He laughs and has to fully remove his mask and spiky gloves to hug her.

She giggles, hugging him back.

"I'm a little confused as to why that was worthy of a hug but I'm not complaining! You even took off your spikes for it, aw."

"It's because you're a delight," he says, without missing a beat.

"Awww," she repeats, squeezing him a little in the hug. "Well, okay, carry on."

Spikes are back on and they can go find some more jade constructs.

They can!

(.... But first she gets telling samples of the previous jade construct, because she's a professional.)

"These are possibly the freshest samples you can find of mursaat magic," James tells her as they sneak around towards their next target. "I believe they have not been active in centuries."

"Precisely! And won't that be useful for our charming new mursaat who claims to be a friend?"

"Do we want to be useful to him?"

"I meant more in the way of being useful to us in either countering him or figuring out if he's a fraud more than being useful to him, love. I doubt he'd find either of those very useful at all."

"Oh, well, that's a more useful use!"

"Precisely!"

All samples acquired, it's time to go activate some more agony jade construct things. Maybe her new spell set will be better at stopping their shit.

How fortunate for them there's another agony jade construct thing right over there!

(This is not fortune. This is just the natural result of their poor, poor life choices.)

Look, if they weren't here to kill it, then it'd just sit here waiting until some poor unaware fool inevitably stumbled across it later. These are proactive choices, not poor ones.

While she understands this intellectually, in her gut she's still not very happy that her best plan for shutting down the jade construct's agony thing is 'let it do it once.' Admittedly, this feels like something of a set of poor, poor life choices. Better than if she weren't here, though. She waits for her moment to strike to prevent this rude magical construct from getting to use its agony thing more than just the once. In the meantime, she is going to do her best to kill it dead.

James is getting better at reading the construct's tells so he manages to dodge most of the agony.

But not all of it.

Her poor boyfriend.

She casts her spell right before it looks like James will be hit, and gets back to trying to kill this stupid, boyfriend-hurting construct. It needs to die very, very badly.

Her spell plus the fact that James's skill increases in dealing with these means that he's not hit any more times before they manage to shut that one down for good.

Onwards?

Onwards!

(She grumpily kicks the construct as she goes through the standard post fight sample collection and looting. Out of principle.)

Delightful.

A couple of encounters later finds them the first piece of armour: a dented helmet!

She inspects the helmet critically, then nods.

"This will hold an illusion well enough to cover the dent, though maybe not enough to last through proper combat." This is mostly because she's not a particularly good illusionist, not any lack of material or craftsmanship in the helmet itself, but she doesn't need to belabor her own shortcomings as a mesmer to make her point. "I think this'll work. Provided we find more, of course."

"And ideally it would see no combat at all, if it succeeds at its purpose," he says, nodding. "I wonder how these came to even be here. And how the dwarves' device did, too."

"I imagine the dwarves put it here on purpose, since I expect the mursaat were smart enough to build their fortress on a confluence of magical ley-lines that they could weave extra defensive power from. If the dwarves didn't place the devices carefully, there would likely be twice as many for us to run around and activate, if they'd even work at all. How they pulled off putting their own magical device in an abandoned fortress with functional defenses is harder, but they also would have had more time than we do to figure out clever ways around the system. This is a quick and dirty method of sneaking past defenses, darling." She smiles fondly at him.

"... As to the stray armor pieces, I've no idea. Perhaps the last two mursaat in the fortress desperately wanted to get each other's clothes off, and couldn't wait until they were in private to start."

That makes him pause. "Well this was the first time it has ever occurred to me to try to imagine what a mursaat would look like unclothed."

She laughs. "I apologize for inflicting that mental image upon you?"

"Never apologise for such gifts," he says, an obvious smirk in his voice.