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A pint with fire
James meets Aestrix
Permalink Mark Unread

Somewhere at the end of a universe, there is a bar.

In this bar is a pretty brunette staring intently at a laptop, humming idly to herself and occasionally scribbling on an attached tablet.

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And through the door walks a... rather interesting figure.

The figure pauses and removes its mask (the fire in the mask's eyes goes out when that happens) to reveal an incredibly pale young man with even paler hair and a scar crossing his right eye. He looks around then back over his shoulder, then around again. "I don't remember there being a pub in my living room."

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The brunette huffs a small half-laugh, and smiles.

"Milliways just borrowed your door for a bit, it'll all be back to normal when you leave the bar and close the door behind you, while you—" she finally looks up from her laptop, and immediately loses her train of thought. "—is that fire. Is your armor on fire. Are there spikey bits and fire bits on your armor."

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He looks at the girl almost for the first time and smiles. "There are! I think they're quite good at projecting a certain image." He starts making his way to the bar. "I'm James Orland, Commander of the Pact. It's a pleasure to meet you, Ms....?"

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"Aestrix, hi. How do your shoulder spikey bits not immediately poke your eyes o—no, no that is not what I came here to do, I am not going to wail about impractical armor. No." She clears her throat and straightens up and Attempts To Look Serious. "Hi, your day is about to get extremely weird."

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"Oh good, I love it when that happens," he says, taking a seat next to Aestrix. "That's an interesting name, I'd have expected it of Sylvari or maybe Asura, not human," he adds conversationally.

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"It's not actually my name, it's my, uh, call name, I guess would be the easiest translation. My actual name's a bit more normal, but I'd rather not say it out loud for... reasons that are also complicated and less easy to succinctly translate."

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"Ah, understood. Most people call me 'Commander,' anyway, so I know a bit of what that's like." He removes his gloves by undoing a clasp near the crook of his elbow and the fire in them also goes out when he does that. He grabs a pouch small enough to fit in his hand that's attached to his belt and opens it wider than it should be able to go then shoves his removed pieces of armour into it before returning it to his belt, no larger than it was before. "So, is the way my day is going to become extremely weird related to how there's suddenly a pub here except there's no one in it except you and you have a strange Asuran contraption I've never seen in my life?"

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"Yes, it's related to that. This isn't Asuran, and I'm not from Tyria. I'm uh." She pauses, and makes a face. "... How do I explain this sensibly, uh. Okay, do me a favor, pretend you're in a book. I am writing half of that book. Right now, anyway, I don't help with all things and I haven't at all meddled in your life up until now. Pretend you're a character in a half written book that I just picked up and started scribbling in."

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"Okay, I can do that," he says agreeably.

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"Okay. So in this metaphor, instead of staying in the background and trying to write any kind of sensible story, I wrote myself as appearing in a bar that borrowed your living room's door and said hi. So, uh, hi! It could be argued that I am a god. Please do not argue it, because I won't."

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"Okay, and how metaphorical is this metaphor, from your perspective?"

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"Not metaphorical at all, I was just framing it like that so as not to freak you out. Sorry if I just gave you an existential crisis?"

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He shrugs. "Nah, I guess my life does make a lot more sense if it's part of a book. And the someone up there who likes me isn't the gods, then, it's—you?"

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"Yeah. In the plural form, anyway. I like you fine but this is my first time meddling in your life. Though I suppose technically I helped you with your pretty face? So maybe nevermind, I did meddle, but the only meddling I did was to help make you pretty. Horror upon horrors."

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"...my face? You made my face?" He grins. "Well, good job on that, I quite like it."

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"Technically it was a bit more like I sorted through very tedious face soup to find your face," she says, brightly, grinning back. "But basically yes. Thank you, and also you're welcome."

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He continues grinning. "So, if it's not you who wrote my life, who is it?"

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"His name is Pedro! He's very nice, we're friends. I suspect he might not appear in a dramatic puff of smoke before you or anything, or if he does, it won't be for very long, because it's much easier to write when you let someone write the other half of the book." She raises her voice and turns her head ceilingward. "But if Pedro would like to come out and say hi, I wouldn't say no or make faces at being upstaged!"

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He looks up at the ceiling expectantly.

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Aestrix waits for a few seconds.

"That'll be a no, not today. Sorry," she shrugs.

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He shrugs. "Well, would've been too much to ask. So, what's this for, then?"

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She shrugs again and makes an extended noncommittal sound.

"Seemed like it'd be neat?"

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He raises both eyebrows. "Meeting me? Would be neat? Well, I can't say I'm not flattered."

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Snort.

"You're welcome? Though it's less that I'm enamored with you, and more that I'm enamored with myself, and the prospect of showing up and confusing you sounded like it'd be fun. Also I guess I can save your world a little, but there's no rush, time's paused in Tyria because Milliways is convenient like that."

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"—oh yeah I was gonna ask, the Queen had requested my presence and I wouldn't want to be late, but that one's good. Now when you say 'save your world'..."

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"You will not be late. When I say save your world, I mean actually save it, no more dragons, no more shitty gods, no more, uh, what else do you have, eldritch whatsits nibbling at reality? Or something? I forget. Oh, oh, no more Palawa Joko, fuck that guy. I am so pissed that he was let loose and no one thought to put him back until after he had his army together, who would do that??"

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"...that would actually be pretty amazing!" he says after a barely perceptible pause, with less than complete enthusiasm.

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... Aestrix sporfles, makes an expression that reads as 'oh no honey I'm sorry,' then pats his hand gently.

"And then put you down in a place that is not boring. I am not going to put you in the unenviable position where you get to like, ask the all powerful person to ruin your life for the good of the world, that sounds shitty to do to you? Instead I can just, I don't know, give you immortality and super powers and send you to gleefully cavort about the multiverse, having adventures in places."

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—he starts laughing and rubs the back of his head. "Was it that obvious or do you just know me better than you should?"

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"Second thing! It's okay, I don't think you're a bad person for enjoying being a hero? Oh no, how dare you get personal fulfillment from saving people. So I'm just going to give you a comfy multiversal home, a way to visit Tyria, probably some kind of comfy immortality solution, and a way to cavort about saving people in an infinite multiverse. Because I don't see why you shouldn't have nice things."

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"I might want to marry you."

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She cracks up.

"I don't think that's possible, considering, but I'm flattered anyway, thank you. So I'm hearing a yes to all of that?"

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"Yes! Yes, definitely! That sounds—incredible!"

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"Okay! Come along, then, I'm going to make you a house, because I like making pretty things."

She snaps her laptop closed, then picks it up and tosses it over her shoulder. It bursts into brilliant blue flames and disappears before hitting the ground.

"This is going to be a fun power trip," she says, brightly, with a large smile.

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He laughs and gets up, too. "Should I just watch or do you want creative input?"

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"I would not mind creative input! I hardly want to make a pretty house that you don't like. Though I have an idea for your multiversal travel method that would be extremely aesthetic, considering." She hums a little tune, then snaps her fingers, and the bar disappears.

Instead, they stand in a large, multileveled library with a warm color scheme and a slightly rustic feel.

"I'm gonna steal from Myst," explains Aestrix, brightly. "Not completely, but the 'books are gateways to other worlds' schtick."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Er, 'Myst' being something other than the Mists, you mean?"

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"Oh, yes, sorry, it's a setting where you travel to different worlds through books. It's very neat, I like it a lot." She reaches out and grabs a book from the shelves.

"All right, rules. Name of the world is on the spine of the book." She flips it open and displays an impressively large tree, with a minuscule city at its base. Its branches sway gently in the breeze. "On the pages, pictures of different places in the world. Usually large places of note, cities, major landmarks, so on. The books will update themselves as the world changes, I think I'll let it catch important places to people in the library, just so you don't have to like, walk ages to get someone back to their house. Touch a picture to go there, and it'll appear you there in an out of the way place no one was looking at. You can take books out of the library, but if you lose them or they get destroyed, they might not ever come back. Or they might come back eventually after a disproportionate amount of time has passed in the world, while only a few days or minutes have passed for you. Or if Pedro is feeling merciful, no change might happen at all and it'll just happily reappear back where it had been. But don't count on it. I therefore do not recommend losing or getting them destroyed. They will not be destroyed in the library itself. So it's a risk reward kind of deal." She smiles apologetically, and shrugs. "I have to make there be actual stakes for the adventures to be any fun, you know?"

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The corner of his mouth tugs up. "I couldn't agree more. I suppose being a fictional character is a mixed blessing." Pause. "What was waiting for me, if you hadn't intervened? And should I expect there's another, ah, 'version' of me who's going to go through it anyway?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Uh, I'm sketchy on the details, but they involve personally fighting Balthazar, dying, and then clawing your way out of death to come back and kill him for it. But then unfortunately you cannot solve all of your problems with murder, because one of the dragons eats his power or something, and killing one more might destroy the world. You know, Tuesday in Tyria. I expect there to be another version who's going to go through it anyway. There's also a phenomenon called alts, which is like... Imagine instead of being born in your world, you were born in another, and grew up there. Now imagine that there is no 'instead,' there is just an 'and,' and that you can therefore meet that other version of yourself. That would be an alt. Alternate version."

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"Do I have one of those?"

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"At least one! He's from one of my worlds!" she says, brightly. "You might run into him eventually. Do you want spoilers?"

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"Sure!"

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"Okay! I so declare that a library is not complete without comfy chairs, so there are some here." She glides down a set of stairs to find (and then sit) in one.

"So I would like to preface this explanation with 'I do not like to get characters into trouble that they can't get out of.' I might do horrible things, but I don't like giving people situations that are impossible to fix. As you might have noticed, I'm a total sweetie, so. Happy endings only."

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"Better than the alternative," he agrees, taking a seat, too.

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"Yeah. All right, so. This actually requires some explanation and understanding of physics to relay the concepts properly, this world is really science heavy because I'm a huge nerd." She pauses to consider how she's going to explain this. "First of all, you know Tyria's round, right, really big sphere, not at all flat?"

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"—yeah. Are there, er, people who think it's flat?"

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Oh you sweet summer child, she doesn't say. Yes, James. Yes there are people that think planets are flat.

"Yes. I had to check with Pedro to make sure that it wasn't, because some worlds actually are. Mine isn't, but it happens, physics gets squirrely sometimes. But anyway, back on topic. ... Oo, I can make this storytime!" She glances up at the many books around them and clicks her tongue, rather like she's calling a dog. A book with the title 'Viduus' removes itself from a shelf and floats over to land in her lap. Aestrix hums, pleased with the minor perks of ultimate cosmic power. She flips open the book to the first page, where a picture of a lovely blue marble takes up the page. She shows James, because that is what one does when it is storytime.

"Once upon a time, on a planet very unlike Tyria, a bunch of humans lived. On the whole, this world was significantly safer than Tyria ever was. There were some dangerous animals, in some parts of the world, but no dragons. No centaurs, no undead, no sylvari, asura, norn, charr, destroyers or, from your perspective, all that much else besides humans. It would be inaccurate to call the world safe, but there was no struggle for dominance between races. No grand threats attempting to destroy or remake the world. The only real monsters there are the ones that are humans themselves, and all the world was free for the taking."

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He peeks at the picture. "No offence but it sounds kinda boring."

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She giggles.

"You'd probably think so if you went, yeah. All of the interesting stuff happens later, and lots of places are not as dangerous as Tyria. Still, what do you think humans do when left to their own devices?" She flips the page, and displays a rather impressive looking building. "With nothing to constantly attack them," flip, "all of the resources of the world at their disposal," flip, "and seemingly endless time in which to build," flip, "and build," flip, "and build." Final flip, to show another picture of the same lovely blue marble. "Until all the world was covered with their wonders."

She smiles at him. "So it wasn't all boring, you know."

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"...okay yeah that's actually pretty amazing."

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"Yeah! And this isn't even me meddling to make it awesome, this is actually just what my world is like. I stole it and ran off cackling because I don't see why I shouldn't. Oh, and we went to space and then to the Moon, I should mention that those aren't mine either, that's actually just humanity doing cool human things."

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"You can... go to the moon?"

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"With really big rockets filled with extremely explosive rocket fuel to blast you at it really fast and really precisely, yeah! It's a place you can go. The universe is sort of like, hm... okay, imagine Earth—that being my world—as a little blue marble, drifting around in a sea of nothingness. The sun is another marble, this one much larger and significantly more on fire. It's also drifting around in this sea of nothingness, but close enough and big enough that you can see it from the little blue marble. The moon, the stars - same thing. Some mix of large enough or bright enough to see. Stars are actually other suns from very far away, they're just very very bright, so we can see them anyway."

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"...huh. That makes the Dragons look way more powerful, though, if they can move stars just by being around."

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"I'm not actually sure if it works the same way in Tyria. You might have weird world physics going on. If it is like Earth, the dragon might be warping light, not actual matter, so it could be like—like a Mesmer's illusions. Warping the way you see it, but maybe not warping the way it actually is. And also I can take them, so."

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"Well, so can I."

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Giggle.

"That's the spirit. Actually now that I think about it, I don't see a reason I shouldn't let you fight the dragons, and just keep them from breaking reality or killing anyone. Is it no fun if they can't kill anyone? I'd feel kind of bad if they did. They'd get resurrected, because when I save the world, I damn well save the world, but still."

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"—breaking reality?"

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"Oh yeah, that's a thing, kill too many of the dragons without a place to put their power, and reality starts breaking down. Or something. I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but it can get messy. Whereas if I help it will just sort of conveniently not be messy."

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"...you're a very convenient phenomenally powerful deity, you know?"

