"I congratulate you on your clothing not sabotaging you!" she replies, just as cheerfully.

And yeah, they should. Actually, Vetareh similarly flips over to work mode and starts eyeing the place.

They're in some sort of arena or temple, a room made out of several flat wall sections arranged in a circle. One section of the circular walls is missing, probably being the erstwhile entrance to the temple before it was forcibly plucked from its original location and made to float in the middle of the gargantuan cave they're in, and the ceiling is missing. It's entirely empty except for a circular pedestal in the middle. However, there are suspiciously humanoid-shaped charred stains on the walls, and bloodstone-coloured scratches on the floor radiating from the pedestal. 

And there's the soft sound of someone clearing their throat coming from there, and a woman with green skin whose hair and clothes are made of leaves is standing there. "The source of the explosion?"

"...Caithe," says James, his voice suddenly much less warm than it's been towards Vetareh.

"Commander. And friend...?" she says, tilting her head in Vetareh's direction.

????? there was a ??? plant person??? hiding there this whole time????

She's going to pretend, for her own sanity, that this Caithe person has only been present for the banter part of her interaction with James, not the, uh. Crying. Part.

"Uh, hi. Vetareh."

"A pleasure."

"How long have you been there for?"

"Not long. You beat me here, and I was investigating the area downstairs until just now."

"I see." He's not sure how much he believes that, Caithe has always been hard to read and one of the few people who can lie to him. Occasionally. To Vetareh: "Vetareh, this is Caithe, she is—an ally." He could have displayed more confidence than this if he wanted, but he in fact did not want to. "Caithe, this is Vetareh. I found her in this cave."

"A friend of the Commander's is a friend of mine." Her expression really is quite hard to read, but she looks—contrite, or something. "You're investigating the explosion, then?"

She has absolutely no idea how to engage with complicated interpersonal problems, but she sure can distract herself trying to figure out what precisely is going on there! Figuring out what is going on is not engaging with it, it's just her being clever and having fun. Clearly the relationship between James and the plant person Caithe is... complicated? They have history? Of some kind? She screwed him over in some way and is apologetic about it? He is still kind of mad about it but acknowledges they're on the same side?

"In a manner of speaking, yes." Does she want to try and explain her whole... Mists situation? Not really. But her perspective on the disaster is legitimately important, so she will anyway. "I was trapped in the Mists and saw a fractal of the leadup to the explosion, and used the explosion itself to get myself back to Tyria. Despite the way it personally benefited me, I am highly offended at the state of the White Mantle's sorry excuse for a magical research department, and against explosions on principle. I'm like, seventy percent spite in volume towards the idiots that blew this up with their stupidity."

Which she has not... relayed precisely what that stupidity was, has she. Hm.

"So they cracked a hole in the outer shell of the Bloodstone," she says, motioning towards where that generally... was, "without fully understanding the implications of the shell being necessary to contain the magic within. The idiots - sorry, White Mantle - then started mining the magically charged, unstable crystals within to leverage them for power in various ways, none of which were reasonable, safe, or, frankly, sane. The whole thing was then charged with - extra magic from a plant based source? Of some kind? Which moved up the time table a lot. A new leader took over, accurately assessed the situation as completely fucked, and set the whole thing up to explode more neatly and efficiently than what would have happened before. And then someone stood at the carefully crafted epicenter and absorbed the majority of the magical blast after it went off. I'm afraid I don't know who or what, and I'm not sure how this wasn't... fatal... for the subject."

There! Knowledge relayed.

"So it was definitely not natural. I'd been afraid of that..."

"If natural disasters of this scale happened very often there wouldn't be much nature left for them to happen in," James reasons.

"You're not wrong."

"The plant based source that powered the explosion was probably the death of the dragon Mordremoth," he explains to Vetareh. "Which... I'm realising you might not know about? Dragons, I mean."

"I know of dragons," she says, a little wryly. "Glint was the famous one, but I hear there was at least one in Cantha, though I don't know its name. ... Makes sense that their deaths would throw out their magic, I suppose, though this Mordremoth must have been quite a big dragon indeed."

"Oh, these are big, yes," he says, looking at Caithe when Vetareh mentions Glint.

"...Glint was the scion and main lieutenant of the dragon Kralkatorrik, before she betrayed her sire and became an ally of the mortal races. She never had more than a fraction of Kralkatorrik's power." She sounds somehow even more contrite when she speaks of Glint.

...he supposes the context may not be that important. Or Caithe just feels embarrassed.

"In any case, we should probably look around this cave for any more clues about what happened. There could be things the Mists didn't care enough about to echo that would still be useful to us." Like whether it was Caudecus that somehow ate all of that magic or... someone else. Something else.

??? no idea what a scion is besides the word's definition, or who this 'Kralkatorrik' is, but apparently this is a sore point. Sure, okay, she can move on and stay professional. It helps that this is a neat magical problem, and she's an expert in those.

"I expect all of their notes are quite incinerated, but..." she touches a stray glowing bit of the ambient magic soup with her scepter critically. "... possibly some echoes were etched into things here. These bloodstones are aligned to preservation, after all, and with this much magic everywhere and them forming into those nasty crystals, it stands to reason that we might be able to piece together more details from the, well. Shards. And possibly get a better look at who or what absorbed that explosion, which I think is the most salient part of the whole puzzle towards future endeavors, frankly."

"Time to collect bloodstone shards, then?" he says, the smile audible in his voice despite the mask. "I love it when someone gives me a mission, I'm so much better at following orders than figuring out what to do."

"Really, Commander?" Caithe wonders pointedly.