"I and several Tyrians can only thank you for it," he says, standing up to make a perfectly correct bow, the kind one uses for courtship.

Aestrix cracks up.

"You're welcome," she huffs between giggles.

He sits back down, the grin still on his face.

She takes a minute to let the giggles run their course, then takes a deep breath and sits up.

"Okay," she says, with only a hint of a snicker. "Serious tactics talk. Yep. Mhm. I am so good at staying on topic, look at how serious and on topic I'm being. Yep."

"According to you time is stopped, there's nothing on the line if you do take a detour or two."

"Yeah. I just try to have some self awareness about my inability to focus, and I'm... still authoring it up a little? I am aware that frequent detours are not necessarily fun for readers to read, and I am..." She trails off. "Mildly concerned about putting on a good show. Proverbially."

"I shall be flattered again that you thought this conversation was fun to be read, then."

"I have had several assurances that readers are having fun! So I was not wrong."

"Even more flattered!"

Snort.

"Though I think we lost some people with the serious Tyrian fixing talk. I've been walking a tightrope of avoiding explaining things to you that you already know, and explaining things that readers don't know, and I think I fell way more on the side of not explaining things to you that you already know. Plus I'm naturally not very inclined towards explaining things, in general."

"I don't mind if you want to explain more than I strictly need to know. It is if nothing else interesting to see how, ah, 'players' see our world."

"All right. I'll take you at your word, then." She considers. "Tyria is a world with five major sapient races: humans, charr, norn, sylvari, and asura. You should all know what humans are like. Charr are... horned cat people. They and humans often don't make nice because they have some history of killing each other. Norn are like humans but significantly bigger, more cold resistant, and also extremely independent warrior viking people. Sylvari are plant people that come from a giant tree, and they only recently woke up. As was recently learned by Our Hero, they were made by one of the evil Elder Dragons, but until recently have escaped being forced to serve his will. Asura are little, um." She makes a face. "Screw it, look at a screenshot here, because fuck if I know how to explain that. Little... mouse people? They are all a bunch of nerds. All of them. Huge nerds. Very brilliant huge nerds, but also kind of rude. If your starting place is 'Feanorian' you are honestly not far off."

She pauses. "There, that was a good exposition dump. I think I'll give it a bit before I do the one for Dragons just to give people some time to digest that."

James sporfles at 'horned cat people' and continues to laugh throughout the rest of the explanation.

Giggle.

"I added pictures," she adds, for James's benefit. "You can't see them because you're on the wrong side of reality, but they're there."

"I thought something like that must have been going on," he says archly.

"I gave up on subtlety when I got to the asura. Because how do I even... explain them. How do I do that."

"I never had to, I wouldn't know."

"Explaining things! It's hard! Especially when it's as complicated as Tyria is. There's a lot of stuff going on in your complicated world."

"I expect to people not born there it could get quite overwhelming."

"Little bit, yeah. Also hard trying to figure out how to fit someone in the world. It's a little... 'How do I do that. Where would there be room.'"

"...fit? I am pretty sure there's some space."

"Physical space, yeah, definitely. But think of it like an author—I'm not worried about physical space, I'm worried about narrative space. And there isn't a ton of that in Tyria, all of the narrative is being chewed on by dragons."

"Ah. Well, there is the space I am currently occupying."

"Yes, I noticed," she says, dryly. "But I am not out to replace you, that would not help me fulfill my matchmaking mission at all."

"...matchmaking mission."