"Rytlock?"

"It's okay, Commander. I'll straighten this out. It appears I underestimated the citadel's response," Rytlock tells James, before turning back to the charr. "Hope you enjoy the medal I'm earning you today, soldier. You get to return with Rytlock Brimstone in tow."

    "Without a fight?" second charr asks, with hope.

"Depends on my travel accommodations."

    "You can have my seat!" he says hastily.

        The first charr snorts. "C'mon, Vikon, you gonna groom him too?" she asks.

"Sorry I'll miss out on all the fun, Commander. I'll catch up with you as soon as I'm able." The soldiers make their way to the gate (the one called Vikon sometimes looking over his shoulder nervously), and Rytlock follows.

Vetareh lets out a breath.

"I don't like that they're trying to twist his arm about it," she says, in an undertone. "It's not, the Mists are..." She trails off, then shakes her head. "See? I don't want to talk about it, either."

"He's a high-ranking official of the Black Citadel and he got new magic that could be useful to the military... I can understand why they would expect him to explain more than he has."

"Mm. Stripping him of his rank and arresting him for it feels like it crosses something of a line, to me." Then she shrugs, and looks away. "But I don't know how the charr work, and I suppose it's Rytlock's business."

"It could be argued that it is akin to treason to withhold critical military information, and Rytlock probably knew this was a responsibility entailed by the job going in. Rytlock's business, though, I agree." He shrugs. "So, looks like I'm headed to the Fire Islands, then."

"Exciting." She hums, thoughtfully. "... I think I'd rather swap back to my previous set of spells, my signet based monstrosity was very clever, but I think it's also too... mechanically fragile for my tastes."

"You did do pretty well there," he says, admiringly. "I had never seen a mesmer act like a battering ram before."

"Thank you," she says, a little smugly. "I'm pretty sure some people in Orr would have considered that some form of blasphemy."

In the background, she rips out all of her spells and begins carefully replacing them with her more familiar set.

"I'd join you, but I just haven't had many moments to work on Scruffy 2.0," says Taimi. "Plus, I need to start experimenting on the thing I told you about in the thing about the new thing findings..."

"I... understand?"

    "Help!" calls a suddenly-appearing asura, coming from the gate. "Someone help!"

Vetareh glances towards the asura in alarm. She...

... is absolutely useless right now, in almost every sense of the word. Also defenseless. A large portion of her magical defenses are currently fried on account of replacing her spells. Are they under attack? Does she need to hide and wait for her spells to finish settling? Because that's about all she's going to be able to do right now, if they're under attack.

James draws his staff and readies himself but no one follows the asura through the gate.

"Windall, what happened?" Taimi says, quickly limping over to the asura.

    "The Fire Islands! Our party... lost," he breathes, falling to his knees. "We shouldn't have strayed from the main outposts! Cami held them off as long as she could, but..."

"No!" Taimi gasps, covering her mouth with both hands. "Did she make it?"

    "No. She... They changed, Taimi. The Destroyers there."

"Oh!"

"Changed?" James asks in alarm. "How?"

    "Like Risen... and Mordrem. Unstoppable."

"Risen and Mordrem? What do you mean?"

    "They're not like they were. Different attacks, a different... feel. I don't—"

"It's okay, it's okay." Taimi looks up at a researcher. "Take him away and get him some care."

The researcher nods and two med golems walk over to Windall to carry him.

Vetareh's spells settle in, and she internally sighs in relief. Phew. She's no longer powerless and defenseless. That was nerve wracking. She makes a note to herself to minimize swapping spells, because she's around James, and James is an incorrigible trouble magnet.

"... They've been absorbing the dead dragons' magic. And they don't... necessarily work like we do. Instead of just converting the magical energy they gather into something else, maybe they could use the magic they get. In order to augment their minions. Or at least other dragons' magic, maybe not all types, I don't want to make too many assumptions."

Taimi gasps again to look at Vetareh. "Of course! That's why Mordremoth was able to—the Mordrem, Commander!"

"What about them?"

"The ones who came from the blighting pods! Mordremoth had its minions, the sylvari, right? But it was able to create more, new ones from the dead! That power came from Zhaitan! Killing Zhaitan caused the other dragons to absorb the death spectrum, but we only saw it in Mordremoth because it was active." She takes a deep breath before continuing with the obvious conclusion. "Then we killed Mordremoth, and now Primordus has absorbed some of the death and, and... planty... ness... I think..."

"Can we test that theory? I'll go and get you a sample from these new Destroyers."

"That'd be amazing, Commander! You two be careful, and let me know what you find!"

He turns to look at Vetareh. "I don't want to assume..."

"Aw," says Vetareh, fondly. It's very sweet that he doesn't just assume she's definitely going to come along, but she's definitely going to come along. "There might be variation in how much death and plant are in each minion. I bet if I'm paying attention I might be able to pick up on it, and we can get Taimi a variety of samples so she can figure out if and what the range of variation is."

"That would be so useful!" Taimi exclaims in delight.