"Best of luck. Should we send some asura your way to assist, or... Would that be the opposite of helpful?"

    "Skritt are nervous around asura, what with all the experimenting. If the asura promise to behave... uh, Commander, you still with us?"

James does not, actually, look to be still with them. He's staring into the distance with a glassy-eyed look...

"I could actually get you and the skritt some leverage if their behaving is in question..." she says thoughtfully, then she notices the boyfriend that is spacing out.

She waves a hand in front of his face. Yeah, he's not still with them. Well, that's unexpected, if not quite into alarming just yet. Probably not a delayed trap from the mursaat fortress, she'd have noticed if there was some sort of hex on him, even if it was just dormant and waiting to activate. It's not clear what's going on instead, though. Nothing's punctured his magical defenses, which either means it's friendly and he's letting it in, or it's very, very bad.

"Ah, James..?"

It takes a few more seconds, but eventually James blinks and shakes his head quickly as if to dispel some thought.

    "Hey! Where'd you float off to just now?" Rhoban asks, a frown creasing his eyebrows. "You alright?"

"I just had a vision. A pretty ominous one."

    "A vision? You sure it's not just the heat playing tricks on you?"

"This was no hallucination." He turns to Vetareh with an intense look in his eyes. "I have to get back to Tarir as soon as possible."

She nods sharply. "Okay. Go, then. I'll wrap things up here and get everyone talking to each other. Toss me a teleport thing for Tarir if you have one, but if not, don't wait up."

James does have a waypoint stone, yeah. He hands it to her, and after a second's pause also gives her the stone thumb. "I'll see you soon," he says, and nods to Rhoban.

    "Don't let me hold you up. Good luck, Commander!"

And off he goes to the closest local waypoint.

She blows him a fond kiss, then returns to business.

Since the torrent building up again is likely to be a problem, then she'll give directions to Captain Grumby and the disguise to Rhoban. Clearly he's the one that needs access to it the most, after all.

"It also means," she adds, "that if the asura would like to study the mursaat fortress with the suit of armor, they'll need to work with you. Do you expect that will get them to behave?"

Rhoban grins widely. "It just might, yes. I'm sure they've already got their grubby little fingers all over some of these devices, so they'd die if they couldn't get to all of them."

"Precisely. And here's your thumb back, thank you for lending it out." And now she put it down and stop touching it, which is excellent, because ew ew ew ew. Not that this shows on her face, she's a mesmer, but: yeah, ew.

"I'll see about sending friendly asura your way - is there anything you might need from a bunch of obsessive researchers? Or from me?"

"Well... the skritt are much more useful when they're together, cooperating... if the asura's terrible, terrible experiments shed any light on how to get them to do that..."

"I'll ask and have the data sent to you if I find anything," she says, nodding.

"Other than that I think we're good."

"All right. Good luck, and thank you for the help."

Okay, the best person to inform of the situation would be Taimi, who is also technically sort of her boss anyway so this is really just good practice. Plus she has neat samples that will probably be appreciated. She swaps out her spells for a set that are less reliant on James using epidemic regularly, so that she can actually defend herself. James probably cleared the way to the nearest waypoint, but there's no need to be stupid and expect to not get ambushed by at least one lava crab on the way there.

One lava crab is near enough that if she made too much noise it'd go to her but honestly given their goings maybe the lava crabs have decided to give the whole area a wide berth for the foreseeable future.

That would make sense if an avatar of death dressed in spikes and fire cut a bloody swath through their ranks, yep! She appreciates James so much. And she'll avoid the lava crab, it's faster than fighting it.

She will then be able to reach a waypoint unmolested!

Hooray! To Rata Sum, then. Hopefully they'll let her in the front door without James. ... Hopefully she can get to Taimi's lab without James.

They recognise her by now.

"Princess! Wait, was that the nickname I wasn't supposed to use? Vetareh! ...that sounds so unserious. You should get a title, just like the Commander. Where is he, by the way? Did you figure stuff out on the Fire Islands?"

Vetareh's mouth twitches.

"I'll work on that. He mentioned something about an ominous vision and that he needed to go to Tarir, I didn't want to keep him. We figured out some stuff on the Fire Islands, mostly how to keep Primordus from overloading the ley lines in the area and setting off volcanic eruptions."

She then explains the devices, Rhoban and his skritt, and then the part Taimi will likely actually care about, which would be the mursaat fortress. Look, she has samples of their constructs!

"... and we left Rhoban with directions to Grumby and the disguise. He's willing to work with the asura in regards to the devices and the fortress, but he's got a whole bunch of skritt working as his minions, and would appreciate asuran research on how to get them to cooperate together to help smooth everything over."

Taimi is kind of staring. "...you are a much better minion than the Commander. I should give you a raise. How about a fifty percent raise? Done." Fifty percent raise on zero is still zero. "—oh, but there was this big magical thing in Tarir just a while ago! That must be what they're doing? It wasn't, like, Elder Dragon levels of big but it was a noticeable blip, here, look—" She puts up a holographic image of a map of central Tyria with various glowy dots of various sizes in various locations. "See there, in the middle of the Maguuma Jungle? That's Tarir. Biiiiig leyline confluence, there. And it's not usually this bright, most times it's as bright as this other one here. I wonder what that's about."

Vetareh hums thoughtfully. "It probably has something to do with Glint's egg. But I mean to find out, anyway, I'm heading there after this. I just didn't want to do that without checking in and getting you the samples while we could. Samples of mursaat magic seemed like it'd be useful to have as soon as possible, considering the whole Lazarus thing."

"Yeah, and with the Commander on the case I'm sure whatever needs punching in Tarir will be punched. He helped lead a counterattack when Mordremoth was holding the whole city, once, and they scoured the city clean of dragon minions, did you know that? Pretty sure whatever this is can't be bigger than—oh. Oh dear." A horde of very small, red glowy dots starts appearing around the city and quickly moving in to the center. "Okay, maybe I spoke too soon."

"Yeah why don't I just. Go there right now and help with that. Lovely talking to you, bye!"

To the nearest waypoint, which fortunately isn't all that far away!

And she will quickly get to Tarir.

The ancient lost city of gold, built by Glint's followers who transcended flesh to become the exalted, beings of pure magic whose sole purpose was to ensure Glint's legacy would be preserved. It would be a beautiful tourist destination if it weren't for the hordes of Destroyers coming in from all directions. From small lava crabs to insectile horselike creatures as tall as an elephant, some even emerge from the ground in lieu of using the doors. Groups of exalted are trying to keep them at bay, but failing to contain all of them, and they seem to all be making a beeline for a very specific hole in the ground over there.

Oh boy.

She's not going to be very much good defending a hole in the ground; her specialization is disruption and sabotage. She can help the exalted out by dumping stolen speed on the largest group of destroyers available, but really, she should try to find the biggest and most threatening beastie around here and ruin its day before it can wreck anything important. This is somewhat convenient, because she bets that will also be where James is.

Might as well ask for directions, though.

While dumping wastrels' hexes on destroyers that look like they need them, she shouts to the exalted group, "Which way's the Commander?"