"So, turns out that, er, the gods have left because if they stayed the dragons would fight them and the world would end. Except Balthazar didn't care and wanted to stay, so the other gods stripped him of his power and chained him to the Mists. But when Rytlock goes there after his sword, Balthazar rekindles it and shows him the way out, and Rytlock frees him, not knowing it's him. He absorbs some magic from a huge bloodstone explosion caused by some White Mantle—"

"The White Mantle are active?"

    "Yeah, have been for a while, right under your noses. So, bloodstone explosion, almost wipes half of Kryta, is instead absorbed by Balthazar, who pretends he's Lazarus the Dire returned from the dead. ...help Aestrix did we mention mursaat yet."

"Probably not. Uh, the mursaat are a bunch of assholes that tried to con humanity into worshipping them and committed human sacrifice and general assholery. They were in charge of the White Mantle, who were the ones to worship them as gods, and committed the aforementioned human sacrifice in their name and are generally also huge assholes. The mursaat have since been almost entirely wiped out, except for one called Lazarus, who very nearly died but didn't quite."

    "Okay! So you're there with Canach because Minister Caudecus was implicated...

"Of course he was," James sighs.

    "Yep. Fake Lazarus appears, Caudecus flees with Valette Wi—yes, Valette Wi—then you return to the Dragon Lab so that Taimi can show you the bit of Rata Novus technology that allows you to simulate a fight with Destroyers. Because Primordus is active. And so is Jormag."

"You are kidding me."

    "Mordremoth's death jumpstarted them, yeah. Hijinks ensue, you have a fight with Braham who's grieving his mother, the White Mantle attack Kryta so you find and take out Caudecus and Minister Estelle who was his accomplice—don't pretend you're surprised—Valette surrenders and helps you out after Caudecus confesses to killing his wife and kills his daughter Demi, you find documents in Caudecus's place that prove that Lazarus can't be the real one. Meanwhile, Taimi found out that Primordus and Jormag's weaknesses are each other so she makes this huge machine that will redirect their magic at each other, that machine baits Lazarus to the Dragon Lab, with Kasmeer's help you reveal Balthazar's true identity, she has a crisis of faith because a god has betrayed you."

"...I didn't know she was very religious."

    Pedro shrugs. "Someone had to be. So, Balthazar steals the machine because he wants to kill Primordus and Jormag to steal their magic and become super powerful and go kill the other gods, but Taimi finds out that if one more dragon dies all of Tyria is destroyed—Aestrix mentioned this—so you go after Balthazar inside a volcano in the Ring of Fire Islands and destroy the machine before he can kill the two dragons. He absorbed enough energy to render them inactive again, though, and got super powerful, not that you noticed this at the time. You find and kill the real Lazarus with the help of this one 250-year-old necromancer who's been hunting him forever, and the Eye of Janthir—to our audience, magical artefact that sees everything—the Eye shows you that Balthazar went to Elona to hunt Kralkatorrik, so you have to go there. And you do go there, alone, because the Pact is in shambles after Mordremoth."

"This is getting a bit hard to follow. Like, I know a basic idea of the plot already, but it's sort of... there's a lot of information. I get that James can keep up, and this is mostly for his benefit, but I'm not sure our lovely and discerning audience is going to be able to."

"Hmm that's fair. I'm trying to find my balance between not giving too much detail about all the everything and giving enough detail to be understood, what should I elaborate on?"

"I think it might be a too much information sort of thing instead of a thing that needs elaboration, uh.

"Audience, in the grand scheme of things, Caudecus does not matter, and you should not care. About him or Valette Wi. Don't worry about it. James probably should, and I probably should, but they're like, relatively minor villains that exist because we can't be fighting gods and dragons all the time. The 250 year old necromancer is not really relevant to much, and is basically just fanservice for people that played the first game. The Eye of Janthir is similar fanservice, with the addition of pointing James at the plot. It explodes shortly after the mursaat die for realsies, so it's similarly irrelevant to our interests. Kasmeer's crisis of faith is important to her, and to the people that care about her, but she's probably never going to actually have any kind of crisis of faith in this authorial meddlesome version of reality.

"So, cliffnotes version. Our major players: the sleeping dragons Primordius and Jormag, the not sleeping dragon Kralkatorrik, the ex-god Balthazar that has lost everything but his grudge, a disgraced evil cult called the White Mantle, and James and his friends. James and his friends recently killed a dragon, and the magic from its death wakes up Primordius and Jormag. The cult experiments with things they shouldn't, and cause a giant magical explosion that Balthazar eats instead of letting get out of control. Balthazar then pretends to be the cult's god, because hey, he's got the resume and references for being a god already, right?

"James and his friends don't particularly know what to think of Balthazar, and can't really focus on him while two dragons are dragoning around, causing mayhem. They figure out that they can set the two dragons against each other, and do that. This draws Balthazar, who wants to kill all of the dragons, take their power, and go on a rampage against all who dared to oppose him. Our heroes don't want to let him do this, however, since it'd destroy the world. So a fight breaks out, and nobody quite wins. Balthazar gets some of the power he wanted, but doesn't get to kill the dragons. James and his friends don't have the world destroyed, but Balthazar is still at large with a major power boost, and they know he is willing to destroy the world to get what he wants. The dragons, having just had their power drained, go back to napping, which is about the best thing that came out of this whole mess.

"Balthazar fucks off to go kill another dragon where he won't have pesky heroes foiling him, and James goes after him. Just James. Because time is of the essence, his friends are mostly all pretty busy picking up the pieces of the giant mess that came before, and he's maybe a little bit too sure that he can fight a literal deity.

"... There. Sorry, I think I just stole your thing, but that's the kind of streamlining of information I'm talking about, if that makes sense?"