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"I try! Also, not a deity, if I admit to being a deity of things that I write I'd be sort of... duty bound... to immediately go write fix fic for every single thing I've ever written, for complicated personal reasons. So. Yes, but also no."

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"Hey, I'm not judging, I was half an atheist before you showed up."

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Giggle.

"Tyria's gods are terrible, anyway, you're probably better off without them. Anyway. I think I got off topic, there."

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"Maybe a little."

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"Just a smidge," she agrees. "Okay, where was I? Explaining space? Right, uh. So everything is floating in an infinite sea of nothingness, and there is a lot of distance between things. More than you're imagining. So much distance that I'm not entirely convinced that anyone can actually, really wrap their head around how big it is. The Earth averages about 149 million kilometers away from the Sun. Or about eleven thousand times the diameter of the Earth, if you don't measure things in kilometers. Astrally speaking, the Earth is pretty close to the Sun. So that might start giving you an idea of the distances we're dealing with, here."

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"...we do measure things using kilometres, yes."

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"Oh, good, that's convenient. Do you need a minute?"

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"No, thank you, a second was quite enough. Do go on."

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She giggles.

"Okay. So Earth's not the center of the universe. It's actually not even the center of the solar system, that honor goes to the Sun. We're sort of in this tiny little pocket of things, drifting together in the really big sea of nothingness. Elsewhere, much further away than anything in our little tiny neighborhood, are other suns with their own solar systems. The closest star to ours is, uh..." She surreptitiously Googles Alpha Centauri's distance to the Sun. "Over forty million million kilometers. And that's about where my brain can't chew on numbers that big anymore, so. Yeah. The universe is pretty big."

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"I think you probably lost me after the hundred and forty-nine million kilometres but other than that I'm following."

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Aestrix giggles again. "I'm sorry, I'll tone it down a bit, I just really like talking about space. So Earth—my Earth—doesn't have magic. Any, at all, that I know of. It's terrible. So I decided that if I was going to steal Earth, I'd add magic, because." Pause. "... It's magic. Plus I needed a way to make the next part make sense. So. The magic's based around transfer of energy. Light, heat, radiation, radio waves—there's this whole spectrum. I decided to let magic users convert between the different energy types, and move them around. So, like, remove all of the light in a room, then go make a brilliant light somewhere else with the stolen light. That sort of thing."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sounds pretty neat. A bit less flexible than our magic, though, unless I'm missing something."

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"Thanks! I think without technological assistance it's overall less flexible than your magic, but I added an unscientific energy type to the list, that being souls. ... Huh. I suppose for you that'd just sound normal. All right then, sorry for not including it earlier. So, rip off bits of souls or consume entire souls for ludicrous power, so forth. Rip off too much, and a person starts losing memories and forgetting who they are, and might experience large changes in personality. There are ways to be ethical about it, but it's not required, magically speaking. I have them as really efficient to convert from, but no one's yet managed to convert other types of energy into it."

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"...huh. Interesting that souls can be—like that. I'm pretty sure ours can't."

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She nods. "Yeah. I think Tyrian souls can be eaten for power, but I get the impression it's an all or nothing kind of deal. All right, now you have the basic premise, so of course here is where it all goes horribly wrong. When we're dealing with people that can transfer power, especially heat and light, what is the brightest, most obvious thing to steal from? Aside from themselves, because most people find ripping off chunks of their own soul inadvisable."

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He furrows his eyebrows. "The sun?"

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"Got it in one!" she says, brightly. "So for most of history, the Sun was a major source of magical power. A lot of people could get by just fine on sunlight given off from the Sun, but there's only so much sunlight occurring at a time, and some people decided they would much rather just directly rip the power from the Sun itself. This turned out to be a bad idea. And so, after thousands of years of being magically nibbled on by humans, the Sun goes out."

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"Thaaaat sounds like it would be a problem."

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"Basically a death sentence for humanity, yeah. Except instead of just sort of dying anticlimactically, I have humanity hatch a crazy plan. Ordinarily, there is no way they could travel to another solar system and survive the trip. Maybe with a generation ship and a lot of resources their children could get there, but then there's no guarantee that solar system would even have a place humans could live. And through a combination of magic and technology, they've figured out a way to rip out people's souls from their bodies entirely, put them into a phylactery, and then later make them a new body, that the soul is then shoved into. If all goes as planned, the person is just fine once this process is done. And a soul jar is significantly more easy to take care of than a bunch of living, breathing humans. So, they rip a bunch of people's souls off, put them in storage boxes with, uh, something-like-Asuran-golems watching over them, and shoot them all off into space to find a new place to live and rebuild humanity."

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"Is this the part where everyone gets turned into an evil lich?"

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"Basically. I mean, not evil," she laughs. "Well, not most of them, anyway. I have the long travel through space have effects, though. Everyone wakes up with amnesia, and some people wake up, uh. Not okay. With major changes to their personality, not necessarily for the better, and possibly with a generous helping of crazy. So what happens is a bunch of amnesiac liches of a varying spectrum of morality running around in a whole new solar system, with their hordes of something-like-Asuran-golem minions doing their bidding. And that's where your alt is, he of course thought ripping out his soul and going to a new solar system was a great idea."

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"...why would he think becoming a lich is a great idea? I'm a necromancer, I'd know."

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"It's not precisely like becoming a lich. It's reversible, for one, and doesn't make him evil. He could get put into a real actual body with a heartbeat and flowing blood and skin that's not rotting off, and be fine. For when he's not in a body, he's got, uh—something like lucid dreaming, because of the soul magic, except the dreams can be shared with other people. So he could experience having a form and interacting physically with them, instead of being stuck in his own head the entire time. Uh, what are the other bad parts about becoming a Tyrian lich? I don't know enough about the process."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hmm, no, I think you covered all the bad parts. So he's basically still himself, minus memories?"

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"Yep! With a whole new solar system to explore and a whole bunch of trouble to get into. Considering that everything's a bit chaotic with a bunch of maybe-crazy amnesiacs running around."

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"...yeah, I think that's my style of thing."

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She huffs a little half-laugh. "How'd I guess. It's a mystery."

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"Unreasonably thorough knowledge of me, I expect," he says cheerfully.

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"Actually it was a bit more like Pedro came up to me and went, 'Hey do you know who would have fun in this world you're making? James,' and then it spiraled. But also yes, that."

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"Ah, yes, my actual author. So does Pedro only write me in places where I would, ah, 'have fun'?"

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She considers this.

"I get that impression? I don't think he'll always be nice, but I don't think it's very fun to write about 'James, and his boring life as an ordinary person.' People are more interesting when they're given room to be interesting, and that's true of fictional characters, too. But I mean, there's not a lot of precedent, your first public thread is actually—" Aestrix pauses, and blinks. "... this... one." Blink, blink. She sits up.

"Oh my God I popped your proverbial cherry. With a meta thread. I." She pauses again, clearly unable to come up with any words. "Oops?" she eventually manages.

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He sporfles. "You 'popped my cherry.' I'm unfamiliar with that specific expression but I think I might be able to guess from context. Is it bad that this is a 'meta thread,' whatever that may be?"

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"It's not—it's not bad. It's just weird, and I just realized I did it by accident, and I'm not the sort of person that likes doing things by accident. A meta thread is where the—the fact that the book is a book is acknowledged, and the characters in the book have commentary on the nature of being in a book or whatnot. Versus like, a book where there's just a story without the acknowledgement of the medium. So instead of people reading about you having adventures, they're reading about you talking to an author about adventures. Which maybe does some weird things to their context, especially if they're not familiar with Tyria and they're just reading because I am famed to show up in person or want to meet Pedro's new character, or something. So, uh." She glances up at the ceiling. "Sorry, readers? Hope you're having fun?"

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"But wait, if he hasn't written anything with me in it yet, where is—everything—where am I from? Did I just get invented at the start of this, ah, 'thread'?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Nnnno. Not quite. I've just avoided the full explanation, because it's a bit complicated and requires concepts that don't exist in Tyria, and the things I gestured at were close enough to reality to be reasonably accurate—oh. Apparently you have something like video games in Tyria, okay then, I guess I should have asked Pedro sooner. So you know of a 'Super Adventure Box,' by an asura named Moto?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I've played it a bit. Not quite my thing but it's fun to do something like that when the fate of the world isn't at stake, sometimes."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Cool. So, that's a video game. Where various things get simulated, and the player can run around in a big world and go on adventures and save digital people and face dangerous threats and the like. You're not precisely from a book, you're originally from a video game, and now you're being written into something that is not precisely a book but is pretty close. Which is why Tyria is so dangerous, it's no fun to play a game where there's nothing to threaten you. You were the character Pedro played in that game. You've been converted into book-alike form, because Pedro liked you enough to want to write about you, and this honestly gives him more freedom about what things could happen. Video games are a bit... you're limited in your choices of what could happen. In Super Adventure Box, you can jump, but there's no way you can sprout wings and fly off to adventure in the clouds."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...huh. So there are lots of different versions of me, for each player playing the game?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Nnnnnno. No, the game lets you create your own character, who is unique. There are lots of different Tyrian people that have mysteriously gone through your exact storyline, but they would not be you unless Pedro was playing your in game character, or decided to recreate you. So there aren't lots of you running around. I'm sorry, I realize that's probably a bit disappointing to hear."

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He shrugs. "Not terribly. There's an appeal to being unique, too."

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Snort.

"True. But on the other hand, how will you have a giant orgy with your alts when there's only two of you?"

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"Oh, Dwayna, you know far too much about me," he says, laughing.

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She giggles. "I'm sorry, should I stop? I don't want to make you uncomfortable, just, I don't feel it helps if I pretend I don't have absurd meta knowledge, you know? Feels too close to lying."

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"No, don't worry about it, I'm just more used to presenting a—more serious face, so to speak. I'm Commander of the Pact, after all. People don't typically speculate about my sex life, except sometimes to brag."

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"Makes sense. I get it. I wouldn't bring it up in front of your subordinates, I don't want to subvert your authority or anything? ... But also, you can probably talk your alt's sorta-girlfriend into a threesome with you two, so, information for you in case you come across them later. I am very kind, you're welcome."

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He raises both eyebrows. "I'm sort of more surprised that my alt has a sorta-girlfriend than that he'd date someone who might be up for a threesome, to be honest."

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"Ah, yeah, Pedro mentioned. I'm not sure what their relationship is going to shake out to be once it's being written, but they definitely do sleep together before the sun goes out. After, they realize they had been together, and probably sleep together again, because hey, why not. She's..." Aestrix trails off. "Well, okay. When she wakes up, her personal data is stolen. So, all of her notes to herself about her previous life are gone, and she's pissed about this. So she goes, and probably with your alt's help, she annihilates the thief and takes back her stuff, which is all pretty normal. And then, in the lucid-dream alike, she chooses to simulate the burning wreckage of those who dared to oppose her, and perches smugly in the middle of it. Like it is the natural state of the world for those who dare to oppose her to be in wreckage around her. Apparently this was the thing that made Pedro think he'd get all gooey for her."

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"Ah."

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Aestrix giggles.

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"Lucky bastard," James says, shaking his head.

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"Aw. Chin up, she's one of mine, you might run into an alt of her at some point."

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He grins. "I sure look forward to it."

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"Aw. Now I'm tempted to try to figure out how to put her into Tyria, but I don't think I know the era you're in well enough to pull it off. Oh well. There's an infinite multiverse, anyway, and I'm giving you a way to explore it, so. Oh! That reminds me." She digs through her pockets and comes up with some kind of laminated card. A two toned blue symbol takes up the left half, sitting on a shimmery black surface with subtle iridescent markings. Penned in beautiful swirling calligraphy in a brilliant gold is the name 'James Orland.'

"Your library card," she explains, with a large smile and entirely too much glee. "So you can get back here."

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"You're enjoying this far too much," he says without heat.

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"I am! I really, really am!" she giggles. "Okay, so your library card cannot be lost and cannot be taken from you. You can find it in whichever pocket you look for it. If anyone hostile tries to take it from you, it'll explode in fire. If someone that you'd prefer not to set on fire tries to take it from you, it'll—hm, harmlessly disappear. I have not decided how you will use it to get to the library yet, any ideas? Making you say 'I would like to check out a book,' seems a bit much, even if it's funny."

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"Well, if you're phenomenally powerful I could just—wish to be here, while holding it or something?—what happens if I want to come back here but I'm naked and with no access to clothes?"

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"Sure, wish to be here while holding it. Uh, good question. I could attach your house to the library, or put a book in here that'll take you to your house? And then put infinite clothes in that house. Does that work?"

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"The... sort of situation where I'd be wishing to come here naked would probably not be one where I have access to my house."

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She has no idea what scenario he's implying, but suspects she would not like to speculate, and to be honest, she doesn't really need to understand the specifics to help him out with his request.

"... I could put a trunk of infinite clothes somewhere without ruining the aesthetic? Or stairs up to some spare rooms that have, like, a bed, a closet, a bathroom, and a kitchen?"

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"—you know what, you don't need to worry about it, it's not likely to come up."

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"Nope, nope, too late, you brought up the problem and now I am going to aggressively solve it," she sniffs. "Spare rooms upstairs on the very top floor, living amenities available, if you need to run from your house there is now a place for you to go."

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"I... was not exactly thinking I would be in my house or anywhere owned by me in such a situation."

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"Well, people can henceforth not get into the library without a library card, and if you get a spare room no one that you don't directly invite in can get into it either. And you can instead just go home if you'd rather do that." She crosses her arms and fixes him with an impressive Mom Look. "Does that solve your problem if you fuck your way into trouble?"

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He laughs. "The specific image I'm picturing is me having, as you put it, 'fucked my way into trouble' and not having access to my clothes and therefore to my library card. As it is if I had such a problem I'd hope to be able to fight my way out."

