"The plot itself needn't change that much, does it? It's just that people won't die."

"I kind of don't want people to get captured and traumatized," she says, mildly. "And if the plot stretches out too far, it stretches implausibility if people don't die. Some of the aspects of the plot can certainly stay the same, but we'll be working under more of a time crunch so as not to give the game away."

"Hmm, that's fair enough. But I don't know how to make it last—less, even with the no-killing and no-mind-control thing. You could I suppose say that part of the reason Destiny's Edge got captured was that they were 'betrayed' by the sylvari of the Pact, and since that's no longer at play they manage to avoid capture. And then I'm sure after they find Tarir James can come up with a reason why they should go exploring those ruins."

"Right. Uh, guessing from context, Tarir's the Exalted in the computer?"

"Oh did I forget to say? Yeah I did, Tarir is the city of gold the Exalted built to house Glint's egg."

"Aha. Okay. Recap, then, so I can understand it—there are two cities hidden in this jungle. Tarir is the city of gold, mysteriously located here to house Glint's egg and mysteriously in the area that the egg happens to end up, for some reason. Rata Novus is the abandoned asuran city, because I guess real estate was cheap in that area and they wanted to have sleepovers with Tarir and paint each other's nails or infrastructure or whatever. They proceeded to trade information and neat things, and preferably both should be found by people while I'm saving the world. But that's like, a nice sidequest, it's not a world saving requirement. Keeping people from getting taken prisoner and experimented upon is more important."

"I mean, yeah, except they don't have the first clue where their friends are and don't have the firepower to actually take on Mordremoth, so they want to use Rata Novus as a base of operations to host the front of the remaining Pact members against the dragon."

"Pedro. Pedro, none of this has happened yet. 'Saving lost friends' only becomes an issue if they get lost in the first place. If we lose them, yeah, of course we're going to go save them, but we should not just assume that they're going to get lost."

"—oh right you meant that from a meta perspective, sorry, got confused."

Aestrix giggles. "It's okay, it happens. I'm more interested in what things are at play than what went down in the canon timeline, though I need to know what happened in the canon timeline to pick up everything. Like, uh, I think the egg should probably go to James if he's up for it, he makes a better baby dragon daddy than some of the other candidates." She looks at James. "But if he'd rather not I can come up with an alternative solution. Do you want to be a baby dragon daddy?"

James sporfles. "That's a bit disturbing! But yes it sounds interesting to be the guardian of Glint's legacy," he says archly.

    "Did you have any doubt he'd respond like that," Pedro asks, deadpan.

"Yes, Pedro, because he does not live in my head. Even if he did, the people that live in my head have thrown me for loops before. Besides, it's still important to ask and give alternatives. I could show up and make a ton of sweeping declarations about what things are going to happen in characters' lives, but that seems like it'd be a dick move, even if I were completely correct about all of my declarations."

    "Yeah that's fair.

    "Anyway, so I think my earlier proposed solution still works: Destiny's Edge doesn't get captured because no sylvari are backstabbing them, and then James finds the egg, takes it to Tarir, finds an excuse to find Rata Novus, they find Rata Novus, they orchestrate their offensive from there and go fight Mordremoth. Bonus points for not having to kill Trahearne because Mordremoth was in his head."

"Excuse me, what was that?"

    "...right, I hadn't finished my story, had I."

"I think I distracted you with plotting, sorry," says Aestrix. "Uh, James, we're definitely averting that one, Trahearne is going to be just fine, not to worry."

    "Okay, so, next! You start looking for Rata Novus and conveniently find a group of Pact soldiers who got captured with Trahearne, Zojja, and Logan but the heroes distracted the Mordrem and they managed to escape. So: a lead!"

"...wow, my life really is fictional."

Aestrix cracks up.

"So you, Taimi, Canach, and Braham go looking for Rata Novus while the rest of your party goes to try to track where the prisoner caravan must've left to. Shenanigans happen, you find this species of giant bugs that eat magic from the leylines—" hologram "—and they're all over Rata Novus, so you deal with that. There are some Inquest—uh, Aestrix, wanna explain them?"

"Evil asura. Amoral nerd off group of our beloved Feanorian-alikes. Pedro, we might be getting into too much detail here?"

    "—right, oops, sorry. Okay so, Rata Novus was effectively deserted—everyone in it had been killed by chak—and after the chak and Inquest were cleared out, you guys found a secret lab with Elder Dragon research. Scruffy—Taimi's golem—had to be sacrificed."

"Oh, poor Scruffy. Taimi must have been devastated."

    "Yeah, she was. You do find out that all Elder Dragons supposedly have a 'weakness' and that targetting it is the way to go. Don't ask me what Zhaitan's weakness is, people have joked it was 'airships' and the game developers said it was all the Mouths of Zhaitan that you killed and released but the plot point is that Mordremoth has some weakness. Spoilers: it's Mordremoth's mind, since he's the plant and mind dragon."

"Convenient."

"Not... really," says Aestrix, wincing. "Not how it goes down, anyway. I mean it's all conveniently located in the murder location but leveraging 'Mordremoth's mind' to kill him is. Difficult and unpleasant."

    "It's kinda awful. We'll get there. So you advance, eventually find Logan and Zojja inside horrible Blighting Pods that were creating plant copies of them. You free them, though they're very hurt, then you find Trahearne fused to vines and he says he can take you to Mordremoth's mind, while the rest of the Pact attacks the Mouth of Mordremoth—giant plant snake thing, his main lieutenant. You and two friends—the game lets you pick, canonically i.e. in my head you pick Caithe and Canach—go into Mordremoth's Mind and kill his avatar in there."

"...didn't you say Trahearne died?"

    "Yep, because a sliver of Mordremoth had hidden inside his mind, and he begged you to kill him with his magic sword."

"—oh."

"Yeah. I'm not sure how to rehash the Mordremoth fight without getting Trahearne killed, I get the impression that it was the sliver of Mordremoth in his head that let him do the mind meld thing? That and being a sylvari. But then, I'm not really clear on how the mind meld thing works. Like, at all. Tyria needs to get its shit together when it comes to its magic system, it's a mess. Sorting through it all to make it make sense is a headache and a half."

"I think it was literally just being a sylvari at all and being connected to the Dream of Dreams. And if it wasn't, you can just say it retroactively will have been."

"I suppose that's true, yeah. I just don't want to start twisting Tyria into things that suit my needs just because it's convenient too much. It feels disrespectful, or... something." She shrugs, awkwardly. "Plus it'd probably freak James out a bit if we quietly rewrote his reality for our convenience."

"I can confirm I have never observed anything that contradicts your decisions, here."