"Offended might be the wrong term, I occasionally grasp at words and throw the first one that seems sort of close enough to what I mean instead of being more deliberate. Annoyed that they don't immediately get the thing they want? Or about feeling like they're someone else's playthings, which, yeah fair enough, that'd upset me, too."

"The story would not be very interesting then, would it?"

"No. But not everyone wants their lives to be an interesting story. They might prefer to embrace hedonism with drugs and hookers."

"They would not be story protagonists if they did."

"Not necessarily! They might be story protagonists only in a specific situation that drives them to protagonist it up, and might find those circumstances uncomfortable to keep being around. Like, a person that gets offended about a problem in the world and wants to fix it. Not because they find it a fun thing to fix, because they do not want it to exist. So they go with the fastest way to get that, which would in this case be asking me, and then there goes the thing that had been driving them. And then: hedonism."

"Hmm, I guess."

"People! They're not all the same." Pause. "I should probably get back on topic now and resume expositioning like a good, responsible author that has some sense of pacing and narrative weight." Pause. "But also that sounds really boring and I don't wanna. Hm."

She glances up at the ceiling.

"Pedro! Pedro save me! Pedro please it is ridiculous to have me be the one to explain the plot! I don't know it, I'm relying on wikis, I bow before your superior knowledge and wisdom in this subject! Save me from the mess I've gotten myself into and the perfectly reasonable consequences of my very own actions and promises! Please? Pretty please? I can bribe you with prettifying consultation work, I am good at pretty! Or possibly I could guilt trip you with 'Hey I found you this pretty,'" she waves at James, "but that sounds lame and I don't want to make you feel obligated so actually upon reflection, fuck that shit. Positive reinforcement only, I'll be a very charming and funny exposition assistant, just please save me from the boring and long paragraphs and the information absorption, I am weak!"

    "Just for the record," says a voice from a person who very much wasn't sitting on another chair there a second ago (making James jump), "that speech was wholly unnecessary and just for effect, we'd agreed to this earlier. Hi, James, nice to meet you," he continues, grinning lopsidedly.

"...nice to meet you, too." He squints at Pedro. "I was expecting something... different."

    "You should probably assume I know whatever you're going to say."

"—that makes sense."

"I feel like if I don't indulge my ridiculous desire to spout speeches here, I can't indulge it anywhere, you know? But yeah we totally worked this out beforehand, I was just being ridiculous because it was fun. Hi, Pedro! This is kind of weird!"

    "It's kind of really weird!" he agrees, giggling. "Oh also Aestrix forgot to mention to you that you and Vetareh—that's the name of the hot chick—fucked in the other thread. Not a lot of time had actually passed, you'd met her earlier that day, but you got on really well and then you took her to your place and taught her the history of Tyria up until that point then you shagged and slept together and then had a bath together and it was altogether really adorable. It's very likely you have fallen or will soon fall in love with her, it's gonna be great, we have such plans."

James... is speechless, so he just nods with a faint smile on his face.

"I didn't forget to mention," Aestrix sniffs, offended. "I was looking for the right dramatic moment, and if we spend all of our time giggling about other threads we'll never get anywhere with this one, and, oh my God, I'm totally sounding like a Jean, oh no how is this my life."

Pedro blinks. "You are? How? Jean is a character written by a friend of ours, he's very dramatic—oh I get it that's why Jean you were looking for the right dramatic moment."

"Yeah, that thing, I don't otherwise resemble one, I'm way more..." She trails off. She does not actually have vocabulary appropriate for describing how... Jean... Jean is. Instead, she just—motions to herself.

"Anyway, yes. Two of you. Super adorable. Very thoughtful and sincere and sweet and the both of you are very smitten, it's so cute."

"I'm starting to get envious of other me."

"Sorry. I'll stop. Multiverse! Think of the multiverse, lovely large expansive multiverse with many places and many pretty people that will no doubt find you very charming."

    "And I'm sure you'll find an interesting significant other while travelling the multiverse if that strikes your fancy," Pedro shrugs.

"I'm... going to trust you on that."