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"... I completely missed the question about summoning it without clothes. Well, that's embarrassing. Right. Okay. Will it to appear and it will come and you can flee. There. All fixed. And now there are also spare rooms in case you need to flee your house."

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"Fair enough, thank you."

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"You're welcome. Usually silly mistakes like this get quietly deleted and written over, but I am not doing that because this is a meta thread, and I have decided to own my silly mistakes like an adult instead of rewriting your reality to suit my trivial desires." Sniff. "You're welcome."

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"I'm very grateful you didn't decide to write over my reality, too!"

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Snort.

"Well, good." Huff. "Okay, I am prepared to stop being huffy for no reason now, this is also very silly."

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He laughs. "I think it's endearing."

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"It can be endearing and also silly, I am a multitasker, that is what got me into the mess with missing the very question you were asking."

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"That makes sense, I suppose."

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Smile.

"So! Want me to make you a house?"

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"I absolutely do!"

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"Okay! Any preferences on anything, or are you just going to wave at me and tell me to go nuts?"

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"Well—what are my options?"

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"Whatever you want, basically? I was planning to not have it be attached to any specific world, and instead have it be perched dramatically in some incredibly cool place. Do you want a door that can borrow other doors in different worlds, so you don't have to have a library? Do you want a lot of rooms in case you have a lot of guests? Do you want your house to change its layout to suit your ever-shifting needs? If you had the perfect impossible dream house that you kept until the end of time while you go running off on multiversal adventures, what would you like it to have?"

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He beams widely. "Well, I like the idea of being able to use doors to get to it, and if I'm gonna be going to other universes it might be useful for it to always match. Other than that, though—I'll give you free reign."

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"Hmm, all right. So, house that can comfortably pretend to be a house in the worlds that you go to. That'll mean the layout and style will change, though I think there should perhaps be secret sections where the layout at least doesn't change. Like, uh, I bet you'd appreciate some kind of trophy room, where you can collect things from your travels. Probably also an armory that'll stay the same, so you know where all of your things are. Both should probably expand as necessary, and maybe change to match the style of what the house is being, but I don't want you to not know where your stuff is. Especially when it's important stuff. Do you want like, impressive and intimidating, or homey and inviting? Probably it'll vary a bit depending on what world you're in, but I'm wondering which direction to take it."

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"Definitely the impressive one."

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Giggle. "All right." She taps her fingers against the arm of the chair and looks thoughtful.

"... All right," she repeats, clearly coming to some kind of decision. She holds out a hand, and a key attached to a key ring drops into her open palm. She offers it to James. "Here is the key to your house. Use it on any door with a keyhole, and the door will open to your house. This isn't as good of an emergency exit as the library card, so I'll just leave it at 'you can retrieve it from any place that could conceivably hide a set of keys in it.' So, pocket, sleeve, bags, impressively poofy hairstyles... you get the idea. The layout and style will try to roughly line up with what would make sense on the other side of the door, but might fudge a bit to make you look more impressive. In the house there will be, hm.... large paintings or pictures of your armory and your trophy hall, in whatever style best fits the world you last came from. And then you, uh, knock thrice on a painting and then hop through to get to your stuff. All sounding good so far?"

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He accepts the key. "Definitely sounding pretty amazing."

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"Good! Oh, and it'll try to have hot water, a large comfy bed, and a closet with clothes that match the style of the place you came from. Aaaaand probably it should come with some way to immortalize people you care about, because you might collect those, and I'm hardly going to demand that you be immortal and watch people you love die. Uh - something that can scale comfortably, so you can dump it in a world and then ignore it if you want, and not have to worry about doing the responsible thing?"

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"How would that work? Wouldn't the world get... a bit full?"

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"Well, yes. But usually the characters of the authors in my social group think it's worth it, and that space to live and resources to take care of people are things that can be acquired. Recall that we've been to the Moon and that there is a very big universe out there. Acquiring more things and space isn't as hard as it is on Tyria. Whereas dead people are often lost forever, and even if they're not, the time they spent being dead, away from everyone they love, is wasted, and all of the pain of everyone that outlived them can be averted. Granted there would probably be massive societal shifts and a lot of freaking out by everyone, but. I vaguely expect someone you run into is going to want to save everyone, it's kind of our genre of thing."

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"Huh. Well, from what I heard the Underworld is pretty dull, so that makes sense anyway."

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"Oh. Right. Tyria's got an afterlife. Sorry, I forgot. In other worlds they can just stop existing, no Underworld to catch them."

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"...wait, so where do they go, then?"

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"... It depends on the author, there are other afterlives that can catch people. Some of them are significantly nicer than the Underworld, some of them are significantly... less nice." She swallows. She is not going to enjoy the next part. "But sometimes they also just, um. Stop. And then that's it, they're gone."

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"—stop?"

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"Um."

She considers the pros and cons of telling a fictional character that has always comfortably had and known about having some kind of afterlife situation about how for many people, death is not where you go to a boring place. Death is where you stop. After some thoughtful and reasoned consideration, she decides that, instead:

"... Nope," she says, firmly, and not really addressed to James. "Nope. Nope, nope, nope, I'm not doing this. I'm not introducing you to this thing. I'm instead going to take over the Underworld, and am going to convert it into a safety net for the multiverse. It will then catch everyone that doesn't get caught by some other afterlife. Nope. This is my ludicrously self indulgent self insert thread, I can do what I want, and now I have decided what I want and that will be that." She crosses her arms, and sniffs. "Nevermind, people do not just stop, I'm interfering."

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"Um... o...kay? Thanks?"

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"You're welcome. And apparently there were soul eating beasts running around the Underworld, but it's mine now, so there aren't. Because it's mine. So instead they will be coughing up the souls they ate, which will be carefully taken care of and repaired and it's fine now. There will be no soul eating in my Underworld. None whatsoever."

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"You might be solving all the problems ever at this rate," he says wryly.

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Snort.

"And we wonder why all of our characters immediately try to solve all the problems ever." She considers this statement. "Well. I suppose maybe we don't, we already know, but still."

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"I'm curious about what actually happens if a Dragon tries to attack anywhere, now."

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"Well, time's still paused in Tyria, so it can't attack anything right now. But, uh." Shrug. "I mean I could go kick its ass immediately, but I'm also fine with subcontracting? And I get the impression you get a lot more out of dragonslaying than I do, personally speaking. But if you'd rather not, I will think of something suitably dramatic and then kill it."

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"No, what I mean is, you said Dragons are incapable of killing people now, so I wonder what happens when they try."

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"Oh. Depends on what I'm going for. If I'm being obvious about my interference, I'd just have their efforts bounce off hilariously, as if everyone in the world has a personal shield generator that is Dragon-proof. And Dragon-minion-proof. If I were being sneaky about my interference, I'd catch people after they were injured but before they died, and keep them from dying, and conveniently time things so that the Dragon does not have time to consider how this is very strange, because there is instead a Commander that is busy killing it."

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He laughs. "I think the latter option raises the fewest questions."

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"Yeah, agreed." She pauses, and makes a face. "... I don't want you to feel like your efforts are useless just because no one will die if you don't. I don't think they're useless. Like, okay, bear with me—for one, there is value in not freaking people out about how I exist and am saving the world. I bet a lot of people would freak out. For another, if I'm being sneaky, there's only so far I can reasonably twist narrative convention for my convenience without being too obvious. It's that or like, making everyone mysteriously not notice even though it is obvious, which is... distinctly not better. So causality is ultimately still going to be in effect. And so the people you'll be saving, you'll be saving from pain and fear and despair, because they will not know I'm there. And I think that's still noble? With actual stakes on the line? Just they're... fuzzier stakes than 'people will literally die if I don't.'"

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"...okay, that's fair. Thank you. Again."

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"You're welcome." She smiles, then gives a little awkward shrug. "I realize you would have done it anyway, but still. I didn't want you to—to have to."

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"Well, if I didn't, someone else would. I hope."

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"Yeah." She hums. "I keep getting distracted from showing you your house by other things. Pedro and I are plotting in the background, do you want to hear?"

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"—sure. And tell Pedro I said hi."

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Aestrix giggles. "He says 'Hi' back. Also 'charming motherfucker.'" Sorry not sorry, Pedro, what were you expecting?

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—he starts laughing. "I think no one has ever called me that in particular, but I'll take it."

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Yep, more giggling.

"Good. All right then, now to work. To be quite frank, Tyria is a mess. A huge, huge mess of truly impressive proportions. Five Elder Dragons, Palawa Joko, keeping your gods from returning once there are no dragons to fight them off, taking over the Underworld, not to mention all of the problems with monsters everywhere and the main sapient races getting into fights with each other." She shakes her head. "But luckily for you, I am a compulsive problem solver, and honestly solving a mess this big and complicated sounds kind of fun. So."

She recalls that she still has the Viduus book on her lap, and gently shoos it in favor of steepling her fingers on her lap. It flies off to re-shelve itself. "I do not think it would be smart to just handwave away the dragon power, because if there are no dragons, then the gods show up and start meddling. I don't like them very much. The way I see it, the first move should be taking out Bubbles, the Deep Sea Dragon. The one that hasn't, you know, surfaced yet or done anything, so no one will really miss it. I feel like instead it should get assassinated, and all of its power should instead go to a dragon that'll rule the Underworld. That way I can disrupt Palawa Joko's control over his Awakened, and replace a dragon with a better one. ... Did all of that make sense, I'm juggling a lot of proverbial mental plates and have trouble keeping track of what you do and do not know about the world."

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"Bubbles? The Deep Sea Dragon's name is Bubbles?!"

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Aestrix grins. "Probably not, but nobody knows its actual name. So the people that play the Tyrian video game have nicknamed it Bubbles. I don't see why I shouldn't stick to that convention."

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He laughs some more then shakes his head. "In any case, what's that about the gods?"

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"They left because the Dragons were waking up, and they knew a fight with them would potentially destroy Tyria. Balthazar did not want to go, and wanted to fight them anyway. But conceivably, if there's nothing powerful enough in Tyria to fight the gods, they could come back and start meddling again. But I don't like them, because..." She trails off, putting her thoughts in order.

"... they're better than the Elder Dragons. By a long shot. If it were a choice between them and the Dragons, I'd pick them. But I don't think that means they're good. And I don't think that means they should get to meddle some more. I'm really leery of powerful people that show up and go, 'Hi, yes, worship me as a god! It'll be fine! I am responsible for all good things in your life, even when actually I'm not!' Especially in Tyria. We already had that shit with the Mursaat, I'm not interested in letting someone else play that game. I also get the impression that the gods would be in humanity's corner and no one else's, and then the charr and the asura and the norn and probably especially the sylvari would burn for all they cared. And... no. That is not how this is going to work."

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"...huh. So is that why I fight Balthazar?"

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"Yeah. Because he didn't want to not fight the Elder Dragons, the other gods stripped him of his power and chained him in the Mists. He then wanted retribution at any cost, including Tyria's destruction. Which is why you fight and eventually kill him. Balthazar being crazy does not necessarily make the other gods evil, but you see why I'm real nervous about them ever coming back, right?"

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"...yeah. Ouch. That would... shake a cleric or two up." Pause. "Kormir, too?"

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"I'd say she's the least likely to be evil of the bunch, but I really don't know. I didn't like her much when I met her in Tyria. To be clear, I've also played a video game set in Tyria, but it was set 250 years before your time. So I have personal first hand knowledge of Tyria, but it's extremely out of date. Most of it's not relevant anymore, but some of it is. For example: I was there when she became a goddess, and I met her before she became one. And I didn't like her. Which isn't necessarily a mark against her character, or anything, I can not like perfectly morally upstanding people, just. I do not trust her, and I don't think I ever knew her very well, especially not after she got dragged into the Realm of Torment. That makes me very nervous. That, and..." She pauses, looking for the right words.

"I'm... I'm leery of Kormir knowing the exact right things to say to get me to shoo. Like, uh." She separates a lock of her hair from the rest of it and twists it between her fingers thoughtfully. "I cannot be defeated in a flat confrontation. That's just not a thing that can happen. Not when I'm still helping to write this story. But I can be reasoned with, and I can be tricked, because I'm a person. People are susceptible to those. I'm not Pedro, but if I were, I'd have Kormir, goddess of knowledge, creepily know way more things than she should. Like all of the conversations in the background I'm having, and all the ways a character could sneak around an author's influence to do what they want. I do not know Kormir, and I do not trust Kormir, and I have decided to take responsibility for an entire world, so I am damn well aware of things that could prevent me from taking proper care of it. And knowledge is one of the things that could stop me. So I'm nervous, and that makes me cautious and cagey.

"That's not to say I think the gods are definitely evil. I don't think they were wrong that a fight between them and Dragons would get very messy, and it could have been the right decision that they made in sincere concern for lives. Maybe they correctly guessed that people could take the Dragons on without them. Maybe they just didn't care. But I don't know. I do know that I have no ulterior motives for Tyria, and that I don't need their help. So I'd rather just keep this world saving in house and not involve them."

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He nods. "That makes sense. You've done more in this while than they did in all their time here, anyway."

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"Grenth did keep Dhuum in check, and I think Dwayna probably actually healed people," she says, wryly. "But yeah. Thank you. Though technically nothing I've done has actually gone through yet, what with time being paused, so I'm not sure it counts."

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"I will be sure to retroactively invalidate my praise if everything turns out not to be fixed when time is resumed."

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Giggle.

"Good. That is how it should be."

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"And who are you going to replace Grenth with, then? I have a... vested interest in the subject."

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Snort.

