"… I don't think I understand how walking down this road and refuting accusations proves they're of good intentions, and I'm also not sure what you mean by 'part of Yevon', since– wasn't that the summoner who explained how to defeat Sin?"

"It happened hundreds of years ago. The records aren't as complete as one might hope."

"Yevon was his name, and it's the name of the organisation and faith that came of his teachings."

"Oh, right. The Crusaders are your holy warriors against your enemy. I should've got that from the name."

"Yes."

"Not holy enough to not use those cursed machina."

"Cursed solely because Sin seems to attack technological places, right? I'm pretty sure someone said it hardly attacked individuals with tech."

"There's a reason machina are banned and Sin attacks us. It's to punish us for our sins" (the two words translate to different concepts) "like using all those machina and being lazy and letting things get outta hand. And these Al Bhed—and now the Crusaders!—are using all these machina and it makes everything worse."

"I. Um." Pause. "I haven't told you much about my world, have I?"

"This has been a somewhat constant complaint of Kaede's," she says, her voice laced with amusement.

"We have kinda a lot of technology? In active use by most of our approximately ten billion people. And we're not plagued by a magical creature named Sin, nor in fact any magical creatures that seem to target places with technology, and we accordingly don't have religion nor cultural understanding that technology is bad? Because, uh, it's not inherently so because we get by fine with it, it's just that you have the evil creature that seems to dislike it?"

This is discomfitting. "Well, maybe it isn't wrong for you to use it, but it sure is wrong for us."

He lets out a short 'hm.'

Paaaause. "I guess that might be possible. But it really just seems like it'd only be bad because Sin targets it? And if Sin were gone then it would accordingly be… fine?"

"Well, why did Sin come in the first place, eh?"

"… Isn't that kinda like saying 'one should not walk high roads, because fiends were sent to punish those who do so'? It appeared because somehow your magic system produced it, presumably?"

"Sin is no fiend."

"Okay, so do you have another generic term for 'magical monster' then or are you just objecting to how it makes it sound like less of a threat?"

"Fiends are dead people's souls stuck in Spira. That's not what Sin is."

"– I'm not sure if I've been told this before. Is this well-known or are you, like, explaining something people don't typically know?"

"Everyone knows that Sin was sent to punish us. It's in the teachings."

"– Okay, but sent by whom, because again, I feel like you could say this about fiends and high roads and I'm not clear why there's a religion around Sin being the arbiter and bringer of destruction for your crimes of using technology."

"It's in the teachings!"

"Sin didn't exist," Kaede looks up from Theo's phone to say, "then it did. Fiends just always existed. Fiends just attack anyone; Sin is cruel. Yevon explained how to kill Sin, and why it appeared, and he was right about one of these two things. He was the only one who had a clue about anything, no one knows how to so much as scratch Sin without using the techniques he taught us. Although of course people haven't given up hope, as this operation by the Crusaders and Al Bhed with machina proves."

"I wonder how he got the information, and I have no idea about the general behavior of fiends – do they always come in the same types, like White Element, do you never get new types or not find new ones, do you get one-offs and if so how rare?"