Pedro nods. "Yeah, that makes sense, thank you, I'll try to do more of that from now on." He looks at James, then at Aestrix again, and hmms. "What if I explain to James, and you translate it to the audience? That way I don't have to balance the different needs, since you're likely to understand it even with a James-appropriate explanation and then you can make it so that the audience gets it?"

She hums. "Sure, I can do that. It's easier to translate what you're saying to something more audience appropriate than to translate from a wiki, I don't think it's as likely to stall me." She turns her head upwards because that seems thematically appropriate, and bats her eyelashes in what can be assumed to be the audience's direction. "Oh, lovely audience! Please ignore Pedro and pay attention to me, I'm so charming and sensible and pretty!" She winks at the ceiling. "Thanks!"

Then she returns her face to a more ordinary neutral expression and looks back at Pedro and James as if she had not done that at all. "Carry on."

Pedro giggles. "So should I move on to Elona?"

"Yeah, I think so. Though, actually. Hey, audience, here is a map of the planet. I think the projection's making it a bit weird—I don't think the continent confusingly named the same as the world is actually quite so big—but there aren't any globes available for you to peer at. Sorry. That'll help with visualizing what exactly is going on where, though. Elona is separated from the rest of Tyria by desert and the desolation, the desolation being a sulfurous death zone that kills anyone that tries to cross it. Okay, carry on, Pedro."

"The sulfurous death zone, by the by, as well as the whole desert, were created when the five main gods fought and imprisoned the sixth god—Abaddon, god of secrets—in the Realm of Torment, which nowadays is the goddess of knowledge's realm.

"So, you take an airship with Elona, courtesy of captain Ellen Kiel, and before reaching Amnoon, the Free City, you see some pyramids and a small village on fire. You land and find this lady made of fire and armour attacking the place—she's Balthazar's Herald, and is attacking anyone who doesn't want to worship Balthazar and destroying places. You fight her off and kill the two pups of Balthazar—they're pups because the original hounds of Balthazar were killed also by you in the volcano earlier—and then you start helping the village out mounted on a giant raptor."

"Balthazar goes to Elona to hunt a dragon. James goes to Elona to hunt a god. The whole area is under the control of an undead lich named Palawa Joko. He is a huge asshole. You will see how and why later."

"Where did the raptor come from?"

    "Oh, the cool feature of the Elona expansion is mounts, you get a bunch of them—the raptor, the springer, which is a giant bunny, the skimmer, which is a giant floating manta ray that goes faster over water, the jackal which is a magical creature made of sand by djinn, and the griffon, a specific species that's magical and that very few people have tamed, and all of them Sunspears. So you get the raptor as a thank-you for saving the village and you can use it to travel anywhere from then on."

"That sounds tempting."

"It should, it's for enticing players. 'Buy the new expansion! Ride a raptor!' you know."

    "They are actually super useful and lots of fun, you basically don't walk anymore, just ride."

"Am I followed by animals wherever I go?"

    "In-game they just appear magically under you, I think I'm going to reify that as some sort of high-powered mesmer magic that summons the mount when you need it."

"... but where do the animals go, Pedro. Do they live in a nice spacious animal enclosure with food and water and friends until they're summoned. Are they forever stuffed in Tyrian pokeballs?? I am now alarmed and concerned for Tyrian animal welfare!!"

"Oh they're definitely in nice spacious animal enclosures, you can visit them and all."

"Oh, good. Okay. Carry on, I am no longer intensely concerned for the welfare of innocent animals. ... Wait, no, they'll be near James, who is an incorrigible danger magnet. I am concerned again, there's a way to easily shunt them back to their comfy enclosure, right?"

"Whenever they are too damaged they are immediately and automatically shunted back to their comfy enclosure and healed, yes," Pedro says, with a half smile. James is just grinning.

"Okay. So the cute animal companions are fine. Good. Now that the matter of critical importance is handled, you may carry on."

    "After saving the village you ride your raptor the rest of the way to Amnoon, whose gates are closed because of the sudden extreme influx of refugees fleeing from Balthazar's actions in the south."

"He doesn't waste time, huh?"

    "He already has an army forged out of the souls of the dead."

"He what."

    "Yep. He found some lost Forgotten magic that was used to create the Exalted and used that to trap the souls of his defeated foes in armour and enslave them. Sort of in the same way Palawa Joko enslaves everyone he lifts from the dead."

"Summary: Balthazar does not care about anything but his vengeance. He enslaves souls to make an immortal unstoppable army. In our culture, this is known as a dick move."

    "So! You reach Amnoon, and guess who's there: Kasmeer and Rytlock."

"Wait, what? How'd they get there before me?"

    "Unclear, there was an unspecified amount of time between finding the Eye and going to Elona. They managed to talk to the City Council and invite you in—the game makes a point of inserting a hook of a scene to show how impatient you are with the way Rytlock keeps not telling anyone about his trip to the Mists."

"I'm still calling plot contrivance. There were better ways to have you meet up with those two than mysteriously having them both get there before you, even after there was a point of you going alone. I'd throw popcorn at the screen, but there is no screen. I'd just be throwing popcorn at James or something."

    "I mean, there's the computer screen of when I got to that part of the game. Honestly the things that bothers me the most about it is that we went on this huge quest to even figure out where Balthazar was headed, and somehow Kas and Rytlock found out anyway? Maybe you told them? I don't know, hold on, let me look up dates on the wiki..."

"Wiki?"

    "A type of online encyclopedia. And yeah, just checked, you went to Elona in the same year as you found the Eye so there's no conspicuous amount of time passing between one thing and the other." He shrugs. "So in Amnoon you meet the City Council and convince them to accept Sunspear aid, even though that would officially mean that Amnoon is taking sides in this war where it's spent decades being neutral grounds."