"Is– uh, are they sentient?"

"...complicated question, that. Yes and no. They're created by the fayth as embodiment of their dream selves, but get an independent existence once granted to a summoner. And then they're... sorta like animals shaped around the personality of the fayth who made them."

"So. Uh, my main question is do I need to treat them – him, it, she, I don't know what pronoun to use – as though they're a person that I should include in a conversation or something?" Pause. "Not that I'm really sure how they would contribute to a conversation with growls though I guess they could maybe do yes/no."

"Ifrit's a he, and he won't really participate in many conversations, no." She pats Ifrit's face—

—and he jumps into the air, higher than he had any right to be able to, and disappears from view.

Of course he does.

"So, I've been told that you have sphere magic that I can apparently do? You have spheres that– might or might not help me very much, since they do things that might already be covered by my invulnerability – uh, he," he indicates Tidus, "already gave me a few."

"Oh, that's cool, what'd you get?"

"Only managed to use one strength thing before I got to the cap? Apparently I need to go around using my strength to be able to use more, but I have a few more of them too – thanks."

"Yeah, you don't necessarily need to use your strength, just, use whatever magic you have—I guess right now it's just strength."

He nods. "So – I asked uh, him," he points at Tidus again, "– sorry, don't recall all your names, but apparently he doesn't know much about the magic – how does it work? You get pyreflies from fiends and you do something with them to get spheres or you shove them into water for, uh, learning to breathe water for Blitzball apparently?"

"It's complicated. Pyreflies don't come just from fiends, souls are made of pyreflies and they occur naturally in many places. They can actually be found and harnessed anywhere, but it's not everywhere equally easily, and fiends are made of solid pyreflies, so sometimes parts of it that aren't anyone's soul coalesce into spheres."

"– So people's souls are, uh, somehow special pyreflies that don't condense into spheres?"

"There's some theological disagreement. Yevon would say that's a simplification but ultimately correct, whereas some people say that pyreflies merely conjure illusions of the dead by reacting to our thoughts and feelings."

"Well, what about unsent, then? Those stay around just fine, even when they're not dead."

"I have no idea what unsent are, and I'm not really clear on how those steps can fit together like that – I'd expect souls to either not exist, not be pyreflies, or somehow be special pyreflies if they form fiends and don't form spheres – even if just special by forming some structure that doesn't break when fiends die…?"

"Souls totally break, even when regular people die. And unsent are people who died but still have a purpose in life so they stay around and get a body made of pyreflies." And to Wakka: "It could still work if the pyreflies were just reacting really strongly to someone's feelings when they die, strongly enough to just copy their mind."

"Is that fact, that souls totally break, or somehow an explanation of how the whole thing might work without them just continuing on?"

"When someone dies and is sent, or when an unsent disperses, there's more than one pyrefly leaving their body, so if that's their soul it's probably fact."

"… I mean, it could also be magic that they've used, or accumulated depending on how it works? I'd expect to have something from that sphere, and then I have no idea how your souls work but I presumably have one so I'd expect someone with this to, you know, produce whatever from a soul and also whatever from a sphere, unless the spheres and the soul merge?"

"People who do more magic don't tend to have more pyreflies, as far as I know, although very powerful unsent sometimes do, so it's complicated. It really doesn't make any sense to refer to pyrefly, singular, they're more like a continuous quantity that sometimes gets clumped together in pretty lights."

"Right, so – there's more than one blob coming out of a body, making you think the soul breaks? … I know this makes it more convoluted, but is there any particular reason a soul would have to stay together in a single blob?"

"Well, no, but that's what I'm saying, it doesn't look like it stays together, and the pyreflies disperse on death."

"Right," he says. "Are souls definitely made of pyreflies? Do souls definitely exist? I'm not clear on what's actually known here as fact and what's sort of– assumed for various reasons."

"Like I said, Yevon says they probably exist, some people—notably the Al Bhed—say they probably don't, but people do in fact sometimes continue to exist after their body dies, and the fayth are all hundreds of years old."

"Yevon being…?"