"I bet. Not to worry, I won't be taking undead minions away from you. Vlast will probably replace him, if he really is up for it. Vlast is Glint's son, he... was not well socialized by his caretakers, and finds being the second Glint really exhausting, especially since he didn't bond with anyone, but he's doing it anyway out of love for his mother and duty. He um, dies to save you, if no authorial meddling occurs. So." She coughs. "Apparently he will be much happier if he can just have the Underworld, not be bothered by anyone, and be ultimately free to not try to live up to his mom's legacy. ... Oh, I'll also be resurrecting Glint, because I don't see why I shouldn't do that. But I think she'd be better off in a more active role."

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"Huh. Destiny's Edge is going to be very interested in that. ...do you think you could bring Snaff back, too?"

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"Sure. I'll want to think of a plausible reason for his resurrection so people don't realize I'm directly meddling in the affairs of the world, but I think 'A nice Dragon takes over the Underworld' is probably a pretty compelling reason."

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"And it being Glint's child—I though he was called Gleam?—also explains why she's coming back. Although I didn't think dragons went to the Underworld."

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"Gleam was the name the bards gave him, as the baby that lives up to Glint's legacy. Which is an awful lot of pressure to put on a baby, really. Vlast is the name he picks for himself. I don't think they do, but I think there's probably some kind of clever way we can make it plausible that she comes back." She peers at the Guild Wars 2 Wiki. "... Apparently some people called the Zephyrites harvested the magic from her corpse and turned it into a really big airship. Okay then. Resurrecting her could have something to do with that."

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"Ah, yes, they're in Lion's Arch helping with the rebuilding efforts. I did not know about the magic, though."

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"They also have the last of Glint's eggs. It's unhatched, but—okay, I think I should probably explain precisely what happens in your storyline, so you can know what I know. So you just dealt with Scarlet, and the day was very annoyingly not entirely saved, despite having killed her?"

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"...yeah," he sighs. "I couldn't—failed to stop her, and I don't even know what she was trying to do."

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Wince. "Sorry. She was, um. Trying to wake Mordremoth." Extra wince. "... Succeeded. At waking Mordremoth."

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"Why."

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"Um." She swallows, then sets her shoulders and lifts her chin and steels herself and forges on. Her voice takes on a calm, slightly authoritative tone. "Let me be clear, do not repeat this to anyone. The only people that know about this are Caithe and the Pale Tree, and none of the sylvari are at fault. They were originally grown to be his minions. The Pale Tree is a purified Blight Tree of his creation. As he wakes up, he begins twisting their minds and forcing them to meet their original purpose. Scarlet included."

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"Fuck."

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"Yep. But I am now here, so he will not be doing that mind twisting nonsense."

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He nods. "That one would have been one I'd have a pretty hard time dealing with. My expertise, as the Queen sometimes likes to remind me, is hitting things."

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Snort. "Well that's not very nice of her. I think you're also useful for looking suitably heroic while hitting things."

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"Ah, of course; my dashing good looks must serve some purpose after all."

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"Yep. I worked hard for those, damn it," she sniffs.

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"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.

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Aestrix cracks up.

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

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

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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."

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

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"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."

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

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

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"Even more flattered!"

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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."

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"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."

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"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."

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

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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."

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

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

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

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"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."

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

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"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.'"

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

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"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."

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

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"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."

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"...matchmaking mission."

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"You reacted really cutely to the story of your alt's sorta-girlfriend, and then you were dejected that you didn't have a version of her running around in your world. So the part of my brain devoted to matchmaking characters is like, 'Aha! I can solve this problem,' except actually the problem has turned out to be kind of hard." She crosses her arms, and tries very hard not to pout. She fails at this, and is definitely pouting at least a little bit. "It's not a huge deal, or anything, if I can't make it work it's fine. I'd rather have it make sense than try to stuff it into a place it doesn't belong. But it would be cute. And usually my genres of writing are, 'miscellaneous heroics' and 'adorable fluffy romance,' and so we're missing one."

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"Well, I was not exactly setting out to be cute, but I am glad it worked anyway."

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Yep she's definitely pouting some more.

"This isn't a big deal and might not even happen. It's just—a thing I'm considering, because I am pathologically incapable of not considering many things at once. Though, actually, it might be smart to make it so that you're, hm, free and clear to run around with authors that are not me, once I'm done saving your world?"

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"Well, you could set a different version of me up. If there are other Tyrias."

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"Well, yes, but auuuuugh! Think of the shipping!"

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"The... shipping?"

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"Oh, uh. Another word for 'matchmaking,' basically, but more in line with my culture. Matchmaking is more serious than shipping, shipping is sort of like... 'This would be cute, but I'm not very serious about it.'"

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"I see. And you think it would not be cute if a different version of me met—the person you want me to meet?"

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"Oh, no, it'd be terribly cute, but I'm a spoiled brat and I want my cuteness now."

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He laughs. "Would I be able to even tell them about—you, all of this?"

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"... Hm." That's certainly a thing to consider, isn't it.

"I'm not sure. I wouldn't have to fear for my life or hers, but I don't think she'd take it as well as you have? Meta-her gets it and is completely fine with the whole thing, but I don't know what happens if I puncture the fourth wall for an instance of her and introduce myself. I haven't done it before and she's often hard to predict."

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"You lost me at 'meta-her' and 'fourth wall.'"

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"Sorry. I have trouble translating myself when I'm thinking out loud, uh. The fourth wall is a term for the divide between the proverbial audience and the people in the proverbial play. To the people in the play, there are four walls in a room. To the people in the audience, there are three, because the fourth has disappeared to let them view inside. So puncturing the fourth wall is doing for her what I've done for you; letting her know that this is a play at all. Or, well, not a play, but I was going with the metaphor.

"Meta-her is a bit trickier to explain, it's..." She trails off, and hums thoughtfully. "If I remove one of her from whatever world I've put her in, and strip away all of the fluff from whatever setting she's in, so that just the—character traits inherent to her remain, and then give that person full knowledge of what's going on, all of the history and knowledge of places and situations a version of her has been in, that would be meta-her. She is fine with being a fictional character. But she never thought she was anything else, an instance from Tyria would not have that. So I'm not sure."

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"...ah. I'm afraid I'm out of my depth and cannot advise, here."

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"Yeah. I'll have to think about it. But my shipping urges are definitely somewhat suppressed, now, I don't want to put you in a situation where you have to systematically lie to a loved one."

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"That would be unpleasant, yes, but not something I had never given thought to; I am a member of the Order of Whispers, even if I have not done anything for them in a while."

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"I suppose that's true. And I sort of did already put you in that position by saying hi, didn't I, it's not like it'd be particularly smart to walk up to everyone you know and say, 'Hi! We're fictional!'"

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"I don't know that it changes much about my life, knowing that."

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"Really? That's interesting. Personally I'd start picking at everyone else's storylines and trying to leverage narrative conventions for my own ends, but... I do kind of do that already, so I suppose that's not much of a surprise."

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"My life was already quite... storylike," he says wryly. "Now I know it will continue to be."

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Giggle.

"Yeah. Oh, speaking of, I didn't finish telling you about your averted future did I?"

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"You did not."

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"Okay. One moment as I take a short commercial break to explain Elder Dragons to our lovely and discerning viewers, so they can be all caught up." She clears her throat, thematically.

"They are sorta kinda part of the world, and spend most of their time napping beneath it, but every now and then they wake up and wreck everything, then go back and have themselves another nap. There were six of them, but Our Hero has kindly already killed one. The other five are Primordius, Dragon of fire, Jormag, Dragon of ice, Kralkatorrik, Dragon of..." She pauses, blinks, and frowns. "... crystal?? That seems like it should be earth or something, but whatever, not my setting, moving on, Mordremoth, Dragon of minds and plants, because those totally go together, and Bubbles, Dragon of the Deep Sea who is terribly antisocial and has yet to come out of its room to say hi, who is the Dragon of something or other, but fucked if any of us know what it is. Kralkatorrik had a baby dragon... somehow... even though I don't think any of these dragons are girl dragons... and that baby dragon was Glint. Who was, hilariously enough, a girl dragon. Glint decided that she didn't like this whole 'serving an evil being' business and fucked off to chill with the cool humans and dwarves while Kralkatorrik was taking a nap.

"Eventually the dragons wake up to do their whole destruction schtick, and Glint goes, 'Not today, asshole!' and scoops up some worthy looking sapients to be her sidekicks, who call themselves Destiny's Edge. Possibly they wanted to form a band. They all go to kill Kralkatorrik, but this goes really, aggressively terribly. Glint dies, a member of Destiny's Edge dies, and the entire group breaks up and goes off to sulk in their own special corners."

She considers this set of statements. "Anything to add, James?"

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Not for the first couple of minutes because he's too busy laughing, but eventually: "Destiny's Edge has mended a fence or two since that, but otherwise this was a very apt description."

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Aestrix looks very pleased with herself. "Thank you. They have mended a fence or two since that, but I would like to make it clear to our lovely and discerning viewers that they mended a fence or two because James sat on them and told them to grow up and get over themselves."

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"Caithe helped."

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"Fair point, thank you. Caithe helped James sit on the silly people."

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"And let us be fair to them, they had some real grievances with each other."

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"Aw. Yes, all right, fair respect to the powerful people that have worked very hard to help save the world, they had some real grievances with each other and my chipper irreverent gloss over does not do them justice."

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He smiles.

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She smiles back.

"So. James rounded up Destiny's Edge with Caithe's help. He met a sylvari called Trahearne, and together they got several different organizations to make nice with each other, and then formed a guild called the Pact. They all went and killed a different Dragon, named Zhaitan, who doesn't super matter anymore because he's dead. Yaaay. Then there was a period of time that was kind of boring, and then a sylvari named Scarlet Briar did many bad things, including waking Mordremoth up. So now everyone is about all caught up. Any important details I left out before we move on?"

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"I met a few people who have been around while dealing with Scarlet," he reminds her. "Kasmeer, Marjory, Taimi, Braham, and Rox."

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"Ah, right. Sorry, and thank you. I don't think I know them well enough to explain them very well, but they definitely helped and were a proper adventuring party together."

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"Should I explain them to our audience?"

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"Yes, please. Save me. I do not know them at all."

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He grins, then begins explaining.

"The Scarlet story is a bit longer than that but I will try to be brief. The first public actions she took were in charr and norn territory. We did not know this at the time but she was behind an alliance between the dredge and the Flame Legion—ah, do you perhaps want to explain those...?"

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"Yeah, I can explain them. The dredge are another race of sapients—there are rather a lot of them in Tyria—who used to be enslaved to a xenophobic somewhat omnicidal group of dwarves, and then stopped when dwarves did. Dwarves are now basically extinct, because most of their race sacrificed themselves to stick it to the dragon Primordius a couple hundred years ago. The remainder of which were the xenophobic dwarf clan, whose major leader was then summarily killed off, and the group never recovered. They have since died off, and will not be missed. The dredge, now being free, are still sorting out their government and trying to figure out how to rule themselves, but generally don't think very highly of non-dredge, because," wince, "no one had come to help free them from their slavery. Their government's currently in a state of war between a totalitarian dictatorship, and a totalitarian military dictatorship. So uh. Yeah they're having a bad time, I'm realizing as I explain this that maybe I should help them out.

"The Flame Legion is a faction in the charr that essentially is the reason why charr and humans are bad at making nice. They used to be the hot shit—somewhat literally—and had the charr worshiping a bunch of evil fire elementals for power, with them in charge at the top. This worked out great for the charr at first, what with how there was a lot of kicking humanity's collective ass, except that also all of the charr were essentially enslaved to their fiery masters, Flame Legion included. They stayed in charge through a mix of magical power, treachery, and various evil deeds. But eventually somebody," she smirks, like she knows precisely who, "made those elementals go away, thus losing the Flame Legion their major leverage. The rest of the charr then tossed them right out and informed them that they did not require any gods anymore. Ever since, the Flame Legion have been scrabbling to try to find a way back into power, but the rest of the charr are not having it.

"There. Works?"

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"I do believe so."

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"As I was saying, the dredge had allied with the Flame Legion—they were calling themselves the Molten Alliance—and were digging deep into the underground and attacking charr and norn settlements. Braham Eirsson was a displaced norn, and I helped him retake his town. Rox, a charr, also helped against the Alliance as part of her tests to join Rytlock's warband—she was called Rox Whetstone, then."

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"Warbands are a big deal for charr, they're very military based. A warband is their social safety net, their group of allies, their family. They usually grow up together, train together, and spend a good portion of their lives working together and trusting their lives to each other. So a charr that doesn't have one is in some degree of trouble. They can join a new one, but it's rare and difficult. Oh, and the norn have come into conflict with the dredge, because they've been forced south by the Dragon Jormag, and now the dredge and norn both want to live in the same cold and mountainous area."

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He nods. "Rox had lost her warband in a mining accident, is why she didn't have one," he explains.

"I met Kasmeer for the first time a while later, on an island that was being used to host refugees from the Molten Alliance's attacks. She showed up as a noble, saying she wanted to see the vacation resort that was being built there, but I knew her family had been ruined by her brother's gambling. I tried to keep an eye on her but more pressing matters demanded my attention and I lost her. I found out later that she had been working with her girlfriend, Marjory Delaqua, to investigate the place.

"Marjory herself I only met later, in Lion's Arch, when I helped her investigate the murder of one of the councilmen. We were led to a band of pirates called the 'Aetherblades' whose captain was vying for councilman position, but it turns out she was doing that on Scarlet's bidding—but we did not know that at the time."