    "You should! I'm your author," he says, nodding sagely, then smiles like a loon. "Sorry this is just kind of insane, I hadn't figured how weird it was to actually talk to a character like this. It's really weird and—" He moves his hands as if grabbing for something invisible, then sighs and shrugs. "Anyway."

"Anyway! Exposition! So I can save the world! Uh—I'd just explained that Eir and Faolain die and that James retrieves the egg from Caithe." She makes something approximating puppy eyes at Pedro. "Help?"

    "So the way this is gonna work," he explains for the audience's and Jame's sakes, "is that I'm pretty much going to be explaining this to Aestrix. This is because if I just explained it to you I'd be the only one writing and this can get tiring fast."

"Makes sense. I'm all ears," says James, crossing his legs and leaning back on his chair.

    "So! You get the egg and start wearing it as a backpack for who knows what reason, presumably you thought it was aesthetic. It's admittedly pretty, look." And a copy of Glint's egg appears floating between them.

"...yeah, I can see how I'd like to run around with that."

"As a backpack," snorts Aestrix. "I just. One of the most important objects in the world, Glint's very last egg, possible chance of helping to remake the world into something less itself, and. It is a backpack." She rubs the bridge of her nose. "All right. Okay, Tyria, you do you. So I'm assuming miscellaneous heroics ensue before he gets beamed in the head with more major plot?"

    "Actually no, he gets to major plot fairly quickly. He finds the Exalted—ah, here's a hologram for you—they used to be humans but shed their mortality in favour of becoming eternal guardians of Glint's legacy. They'd been dormant for a while but reactivated when Glint's egg approached and then they detect that James is the egg's chosen bearer and he has to go through a buncha trials to prove his worth. When he inevitably succeeds at all of them he places the egg in a magic chamber and its magic creates a fuckoff huge forcefield around the magic Exalted city and also gives James a vision of Mordremoth using a captured Logan, Zojja, and Trahearne to create New And Improved Mordrem."

"Er."

    "Mordrem being Mordremoth's minions," he clarifies. "And yeah, that's pretty bad. Not worse than death though."

"This is a future vision, right, it hasn't actually happened yet?" she confirms. "Glint had some future vision stuff, it'd make sense if her li'l unhatched baby inherited some of that. Not that I'd have any idea how to do... anything with future vision and Tyria if I were writing it myself."

    "It's not clear that it's a future vision, actually? They've, like, already been captured. But it's not the last time the dragon is gonna give James a vision of terrible things to come."

"Joy of joys."

    "Pretend you don't like it, why don't you."

James just laughs.

Aestrix snorts.

"So, ominous vision, egg of destiny is safely hidden away, James... immediately rushes off to save his friends from the horrible fate that awaits them? That seems the obvious next thing to do."

    "Exactly! ...well, more or less. They still didn't know where Destiny's Edge was, and James had gotten separated from Taimi when he ran off to do egg shenanigans, so he went looking for her. She had, apparently, found some ruins with a mix of Exalted magic and asuran technology, which was pretty exciting, and after she powered it up—you also helped with that, James, by hitting things until they yielded their magically conductive organs—"

"I do so like usefully hitting things," he says cheerfully.

    "That you do. Anyway, she powered it up, which showed a detailed leyline map of northern Tyria—I don't remember whether we clarified this earlier in this story and can't be bothered to look back, leylines are lines of magical energy through which magic will most naturally flow. So, big map, they see some interesting places highlighted as major nodes, but there's one place they don't recognise. Also, powering the place up woke a hibernating Exalted that was in the computer up, forgot to mention that. So, Exalted explains to Taimi and James that the mysterious hub is Rata Novus, an Asuran city that helped the Exalted fight the Elder Dragons in the past. Taimi gets super excited and wants to go there."

"Of course she does."

"I'm shocked. Okay, so, map of where magic goes, lost asuran city, and maybe the lost asuran city will have nice things in it that will help with the Dragon. I should figure out a way for this lost city to be found entirely to make Taimi happy, though I'm not really seeing an... obvious way to do that."