"Probably not."

“Fine, I’ll just have to figure out how to blast past your world’s weird magical shielding all on my own. I actually think the fire liquid from the river’s my in for that. Only a bit of it, though, it would be so inefficient if I just spewed not-lava at them and covered half of the battlefield, comparatively speaking I only have a little bit of it compared to star stuff. Besides, somehow I don’t think you’d appreciate everything being on fire.”

"I am only heat-resistant, not fireproof," he agrees.

He fusses inside a vase for Loot when the sound of war drums can suddenly be heard from all directions.

Hello, Ares, god of war, you will probably be very helpful about getting out of the Underworld when it's all about fighting, but that doesn't mean she has to like you. She'll just be a quiet little shoulder companion.

Indeed, Ares's voice echoes in the garden a second later: "Well, cousin, I think I sense quite the bloodthirst around you recently! You are growing into quite the death dealer, aren't you? I like to think my blessings have something to do with that."

"Oh, don't worry, they don't," replies Zagreus, mostly to himself, rolling his eyes.

"... Can he not hear you?" murmurs Yvette, cautiously.

"Not if I don't direct it to him very forcefully and even then it's iffy. Offerings help." He shrugs, and his eyes lose focus as he looks through blessings to pick.

"Huh. All right. Is that normal?"

"They have very limited reach here in the Underworld, and Nyx is casting a veil of night on me to make it even harder to see me."

"A veil of.... huh. Then either it's covering me too by proximity, or. ... No, I think she's shielding me, too."

"Is she? Huh. Interesting. Maybe she does not want Father to worry."

"You'd know her motives better than I, I think. I suppose I'll just go with it and not try to disturb her veil with anything particularly big."

"We can ask her next time I die," he says, nodding.

Onwards to the doors.

"If you die! Or we could get out and you could live forever, running rampant."

"Here's to hoping!"

"Quite."

She peers at Nyx's shield. Hmm. She's already pretty aligned with it, aesthetically speaking, which seems to actually mean something here. Blasting things with power from stars is actually not going to make much of a ripple at all, it's the not-lava that's the one that might disturb it more than she ought to. Which means she needs to figure out how to do exactly what she planned to, which is to say, rely mostly on stored power with the not-lava as supplement to get it to actually have some real bite to it. Well. Glad to have confirmation, she guesses?

Onwards past a couple more chambers, until they reach one particularly different garden. This one has a small island with an enormous statue of a Greek warrior surrounded by vases. "Is that... Achilles?"

"I really wouldn't know. Probably?"

"I always wondered why he was back at the House rather than here, really..."

He walks on.

And a voice can be heard up ahead, a single voice, taking to itself. "...knew of no one, nothing stronger, other than the love we shared."

Huh. Strange. Usually shades in Elysium seem either more content, or more murderous. She stays silent, and doesn't interrupt.

"Was I deceived, in thinking this of you, of us? Well..."

The shade looks up when he sees them approaching, then blinks slowly when he sees Zagreus slowing down. "...go on stranger. Plenty more shades looking to fight with you out here."

"I'm just passing through. You seem unlike the rest. May I ask your name? I'm Zagreus."

"Names are there to be forgotten, stranger. You shouldn't be here. May the Fates favour your journey. But just in case they don't..." He reaches to his left, where a few empty cups and a few less empty mugs are, and grabs a mug to offer it to Zagreus. "Here. Why don't you take this? And leave me alone."