"Yes! Yes I have! Quickk has it up there," she says, pointing west and up to the lip of the volcano. "Or, well, has what's left of it. It was hit by a volcanic bomb expelled from the caldera and the pieces are all over the place but I can't leave my post, the lava wurm can wake up at any moment and we need to be ready."

"Lava wurm."

    "Yes, yes. So, can you help? With either problem?"

"Yes, of course." She looks at James. "Device first? A fight with a lava wurm might cause damage to the environment that would further damage the pieces of the device, if it's already in scattered pieces that we'll have to track down."

"Agreed. We'll find the pieces then hand them over to Quickk."

    "Thank you! And I'll fret, in the meantime."

"If the lava wurm does wake up we will be nearby to help," says Vetareh, and then: well, time to look around for some pieces of a magical device.

And there are sure to be many Destroyers to try to stop them.

Excellent.

Her first two hexes are actually mass hexes, and don't actually require James's help to spread. Visions of regret is an elite spell that damages someone every time they use magic, and does twice the damage if it's the only mesmer hex on the target. With a bunch of other mesmer hexes, it's useful, but not precisely great. But she is not only a mesmer, and if the hex doesn't have any other mesmer hex magic getting in its way, it's... well, arguably the best elite spell she has. Her second mass hex is called reckless haste; it would be the one that causes enemies to attack faster at a cost of accuracy. Generally, the ratio of hits that actually land while an enemy is under the hex is less than what would have landed without. It's not bad by itself, as counterproductive as it might seem at first glance. However, combined with a hex named price of failure that punishes an enemy for every time they miss with an attack, and, well. This is a recipe for chaos and mayhem, now isn't it. The only problem was that price of failure can only be aimed at one target at a time. Except, as pointed out, James can spread hexes to multiple foes.

Her last set of spells were inexpensive, energy wise; backfire was the most magically expensive of the lot, and wasn't used often enough to make much of a dent in her energy reserves. These set of spells... not so much. Reckless haste and price of failure take about as much as the complicated backfire, each, and visions of regret isn't all that much better. And she just did one, after the other, after the other, and is starting to feel just a little bit spent. She ignores the faint weightlessness feeling from being pretty empty of magic reserves, and waits just long enough for them to refill enough to cast a fourth, thankfully much more economic hex. Parasitic bond is not a very fancy necromancer hex, but it is rather useful to her purposes of not dying. Or, it will be, later. Right now it's just sort of innocently nibbling at the edges of its target's life.

All major hexes cast, she hisses a breath through her teeth and casts an illusion. Not an expensive and fancy battle spell illusion that would hold up under pressure; this one will get dispelled in a couple seconds by all of the flying magic. Still, the flash of violet light around this one unlucky destroyer is enough to alert James to the fact that she would like him to please make a plague of her hexes.

Her wish is his command. Five other Destroyers are now covered in hexes and, assuming the hexes last more than a couple dozen seconds, one of the new targets is the source of a new epidemic, which means the original target of the hexes has them twice.

Price of failure is the only one to last that long, but Vetareh doesn't much mind the other three ending. Two are the mass hexes that double up when spread regardless, and as for parasitic bond, well. She doesn't particularly mind that one ending. The almost harmless nibbling it was doing? At the end of the hex, the collected lifeforce swirls back to the caster, healing her. Each separate casting by itself would heal her by a small but respectable amount; spread out among the many targets and diminished in duration by the epidemic, and she has quite a lot of healing power returning to her. This is an excellent solution to the problem of being too vulnerable.

She manages to regain the necessary energy to recast her mass hexes and parasitic bond for his second round of epidemic with the use of an energy stealing interrupt spell. She spots one of the little explodey ones about to go off just as James begins to cast his latest round of epidemic on something else, and she slides her second interrupt onto the target of his spell. This one is a new one; an interrupting hex called web of disruption. While her target is not the one she really wants to interrupt, that doesn't much matter; it's a hex. So as James spreads it with his epidemic, the little explodey one gets interrupted anyway. Along with four other destroyers around him. And again, ten seconds later, when the hex ends on its own, or when Vetareh shatters it with her hex breaker at an opportune moment. This mesmer hex lessens the damage done by visions of regret, of course, but such is life.

To say the destroyers have a hard time of it would be putting it lightly.

It's a very short hard time, and they're dead now.

Vetareh looks very smug.

"So that'll take some getting used to, but I think that works very well."

"I agree."

She beams at him. "I'll want to learn epidemic in the future, but for now, let's go keep the islands from exploding, hmm?"

"Do let's."

It'll be a few hours before they find all the scattered machine pieces. The sun gets higher and to its midpoint in the sky, and then a bit past that.

No lava wurms come bursting out of the ground to murder them, though, so it's not all bad. Though, now that she's thought about that, maybe one will show up just to prove her wrong.

"Let's get these back to the device and see about repairing it while we eat?" she says. "It's not like we know the exact number of missing pieces, yet."

"Yes, sounds like a good idea." He eyes the distance to where the scientist from earlier said scientist Quickk was, and traces a path via leylines in his head. "I believe this is one of the terrible times when I shall have to carry you in my arms again, princess."

"So terrible. Truly. My heart, it breaks." She casts the weight lightening enchantment and saunters over to him for pickup, smiling faintly.

He picks her up, walks over to a good vantage point, jumps, and activates his glider.

Up, up, and away!

Wheee!

She settles in for comfortable snuggles while he does all of the difficult 'gliding' and 'carrying her' business.

Yup. It doesn't look difficult, though; for all she can tell he was born in the air.

Eventually they reach the lip of the volcano again and he sets her down on her feet.

"Thank you, darling."

Then: off to see this 'Quickk' about putting the device together.

They find an asura, eventually.

    "Excellent, assistants arrive!" he says when he notices them from the corner of his eyes, looking up from the broken machine in front of himself. "I must remember to thank Taimi once we're out of here. Now, to buisness: what do you suppose this contraption is?"

"It's an ancient dwarven device built to release the magical pressure building up beneath the volcano and prevent an eruption," she says. "But it's broken. We picked up the pieces we could find, do you know if we found them all?"

She offers up the device pieces.

The scientist blinks at the pieces, then looks up at Vetareh. "Well, you're... surprisingly informed and proactive for an assistant. Let me see, let me see..." He takes the pieces and starts fiddling with the device. "...impressive. Very impressive. Yes, this is all of it! Tell Taimi I recommend you two get a raise."

"Thank you. We'll be sure to let her know," says Vetareh a little wryly, not pointing out that neither of them are actually getting paid at all. As far as she knows, anyway. "Do you need help repairing it? The Commander," it feels so weird to call him that instead of his name, "is carrying an item that will activate it once it's all in one piece."

    "I'll repair it in thirty-seven seconds," Quickk huffs. It takes him thirty-five, and he presents them with the inert-but-fixed device as well as a self-satisfied grin. James rolls his eyes but he's too hidden by the armour for this to be noticed. Instead, he taps the device with the dwarf's thumb, and it immediately lifts up off the ground and starts glowing and rotating. "Well, that was... anticlimactic," the scientist comments.

"There's still one more machine we must activate," says James. "Do you know where we can find it?"

    "We detected the signature of another one of these devices in the mursaat fortress. West of here, near the coast," Quickk explains, pointing west. From where they are, they can see... volcanoes, in the distance. No mursaat fortress is in evidence but it's probably far enough away that it wouldn't be. "We'd have investigated it already, but none of us have dared set a foot in that perilous place. Do be careful, Commander and...?"