"Sure, I can be your researcher to escort," she agrees, a little amused. "This way, then, the magical soup that surrounds us feels more correct over there..."

And that-a-way she goes!

... She does seem very obviously comfortable working in a team. And experienced. She is less 'wandering' and more 'following a faint trail.' As an escort quest, she's keeping a good pace while not rushing ahead without them, and eventually she stops and says, "I do believe something is about to try to kill us," moments before something does, indeed, try to kill them.

The something that tries to kill them turns out to be ley-infused weapons, floating in the air and animated with bloodstone magic. The fact that they're meant to be inanimate does not seem to stop them from desiring blood.

Something to kill! Always good to have something to kill, makes him feel useful. He summons a disgusting golem made of muscle, bone, and sinew taller than he is out of thin air, then rushes the enemies with his greatsword to fight alongside the golem.

Caithe's fighting style is much more indirect. Stepping into the shadows and reappearing elsewhere, applying debilitating magics from a distance, throwing daggers made of solid darkness that disappear on hit.

(.... uh? where did he get that... was he keeping that in the mesmer bag along with the glider, there aren't any exploitable corpses around...? no, it felt like he summoned it, but - no, no, bad nerd, not now. Now is the time for violence.)

Anyway, here is what fighting with Vetareh is like:

It is not immediately obvious what she's doing, at first. She summons no dramatic illusions, no clones of herself to join the fray, in favor of quietly standing back. She watches with a critical eye and twitches her scepter every now and then. She is not exactly more indirect than even Caithe, but - what she's doing is primarily not killing things, actually. She does still do some of that, but primarily her focus is not on harming them.

Just making it very, very hard for them to accomplish much of anything. Every single time they try to wind up for one of their larger attacks, there is a delicate but vicious twist of purple magic that interrupts that. She's also put some kind of debilitating effect on the whole group, something that makes all of their magic come out slower than normal. At the same time, it's easier to cast magic against them. It flows faster, is snappier, tangles around them more easily.

It's actually really nice to fight with her present. She just - makes it easier. By how all of their enemies are having trouble doing much of anything.

Fights involving the Commander don't tend to be very long fights, but this was exceptionally short even so. "Useful magic," Caithe says, blandly.

"Very useful. Was that mesmer magic...?"

"Thank you, I try. And - yes? Do mesmers not do this these days? I know Kryta had more of an illusion culture instead of control and shutdown, but, really, have you entirely lost the noble art of making the enemy's day the worst in the past two hundred years?"

"Entirely lost, no, but... it is not what most modern mesmers tend to focus on."

"I believe Lady Kasmeer has recently been experimenting with time magic."

"Hm. Time. I suppose a mesmer's kit could theoretically flex in that direction, and in a way the spell Stolen Speed is within that wheelhouse..." she muses. "Is Lady Kasmeer open to collaboration? Because that sounds fun."

"Almost certainly. I imagine she'll be all over you, mesmer from past legends and all."

"Fair enough. I would likely do the same in her position. If nothing else, I expect the Orrian tradition of mesmer magic to be, ah. Rather lost, let's say."

Pause. "It may... not necessarily be entirely lost."

"Is this what we're looking for?" Caithe asks, pointing at a crystal she found.

She is distracted from the line of conversation to inspect the crystal.

"Hmmm.... close enough to potentially be useful. Worth taking." She takes the crystal, casts a standard preservation spell to keep the magical aura from getting rubbed off further from the general chaos of their surroundings, and bags it.

"Really? Were there a lot of survivors, then? I suppose there might have been some time to evacuate before the whole 'massive explosion' thing. Or perhaps a lost tome of knowledge, or something?"

"It's a bit of a long story that I should tell you once we're less at risk of interruptions, I believe. You're still probably the best repository of that knowledge in existence."

She eyes him, critically.

He's wearing a (pointlessly spiked, ridiculously on fire) mask, but she can read his tone of voice just fine.

".... It's not a nice story, is it," she observes softly.

He probably shouldn't have brought it up at all. "No. Not very nice."

She gives a firm nod. "Then yes, let's save that for when we are not in a combat situation." Vetareh has a lot of practice shoving her complicated emotions into a box for dealing with later, so she does that.

"... Thank you, though," she adds softly. With that said: yes, those feelings can now be boxed.

"Yeah," he says, also softly. 

And then back to looking for crystals.

Back to looking for crystals! Like, ooo, that one! She picks it up and inspects it, then preserves and - actually, she can show the class, before she bags it.

"Ones like this," she says, showing the class of two the appropriately flavored grey-ish crystal. "This one is fantastic and definitely from the epicenter."