She snorts with laughter, then ambles towards him to be carried.

"Yes, please. At some point I'll need to take you up on those gliding lessons."

"Perhaps someday the world will be less on fire for long enough." He carries her, and then updraft and then leyline gliding. Whee.

Whee! Gliding! Gliding while being carried by James!

"Someday! Until then, I'll just have to learn to cope." Lean.

"I'm sure you must find this terrible, really."

"Nope, it's pretty great!" she says, brightly. "You're even still calling me your princess, it's all terribly cute!"

"Of course I am. I don't tend to lie."

She snorts, and has a sip of her coffee to distract herself from the urge to kiss him.

"You realize that you were the one to start with the yours-ing. I grumpily claimed that you were mine in a fit of sleep deprived pique, you went and started calling me your princess."

"And I am right about it."

"So if I go found a nation and proclaim myself princess of it, you'd be my very first subject?" she wonders, amused.

"I'd be honoured to."

"Aw," she says, melting a little. "I mean, I'm not going to do that, but still. Aw."

He smiles, but then turns a bit more serious. "If you do want me to stop, I of course will. I do not want to stake any... claims... that are not mutual."

"I don't want you to stop," she murmurs, nestling into his arms. "I can be your princess if you'd like me to be. And you can be my... something or other. Whatever that is pending on when we actually have a talk about our feelings, wants, and needs, like grownups."

"Good thing we are grownups, then," he says wryly. "It would be much harder otherwise."

"Quite. For a number of reasons. Eugh, stuck in the Mists mid-puberty." She shudders. "Horrors upon horrors."

"You probably wouldn't have aged, would you."

"Nope. I would be in the exact same state I was when I arrived. I am very glad I was not mid-puberty when I fell into the Mists."

He laughs. "I think our meeting might have gone differently if you had been."

Snort. "I bet. Luckily for us both, I fell in at twenty-five, not fifteen."

He nods. "I'm twenty-six."

"Aw. Look at us, comparable in life stages and terribly cute together."

He laughs. "Meant to be, really."

Eventually they reach dry land again, and he disengages from the leyline and slows down. There is another volcano up ahead, to the southeast, and a bigger one to the north. They're all active enough that lava can be seen flowing in various crevices and caves, down into whatever underground tunnels the lava that hasn't pooled in the ocean floor and solidified goes. Up ahead, sheltered under a stone ledge, there's one of those tents, with a dismantled golem smoking visibly next to it, and an asura furiously typing into some sort of flat stone surface in her hand.

Vetareh's pretty okay with letting James do the talking, here. He's good at it, and also more recognizable. She trails after him and looks pretty.

He walks over to the asura. "Excuse me?"

    "What do you want? I'm quite busy watching my work get repeatedly dismantled by monsters, so if you don't mind—"

"Easy there. Taimi sent me. I'm here to help you retrieve those Destroyer samples."

    "At last support! I located a sizable Destroyer nest, but the beasts ambushed me. Made a mess of my comms equipment. Help me deal with the Destroyers and fix the equipment, and I'll get any samples you retrieve back to Taimi."

"Consider it done."

    "Let's move quickly. The sooner we're done, the sooner we can all retreat to... a less life-threatening environment."

"Destroyers first, so we have space for fixing the equipment?"