"Yes, yes, but it should be fairly easy, it's those golems and recorders over there, see?" She points at various dismantled golems and poles with cubes amidst the Destroyers, a few minutes' walk away. There are streams of lava everywhere, and the creatures seem to like swarming around them.

"Fairly easy for a bookah?" James asks, wryly.

    "Of course, an asura progeny¹ could do it in their sleep."

¹ Progeny: term used to refer to younger asura and has different cultural connotations than the standard English meaning. In particular, an asura progeny typically has never been part of a krewe² and has not finished their first degree in the university. It is not an insulting term. Except in this case it is slightly insulting because it is saying that the average human is much less smart and capable than the average asura child.
² Krewe: the basic unit of organisation in asura society, consists of a (typically but not always) temporary group of (usually) asura working on a single project or meta-project over an extended span of time.

"We will aspire to live up to an asuran progeny's standards," says Vetareh, dryly.

Right then, off to go kill destroyers. Before they do the actual attract-the-attention-of-for-killing, though: how do the destroyers feel, magically?

Like fire fire fire...

...and some plant and mind and death, here and there. There's no Destroyer that has both death and plant and mind, it's either just death, or just plant and mind. Plus the fire.

"... That's interesting. Okay, uh." She starts pointing out which destroyers feel like what to James. "And so far there have been no destroyers that feel like death and plant and mind. Just death and fire, and plant, mind, and fire."

"Huh. Maybe it takes more energy to combine more dragon aspects?" James wonders while he grabs the rest of his armour—the mask, wristguards, and shoulderguards.

"Maybe? I hesitate to hypothesize, I bet Taimi will be better equipped to figure out this mystery."

"Probably. We'll tell her when we see her again." And fully attired, he unsheathes his scepter and dagger and summons a Flesh Golem from wherever they come from.

"Yeah." She looks thoughtfully at the destroyers. "After you, since I'm squishy and delicate. Any specific set of destroyers you'd like me to focus on ruining the day of?"

"The small ones, they self-destruct and it's nasty."

The Flesh Golem starts running forward and so does James, and he starts casting something that makes several giant bone hands emerge from the ground and grab some Destroyers, pulling them and squishing them against the hard stone.

She follows after him. The little ones self destruct, hm? It's a pity she hadn't been watching for that kind of thing in the simulation, she could have seen by what mechanism they self destructed and learned how to intercept it. Instead, she was a battering ram. Not a pointless pursuit, clearly, but still. Oh well, something to learn for next time.

Stolen speed on the largest group available, backfire on the most prolific looking caster, and the wastrels' hexes on one of the little ones, while she tries to figure out how their self destruct works. Is it a spell that she can interrupt?

The self-destruct turns out to be a spell, so she can definitely interrupt that! And the most prolific-looking caster is this flying Destroyer thing that's summoning a meteor shower, which James is deftly maneuvering around while he siphons life from his targets.

Since James can dodge the meteor shower, and destroyers don't seem to be very smart, she'll just let that flying destroyer cast itself to death under backfire, and save her interrupts for the little explodey ones.

She likes working with James, for more reasons than just the fact that she's sleeping with him. He's a caster that directly benefits from her group hex, creates meat shield minions that get between her and the monsters, draws groups together so she can hex large groups at once, and he is personally scary enough that most things are really quite distracted by the shadow of death among them. This is about the perfect partner she could have, really. She's free to work her sneaky mayhem and quietly support him and protect him from things that would actually seriously hurt him. Like the little explodey destroyers.

They'll have gotten rid of this group in short order, then. He lifts his mask to beam at Vetareh before turning to look at a dismantled golem nearby.

"Now let's see if I'm at least as smart as an asura progeny."

She beams back at him, resisting the urge to giggle and hug him.

"You can do it, I believe in you. While you're doing that, I'm going to go collect destroyer samples for Taimi before their magic starts to dissipate too much to lose the useful data. Call me if you need help." She winks at him.

"Yes, ma'am!"

Collecting samples is easy enough, she knows a signet for preserving the magical energy of a gathered material. This isn't necessary for all magically imbued materials harvested from monsters, some take centuries to lose whatever magical properties they have, and some never do. For a set of research samples, though, it's highly recommended to preserve them like she's doing. Where 'highly recommended' means, 'if she didn't with research samples in Orr, some specialist would be highly inclined to personally kill her.' She suspects it's the same way with the asura, and she does not want to die today.

Because she's a professional, she also collects samples of the more ordinary destroyers, for comparison. Taimi probably already has some samples of these, but it's important to establish something that at least resembles a control. She also carefully attaches little labels to each sample as she goes, so Taimi will have less to sort through, and more to go off of. Here is the span of time between monster death and sample harvest, here are the flavors of magic she spotted already present, here is what magic they were killed with in case cross contamination occurred during the killing, and here is the location they were acquired. She'll also write up notes on the specific preservation signet she used, in case that's relevant, but that'll come after the gross bit where she runs around prying organs out of dead things.

She's very efficient about it. One might get the impression that she has practice gathering research samples. What with having been a professional nerd in the ancient nerd capital of magic and religion. Funny how that works.

"Done," she pronounces, once all samples have been gathered and properly labeled.

James is still focused on that golem, his tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth, a concentrated furrow of his brows decorating a face not covered by the mask.

Adorable.

"Would you like help?" she offers, amused.

"No! I can do it! I'm almost done!" he calls without looking up from his work. His Flesh Golem is just standing around, being useless.

She giggles. Gods (that she reminds herself she doesn't worship anymore) he's cute.

Since he's busy, she can just get to writing a report to Taimi on the preservation signet she used. There are subtly different ways to preserve magical monster bits, and it's important to provide documentation in case the information becomes relevant. ... While she writes, something occurs to her.

"Did you standardize preservation signets in the past couple of centuries? I pushed for it for years, but no one wanted to commit, it was terribly annoying."

"Wha?"

"Preservation signets. You know, for keeping the samples from dissipating important magical data. I suppose you might use something else instead?"

"I don't think I've ever used anything like that—aha! So this is not a way to fix the golem! The more you know."

She suppresses another giggle. He's so cute when he's trying to live up to unfair standards set by an arrogant researcher that thinks that just because he knows a field like the back of his hand, others will too.

"Well, I suppose I'll just write a very thorough report, then." She eyes his efforts fixing the golem, then decides to weigh in. "You can do it, darling, you're brilliant and I believe in you. You are overcoming adversity because you had a different educational background than an asuran progeny, and this proves that you are both very smart and very good at adapting to new systems."

"Exactly!" he says, raising a fist. "Come here give me a kiss before you continue writing the very thorough report."