players the new available profession they can play as, called the revenant." Aestrix sighs dramatically. "Marketing makes puppets of us all."

"He got new magic in the Mists? That's... peculiar."

"A bit, yeah. It's magic of the Mists, too. There's this whole thing about invoking the power of dead famous people."

"Huh. Doesn't sound much like Rytlock."

"I am unfortunately not very familiar with how the experience changes him, sorry."

"I'm sure it must have made sense for such a change to occur."

"Yeah. And I don't think he does a personality 180 or anything, just." Shrug. "Not familiar with the circumstances."

He nods. "So, the Pact airships are attacked by Mordremoth, half my friends disappear and are presumed dead or captured..."

"Captured, they're not going to offscreen kill anyone that important. They'll make them die in front of you. Probably slowly, with time for them to have some dramatic last words and some sort of satisfying narrative conclusion." Pause. "It's actually pretty fucked up when I say it out loud like that. Anyway. You learn Mordy's collecting corpses and prisoners, and at a dramatically appropriate time, Rytlock appears from the Mists, blindfolded and with new fancy magic to help you in a key moment in battle. Uh, you and the rest of the Pact take up learning how to use gliders, which isn't very relevant but is pretty neat. Hm hm hm, standards heroic business, you make nice with the hylek—another sapient race, told you Tyria has a lot of them—and eventually find one of Mordy's prisoner camps." She reads the next section, and then winces. "Ah. Eir and Faolain—a bad person, don't worry about it guys she's not going to live very long—are in a cage together. Faolain agrees to help you, but fat lot of good her promises are, because when the standard big monster shows up and she trips, Eir goes to help her up, and Faolain stabs her for it. Eir stabs her back and Faolain dies, but then Eir gets gotten by the big monster. In front of her son." Pause. "Yep, I stand by my statement, that's really fucked up, what the hell."

"—Eir is going to die?!"

"Well not anymore she's not! ... Here. In this reality, anyway."

"...right." He sighs. "That is, yes, as you said, 'really fucked up.'"

"So fucked up! Eugh. I mean I have approximately no legs to stand on for calling other people's writing fucked up, but still."

"Have you done... similar things?"

"The villain betraying and mutual killing someone trying to help them? No. Killed people in front of their kids?" She pauses, frowning. "... I don't... think so? It's kind of hard to recall. I've written a lot of pretty fucked up stuff. I wrote the death of a mother's child once, but I was in my teenage angsty writing phase, I've mostly grown out of that kind of thing. Usually I'm more for really internal tragedies or really large scale ones."