Yeah. Yeah.

"While I may already be fifty percent of the way to doing so, would you like me to hug you?"

"I-if, you d-do, I will almost certainly start crying on you, s-so as long as you don't mind t-that," she mumbles, the waterworks already starting to begin despite her best efforts.

Yeah. He no longer has spikes, so he can hug her.

Oh, okay, then. Yeah. Crying time properly, then. She will just be sobbing out of a mix of relief, grief, and general emotions, of which there are many and most of which she doesn't know how to describe. Because, holy shit, she is out of the Mists and back in Tyria and she can feel so many things again, she's really in properly supported reality again, but also everyone she knows is already dead and in the Underworld, and there's a hot guy who is holding her and who arguably personally saved her and that also elicits some feelings and -

Suffice to say, there's a lot.

That's fine, he's not in- actually yes he is in a bit of a hurry but it's not so much of a hurry that he can't console someone who has been trapped in the Mists for two hundred and sixty years. With the spikes withdrawn his armour is actually quite soft, and despite his necromancerness he is warm.

He is warm and he has a heartbeat, and the air smells a little bit oversweet mixed with fire and dust, and her muscles finally feel like they're real, and she can feel thirst and hunger and pain and tiredness and everything the Mists denied her is back, now.

Her eyes sting with her tears, and her skin tingles at where it meets his, and everything sucks, but she's out, and that was so insanely improbable and unlikely, and this is such a stupid time for her to be crying, and she feels like she's not living up to the tales people told of her, apparently, which starts a whole new round of crying -

- eventually, she does manage some words.

"W-what, um. Y-year is it?"

"It's, uh, 1329AE."

That... is over two hundred years. Two hundred and sixty-three, if her math is correct. Which it probably is, one of the things she did to amuse herself was in fact practicing her math.

"... Ah," she says, sounding a little dead inside, and plopping her head back into James's chest.

Yeah. Yeah. He can hug her and allow her some time to decompress from... everything.

Yeah.

Vetareh does eventually get a little embarrassed about crying on someone who's essentially a stranger, though. She's so tired, and almost wants nothing more than to curl up and cry for a while, except she could do all of the crying she wanted in the Mists, so doing it now is stupid, and she wants to go and do something.

There is, in fact, a crisis of some kind going on. That seems like a something she can do. She takes a deep breath, and attempts to pull herself back together. It's easier, with something to focus on. No time for hugs, she has a task to accomplish. (She accordingly steps out of his arms.)

" - S-so the majority of the explosion's energy was absorbed by, er, someone. I couldn't see who, sorry, but - the leader person who ordered the ritual? That was why the - change in orders, to neatly set off the explosion - er, sorry, I don't know how much you know, should I back up and explain what I saw in the fractal of this?"

—oh okay they're doing this cool.

"It might be useful. If Caudecus absorbed the explosion, though... dealing with him will be a lot less straightforward than we'd hoped."

"Yeah. Though I don't see how a human could absorb all that energy and not explode."

"Nor me, but—I should let you speak."

"Oh, um. Mostly I think these people are idiots? They mined their way down here, broke a hole in the outer shell of the Bloodstone, and began mining the more energy dense crystals inside. Those of course also started growing outside of the shell once it was broken. They started trying to leverage the harvested crystals for power, involving various stupid things like embedding them into people, or eating them, or - just, any stupid thing they could do with the shards, they probably did." It is not relevant to talk about how they were doing horrible things to science, though her expression probably gets across most of her thoughts on the matter.

"Uh - there were two major factions pushing for different uses of the power? One was for weaponizing it, the other was for something called 'Operation Rebirth,' which I didn't ever discover the details of. It's not clear to me which one the ritual that blew up the Bloodstone was, either, I'm afraid."

"Rebirth? Of—what? Sorry, you just said you didn't know... It's just concerning, I suppose."

"It sure is! Sorry I don't know more. Um, I'm happy to help investigate this, er, this," and she motions around them, "and stop their incredibly dumb plans on principle."