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"I am mildly impressed that Scarlet had her fingers in so many pies. Proverbially. She was a very busy woman," comments Aestrix. Then she remembers that she's helping with making this clear to the audience. She—almost explains the wrong thing about Lion's Arch. Two hundred and fifty years ago it might have been Kryta's capital, Aestrix, but it's not anymore. Instead: "Uh, the council in question is the council for Lion's Arch, a pirate's haven. The council was also made of other pirates."

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"Marjory and I managed to capture the Aetherblade captain, Mai Trin, with the help of Inspector Ellen Kiel, who later became the next councilman," James continues. "So that was that, but we had not found out about Scarlet yet.

"A while later, the Queen threw a celebration in honour of the ten year anniversary of her coronation, and Scarlet revealed herself there. She tried to kidnap the Queen and—" He visibly winces, then, before sighing and continuing. "She killed a lot of people. She hijacked the Queen's exposition of watchwork knights, but ran away on an Aetherblade ship. We also suspected she was the one behind the Molten Alliance, because she used teleportation technology similar to what we had found amongst their hideouts."

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Aestrix doesn't really have anything to add, here. ... Well, okay, one thing.

"Do you want a hug? I promise not to impale myself on your shoulderpads."

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"—well, I don't think I would say no."

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"All right." She gets up from her chair, then holds her arms out in an offer of hug that he is free to accept.

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He chuckles a bit but stands up and hugs her. He's warm.

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It's almost like he's on fire, or something.

"You realize the silly spikey shoulder bits and copious fire are not conducive to hugs, right?" she informs him.

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He laughs. "Are you trying to get me to undress?" he asks archly.

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She sporfles.

"No!" she laughs. "I can't see anything of yours anyway, I would get nothing from you undressing except the knowledge that you're undressed. I am informing you that your armor is impractical."

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"So you only found me a face, not a body?" he teases. "Well, I can see my body just fine, and the armour is not meant to be practical, it's meant to be intimidating."

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Snort. "Armor can be practical and intimidating," she sniffs. "And your face comes attached to a body, but they're all pictures, and none of them are of you without clothes. ... Well, some of them are shirtless, but that's Pedro's fault, not mine."

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"I see Pedro has the right priorities," he says, brightly. "Regardless, my defences are magical rather than physical, so more practical armour would not buy me much."

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"They might buy you more hugs. I'm immune to spikes and fire! Other people aren't! Also they might buy you eyes that are not poked out by your shoulderpads when you raise your arms, which I hear is very useful for people."

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He tries and fails to raise his arms above ninety degrees to demonstrate that the shoulder pads make it impossible to raise them that much in the first place. "If I'm in armour I do not often find myself in situations where hugs happen, and when I am in such situations I am usually not in armour. I was just wearing this now because the Queen specifically requested the Commander of the Pact, not James Orland."

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"But you could conceivably need to raise your arms above ninety degrees in a combat situation. That could happen. What if you need to climb up a ladder? What then? Commander of the Pact is foiled by ladders."

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Now he points his arms forward, taking a step back not to hit her, and raises them. In that position they can go a bit above his head. "Works for you?"

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"No. Why do you even need ridiculously large spiked shoulder pads, anyway, are you a linebacker?"

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"...a what?"

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"A... person that professionally tackles people. In a sport. From my home. That I don't watch or really know anything about."

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He laughs. "The answer to your question is, again, merely aesthetics."

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Aestrix huffs, affronted.

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He laughs some more and sits back down.

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She sits, and she pouts.

"Fine, all right, continued storytime, go on." She waves her hand imperiously at him. Then she considers this, and adds, "... please."

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"As you will," he says, bowing his head a little. "I was talking about the Queen's Fête. There were some more disasters involving Scarlet after that, and all of Rox, Braham, Marjory, and Kasmeer helped me with them. Caithe occasionally showed up; she said Scarlet knew a secret of hers, but we don't know what it was.

"Taimi we met when we were fighting one of Scarlet's constructs, a watchwork marionette. She's young, but much smarter than the average asura, and she admired Scarlet's work. It was... strange. But she's been a true ally and we would not have defeated Scarlet without her help."

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"A good and proper adventuring party," says Aestrix, a little fondly.

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"They are! We are currently investigating some things that with context you have given me are probably Mordremoth and that is as far into my story I have gotten to."

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"All right, my turn then. So, yep, it's Mordremoth. The Zephyrites—for those playing along at home, the ones who snapped up Glint's residual energy and also one of her eggs—pick up a couple of sylvari once repairs have been completed. This... turns out to go poorly. Mordremoth forces the sylvari to sabotage the ship, and the entire thing comes crashing down."

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"—are they alright? Do they survive?"

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"I don't think they all make it out, but there are a lot of survivors, and they set up a camp. Their leader runs off with Glint's egg, because that was why Mordremoth brought the airship down in the first place. You follow after him, unfortunately just in time to watch him die, and he goes to hand the egg to you... Only for Caithe to show up like a ninja and steal it before you can get a hold of it, without any kind of explanation."

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"What? Why? Did she get controlled by Mordremoth, too?"

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"Not controlled, precisely, but influenced by. Caithe got a new Wyld Hunt. For those playing along at home, some sylvari get a, a mission upon their birth. Not by the Pale Tree, just as a part of who they are. All other sylvari have only gotten one. Caithe got to be a special snowflake and get a second; to protect the egg. With Mordremoth's voice messing with her perception of reality, she didn't know who to trust, so she only trusted the Wyld Hunt. And thus, she ran off with the egg."

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"—I see."

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"Yeah. Poor Caithe. Just so you know, that took like, three edits to get all of the information correct," sighs Aestrix. "Relaying information I have not personally experienced: a difficult thing."

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He blinks. "I have to say it is somewhat disconcerting to know that my experience was edited and I never noticed." He shakes his head and smiles.

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"Sorry. I've been trying not to edit very much here, but it just. Sometimes absolutely needs to happen so I'm not giving you false information. Or making typos."

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"Typos being...?"

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"Misspellings, unclear phrasings, dropped punctuation. That sort of thing."

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"Ah, that makes sense," he nods. "Anyway, ah, do you know why Caithe did not—decide to continue to trust the people she already trusted, before?"

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"Nnnot really, no. I'm not sure of the specifics of Mordremoth messing with her mind, but I think it had something to do with trying to make her paranoid? And possibly betray you."

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He sighs. "Thank—goodness—you are going to prevent this."

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"Yeah," she agrees. Then she raises her eyebrows, amused. "Did you almost thank a god, James. Is that what almost just happened?"

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"That is indeed what almost just happened. Force of habit, I'm afraid."

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Giggle. "It's okay, I don't particularly mind. I just absolutely might tease you for it."

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"I shall somehow endure."

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"Stay strong," she encourages, in a stage whisper.

"Okay, let's see." She dutifully reads the plot summary of the relevant part of Guild Wars 2. "Uh, I'm going to skip over a lot of the minutiae, because a lot of that doesn't really give us much, it's just. You run around, you save some people, standard hero fare. Marjory's sister dies, but that'll be averted, so, yay for that." Read, read, read. "You learn about the sylvari being Mordremoth's creations while chasing after Caithe, the Pale Tree informs you that you are destined to care for the egg she stole, which makes it super weird that she stole it, you catch up to her and she refuses to hand over the egg, blah blah, Mordy chooses that moment to attack, Caithe escapes in the chaos, standard plot contrivance to stretch out the climax, blah blah."

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"Standard plot contrivance."

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"The whole... 'confrontation with person is interrupted by another thing' is a standard plot contrivance. Not necessarily a bad one, I'm a big believer in good writing being more about how you use something instead of what you use, but. Standard plot contrivance."

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"It remains an—interesting lens to see my life through."

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Snort. "I bet. So, being practical, you and the rest of the Pact decide to try to take out Mordremoth before he fully wakes up." Wince. "Unfortunately, this doesn't go very well. Mordy drags down your airship armada with vines, and an impressive portion of the fleet is lost. Trahearne and the whole of Destiny's Edge disappears in the chaos. ... Rytlock not included, since he's still in the Mists. Poor guy."

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"Wait, still in the Mists? What was he doing there?"

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"Oh." Blink. "I suppose that hasn't happened yet, then. Whoops. For our discerning viewers, I'll give a bit of background." She clears her throat, thematically. "So once upon a time, there were three main kingdoms in this section of the world. Kryta, Ascalon, and Orr. They all failed to get along, and spent a lot of their time fighting among themselves. Since they were busy, the charr took the opportunity to invade. This is when the Flame Legion were in full power, and they used it accordingly. They blasted Ascalon to cinders in an event known as the Searing, then marched right on through the ashes to attack the other two nations. Kryta tossed them out by finding religion in the form of a group called the White Mantle, who were ultimately bad news, but were powerful enough to expel the charr. Orr, meanwhile, blew itself up rather than let themselves be taken, and took out quite a large portion of the charr force in doing so.

"So the charr certainly made an impression, but only really took Ascalon. With the attacks on Orr and Kryta, they'd overextended themselves and failed to cement their victory there. Ascalon had several insurrections, and a number of places held out. The capital of Ascalon held out for years against the charr, until eventually the defenses began to falter. The king of Ascalon then took a route rather like what Orr did. Rather than surrender, he blew his city up. Worse, every human soul in the city was bound to defend it as an unstoppable army of ghosts. And so Ascalon denied the charr their ultimate victory, and its capital never precisely fell."

She pauses. "Hundreds of years later, a charr named Rytlock thinks that's stupid. A place shouldn't be haunted for hundreds of years by murderous bound ghosts. It's not fair to the ghosts, it's not fair to the living to have old grudges they were never involved in to impress themselves upon them constantly, and frankly, he was not having it. So, he looks for a way to dispell it. He finds a magic sword that can potentially dispell the curse, and does a test run. This small test run works for the area it's in, but not entirely, because it was just a test run. Then the sword falls into the Mists, because this is Tyria and therefore something has to go horribly wrong, and Rytlock jumps in after it rather than lose the way to end the curse entirely."

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"...huh. He has been fairly secretive lately..."

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"Well, that's what he's been doing. And so he jumped into the Mists, because that's a smart thing to do. I mean, I get it, don't want the sword to be lost forever, but." She grimaces and shakes her head.

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"At least he finds his way out?" James says, dubiously.

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"You're getting better at predicting what will happen based on the narrative!" she says, pleased. "Yes, he does. With some new skills he picked up from the Mists, which is basically entirely to show off to the players the new available profession they can play as, called the revenant." Aestrix sighs dramatically. "Marketing makes puppets of us all."

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"He got new magic in the Mists? That's... peculiar."

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"A bit, yeah. It's magic of the Mists, too. There's this whole thing about invoking the power of dead famous people."

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"Huh. Doesn't sound much like Rytlock."

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"I am unfortunately not very familiar with how the experience changes him, sorry."

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"I'm sure it must have made sense for such a change to occur."

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"Yeah. And I don't think he does a personality 180 or anything, just." Shrug. "Not familiar with the circumstances."

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He nods. "So, the Pact airships are attacked by Mordremoth, half my friends disappear and are presumed dead or captured..."

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"Captured, they're not going to offscreen kill anyone that important. They'll make them die in front of you. Probably slowly, with time for them to have some dramatic last words and some sort of satisfying narrative conclusion." Pause. "It's actually pretty fucked up when I say it out loud like that. Anyway. You learn Mordy's collecting corpses and prisoners, and at a dramatically appropriate time, Rytlock appears from the Mists, blindfolded and with new fancy magic to help you in a key moment in battle. Uh, you and the rest of the Pact take up learning how to use gliders, which isn't very relevant but is pretty neat. Hm hm hm, standards heroic business, you make nice with the hylek—another sapient race, told you Tyria has a lot of them—and eventually find one of Mordy's prisoner camps." She reads the next section, and then winces. "Ah. Eir and Faolain—a bad person, don't worry about it guys she's not going to live very long—are in a cage together. Faolain agrees to help you, but fat lot of good her promises are, because when the standard big monster shows up and she trips, Eir goes to help her up, and Faolain stabs her for it. Eir stabs her back and Faolain dies, but then Eir gets gotten by the big monster. In front of her son." Pause. "Yep, I stand by my statement, that's really fucked up, what the hell."

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"—Eir is going to die?!"

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"Well not anymore she's not! ... Here. In this reality, anyway."

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"...right." He sighs. "That is, yes, as you said, 'really fucked up.'"

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"So fucked up! Eugh. I mean I have approximately no legs to stand on for calling other people's writing fucked up, but still."

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"Have you done... similar things?"

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"The villain betraying and mutual killing someone trying to help them? No. Killed people in front of their kids?" She pauses, frowning. "... I don't... think so? It's kind of hard to recall. I've written a lot of pretty fucked up stuff. I wrote the death of a mother's child once, but I was in my teenage angsty writing phase, I've mostly grown out of that kind of thing. Usually I'm more for really internal tragedies or really large scale ones."

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"I suppose it is just fiction to you."

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"Yeah. And my characters don't really mind if I put them through hell? As long as I don't, mm. Character assassinate them. The trials are a chance to show how they shine, not break them apart into tiny pieces."

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"Ah, yes, that meta-instance you mentioned earlier."

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"Yep! Though if the specific instances found out they had an author that had purposefully put them through horrible things, they might understandably not be happy. Aheh."

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"How does that work?"

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"Difference in perspective, mostly. 'I'm fictional, so the thing that matters is how people read me,' versus, 'I'm a person, so the thing that matters is how I feel and how I'm treated.'"

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"And knowing they're fictional does not help with the latter?"

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"For some characters it does, for some characters it doesn't, it depends on them. And people can come to the conclusion that it matters how people read them and it matters how they feel and are being treated. The categories aren't mutually exclusive, there's space for both."

