"Is sending unsent to the Farplane, uh, an easy thing to do? Could you instead help tether them here so they don't need such strong feelings to stay or something?" Pause. "I honestly don't know if this will help in any way, I'm just wondering if this is in fact a thing you could do, and if so how much preparation it'd require if any."

"If it could be done, I'd be doing it. Well, maybe, if it was very complicated then defeating Sin might still be the highest-leverage option. But no, as far as I know no external force invented yet can keep a dead person here. Or—bring them back."

"And why do you think the things in the Farplane are illusions? I'm not clear on why they can't just be weird manifestations of the spirits or something – are people both there and out as fiends or unsent, is that an easy thing to check…?"

"I don't think they're illusions, or not just illusions at any rate—people don't appear in the Farplane unless they're dead and sent. But elsewhere you can totally get pyreflies to show you illusions of loved ones regardless of how dead they are and the ones you see on the Farplane are pretty similar."

"Oh," he says. "I think I might have an unclear idea of this thing, then, since I'm forgetting bits and apparently misremembering things. What parts of your Plan might actually change now I'm here, and what do you have in your plan for after you die and hopefully become unsent – just work with people from there and hope you have extra information after doing the summoning?"

"Maybe now you'll pay attention," she says in a not-very-low voice.

"Worst-case scenario I just kill Sin again and again, however many times I need to, but I'm planning on gathering as much information as I can about it on the way there and there. The way you change stuff is that you may actually be a way to kill Sin and keep it dead, somehow."

Theo gives Lulu a bit of a look, then says, "So you can still do magic while you're an unsent, or whatever you need to be able to do summonings? And I don't know, it might be of help, but it seems to have pretty drastic limitations when it comes to fiends and this seems like a step up."

"I can still do magic while I'm an unsent, I don't know if I can still summon while I'm an unsent but I'm betting I can, and in any case the Final Summoning is a terrible palliative and I want to find something better."

"Right," says Theo. "I don't suppose you know where any unsent summoners happen to be, since I guess you probably would have checked in with them?"

"As far as I know, all high summoners are in the Farplane, but I plan on checking for them there once we visit."

"Can you do magic in the Farplane? The dead people, I mean."

"Probably not."

"Is 'high summoner' different from a regular summoner?"

"Once a summoner has defeated Sin, they posthumously receive the title of high summoner."

"Do you expect the Final Summoning to be somehow distinct, and you can't do that while unsent even if you can do regular summonings? – I'm wondering why you specified high summoners, that is, and haven't just asked some generic summoner unsent if they can summon things, or have you?"

"I haven't met a single unsent, and people don't tend to announce they're unsent when they are, so I don't know, but it's totally possible the Final Summoning is different in that respect, yes."

He nods. "I feel like I'm somehow not going to have any novel insight here."

"I'd be surprised if you did, I have spent all my life thinking about this and I have all the incidentally-relevant information I'm probably forgetting to tell you."

"Yeah, that's what I mean." Shrug. "I'm not coming up with any sudden applications for my power, either, unless we want to try dropping something on Sin that would otherwise be difficult to procure – like something radioactive, though y'know, that has risks and I doubt it'd help – or it turns out to be mysteriously non-magical and I can just get rid of it without you needing a summoning."

"What's 'radioactive' mean?"

"… Sort of, poisonous from a distance. Causes illness. Would be dangerous for living creatures nearby unless you're all somehow persistently magical against it, which I doubt, and would probably not do anything to Sin because it's sort of slow-acting and also sort of requires that you have cells to destroy."

"...and cells are...?"

"Really small things that make up living creatures that I am acquainted with. A lot bigger than atoms, if you know what those are, and if you don't, uh, do you know about bacteria and other microorganisms?"

"Not really..."