"Bet you ten-to-one if we ever run into Rikku and ask her about it she will also not recognise it."

"...hm."

"Intriguing, for sure. But that reminds me, what is an Al Bhed and why is Wakka... like that... about them?"

"I am also curious about that."

"The Al Bhed are a group of people who do not follow Yevon's precepts and believe that Sin can be defeated using technology."

"Under Yevon's tenets, they are a direct threat by their very existence, since for as long as they try to use technology like they do we cannot ever really say that we have attained sufficient purity.

"However, my mother was Al Bhed, and my father did kill Sin ten years ago."

"How awkward, I see. ...my condolences."

"Thank you.

"For some more strangeness: my father's only guardian, Auron, presumed to have died when my father did, actually spent the intervening ten years in Azym's Zanarkand, raising him as an adopted child. Azym's Zanarkand is an island, while the real Zanarkand—well, our Zanarkand—is reachable by foot. Azym and everyone he has ever known seems to have been under some sort of strange mental effect that made them uninterested in the possibility that the world outside their island existed."

"Mysteries compound on mysteries. Honestly it seems like he might be more mysterious even than I am, I'm just very odd."

"...is it normal for you to go to places where the rules of magic work completely differently from yours? That was not on my radar as a possibility at all."

"No, not at all. But it sounds as if there are many perplexing questions about Azym that must be answered, whereas my only question is a hearty what the fuck. Which isn't much of a mystery at all."

"Oh. Yeah. That said, Azym's presence does lend some more credence with this other theory that I have that's, like, doubly heretic—"

Lulu shuts her eyes and takes a deep breath.

"—and the two—three, sorry, Oni-Goroshi—of you will probably need more context to know why I think it, but I think Auron is Sin."

"Oh, me too."

"—okay!"

"I don't have a proper theory, though, just—the way he acted weirdly when—uh, Zei didn't mention," he says, turning to look at Emil for that last part, "but Sin destroyed my Zanarkand two days ago, and apparently I hitched a ride on it to here. Also the first place it took me to, I met a girl named Rikku, who happens to be Zei's cousin. Then it attacked the boat I was on and I showed up in Besaid and met Zei. And Auron was acting really weird back in Zanarkand just before."

"...I hope Rikku's okay."

"Further condolences. Sin... hadn't attacked during the time Auron was raising Azym?"

"Oh, no, it had. It was only inactive for about a year after my father defeated it."

"A year."

"How long the previous times Sin was sealed?"

"The very first time, after Lady Yunalesca defeated it, it was gone for ten years. She had warned Bevelle that it would come back, and the official history is that it spent those ten years training summoners to prepare for it, but some... other sources... I put my hands on disagree with that narrative. The second time, four hundred years ago, lasted five years. Then about two hundred and thirty years ago, four years, and a hundred years ago, a bit over two."

"How in my own name is anyone on this god-forsaken continent still alive?!"

"That is a great question. I ask myself that question a lot."