Rytlock snorts. "I guess when it comes to the Commander, it might have been." He walks towards one corner of the room where there's a slightly raised platform, steps on it, and disappears.

Vetareh does the same, of course. Before she remembers that she's in a fantastically complicated magical contraption and has the urge to take it all apart right this minute.

"So, did we beat Cami's high score?" she asks once she's out, because she definitely has her priorities in order, thank you very much.

"Only in this last round, and she's still leading overall."

She resists the urge to gloat, but takes satisfaction in the fact that her sacrifice was not in vain. She returns to her earlier seat and fails at pretending that she's not smug about that.

"Well, Taimi, outside a few monkey anomalies, the room was very impressive. Next time, you'll have to program in some Jormag minions." He pauses, then looks at Vetareh. "And that was the bad news, I don't know if you were listening when Taimi said it. Jormag is active, too."

Aaaand there goes her good mood. It was nice while it lasted, anyway.

"... Ah. Both of them. At the same time. Wonderful. Do we know what woke them up?"

"It was... probably Mordremoth's death. It sent a lot of magic into the leylines and the two dragons were right there to slurp it all up."

She nods, looking thoughtful.

... Hm. The Dragons began waking up after Abaddon was killed. It occurs to her that a god's death might release quite a lot of magic, even if a lot of it got slurped up by a mortal to become a new god. Then the gods all left. Right around when the Dragons woke up. Rather like they didn't want to clean up after their mistake, and abandoned everyone in the world to deal with it instead. What the fuck, gods?

Carefully, she takes a deep breath, and forces herself to relax. Now is not the time to start shouting about how the gods suck some more. She doubts Taimi and Rytlock care; the five gods (well, technically six, now) exclusively favored humans.

"So it might actually be sort of a good thing that Lazarus ate most of the bloodstone's magic. Because this way it didn't go to the Dragons, and if we decide he needs to die, we have time to figure out some way to capture it without letting it run off into leylines that feed the Dragons."

"Great idea! Let's not kill the crazy Mursaat who just ate a lot of Bloodstone magic." She pauses. "Yeah that's actually a great idea."

"Any idea what's happening with the other Elder Dragons?"

"Nothing on Kralkatorrik, and ditto for... Oh, what's its name? Brain malfunction. Starts with an s...?"

"What about a weakness? All this machinery has to be good for something!"

"Why don't you channel some patience from the Mists there, Tribune! A whole civilization of brilliant asura couldn't find it, but, yeah, I got this in five minutes!"

"The Mists aren't actually patient," clarifies Vetareh, dryly. "They are a void of patience, devouring endless amounts of self restraint and willpower into an uncaring eternally hungering maw. Trying to channel patience from there is like trying to channel water from a desert."

This said, she glances at Rytlock. She'd been avoiding squinting too hard at everyone's magic for fear of getting, well, sucked into studying them too hard, but now that 'Mists' and 'Rytlock' have been brought up in the same sentence... yes, that does ring a bell, doesn't it. She didn't know what to compare his magic to and hadn't put any thought into it, but yes, it does taste like echoes and emptiness and the Mists, doesn't it. Put together with 'The Mists does like collecting prizes,' said like he knew, and, well.

Maybe she's not the only one in Tyria that knows what the Mists are like.

Rytlock snorts. "She got that right."

"Well at least someone here's willing to share the juicy details."

James glances at Vetareh, then says, "Okay, okay. We're all on the same team here. Rytlock is gonna share what he's comfortable with sharing when he wants to share it." James doesn't look comfortable with this but such is life.

Vetareh's pretty comfortable not talking about the Mists at all right now, yep. Factual 'this is what the Mists are like' is sort of okay, but starting to edge into dangerous territory with terrifying beasts made out of emotions. Emotional beasts are not things one tangles with lightly. Talking about her experiences, or someone else's experiences is worse, it's...

...Nope. Not right now. She's not doing it and they can't make her and they can't make Rytlock, either. She will deal with her baggage later, along with addressing the 'Orr' problem. It is only fair that she gets some time to exist in the world without having to get dragged right back to the Mists and to Orr, that goes for Rytlock, too.

She nods at James's assertion, and obligingly changes the subject. "So as I see it, the problem is not actually that the Dragons exist, per say. The problem is that they wake up and kill people and eat magic. Could we figure out ways to prevent them from eating, and maybe send them back to bed?"

"The problem with that is that they wake in cycles. Even if we made them go to bed, that would just be buying time, not solving anything."

"Buying time so we can solve it is important too," she points out, mildly. "But yeah, I don't particularly want to spend the rest of my life tiptoing around sleeping Dragons, either."

"And so far we have killed two of them so we know they can be killed," grunts Rytlock, a bit impatiently. "We don't know anything about sleeping dragons or stopping magic."

"Actually!"

"Go on, Taimi, I know you're dying to tell us this."

She grins—asuran facial expressions are much more similar to human ones than Charr. "First, remember my chak organ?"

"That horribly disgusting body part of an even more horribly disgusting giant bug you keep in a despicable blighting pod fluid?" asks James, in a careful deadpan. "Yes, I remember, despite desperately trying to forget."