He sits right next to her, also smiling, and leans closer to plant a kiss on her lips.

Aw! She reaches out to caress his cheek, and gently returns the kiss.

"So, do you think this is our first date?"

"Maybe! I suppose yesterday was a bit too action-packed to count."

"We were also a bit less lovey and coupley," she points out, nibbling on a sandwich. "And a bit more surrounded by your close friends. Not that I minded, I liked them all, but this way we can say our first date was on the Fire Islands."

He laughs. "Yeah. I think we'd still have Taimi's company if this place didn't block her communicator."

She snorts. "That'll take some getting used to. I suppose your sparse time off you're rather on call for whatever crisis Tyria happens to have at the time, so it makes sense. Though not, perhaps, always being able to hear your side of the communicator."

"I suppose it would be useful to have a communicator I can shut down."

"Sure. And something you can shut down certain parts of. So you're available if an emergency occurs, but we don't subject a... I recall hearing she was sixteen? To our flirting."

"Yes, I'm sure Taimi has less than zero interest in that, if I frame it that way she'll probably jump on adding that feature in a heartbeat."

"Clever man," she says, fondly.

He beams at her.

And: food!

Food!

"This is nice," she comments. "I mean, the picnic too, but the adventuring. Collecting research samples is fun. Sort of... nostalgic."

"Nostalgic?"

"I was a researcher in Orr. Professionally, I mean. Specializing in studying the interplay of different magic types, with special respect to the subtle changes mesmer magic can have on other branches of magic. Beholden to the crown, with a lab and an office and grants for my research. It was pretty cushy, though it did mean that if the king said jump, I was beholden to jump."

"Huh. So this is definitely your thing. I bet Taimi will love having you around."

"This is absolutely my thing!" she agrees, smiling. "And yeah, I bet she will, too. Though, standard field practices have probably changed in the past couple hundred years, so I might not be up to the highest standards for data collection." Smirk. "Yet."

He laughs. "You're amazing."

"Yep, thank you for noticing!" she agrees. "Later in my career I ended up doing more and more field research, because, uh. People started realizing that it was useful to have me around to disentangle weird magical stuff. I got ordered to go to weird places with growing frequency. Ironically I ended up being more of a specialist in dealing with out of control magical anomalies, because, well. I could often just shut them down."

Then she winces and looks away.

"Which is how I fell into the Mists."

"—oh. I'm sorry." He scoots over closer to her to wrap his arms around her.

She leans into him and closes her eyes, giving a little hum of appreciation.

"Thanks. It's okay, it was a long time ago, I have since lost all of my bitterness about the circumstances. I made my peace with it, it's just. Hard to talk about."

He nods and kisses the top of her head. "I can imagine. You know, I'd always wanted to come here but never had time and reason to get around to."

"Thanks, Primordus?" she wonders, wryly. "The place is certainly something, I can see why you'd want to see it. Do you want help finding reasons to go to other interesting places?"

"They usually come around one way or another."

"Well, all right, you are pretty busy and well travelled. But if you get bored and antsy, I'm ready and able to help you out." She leans over and kisses the end of his nose.