—causing a light show, a magic circle to appear on the floor, the clouds to scatter, and a bird-thing to appear from who-knows-where in the sky.

The gag's gone, too.

Theo drops down from the sky, too. Avenging angel style.

"Figured it'd've been you," he says in the common.

One of his two captors points a gun at the aeon and the other at Theo, and both of them shoot large nets to try to contain them.

Oh fuck off that gun can turn to air and so can both the nets. Not instantly but fuck off are they going inconvenience him with that again.

"D'you maybe wanna stop that," suggests Theo to the Al Bhed.

Kaede looks at Theo with some appreciation.

And before the Al Bhed can react, Valefor screams and beats her wings towards them, creating a gust of wind strong enough to throw both of them into the ocean.

The metal door onto the deck opens and three other Al Bhed come out, survey the scene, and quite promptly get back inside the boat.

After glaring at the applicable people, Theo turns to Kaede. "You okay?"

He's still looking at Theo with... well, naked desire, to be honest. "I've had worse." He walks to the edge of the boat and calls to the Al Bhed in the water in their language: "If your thing was bondage threesomes you could've asked!"

Theo raises an eyebrow. Feels slightly inclined to snort but more just wants to punch someone.

"Lulu and the others are worried – we should probably get back."

"Yeah." He dismisses Valefor and starts walking down the ramp from the boat onto the dock (sometimes glancing at Theo)—

—when Lulu and the others arrive. "Oh, praise be to Yevon you're okay," she says, and takes Kaede in an embrace. "Did you hurt them?"

He hugs her back, and says, "Maaaybe a little, but Theo helped."

"They tried putting me in a net."

He lets go of Lulu. "And Valefor, too, but Theo turned the net and the net throwers into air and then was sarcastic at them, it was awesome."

She looks at him for a couple of seconds, then says, "It seems I misestimated you."

Not gonna disagree there.

"Oh, we have to tell Wakka!"

"Oh!"

She points up with her right hand, and a magical red flare shoots up into the sky.

"– Does he know that Kaede was kidnapped yet?"

"Yes—the game's already happening, he told us he'd handle it and we should focus on rescuing Kaede, but he should relax some knowing Kaede's okay."

"Is he delaying the start of the game, then? 'Cause Tidus… aren't you playing?"

"Not this game, I was backup, and then was on the rescue-Kaede wagon when that came up."

Nod. "Do you guys have any sort of– communication devices? Because if there's some magical telepathy or magical far-speaking or something, that'd be nice to know about and it might be useful to fetch in case people try to kidnap Kaede – or any of you – again."

"No telepathy or far-speaking or anything like that, no."

"Unfortunate," he says. "No written communication either? Can you do illusions, especially from a distance, target them at a person?"