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"Interesting."

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"Yeah. Anyway. Back to storytime?"

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"Sounds good!"

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"You know, I volunteer that, and then immediately get stuck trying to figure out how to summarize something I've never personally played," she admits, self-reproachfully. "You go chasing after Caithe again. You find her, and so does what's left of Faolain. Oh, uh, Caithe and Faolain were a thing before Faolain went evil, so people playing along at home, this is narratively satisfying instead of just arbitrary. You get the egg from Caithe, Caithe goes chasing after dead-and-raised Faolain to give her a proper final rest instead of the messed up fate Mordy gave her. Okay, I have to say, I have never confronted someone with the undead corpse of their evil ex-girlfriend, so, points to me I guess?"

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"What kinds of story do you like telling?"

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"There's a decidedly heroic bent to a lot of them, honestly? Where good is good and also good is not dumb. I mentioned my genres were 'miscellaneous heroics' and 'adorably fluffy romance,' didn't I? I can write for villains or morally grey situations, but honestly, I don't think it's my strong suit. Whereas I write some damn good heroes."

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"But heroes do need something to fight, do they not?"

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"Well, yeah, but I usually make my coauthor do that one. Or I pit the hero against circumstances without involving a villain. Like, uh." Pause. ".... Cards on the table, I am now also writing a thread with you and person-I-ship-you-with, and just for the record I was totally right you two are adorable together."

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—he cracks up. "How long has it passed on your end between your indecision about that and now?"

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"Foooour days? But I started writing it the day of because someone had an idea for how I could have her exist in Tyria without me having to figure out how to stuff her into Kryta."

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"Is that so? What was the idea?"

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"Have her be from the time period that I knew, then uh." Pause, wince. ".... Throoooow her into the Mists and have her pop out in front of you?" She tries on an apologetic smile? It doesn't fit, oh no, now she feels bad.

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He blinks slowly. "How long did she spend in the Mists?"

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"I mean time in the Mists is fuzzy, so it's hard to really say how long it was on her—" No that's enough dodging, answer the question. "—uh, 263 years."

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"Wow."

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"Yeah, sorry. She's fine. It's fine. Meta instance of her consented, and she got to be really aggressively awesome in the Mists, it was very impressive. Um. And it turned out that it was approximately the perfect setup for meeting a version of you? I'm sorry anyway, I felt very mean."

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"...perfect setup?"

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"She is really primed for having fast paced adventures right out of the gate, does not flinch at seeing weird shit at all anymore, and she's sort of..." she trails off. "There's a part in the narration where I write like, a paragraph of laying in just how unpleasant the Mists really are, and I end it with 'It's just her, alone in the Mists.' Her response the paragraph after was 'Well, all right then,' and coping, and, and—comfortably living with herself. According to Pedro, you thought the whole thing was super hot. And she carries that quality with her once she's out of the Mists."

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"...ah. I see."

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"So, yeah. Turns out it was the perfect setup and I tripped and faceplanted into it, because someone offered up the idea. Thank you, that someone, if you are in fact reading this thread."

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"And you say we're—ah—adorable together?"

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"Really, really adorable. You actually work better than we'd thought you would, which. Was honestly kind of impressive, we were expecting you two to get on like a house on fire."

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"So do we get on like the Beetlestone Manor on fire, then?" he asks archly.

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"Something like that. The two of you have some really great banter."

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"Banter."

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"Yep. I'm not quite sure how to describe it, except that it's playful and teasing and clearly for the fun of both self-assured participants. A lot of it leads into flirting, but not all of it. It's just... so cute. And frequently clever."

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"Do you have... examples?"

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"Yeah, I'm just lazy and was dodging looking them up, I'll stop doing that now if you really want them." She peers at the other thread. "... It's kind of hard to give good examples, because you both make clever jokes that you then play later to greater effect. Like, uh, she explains herself to someone with 'He found me in a cave.' Then when you encounter your friends and she thinks they might not accept this explanation, she leaves the explaining to you. You explain her with, 'I found her in a cave.' Which of course they all accept. There are some better ones, but they require even more context."

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"I found her in a cave? That... sounds like me, I'll admit."

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"You found her in a cave while fighting a monster! And you had your Flesh Golem tackle her immediately out of the way of a dangerous thing, because she went from 'watching invisibly in the Mists' to 'not that' without any warning."

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"That also sounds like me. I hope she didn't get hurt."

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"Aw. No, she was fine, she even helped out with the fight quite a bit."

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"What does she do?"

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"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."

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

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"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."

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

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"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."

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"What were necromancers like, back then?"

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"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."

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"—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."

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

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"A dozen. Wow."

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"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."

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

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"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."

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

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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."

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

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"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."

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"A cipher a whole civilisation used."

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

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

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"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."

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

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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."

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

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"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."

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

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

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

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"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."

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"Hmm, I guess."

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"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!"

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    "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."

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"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!"

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    "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.

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"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."

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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."

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"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."

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

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"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."

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    "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."

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"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?"

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    "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."

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"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?"

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    "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."

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"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."

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    "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.

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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."

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    "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."

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"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."

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

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"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."

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"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."

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

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

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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

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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?"

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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.

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"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."

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    "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."

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"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."

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    "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."

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Aestrix cracks up.

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"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?"

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

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    "—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."

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"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."

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    "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."

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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

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"Well, good, but would you rather I be overly cautious, or overly rash?" she wonders, amused.

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He tilts his head to one side, then the other. "Can I have a moment to think?"

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"That was... supposed to be rhetorical... but okay, sure."

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    "He was mostly joking," Pedro explains.

"I think the amount of caution you've shown so far is sufficient."

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"Sarcasm has trouble transmitting through text. Besides, my brain's weird and so are people, so we're lucky I understand anyone at all. Thank you, though, I'm going to keep on being my exact level of cautious."

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"There we go again with the jarring part of being a fictional character."

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"Oh, that would be frustrating, wouldn't it," she says, sitting up. "I'd be so annoyed if I were communicating with someone by speaking to them, but they were only getting text. It'd be such a loss in information I'm sending, and I'd be basing it around being heard and seen, not read. ... I don't know how to fix that, though. Sorry. Constraint of the medium."

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He shrugs. "It's okay. Maybe the narration could be more helpful?" he asks, eyeing Pedro.

    "Look, it's a pain to describe your every movement and tone of voice and sometimes I rely on the picture I'm using for you and there's some content loss, deal with it."

James laughs.

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"And usually if I have questions about tone and body language I'll just ask Pedro, whereas in this thread it's just. Charge on ahead, all the readers get to see me being a social doof, whee."

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"You're doing just fine, don't worry about it."

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"Thank you! I wasn't really, I can acknowledge that a thing is going on and not... worry about it or want to change my actions in any way."

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"So, the sylvari will still have the ability to reach Mordremoth's mind, now Trahearne doesn't have to die... what else needs to be changed?"

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"The Pact needs to not get pulled out of the sky and horribly beaten into a pulp. Sylvari are avoiding getting mind controlled already, uh. There are some things for later that need to get changed, but it's sounding like most of Mordy's sorted."

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    "Yeah, Mordy seems to be fine. But it turns out that, ah—hmm. Give me a minute while I confer with Aestrix in another dimension."

"...sure."

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There is a brief pause, then:

"Okay, all done. The thing we were just talking about requires some explanation. Pedro? Pedro help."

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    "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."

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"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."

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    "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."

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"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."

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"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?"

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"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?"

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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?"

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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."

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

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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

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    "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."

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"... 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!!"

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

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"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?"

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"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.

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

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    "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."

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"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."

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    "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."

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"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."

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    "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."

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"To clarify, the Sunspears are fighting Palawa Joko, undead lord that would like to rule all of Elona, but doesn't quite yet. Amnoon has been Switzerland for his conflict because it seems smarter than anything else. James persuades them to stop.

"Uh, Pedro, this might still be too much detail, I'm not sure how relevant Amnoon's tenuous political situation is until we get there, and I don't... super know how to respond. I vaguely want to get to the part where I'm awesome and save everyone. Or at least where I get to make pretty things, I have only gotten to make a library so far, and I didn't even have to do anything, it was just already present in my natural aesthetic."

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    "Right okay I'll elide over more stuff especially because James isn't even going to live this future if Rytlock never happens to run into Balthazar."

"Doesn't he remain a threat in the Mists, for anyone else to stumble upon and release?"

    "I dunno, maybe Aestrix could create a plot armour around his shackles and make sure he never gets released. Although that's kinda crappy to him. Uhh. I dunno. We'll decide this later. Anyway, so you explore around to figure out what Balthazar is up to, and Vlast—to our readers who might not remember, that's Glint's first kid, Aurene's big brother—Vlast has been fighting the Forged in his free time. So you go look for Vlast, run into Balthazar's Herald, kill her, she begs you to kill her god for her, and then when you find Balthazar he got Vlast trapped and is trying to drain him. You fight Balthazar, he kicks your ass, when he's about to kill you Vlast intervenes and dies instead and explodes Balthazar away. You find Vlast's memories in the form of crystals, and you go to Glint's lair to find a weapon that could kill Kralkatorrik, and destroy it before Balthazar can use it.

    "So you're all like, okay, what now? And Kasmeer suggests trying to go talk to the gods and figure out what the fuck. So you open the portal to the Mists in the Tomb of Primeval Kings, find Kormir, and she tells y'all the thing about how the gods left in order to prevent the destruction of Tyria that would be the inevitable result of an inevitable battle between them and the Elder Dragons, and Balthazar wanted to stay behind so the other gods bound him."

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"Summary: Balthazar attacks Glint's firstborn, because he's directly useful to killing Kralkatorrik in particular, and Balthazar wants his shit so he can kill and eat another elder dragon. In the ensuing struggle, Balthazar kills Vlast, but Vlast fails to give him power out of spite, Balthazar runs off.

"I'll probably have some kind of talk with Balthazar, if you can run him. I don't want to leave him in chains forever, and I don't want to give him oodles of power and lint him at the other gods and say 'go get em, tiger,' but killing him for what he might do seems... something." She shrugs. "I'll figure something out."

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    Nod. "Yeah, I can run Balthazar, sure. So, you destroy Glint's special weapon—Rytlock is against this, partly because it's the only thing you know for sure can kill Kralkie, partly because of sentimental reasons, Glint made that weapon for him and his friends. Then you talk to Kormir, blah blah blah, after she explains all the things she says that the means to kill Balthazar are within your grasp and that you should follow Vlast's trail. You know, in typical god fashion, no straight answers, just riddles. She could've said, 'Use the sword, it's super strong and will kill Balthazar,' she could have said, 'Go to Kesho, the hidden city—here's a map,' but noooooo, all she gives you is riddles. And, well, access to her library, I guess."

"We've fought worse things with less information."

    "Always the optimist."

"It's what I do."

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"Wow. Summary: James asks the gods for help killing their rogue god, and the gods fail to be helpful, but say some riddles and tell him he'll be fine. Kormir is like, the worst."

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    "You and your friends go south, looking for Vlast's trail. After much asking around you find the hidden city where he was raised by the Exalted, Kesho, and in there you see representations of visions of Glint's plan, which involved replacing each Elder Dragon with something that was less murderous and could keep the balance. She wanted herself and her children to take some of those places, but now it's only Aurene left. So you message Taimi so she can arrange for your friends to meet you somewhere with Captain Kiel's airship, but Balthazar beats you there, beats you up some more, and just as Aurene shows up to save you he kills you."

"...ouch. Shit."

    "You get better, and also you run into Palawa Joko in the Underworld. Turns out he and Balthazar went in there to collect souls, they had a deal that they'd take half each, but Balthazar betrayed Joko and locked him up there and took all the souls to himself, to add to his Forged army. You come back to life—"

"How?"

    "You kill an evil beast that was there because of all the everything going on. Anyway, you come back to life, and you have a plan: impersonating a high-ranking officer of Joko's and taking your Awakened army to war against Balthazar. It... works pretty well, you face Balthazar again in single combat, this time with Aurene's help and using Rytlock's sword. You kill Zarzar, Aurene and Kralkatorrik absorb his energy, and unbeknownst to you Palawa Joko gets free because Balthazar's magic is gone."

"...so now Kralkatorrik has a god's magic and is more powerful than ever, and Joko is free again. Joy."

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"And also personally pissed with you for stealing his army and abandoning him in the Underworld. Oh, right, summary, uh.

"Balthazar can use Glint's other kid, Aurene, to hurt Kralkatorrik. James is Aurene's guardian. So Balthazar ambushes, attacks, and essentially tortures James to draw Aurene out to help her daddy. She falls into this trap, and is captured. Then he kills James. James gets better, steals Palawa Joko's army through shenanigans, and flips the undead lord the bird in the process. He then goes and avenges his own death by killing Balthazar. Balthazar's power goes into Aurene and Kralkatorrik, and Joko is now pissed with James. End expansion."

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"After the expansion, Kralkatorrik invokes a Brandstorm even without having to be nearby—that's how powerful he got—and Brands all of Amnoon. You go there to rescue people, fight one of Kralkatorrik's lieutenants with Aurene's help—she's pretty big now, actually, that magic jumpstarted some growth—and after that she sends you and your friends a vision of a city, which the Order of Whispers liaison identifies as Fahranur, the First City, which is on the island of Istan. At some point that's not super clear where it fits in the storyline, you meet the corpse of Tahlkora, the last Sunspear Spearmarshal, whom Joko Awakened but didn't manage to control. She teaches you how to ride griffons, they're the coolest mount of the expansion.

