"Precisely!"

All samples acquired, it's time to go activate some more agony jade construct things. Maybe her new spell set will be better at stopping their shit.

How fortunate for them there's another agony jade construct thing right over there!

(This is not fortune. This is just the natural result of their poor, poor life choices.)

Look, if they weren't here to kill it, then it'd just sit here waiting until some poor unaware fool inevitably stumbled across it later. These are proactive choices, not poor ones.

While she understands this intellectually, in her gut she's still not very happy that her best plan for shutting down the jade construct's agony thing is 'let it do it once.' Admittedly, this feels like something of a set of poor, poor life choices. Better than if she weren't here, though. She waits for her moment to strike to prevent this rude magical construct from getting to use its agony thing more than just the once. In the meantime, she is going to do her best to kill it dead.

James is getting better at reading the construct's tells so he manages to dodge most of the agony.

But not all of it.

Her poor boyfriend.

She casts her spell right before it looks like James will be hit, and gets back to trying to kill this stupid, boyfriend-hurting construct. It needs to die very, very badly.

Her spell plus the fact that James's skill increases in dealing with these means that he's not hit any more times before they manage to shut that one down for good.

Onwards?

Onwards!

(She grumpily kicks the construct as she goes through the standard post fight sample collection and looting. Out of principle.)

Delightful.

A couple of encounters later finds them the first piece of armour: a dented helmet!

She inspects the helmet critically, then nods.

"This will hold an illusion well enough to cover the dent, though maybe not enough to last through proper combat." This is mostly because she's not a particularly good illusionist, not any lack of material or craftsmanship in the helmet itself, but she doesn't need to belabor her own shortcomings as a mesmer to make her point. "I think this'll work. Provided we find more, of course."

"And ideally it would see no combat at all, if it succeeds at its purpose," he says, nodding. "I wonder how these came to even be here. And how the dwarves' device did, too."

"I imagine the dwarves put it here on purpose, since I expect the mursaat were smart enough to build their fortress on a confluence of magical ley-lines that they could weave extra defensive power from. If the dwarves didn't place the devices carefully, there would likely be twice as many for us to run around and activate, if they'd even work at all. How they pulled off putting their own magical device in an abandoned fortress with functional defenses is harder, but they also would have had more time than we do to figure out clever ways around the system. This is a quick and dirty method of sneaking past defenses, darling." She smiles fondly at him.

"... As to the stray armor pieces, I've no idea. Perhaps the last two mursaat in the fortress desperately wanted to get each other's clothes off, and couldn't wait until they were in private to start."

That makes him pause. "Well this was the first time it has ever occurred to me to try to imagine what a mursaat would look like unclothed."

She laughs. "I apologize for inflicting that mental image upon you?"

"Never apologise for such gifts," he says, an obvious smirk in his voice.

"Oh? Should I take notes for illusions later? Bird feet and feathery wings, visual gifts to James Orland?"

James laughs and resumes their trek. "Illusions are a gift that keeps on giving."

She follows, of course.

"You're welcome!" she says cheerily, noting that also he didn't say no.

He did not, no.

Although not an uneventful search, it becomes rather dull—mursaat ruins, mursaat constructs, lava, the occasional lava crab, nothing new.

She does eventually stop kicking the constructs once they're good and dead, and perfects the art of killing them as quickly as possible and preventing them from using their agony thing more than just the once, but that's about all of narrative interest.

Is there an almost full suit of mursaat armor that they can cobble together?

There are enough mismatched parts that they can eventually do that. James can even replace the original helmet with a less-dented one.

Oh, good. ... They probably don't have the time to scrape together two sets of mismatched armor, do they. Great. They'd better have a conversation about this, then.

"So I'm guessing you would like very much to be the only one to put on the cobbled together armor for this quick and dirty infiltration plan instead of seeing if there are somehow, miraculously, enough stray pieces of armor for two disguises," she says. It doesn't sound very much like a question, despite the phrasing.

"I think I'm hardier than you, if anything does go wrong."

"I think I'm also less likely to trip any notable defenses and will have an easier time locating the device," she replies, without any real heat. "... But yes, agreed. You'd recover from any mistakes far better than I." She huffs, annoyed. "Fine, fine, but if you die I swear I will figure out how to get resurrections working so I can kill you again. Clear?"

"Crystal clear, princess."

"Good. Now please take your spikes off so we can get you into these without making more holes for me to hide. Best to save the illusions until after everything is on you and I can see where the major flaws are."