"What does she do?"

"Mesmer specializing in disabling and harassing enemy spellcasters, and supporting ally spellcasters. So her entrance was 'This spellcasting enemy can no longer do anything, and my ally now can get spells out significantly faster.' Which was a pretty good entrance."

"Huh. That's an interesting way to do mesmer."

"Well, there are two games set in Tyria, and they have mesmers play a bit differently in each. In the first, the one I played, they were more about being made out of paper and spite and making people cry, whereas in your game they're more about confusing the enemy with clones and controlling the battlefield. So instead of trying to learn the new system, I really just brought over what I know."

"...and how does that work, narratively?"

"She knows ancient magic instead of the modern kind of magic, but is still working from the same sort of system. Modern mesmers could do the same sorts of things she can do, but have mostly stopped doing that sort of thing. I was imagining the explanation for that as 'moving away from working in a large organized group,' because living as a mesmer in the first game, you uh, really needed to hide behind your teammates."

"What were necromancers like, back then?"

"It varied a bit, you could play a necromancer in a couple of different ways. My personal favorite was as a minion master, which relied on making minions from accumulated corpses of enemies. The minions weren't like yours and didn't last indefinitely, they slowly decayed over time, but they could make a lot more. So a minion master played kind of like a steamroller; they took a while to wind up, but once they got rolling they were rather unstoppable."

"—huh. That sounds useful, at least sometimes. The fact that they decay limits it some but in very big fights... it would've been good to have an undead army against Zhaitan."

"Yeah. The limit was about a dozen minions, if I'm remembering correctly. They were really good for soaking up hits for other people."

"A dozen. Wow."

"The composition could vary, too. A necromancer could only have one flesh golem, but have their undead ranks otherwise filled with varying types of undead, with a mix of melee and ranged attackers, or minions that would sort of have two, uh, un-lives. They'd die and then immediately come back as version two to start again."

"Now that one would be useful. I wonder if I can mix my kind with yours up..."

"Yeah, we're plotting to have it do that in the other thread. Actually, you know what, I can just..." She appearifies several ominous looking dark books with engravings of skulls on the front cover, and slides them over to James. "I'm hooking you up so you have something to nerd about, but this is all of the easy direct power upgrades I'm giving you. Besides, you know, the everything else, with the immortality and the nice house and the library card."

"—oh wow that's amazing—" He takes one, opens it, and pauses. "Is this ancient Orrian?"

Aestrix blinks innocently. The smirk kind of ruins it.

"It'd be awfully weird if you got books on ancient magic written in a modern language!" she says, so very innocently. "This way, you can just show people in Tyria and say 'I found them in Orr.' And now you have a quest! I'm helping."

He laughs. "Well, I don't typically see learning languages as a quest but I suppose. Thank you."

"Really it's just written in a different alphabet, some of the spelling and vocabulary might be weird, but the Orrians didn't speak a language all that different from yours. They just hadn't agreed on a writing system with Kryta or Ascalon. It's really more comparable to learning a cipher than learning another language. That one sounds... less fun."

"A cipher a whole civilisation used."

"Yes. But you don't have to learn a whole new vocabulary and muss around with grammar. And the Orrian alphabet is neat."

"I suppose it is. I only recognise it because I saw it while exploring Orr."

"There's probably someone in Tyria with a translation thingy. If there isn't, I'll make sure there's one for you to find somewhere interesting."

"Can't wait to find it, then."

She beams at him.

"It's honestly kind of great that you're just... up for narrative meddling if it's in the name of fun. A lot of characters would get offended."

"Offended sounds... I'm not sure I know what it sounds."