"Yes, yes, good, what do we need to do?" wonders Smipa.

    "Just put your hand here, I'll compare your signature to the Commander's and Nelia's... well, I'll need to figure out how to tell things apart with Vetareh but I'm sure it won't be a problem."

James grins fondly at Vetareh while the Agents get their signatures collected.

She grins back! It's distracting that his pretty face is out and about instead of hidden behind spikes and fire. Not a bad kind of distracting, but. Distracting.

After Elodir is done collecting their data the Agents salute again and return to their work. "Right, then! Let's see what I'll find." He places the device on a little rectangular indent of the wall where it somehow sticks in spite of gravity and then a section of the wall lights up to show a lot of writing going by really fast. "Just a minute, need to boot this up."

Well, obviously Vetareh is going to try to figure out what the writing is about! She might not manage it, but it's something to do, and she despises boredom.

It seems to be giving information about the initialisation of various... things? The names seem to be the kinds of things the asura would invent, like "Aetheric Alterator" or "Enormously Massive Data Storage Unit Lite", but if they're referring to any actual physical... things... those things are nowhere visible, or not reacting in any way if so.

Huh! That's interesting. At some point she should probably acquire at least a basic knowledge of how different Asuran tech works, but now is probably not the time for that. She'll keep reading over Elodir's shoulder, though, that seems like a worthwhile endeavor.

After another few seconds, something like a graphical interface not too different from the ones Taimi uses pops up, and Elodir starts quickly tapping various things on the screen. He reaches a point where a diagram of a human shows up, with highlighted glowy points around its body and thin vein-like connections between them. He rotates the diagram and taps various parts with purpose even if the order seems to be random, but the colour of the lights changes as he does that and various diagnostics data appear when they do.

He starts humming tunelessly to himself while that happens, almost but not quite as if he was talking aloud about his thoughts.

Vetareh would actually prefer if he were talking aloud about his thoughts instead of just humming to himself. ... She's getting bored already, trying to figure out what Elodir's doing with little to no context and no outside help is very like how she kept herself amused in the Mists, and she has not had enough time or distance to get completely over it.

This is the point where she'd go snuggle James and have him distract her, but also they're kind of on duty, and she would kind of like to not end up making out (or... other things) in a closet in his adorable secret society's library. Not... that this is what would end up happening, no, no, that would be silly, she and he are far too professional for th—hahaha okay she'll stop lying, it's totally what would happen with the both of them bored and with nothing better to do. Even if they could probably totally get away with it, because he likely knows this place well enough to know all of the out of the way nooks, and she's a mesmer. Great, now she's reminded of Kas's illusionary clothes, that is not helping.

She looks at James. C'mon, one of them has to be reasonable, can't she pass the reasonable stick to him this time...? It's his fault for showing off his pretty face, this was much easier when he was covered in spikes and fire.

His pretty face is being shown there, yep, all austere and serious, arms folded, eyes closed, concentrated in his thoughts probably.

........

...........maybe a bit too concentrated in his thoughts, actually.

She squints at him, then she leans over and pokes him. Jerk. Sleeping while standing up is very clever, and also tactically smart, but also, they're in this together and so he does not get to just tap out because nothing's happening.

James opens his eyes and raises a questioning eyebrow at her. He does not look like he was asleep—no grogginess or startle from the poke or even loss of balance.

But then again, she has seen how quickly he gets his bearings upon waking up.

By the expression of his girlfriend, with crossed arms and raised eyebrows: yeah, right. That can be their story if anyone else asks, but she knows better. She flicks an illusionary butterfly to land on his nose, just because, then it disappears before anyone else has any chance to spot it.

He keeps the act for a couple more seconds but when the butterfly lands on his nose it cracks and he grins at her.

She grins back. Sleeping while standing up? That's impressive, and also kind of crazy, and probably he can't teach her, but still. Very clever, as long as it doesn't actually get him into trouble!

He scratches the side of his nose and eyes the screen Elodir is working on then rolls his eyes and sighs heavily in silence.

Booooooooring.

He’s so cute. He’s so absurdly cute. How can he be this cute, it’s impossible that this much cute can fit in such an intimidating adventuresome person. And yet! It’s there! He’s so cute!!

She makes him one of her illusionary puzzles from the Mists. Here you go, you cutie, figure out how to solve this instead of being bored!

...well now he's curious, how does this work?

So! The purpose is to move these illusionary rings to get the colors to line up, except the rings are interconnected, and moving one messes up its fellows. It is unfortunately not autonomous, though, she’s the puzzle master and has to move it for him with her mind. But he can poke rings and move his finger and she’ll obligingly move the puzzle bits for him!

She’s long grown bored of this puzzle herself, but operating it for her boyfriend and watching his reactions is very novel, and she doesn’t have much else to do right now.

Oh wow this is complicated. He's not sure he can figure this out in their time here.

On the other hand it's not like he has literally anything else to do.

He does not! He's cute when he's trying to figure out a puzzle, d'aww. Look at him. And his cute face.

But eventually:

"Okay, I think I have you two mapped out," Elodir says, frowning at his screen.

"Great!" says Vetareh, who shrinks down the puzzle illusion to the size of a copper coin, then tucks it against the inside of James's sleeve. If they get into a fight it'll probably be dissipated from all of the magic flying around, but if they're not going to get into a fight, he has his progress saved until next time they are bored.

"So now what?"

"Now I am very thankful that the Commander is here and that you have some necromancer in you otherwise I would never have been able to isolate this thing. Here, come look."

"Strangely convenient that I'm weird and novel," she says, brightly, and comes to look.

"So you did manage to isolate the problem?"

    "In a manner of speaking," Elodir replies cautiously. "It's definitely alien, as in not part of your native magical makeup, but it seems like it's trying to make itself cosier. Here, look." He takes a step to the side to show the screen, which now has a 2D line drawing of a human male with roughly the Commander's build, although any defining characteristics are too fine to be captured by the diagram. There are swirling patterns of light flowing around his body, almost like bloodflow if blood didn't need veins to have its direction set, and there are multiple colours distinguishable there.

The most frequent colour is a dark green, which seems to permeate approximately all of James's body; secondary to that is a dark blue, which—when Elodir slides his finger across the screen and makes the body slowly rotate tridimensionally—seems to be more concentrated on his skin. There is a light green and a soft yellow amongst the other colours, but there is one colour that stands out the most, both because it's brighter than the others—despite being relatively localised to close to his brain—and because it seems to not quite mingle as much as the others. While the other colours flow into and out of each other and sometimes mix and fade, this red seems to be almost set apart from everything else by some invisible membrane. It also behaves weirdly, being more self-contained but at times seeming to try to lash out aggressively down James's throat, at which point the rest of the colours gently push it back up. Some specks and flecks of the red seem to get separated in this process, though, and dissolve into the other colours.

    "The colours are artificial, of course," explains the sylvari once he has given them enough time to digest the diagram. "This red one is the foreign one, and it's—actually if the colours were at all accurate it'd be green-white, it's very heavily balanced but a bit skewed towards Destruction and Preservation. I managed to isolate it from the other strands of your personal magic due to how self-contained it seemed to be, compared to everything else."