As they walk, the bubble-path closes in behind them. Saikirei spends a minute struggling with words. Translation magic doesn't help when the problem is that you don't know how to say the thing you mean at all.

"I should tell you, I'm... not a good person," he says. "I didn't know how to say it before. I—the reason I'm down here is—I didn't just want life; I wanted Meraiyu. I wanted... all of this," he waves at the rubble ahead of them, "to be mine. And I was willing to kill a lot of people to get it. I just didn't realize how... big the trouble was going to get, and by the time I did, it was too late to stop it, and I was at the bottom of the ocean surrounded by dead people. And I... I had the things I'd wanted, but I didn't? I was immortal but with a life so thoroughly empty that I would've rather not had it at all if I could've managed that. Tried. Couldn't. And Meraiyu..." He sighs. "Every lump of rock in the whole span of this former continent is part of me. I can feel where everything is, constantly. It's how I knew to spare your house when I built the gardens—it had the only things in this city that had moved in the last century."

"Makes sense," she says, because it only sort of makes sense, but hey, she understands it, and their lives have already been established to work on fairy tale logic.

"So—but in all that time I never wanted anything the way I'd wanted things when I made my grand mistake. And then... you were out there, and I couldn't reach you, couldn't talk to you, couldn't help you at all, and you could have been hurt and I wouldn't have been able to do anything about it, and... I wanted you to be safe... and it, it felt like..." He shakes his head. "I don't know how to say it, but it was—about wanting something the same way that getting trapped here in the first place was—except, outward instead of inward? And then I was free."

"...that's kind of a poetic way for it to work, I guess."

He half-smiles. "You're not wrong."

"I haven't been, like, assuming that you're naturally a paragon of virtue, y'know. You told me you destroyed Meraiyu, and I don't know how much it matters whether it was intentionally or through gross incompetence. But - it happened, like, thousands of years ago, and it's sad, but you have to be able to... I would hope that a thousand years is long enough between tries that it makes sense to give someone a second chance at being good. And - you have been pretty good, since I got here. So there's that."

"I still don't... think of 'good' as a thing that I am."

"I dunno if I know anyone who does."

...he chuckles softly. "I suppose that's fair. I just—I don't want you not knowing what I'm like. It wouldn't feel right, to have a friend who didn't know."

"I mean I probably don't know everything. And you probably don't know lots of important things about me. But we have lots more words now, so I'm sure we'll be able to fix that."

He smiles. "Yeah. It's nice to be able to talk to you."

"Yeah! It was so frustrating trying to do things the slow way - people say I'm decent with words, which is I guess a good thing because I tend to use a lot of them, but I'm not very good at learning them, I don't think."

"You're a lot better at it than I am!"

"Well, you're out of practice!"

"True enough!"

"So," she says, feeling like she should probably take this opportunity to fill in some of this aforementioned possibly relevant information. "I'm Imrainai Tellari, slave of House Tellari, officially a spacer and unofficially a poet and the guardian of Taz and Ves Tellari, although they probably have a new one now. Uh, I was raised on Yahi by House Kendari to be a domestic servant, I got moved to Earth over the course of a little over a decade, I'd been there for almost a year when I accidentally passed through the orbiting gate we were working on and got thrown, uh, here. Those are the basics."

"Saikirei Ulara, former prince of Meraiyu, and I've already told you the story of that. —Is it true that all your fishbone countries were separate planets? I thought that, but I wasn't sure."

"Yep! Well, stars, but most of the stars only have one inhabited planet of any significance."

"Even when Meraiyu was a civilization and not a—" (he gestures ahead of them again) "—this, it never managed to reach as far as another planet. Though we did move ours a little, to make the years line up right. Long before I was born. I told you about that, didn't I, or tried to? When we were discussing time."

"Oh! Right, yeah, that makes sense now. I wouldn't really expect - it's weird that you guys exist, and it'd be weirder if you were an interstellar empire. Or maybe I'm just expecting aliens to be more alien than you are and you really are a proper alien and not a Liar at all, it's hard to say."

"The people of my world look more like you than I do. I got... much taller and stranger, when all the trouble was happening."

"That's weird. But I guess if there are independent Liars on Earth then there could theoretically be independent Liars in other places."

"—Wait, you call yourselves 'Liars'?"

" - well, yeah, that's what they call us."

"...why?"