"So, you go to Istan, find out the Sunspears have been rallying there and they have a new Spearmarshal but he was captured by Joko's forces and he also happens to be the only person alive who knows how to get to Fahranur. Adventuring happens, you save him, but Taimi talks to you via comm and she sounds extremely distressed and in danger. You go to Fahranur to rescue her, because she's there, apparently, and when you get there you find that Joko is in fact back from the Underworld and using asura technology to send his Awakened army to northern Tyria under the pretense that when you usurped his army you effectively declared war on behalf of the rest of Tyria."

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"Summary: Kralkatorrik is supercharged and Joko is a massive asshole. Uh, not sure any of this is relevant to fixing the world anymore, and it's sort of... it's hard to focus on a thread that's entirely exposition? Even for me. Thus why this thread has sat dormant for, uh." She checks, and winces. "Twooooo months?" Pause. "So we should maybe stop expositing and I should go adventure."

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"Wait, but do I eventually kill Joko?"

    "Technically yes; you assault his fortress and then go on a very ill-advised duo mission with Braham into it and kill him but he turns out to be too immortal for that and while he's monologuing at you Aurene appears and eats him."

"That's... good? Is she okay?"

    "Well, the last we see of her she's belching and seems to have a stomach ache but seems to be otherwise fine, if a bit more dragony than we're used to." He looks at Aestrix, then. "There, all done, we're caught up on all the content that's been released so far. Adventure time?"

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"Please," she agrees, nodding firmly. "And we'll need to figure out where to add skip links so readers can skip to the fun part. Ugh. Not being able to edit is terrible, appreciate our sacrifice, James, this is for your benefit."

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"I'm very appreciative! And I'm sorry for the exposition not being fun to read, it had not occurred to me that that would be the case, I might have asked for some adventuring in between if it had."

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"I think I hyperfocused on The One Singular Possible Solution, to the exclusion of all else. And Tyria's super fucking complicated and that makes it hard to do anything on the macro level to it without it seeming nonsensical to denizens and readers and this was a slow slide into illegibility and it's not clear where exactly things went wrong, and." She sighs heavily, and pinches the bridge of her nose. "It's a mess, and I don't know how to fix it, because it's hard to fix. It's not even clear where to add skip links because it's not clear where it started going wrong."

She considers her options.

"Fuck it, I'm shooting something. I am shooting Bubbles the evil deep sea dragon, and then maybe Joko, because fuck them both. I'll catch and contain the power so it won't cause a mess and wake up any sleeping dragons. I can hand it off to a replacement dragon when we're ready to do that. There, solved, now everything is very simple and some big monsters are gonna die." Aestrix snaps her fingers, and a rectangular portal appears. On the other side is what looks to be open ocean.

"Who wants to come watch me kill a dragon," she asks, standing.

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"I do!"

    "I think my purpose here has been used up," Pedro says.

"What if I like your company?"

    "James, do not flirt with me, I can give you some steamy scenes in my imagination that you'll remember later but the readers probably did not sign up for that."

"Good memories, I hope."

    "Wouldn't dream otherwise."

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Snort.

"Yeah, let's not have that be in this thread. Separate thread if you want to write it, please. Want a counterfactual hug before you technically don't go anywhere at all?"

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    "I absolutely do. And I absolutely will not write this thread, it's weird enough to have this self-insert, doing self-insert porn would be—" He pauses. "Kind of hot, actually, I'll think about it. Either way, you and I gon' fuck, friendo," Pedro tells James.

"I'll hold you to it."

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Aestrix snorts with laughter, then goes and hugs her friend! With words.

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    Pedro hugs her right back. "Bye, then! Have fun!" And now he's gone, not with a bang, but with a disconcerting sort of unfocused disappearance that makes it look like he was never there in the first place.

"—okay, then, let's take on a dragon!" James reaches inside a pocket to grab his breather.

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"Yep, let's!" she agrees, brightly. She looks at his breather. "You don't need that, I'm going for cool factor. Obviously we're walking on water, because literally why wouldn't we do that."

She traipses through the portal and onto the surface of the ocean demonstrably. The water holds her up, and the ocean waves calm to gentle ripples around her feet so as not to disturb her balance. She beams at James, smugly.

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...alright, then. Cool factor it is. He steps through the portal.

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The ocean is calm around their feet, but not precisely friendly. There is an ominous feeling of great power far below them, as if they stand over the lair of some great terror that could (and would) casually swallow them both whole without noticing their existence, like dust motes.

"So by the almighty power of narrative convenience," explains Aestrix brightly, "we are right over the dragon's lair. Normally I assume there would be some kind of undersea adventure to actually get to it properly, but I have a magic gun, so we're skipping that." She summons the aforementioned magic gun. It... is actually not all that visually impressive. Just a small, simple and sleek looking pistol with bits that glow a brilliant blue.

"You unfortunately also can't really help with the dragonslaying, because we don't know anything about Bubbles. So anything that we described would inevitably turn out to be wrong. Therefore, the dragon needs to die offscreen, so as not to contradict the way your world is going to turn out to work."

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"That makes sense. And I suppose I could make your job easier by not looking."

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"Nah, it's fine. Won't help or hurt either way." She shrugs. "I'm killing an Elder Dragon, not picking up groceries. There's going to be a spectacle regardless. It'd be a shame to not describe it at least a little."

She looks down at the water and raises her visually not-that-impressive gun, then clears her throat. "Oh Bubbles?" she singsongs cheerfully. "Your mystery shtick got old years ago and water levels are near universally reviled, so kindly die in ignobility."

With that, she shoots a single brilliant blue bolt of energy into the water below.

... Nothing immediately happens.

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Oh, now that he's aware of the narrative nature of his life, he's quite sure something pretty incredible is about to happen.

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That is a pretty safe bet, yep.

After a couple heartbeats, the depths begin begin to glow with a bright azure light, same brilliant shade as the bolt. The ocean begins churning and swirling, spinning into a shallow whirlpool beneath their feet that grows steadily deeper with each passing moment. Small motes of light rise from the sea-foam, glittering and faintly iridescent.

Then, there is a scream. It's not a sound that could come from a man or a beast, but something more primal. Deep, bubbling from the waters beneath them and the fabric of the world itself, raw with surprise and pain and most of all rage. To say it is loud would be an understatement. James might remember something like it, from the last time he witnessed a dragon's death. This time, there is no great undead magical construct falling from the sky; there is no ritual to rip the dragon away from its power source; there is no alliance of races and organizations working to do the impossible. There is just an ocean, a writer, and the death of great and terrible pillar of the world. For a second, it's like reality will fall with it. Like the hole in the sea will open to the Mists themselves, and Tyria will unravel like sundered and flimsy fabric.

The moment passes, and the scream fades off into a dull, pained hiss, then to silence. A tide of powerful magic swirls up and out of the whirlpool, shepherded by the little motes of light out of the water and spinning up into a large ball of magical energy. The air around such power twists as if from heat, and the trails of magic pulse and ripple in strange ways. The strands of power shifting through spectrums of color, twisting and forking and reforming, playing tricks on the eye that shift from moment to moment. It's a little uncomfortable to look directly at. Like brilliant and pulsing rainbow soup, if one were also on acid at the time of viewing.

"Right, so, once I've caught this all, we should go find Vlast and ask if he'd like it as a snack. This was not a stealth kill, to be clear. This spot is going to be swarming with confused asuran scientists and bewildered members of the Pact complaining about kill stealing, in, uh, however long it takes for them to get here."

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He applauds quietly. "What explanation will they find?"

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"That Bubbles died and the burst of power from his death got very quickly absorbed into a suitable vessel. That vessel presumably being another dragon that was present for the killing, but actually it's going into a bubble of plot convenience that we then feed to a dragon later." The multicolored well of power is enclosed in a shiny iridescent bubble accordingly. The bubble then begins shrinking so it can be a bit more easily carried. "That will probably be Vlast, but if he doesn't want the job I'll figure something else out."

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James grins. "'Bubble of plot convenience'," he repeats. "I like it."

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"Thanks!" she says brightly, petting the little bubble. "Iiiiii should probably hide this so Vlast doesn't immediately zero in on it and very sensibly try to eat it immediately because I'm a stranger with an Elder Dragon's power and that is kind of worthy of jumping to some hand-biting conclusions." The bubble shrinks until it can fit inside the tiny, tiny pockets that girl jeans are burdened with, and then she casually pockets it.

"So do you want to come with and tag along for talking to Vlast, or run off to immediately adventure while I go talk to a dragon? Either's fine, I get if you're getting bored just following me around and want to go be The Commander at things. I will definitely find you meaningful things to do, to be clear, you wouldn't just be getting busy work."

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"I'm finding this pretty incredible, but you can get rid of me if you want."

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She snorts. "Nah, just checking that you were having fun. Being bored is the worst. Also, it would have been convenient if you wanted to disappear for a bit and come back later so the time difference between us wouldn't be so instant and jarring. Like, for example, I gotta do this so I don't feel like I'm lying to the world about my looks." She fluffs her hair, and it goes from light brown to auburn. "There, all better."

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"How long has it been, for you?"

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"Oh, Hell, now I have to count. Months. Uh, since the start of the thread, liiiiiike... oh, wow, like long enough to have a literal kid. Nine months. That's not weird at all. And then there was a span of like, four months where Pedro and I played the worst game of catch with the depression ball, so."

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"...the depression ball?"

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"Uh, you know." She mimes throwing a ball. "You have depression! And now I have depression! And now your anti-depressants are messing up! And now mine are! Wheee this is the worst game!"

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"Depression here means something other than feeling sad," James clarifies.

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"Yeah, medical condition. A casual gloss is being bored all the time but having no will or energy to do anything."

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"Wow. That sounds..."

Like he would rather die, he doesn't say but his narrator helpfully provides.

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"Can't say I recommend it to literally anyone! Anyway. Onwards to Vlast? I'm antsy to finish fixing the world so you can go on fantastic multiversal adventures."

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"Onwards indeed."

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Aestrix helpfully makes another portal! This one goes out to an ocean of sand, instead of water. She bounces through, blinking at the bright sunlight.

"Okay, so I don't actually have any idea how to find Vlast, but I am confident in the power of narrative convenience."

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"I'm sure narrative convenience will bend to your will," James says wryly, and just as he does there's a roar in the distance.

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"Thank you, Pedro!" she says to the sky. "Okay, uh." She pauses as she realizes she hasn't actually planned out what she's going to say to Vlast. Uh. Okay, it'll be fine, probably. Right? Right. Ignore the growing nervousness.

Is Vlast, uh, looking particularly hostile? She'll be fine regardless, but it kind of puts a wrinkle in her attempt to sell him on being Dragon King of the Underworld if his opener is trying to find out if she's edible. Um. It'll be fine. Really. Trust in the narrative convenience.

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James side eyes Aestrix. "It's just a dragon."

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"You are misunderstanding the reasoning for my sudden onset of nerves, James. A dragon is as physically threatening to me as anything else here, which is to say, it isn't. Psychologically, on the other hand, aaaaaa I'm about to have to explain something really complicated to someone I don't know super well, aaaaaaaaa social anxiety." She coughs. "I'll deal, it just feels like it'd be disingenuous to not display my actual emotions."

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"—ah. How much are you planning on telling him?"

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"Oh, everything," she says, cheerfully. "Pedro says he'll be cool with being fictional, so. Besides, I'm not going to ask him to please be Dragon King of the Underworld without explaining what's going on, that'd just be rude."

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"Seems sensible."

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And presently a dragon the size of a horse, brown-black leathery skin covered with green crystals here and there, quickly approaches them. It roars once more, then dives towards them and lands a few feet in front of them, raising quite a lot of dust as it does so. It stands on its hind legs, extending its wings to the sides, their span twice as large as he is, and looks straight at Aestrix.

"Who are you," it growls, a deep raspy voice mixing with since rather inhuman sounds produced by the rocks inside its body, "and what is this power I sense in you?"

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Squeak.

"Aestrix, hi," she says, powering through her social anxiety, "and it's this thing," she brings out the little bubble, "that I got from ganking an Elder Dragon, do you maybe want to eat it, become all powerful, and keep the world from breaking apart?" Pause. "That was an actual question, if you decide not to I'll find someone else, this is not a 'do this or the world ends' sort of thing."

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"Explain."

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"Yessir." She clears her throat. "Okay so, uh." She considers how best to word this. "From my perspective, you're fictional? And I have done the equivalent of running off with someone else's manuscript, and now I'm scribbling self indulgent fanfiction in the empty pages after everything that's already been written. I had nothing to do with the way your world was built and nothing to do with any strife that you or anyone else in this world has experienced. So I would like to fix this big insane world as quickly as possible, save all the people in it, kill and replace the Elder Dragons, probably resurrect Glint and Snaff and prevent general world-suck and - and stuff. Details pending but mission straightforward."

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"Prove it," he says immediately.

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"Okay." She summons two chairs, one for herself, and one for James, and she sits down in hers. "So your name is Vlast, you're Glint's son, the bards named you 'Gleam' without asking you of your opinion of the matter because the bards are jerks. You were raised by exalted, who mostly didn't know how to treat you as a person instead of a duty to Glint and the future of the world. They summarily didn't really do a great job, and thought that keeping a dragon locked in a tiny city shaped cage would be a good idea. For some reason. You hate this, and also them, but you overall agree with the premise, even if you are personally so sick of the duty that's bound you since you hatched that you'd much rather just go fly off into the desert to not be bothered by anyone, ever. But you don't. Because you refuse to turn away from responsibilities that large and important." Pause. "Honestly you really got shafted, for your entire life, it really sucks, I'm sorry man, I want to fix it. Is there anything you'd like me to do to prove my author-hood?"

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(He takes the seat.)

