"Oh? Should I take notes for illusions later? Bird feet and feathery wings, visual gifts to James Orland?"

James laughs and resumes their trek. "Illusions are a gift that keeps on giving."

She follows, of course.

"You're welcome!" she says cheerily, noting that also he didn't say no.

He did not, no.

Although not an uneventful search, it becomes rather dull—mursaat ruins, mursaat constructs, lava, the occasional lava crab, nothing new.

She does eventually stop kicking the constructs once they're good and dead, and perfects the art of killing them as quickly as possible and preventing them from using their agony thing more than just the once, but that's about all of narrative interest.

Is there an almost full suit of mursaat armor that they can cobble together?

There are enough mismatched parts that they can eventually do that. James can even replace the original helmet with a less-dented one.

Oh, good. ... They probably don't have the time to scrape together two sets of mismatched armor, do they. Great. They'd better have a conversation about this, then.

"So I'm guessing you would like very much to be the only one to put on the cobbled together armor for this quick and dirty infiltration plan instead of seeing if there are somehow, miraculously, enough stray pieces of armor for two disguises," she says. It doesn't sound very much like a question, despite the phrasing.

"I think I'm hardier than you, if anything does go wrong."

"I think I'm also less likely to trip any notable defenses and will have an easier time locating the device," she replies, without any real heat. "... But yes, agreed. You'd recover from any mistakes far better than I." She huffs, annoyed. "Fine, fine, but if you die I swear I will figure out how to get resurrections working so I can kill you again. Clear?"

"Crystal clear, princess."

"Good. Now please take your spikes off so we can get you into these without making more holes for me to hide. Best to save the illusions until after everything is on you and I can see where the major flaws are."

So he strips to his underwear and then dons the armour on.

She disguises the dents and scorch marks and other imperfections with magic, then adds finishing touches like the wings and skin tone. She can't make it so that he looks like he's floating instead of walking, but hopefully the ancient and faded defenses aren't actually smart enough to understand this as a flaw.

"Okay. That's as good as I can make it from memory without spending too much time fussing over if it'll hold in combat," she says, after her third inspection of her work. "It will probably not hold in combat. I don't want to do too much and cover up too much of the mursaat magic in the armor with mesmer magic. The riskiest places are at gates and checkpoints, if you're not sure if you can get past one, don't try it, come back and I can help figure out how you can trick it. It's easier to take the time to sneak past it correctly than to fight the whole damn fortress with just two people if you wake it up." It occurs to her that he probably knows all of this already, and that she's fretting.

He nods along anyway, and after removing the helmet one last time to give her a kiss he goes off and up the steps to the fortress.

She kisses him gently, gives him what will certainly not be a final squeeze, and immediately starts pretending that she isn't nervous. What is there to be nervous about? Nothing, surely. He's a powerful, intelligent, and experienced necromancer who has done things much more dangerous than this. Probably. It's fine. It will be fine. He'll be fine, and come back. Besides, if he does wake the entire fortress, it's built for defense anyway. If it doesn't kill him instantly it'll likely be possible to outrun whatever horrible monstrosities that show up to kill him and she is going to stop thinking about this now, okay? Okay.

Instead she distracts herself, figuring out which of her puzzles would be good for mass production and sale. And doing them. Doing them also helps.

Nothing much happens for the next while.

Good! That's good! Probably. Unless he couldn't manage to get a message to her from in there if something went horribly wrong, in which case that's very bad and she wouldn't even know that he needs help and wow how about those puzzles that she's sick to death of, huh? How about those, those are neat except for how she hates them.

It's quite a while, really.

Auggggghhhhhhhhh.

Is it disingenuous if she says that she's too old for this kind of stress? She's technically over two hundred but with the Mists and its wibbly time shit it's not quite accurate, so, it really doesn't count and she shouldn't act like she's actually lived through each and every year since she was born.

She sits down and grumpily starts penning an explanation of resurrection signets and how they were used. Probably someone already knows this, but it's possible that since they stopped working someone stopped recording them entirely for some shitty reason. Really, she's just being thorough on a subject she has a unique perspective on in the current world that has nothing to do with any possible subject in her day to day life. None whatsoever. Nope.

Wait what was that noise?

...oh, just a couple of lava crabs over there having a scuffle. Nothing of note.

She jumps a little at the sound, and spends several seconds firmly telling herself that it would be dumb to pick a fight with some lava crabs just because she's antsy. It's that sort of thing that would lead to James coming back to a corpse, which would just be the most stupid thing possible. Except possibly going alone into a super deadly fortress of sacrificed souls with nothing but some scavenged armor and a cheap illusion from a mesmer that isn't even specialized in illusions. Except that.

She writes hypotheses on why the gods were necessary for resurrection to work, and guesses possible ways this could be circumvented. The most obvious reason is sheer power, but something about finesse in the restoration of the body and reconnection of the soul might play in as well, not to mention locating the soul itself, and making sure it's fully intact and not having the memory and homicidal impulses problem lost souls sometimes have when they don't stick to the Underworld where they belong?

Maybe the ghost of Captain Grumby could help enlighten her on those musings?

Writing hypotheses on stuff is rather hard when she doesn't have a good grasp of the situation, what the modern magical standard is anymore, what went wrong, or what a resurrection failure even looks like. She gets herself a list of things to test and observe in order to make more grounded hypotheses, and then... doesn't have anything to do.

...

Fine.

She's bored and anxious and she hates it.

She writes a little note in violet illusion on the ground for James, so he knows where to find her, and then carefully sneaks back to where Captain Grumby is in order to have literally anyone to talk to. Fortunately for her, they cleared a lot of the constructs on the way here, so she can retrace their steps without all that much danger. She might be accosted by a stray lava crab, but she is not actually so delicate as to not be able to take a stray lava crab in combat.

Fortune is on her side this time; no lava crabs.

Grumby spots her from a distance, and raises a hand in greeting. "Ahoy!" he calls when she can hear him. "The Commander dead or somethin'? Haven' seen his ghost 'round here."

"Not that I'm aware of. We couldn't wait to gather two sets of armor, so he went in alone. Really, I got bored."