"Quite. For a number of reasons. Eugh, stuck in the Mists mid-puberty." She shudders. "Horrors upon horrors."

"You probably wouldn't have aged, would you."

"Nope. I would be in the exact same state I was when I arrived. I am very glad I was not mid-puberty when I fell into the Mists."

He laughs. "I think our meeting might have gone differently if you had been."

Snort. "I bet. Luckily for us both, I fell in at twenty-five, not fifteen."

He nods. "I'm twenty-six."

"Aw. Look at us, comparable in life stages and terribly cute together."

He laughs. "Meant to be, really."

Eventually they reach dry land again, and he disengages from the leyline and slows down. There is another volcano up ahead, to the southeast, and a bigger one to the north. They're all active enough that lava can be seen flowing in various crevices and caves, down into whatever underground tunnels the lava that hasn't pooled in the ocean floor and solidified goes. Up ahead, sheltered under a stone ledge, there's one of those tents, with a dismantled golem smoking visibly next to it, and an asura furiously typing into some sort of flat stone surface in her hand.

Vetareh's pretty okay with letting James do the talking, here. He's good at it, and also more recognizable. She trails after him and looks pretty.

He walks over to the asura. "Excuse me?"

    "What do you want? I'm quite busy watching my work get repeatedly dismantled by monsters, so if you don't mind—"

"Easy there. Taimi sent me. I'm here to help you retrieve those Destroyer samples."

    "At last support! I located a sizable Destroyer nest, but the beasts ambushed me. Made a mess of my comms equipment. Help me deal with the Destroyers and fix the equipment, and I'll get any samples you retrieve back to Taimi."

"Consider it done."

    "Let's move quickly. The sooner we're done, the sooner we can all retreat to... a less life-threatening environment."

"Destroyers first, so we have space for fixing the equipment?"

    "Yes, yes, but it should be fairly easy, it's those golems and recorders over there, see?" She points at various dismantled golems and poles with cubes amidst the Destroyers, a few minutes' walk away. There are streams of lava everywhere, and the creatures seem to like swarming around them.

"Fairly easy for a bookah?" James asks, wryly.

    "Of course, an asura progeny¹ could do it in their sleep."

¹ Progeny: term used to refer to younger asura and has different cultural connotations than the standard English meaning. In particular, an asura progeny typically has never been part of a krewe² and has not finished their first degree in the university. It is not an insulting term. Except in this case it is slightly insulting because it is saying that the average human is much less smart and capable than the average asura child.
² Krewe: the basic unit of organisation in asura society, consists of a (typically but not always) temporary group of (usually) asura working on a single project or meta-project over an extended span of time.

"We will aspire to live up to an asuran progeny's standards," says Vetareh, dryly.

Right then, off to go kill destroyers. Before they do the actual attract-the-attention-of-for-killing, though: how do the destroyers feel, magically?

Like fire fire fire...

...and some plant and mind and death, here and there. There's no Destroyer that has both death and plant and mind, it's either just death, or just plant and mind. Plus the fire.

"... That's interesting. Okay, uh." She starts pointing out which destroyers feel like what to James. "And so far there have been no destroyers that feel like death and plant and mind. Just death and fire, and plant, mind, and fire."

"Huh. Maybe it takes more energy to combine more dragon aspects?" James wonders while he grabs the rest of his armour—the mask, wristguards, and shoulderguards.

"Maybe? I hesitate to hypothesize, I bet Taimi will be better equipped to figure out this mystery."

"Probably. We'll tell her when we see her again." And fully attired, he unsheathes his scepter and dagger and summons a Flesh Golem from wherever they come from.

"Yeah." She looks thoughtfully at the destroyers. "After you, since I'm squishy and delicate. Any specific set of destroyers you'd like me to focus on ruining the day of?"

"The small ones, they self-destruct and it's nasty."

The Flesh Golem starts running forward and so does James, and he starts casting something that makes several giant bone hands emerge from the ground and grab some Destroyers, pulling them and squishing them against the hard stone.

She follows after him. The little ones self destruct, hm? It's a pity she hadn't been watching for that kind of thing in the simulation, she could have seen by what mechanism they self destructed and learned how to intercept it. Instead, she was a battering ram. Not a pointless pursuit, clearly, but still. Oh well, something to learn for next time.

Stolen speed on the largest group available, backfire on the most prolific looking caster, and the wastrels' hexes on one of the little ones, while she tries to figure out how their self destruct works. Is it a spell that she can interrupt?

The self-destruct turns out to be a spell, so she can definitely interrupt that! And the most prolific-looking caster is this flying Destroyer thing that's summoning a meteor shower, which James is deftly maneuvering around while he siphons life from his targets.

Since James can dodge the meteor shower, and destroyers don't seem to be very smart, she'll just let that flying destroyer cast itself to death under backfire, and save her interrupts for the little explodey ones.

She likes working with James, for more reasons than just the fact that she's sleeping with him. He's a caster that directly benefits from her group hex, creates meat shield minions that get between her and the monsters, draws groups together so she can hex large groups at once, and he is personally scary enough that most things are really quite distracted by the shadow of death among them. This is about the perfect partner she could have, really. She's free to work her sneaky mayhem and quietly support him and protect him from things that would actually seriously hurt him. Like the little explodey destroyers.

They'll have gotten rid of this group in short order, then. He lifts his mask to beam at Vetareh before turning to look at a dismantled golem nearby.

"Now let's see if I'm at least as smart as an asura progeny."

She beams back at him, resisting the urge to giggle and hug him.

"You can do it, I believe in you. While you're doing that, I'm going to go collect destroyer samples for Taimi before their magic starts to dissipate too much to lose the useful data. Call me if you need help." She winks at him.