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Vlast takes a few seconds to think about it. "Give me that magic," he eventually settles on.

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"Sure thing, catch!" She tosses the little bubble of power at him, at an angle where it could easily be snatched out of the air and eaten.

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He eats it.

He pauses.

He roars, then jumps into the air and flies towards the sun.

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Aestrix beams and folds her hands in her lap expectantly.

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It takes a few minutes, which Aestrix herself will never experience, what with the fourth wall separating her from everything happening here. Still, Vlast's still visible form in the sky starts growing. There's a light show accompanying it but with the glare of the desert sun most of it is lost to witnesses. The really noticeable changes are the dragon steadily getting larger than a building and then larger still while his body assimilates all the power.

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Yep, on this side of the fourth wall it's kinda hard to ooo and aaah over the spectacle of an Elder Dragon's ascension properly, but she can respect the passage of time and conjure a cup of tea for herself, and a glass of strange and bubbling liquid, complete with a straw and a little umbrella, for James. She sips her tea and waits.

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James accepts and sips from the straw—then pauses and inspects the drink thoughtfully.

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It's carbonated, sugary, and loaded with the artificial otherworldly (for James) flavor of the confection known as 'soda.'

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Well. Why not. He sips and watches and waits. This is a significantly different experience from his side of the fourth wall.

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Vlast's growth accelerates, and he soon blots out the sun. He roars again, and this time the sound is loud enough to be felt, rather than heard, all the way down where they are.

He begins his descent, and it soon becomes clear just how much he's grown over these minutes. His head alone is three times larger than his entire body was before. He's clearly the same dragon, but the crystal patterns are much more present and intricate, spanning jungles of rocky pillars along his back—and he's large enough one could in fact walk in this jungle. He lowers closer to the ground slowly, trying not to buffet Aestrix and James away with the ponderous flaps of his wings, which makes for a not so graceful descent, and takes care.

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It's so nice for there to be a dragon this powerful in Tyria that isn't an asshole.

She stands, applauding, and then makes a little bow to the brand new Elder Dragon and foundation of the world's stability. It only seems polite. The wind buffets her and James in a suitably dramatic fashion, but Conveniently, they are not blown away.

"Hey Kralky's going to make a play for you, but fuck him, Imma pause time so we can talk in peace without that prick showing up," she calls, and the world goes still and slightly grey around them. "Also this keeps James from being late without time shenanigans, which is a nice plus."

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The not-that-old Elder Dragon finishes landing, and turns his head so he can use his left eye to look directly at them. He opens his mouth slightly to speak, but clearly the words are not being formed by anything as mundane as the interaction between air, tongue, teeth, and lips.

"This is strange. I can feel my grandfather. He started coming this way as I did, but now... he is still." He blinks once, slowly, and makes a low growly noise. "I believe you, 'author'. What do you desire of me?"

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"Uh, for you to not be terrible and seek only to gorge yourself on the magic and the lives of those that live on this world. So, good job, you're already doing it? I have a longer list of desires for world-fixing, and you can help with them if you'd like, but let me be crystal clear here: if you want to fly off on your own, right now, and do whatever you want for the rest of your life, you absolutely can. Your contribution of eating the power of that other dragon will be valuable and valued, and it is key to the world's continued stability. Regardless of anything else, you absolutely get to help with killing your grandfather and resurrecting your mom and being at your baby sister's hatching and anything else personally relevant to your interests if you want to. I am highly uncomfortable with anything close to trying to twist anybody's arm to make them do things they don't want to do, so, uh. I'm not. Above anything else the only thing I really desire of you is for you to be okay. Okay?"

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He nods, once. "Zhaitan is dead. If we kill my grandfather, we will be one step away from the end of Tyria. My mother had plans—but if you can bring her back—"

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"Yep! Vague plan is for us to go dramatically kill Kralky at some point, and resurrect your mom with that, since he uh, ate her magic. It makes logical sense that she could be brought back from his death with some shenanigans and retrieving her ghost from the Mists and whatnot. Narratively, I mean. I can make pretzels out of rules all I want, but I kind of don't want to ignore causality here. People not noticing that things don't make logical sense implies I did something to their minds to make them not notice, and that is not the 'everybody lives' ending I'm shooting for here. Which is just unacceptable."

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"Hm. And then? Will she replace my grandfather?"

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"If she wants to, which I expect she will, but I'd still like to check."

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He huffs instead of nodding—a nod from this height might crush the ground and he wouldn't want that. "And me? Am I to replace the Deep Sea Dragon?"

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"If you want. But because Bubbles has never been properly fleshed out in-fiction, there's not really much for you to replace besides the Elder Dragon World Foundation slot? I could make stuff up, but whatever is made up would inevitably be incongruent with the original fiction, whenever the original fiction gets to fleshing Bubbles out. So you are actually just free to do whatever you want. My plan was to ask you if you wanted to go eat Dhuum and become Dragon God-King of the Underworld, actually. But I'm pretty open to not going according to plan, if the plan isn't loved by the people the plan is for."

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Vlast frowns. It's quite a sight, a frown on a face that big. "Dhuum? The old human god of death, exiled and sealed many hundreds of years ago. He walks free?"

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"Trust me, I wasn't thrilled by the news either."

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"Ish? He's eating his way out of his prison now that Grenth's left and stopped keeping him in check. He needs to be eaten by somebody. Might as well be you, if you'd be okay with being Dragon God-King of the Underworld. Or whatever. I'm not married to the title, it just succinctly gets across the thing I mean."

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"What would I do, in his place?" He sounds a bit guarded about it. Yet another responsibility sounds not-so-great.

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"Hunt down and eat the demons that break in and try to eat souls. Take credit for why resurrection works again without actually personally having to do anything in particular, because narrative convenience. Maybe also eat Palawa Joko, since he also deserves it? Oh, hey, there's a good order of operations for explanations if you want to go that route - eat Joko first to steal his power and break into the Underworld, eat Dhuum, then break back into reality with your newfound power to eat Bubbles, even though... that was not the order, but whatever, it's fine." She shrugs. "Anyway. Fancy lair? Lots of things to watch? The ability to not talk to people, because you'd be the dragon of death and ooooo, scary, they better not mess with you if they know what's good for them? It's not so much a huge responsibility as an explanation to Tyria's denizens for why their world is fixed, and the best way I could think of to get you, uh, out. Of Tyria. With its abusive grandfathers and its twisting prophecies and how it's pretty much constantly in peril, it seems like you'd have reason to want to go fuck off to fly around in the Mists eating demons."

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"That would be acceptable," he grunts, blinking slowly to mark his assent.

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"Okay! ... And to be clear, that's watch in a 'people watch' sense, not watch in a 'babysitting, watch the kids and clean their nappies' sense. I basically just want to give you the freedom to fly around in a huge infinite landscape, and terrorize and eat horrible things that deserve it like the awesome dragon that you are. So if you're cool with that we can go have you eat Joko so you can plausibly break into the Underworld to eat Dhuum, and therefore have had the power to plausibly win against Bubbles."

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Vlast huffs and blinks again.

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"All right then. Now how to make that order of operations actually happen. Uh. Do you mind if we do some minor time travel? Pedro can I do time travel, I'm so sorry I swear I'll sort this headache out without much trouble?"

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"...Pedro?"

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"Co-author. He's helping me rewrite reality, so neither of us have to figure out everything ourselves."

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Vlast's eye points to James.

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"Not me," James says, shaking his head. "He's the one writing me, though. I'm not sure which of them is writing you."

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"Pedro's writing Vlast. It's easier to have a plausible dialogue with another person than with yourself. James is the protagonist of the fiction you're from, tagging along because it amuses him and because I've promised him fantastic multiversal adventures after I finish saving the world."

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Another huff.

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She hums thoughtfully. "Okay, sorting out this minor mess of logistics... Do you mind if you become a Smol Vlast for a bit while we nip over into the recent past so you can visibly eat Joko as your smol self?"

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Huff. "That is... acceptable."

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"All right!" Vlast begins gently shrinking to his original size. "... Actually, do you want me to just give you size shifting powers, that seems like it'd be super convenient for you, and also you could stop being the subject of someone else changing your body, which sounds uncomfortable."

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Slow, assenting blink.

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She wiggles her fingers at him meaningfully, and he stops gently shrinking. "There, control passed to you. You can now be any size between your natural size and the size you hatched as, at will. I can throw in more shapeshifting but I honestly don't see why you'd literally ever want to shapeshift into not-a-dragon. I can if you want it, just." Pause. "You're a dragon," she finishes, as if that answers itself.

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He is, indeed, a dragon.

Now he is a more realistically-sized dragon, for the timeline.

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"Great! Then let's go break into his palace so Vlast can eat him."

The landscape around them shifts, and then they are hidden unceremoniously in a ditch, in a desolate wasteland that smells strongly of sulfur.

"So I was thinking we actually, you know. Break things, kill Awakened, generally cause mayhem together, the usual. Do you two want to rampage throughout Joko's stronghold and then kill him?" She has a massive, slightly manic grin that hints that she maybe knows the answer to this question.

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"He has many defences," Vlast objects.

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"And? You have the author on your side, a massive element of surprise, just got transported behind many of his defenses, and even though you don't look it right now, you're an Elder Dragon. Have you never wanted to rampage around a large and intimidating fortress causing mayhem and destruction to all who are stupid enough to oppose you?"

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...well, when she puts it like that.

He turns towards the Awakened and does the dragon-equivalent of raising his heckles—

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- and time obligingly unpauses.

"Have fun!" she chirps, grinning.

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—and he roars, a sound loud enough to cause shockwaves.

Then the rampage is on. He extends his wings and uses them to prop a jump onto the nearest Awakened guard, who can't even so much as squeak before the dragon's torn its putrid head from its body.

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James is somewhat less showy, only becoming a spectre of green death holding a shadowy scythe and swirling his way through the masses of enemies, cutting them to shreds.

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Aestrix is mildly tempted to join on principle, but she doesn't particularly have anything to gain by indulging in a power fantasy here, and there's no way to actually convey in-game skills and abilities accurately. Plus, apparently James wants to see how far he and Vlast can get on their own, which is fair enough.

"Watch out for the annoying dog things, they disappear, then ambush and stunlock you for lots of damage. Avoid that with a dodge or shield thing or something!" she calls, mostly to the spectre of green death. "I'll come help if you're in trouble."

And then she conveniently disappears when no one's looking at her.

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Spectre of green death doesn't acknowledge but does hear. He figures his narration will be sufficient to inform Aestrix.

He dodges an annoying dog thing and pierces it with his shadowy blade, then drops out of reaper mode to swing a scepter and a dagger towards a group of clumped Awakened, causing huge skeletal hands to emerge from the ground and crush them.

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Vlast's strategy is simple but effective: be a horse-sized dragon who pounces on things and then eats them. It doesn't hurt that the crystals covering his body are extremely durable and regrow after broken. He's very hard to hit and even harder to actually injure.

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They seem to have been transported past the Bone Palace's outer defensive wall, and have certainly caught the defenders off guard. In front of them, the palace's main gates lie open. There is an awkward scramble of disorganized enemies trying to recover and buy time for some kind of proper defense to be raised. Several Awakened throw themselves at James and Vlast, either from stupidity or as a sacrifice to slow them down. The smarter ones try to escape in order to sound some kind of alarm; in particular, one archer gives up trying to get past Vlast's crystalline defenses and starts trying to coat arrows with tar to ignite and shoot into the air.

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Crystal isn't flammable. And you know one of the cool things dragon magic gave Vlast?

Branding.

He roars purple light at Awakened, and they grow crystals and immediately turn around to attack their fellows. Dragon trumps undead.

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This makes an excellent distraction. The branded Awakened summarily swap sides and begin shooting their once-allies.

More defenders are on their way! Including another teleporting dog thing, and a large quadrupedal abomination with a whip-like tail.

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Damn. Spooky.

...he's gonna go stab it.

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It is stabbed! This works pretty well for the first couple of stabbings, and then the abomination growls and summons a magical barrier around itself and it is maybe a bad idea to keep on stabbing it, but he can certainly try it if he'd like.

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Oh. Those. Okay he can deal with those. His flesh golem can go tackle it and he can pull on it using spectral hands from his staff.

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Yeah, that turns out to be a bad idea. Aestrix feels a bit bad about not warning about this beforehand, but: this is a reflective shield, not a defensive shield. Does he like feeling the results of his own magic? Because that is what he's going to experience. His golem too, though that just experiences the unpleasant kinetic reversal of getting its tackle reflected right back at it.

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...well what happens is a very dizzying effect where James is pulled towards himself and ends up falling onto his arse.

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How about Vlast's magic-cancelling roar?

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That one works much better. The reflective shield breaks apart into pieces and the abomination stumbles in confusion.

Oh, did James fall on his arse? Well, this dog thing would like ever so much to help him with that. By pouncing upon him to maim him. Hooray!

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Yeah how about no. James has a flesh golem tackling the dog thing for its trouble.

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The dog thing is so disappointed. And so tackled.

Abomination thing thinks it can take a dragon, for some reason. It is not, actually, bigger than Vlast, but it's about the closest thing that the Awakened have got. So far.

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No.

Omnomnom.

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Abomination thing immediately regrets this decision!

In other news, looks like the Awakened forces are onto something happening here. The door to Joko's Bone Palace begins to slowly shut. Fortunately for Vlast and James, it was built for sturdiness against prolonged siege, not for being the sort of thing that can quickly slam shut. There are a few Awakened between them and the door.

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Vlast growls lightly and turns to look at James—

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—who gets it immediately and leaps over onto the dragon's back.

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And now the dragon is bounding towards the doors.