"You're still a prickly youth," Oni-Goroshi notes. "Really, I don't see the problem. If they're dead, they're dead."

"Fuck off, Goddess."

"You know as well as I that –"

Ting. Her blade resonates for a moment.

"Stop. There's something in that building."

"...can you be more specific?"

"It is something to do with magic."

"Thanks."

Enter the dilapidated shell of a library! Theopolis had a lot of libraries. Fire loves those, as it turns out.

...but the frame of this one is unusual. Solid granite, and there's a safe-room inside with a door of steel. Emil puts Oni-Goroshi through the hinges; they clank to the ground, and the door falls open.

Behind it is some kind of grand orrery. There's also racks upon racks of circular stones, inscribed with runes.

Oni-Goroshi shhhhings excitedly. "This is so strange. Pick up a rock!"

Emil does so.

There's some kind of slot in the device, perfectly shaped to hold one. He puts it in...

"No, you –"

There's a lurch in his gut, and suddenly he's somewhere else.

"fucking idiot!"

They arrive on the deck of a ship in the middle of the sea.

Said ship is swaying more than ships ought to. Quite a lot more, actually.

The reason it's doing that is, it seems, that it is hanging, by way of a harpoon, onto some sort of monstrous creature akin to a whale, only the top of which Emil can see, and it seems to be swimming much more rapidly than this boat is accustomed to. The tiny iceberg tip of the creature might be enough to nevertheless give Emil the impression that it's many, many times larger than the last enormous creature Emil had to fight.

That's not all, though. There are several people on deck fighting some disgusting little creatures about half as tall as an adult human, using magic quite unlike anything Emil has seen before.

(The disgusting little creatures.)

The people fighting the creatures include:

A black-haired woman wearing a fluffy black dress that not only defies gravity but also any conventional wisdom about the number of belts people are meant to wear, or what they're meant to be attached to, who seems to be casting elemental spells of destruction.

A boy in ceremonial-looking gear, with numerous necklaces on top of his bare torso and a skirt that looks too elaborate and fancy for combat, holding a long metal staff that he seems to be using as a focus for various kinds of supportive spells.

Another boy in a different kind of skirt, this one wielding a sword made of a strange blue crystal that reflects and refracts the sun in a way that looks almost like it's made of water.

A man in a yellow vest top cut away at the stomach and blue and yellow baggy trousers gathered above the ankle whose weapon seems to be a ball of some kind which hits a lot harder than it ought by rights to and which always seems to somehow finds its way back to his hand.

And some sort of tall blue humanoid lion-person wielding a lance taller than he is, managing jumps into the air much higher than seem possible that end in landing his spear bladefirst into the creatures.

The monsters don't seem to take damage in a conventional sense, though; they immediately heal of any cuts or immediate physical harms, but after sustaining enough damage they evaporate into wisps of light that dissipate in the air.

Emil's snap tactical judgments improved, over the course of his exile. This isn't a difficult one.

An ampoule of quicksilver on his belt bubbles vigorously. At superhuman speed, he slashes straight through the nearest monster; it explodes into hellfire (and those same wisps, which dissipate as normal), and he explodes into a very different kind of fire. Blue-green, the same color as the length of sharpened jade that's now slashing even faster at another monster that could've sworn, if it swore, that he was five yards away.

He goes after clusters of enemies, generally. It's not difficult to see why, what with how he can swing his blade and bisect three monsters that then explode and take out three more apiece. Individuals are low priority.

Except the big one. That one... once the disgusting little monsters are less of an issue, he'll have to figure out what to do about that.

While he's fighting, a voice calls out, into the ears of everyone present. Almost all of them hear it in Spiran. One of them hears it in Al Bhed. One hears it in a Ronso dialect which very few people outside of a particular mountain range should know anything about.

"Hello," the voice says, female and disconcertingly calm. "Would anyone mind getting us up to speed on what the fuck is going on?"

"Sin is heading towards Kilika, we're trying to be enough of a distraction that it'll give up, it's currently throwing—"

Several more disgusting little creatures shoot off from the bigger monster's carapace like evil ticks and fly straight at the deck.

"—more Sinspawn at us continuously."

"Convenient," she says opaquely. "Should we know anything about this Sin? Its defenses and resistances, its likelihood to escalate, whether it's the only thing preventing the apocalypse..."

"That was one time!"

(This is not spoken in Spiran, Al Bhed, or any other language that anyone on this vessel might speak, nor is Emil a deity, so it doesn't come through.)

??????

"It is invulnerable to—most things—but is not as far as I know preventing the end of the world. It may be causing it."

(The others seem to be accepting that he's speaking for them and are in any event too busy to worry about it.)

"Invulnerable is as invulnerable does."

Now Emil is standing on the beast's back, jade fire pooling around his feet, boiling away any water that splashes near him. And he funnels the sparks he picked up from the monsters into a particular gem...

and, for the next few seconds, things get odd. He is not literally in five, or twenty-five, or a hundred places at once; that would be silly. And the slashing blades from those phantasms don't do anything. But when the flickering is over, he swings, and swings again, and then thrusts his blade into the intersection of the two slashes, and it has the terrible weight of a hundred blows.

That breaks through the outer magical shielding that covers the surface of the creature and sets in on fire. Fire that is not being put out by the seawater splashing at high speeds and Sin's own resistance to fire, and that fire is rapidly spreading from the point of contact. The creature sways in place a bit more than it was, and then—

—a section of the monster's outer carapace including where Emil is standing and where the fire has spread, about a hundred square metres in area, is ejected out into open sea with what would be enough force to leave a medium-sized crater on land.

Being extraordinarily fast is a not insignificant part of Emil's entire deal. As the carapace launches into the water, he's already off it, flicker-boom creating another pool of jade fire, and he's on the offensive, slashing wildly (though not so existentially), intermittently producing more explosions.

Sin's magical shielding has already regenerated by the time he's doing that, and several of the creatures that boy called "Sinspawn" earlier, which are attached to Sin all over everywhere, are now being shot in Emil's direction like bullets, or perhaps more precisely like guided missiles, one after another tracking Emil's position with uncanny accuracy. Any that aren't destroyed and miss or are deflected open their "wings" and start shooting rays of light at Emil from the air.

At the same time, a much larger Sinspawn shoots up into the sky and then down towards the boat, a towering thing about four times the height of an adult human which looks much meaner than the smaller creatures.

The adds are not only not a problem, they're a gift. Intermittently he lobs a burning missile at one, chaining through their little shooting gallery, and gathers up a few more soulsparks from the fission of corpus and anima.

The big bastard... he'll keep half an eye on the situation on deck. If it looks too dire down there, he may have to distract himself. Right now, he's working.

The situation on deck is actually deteriorating very rapidly. The people there are clearly used to fighting but—not to this much pressure.

There's another creature with them, now, which wasn't there before and didn't come from Sin. It seems to be fighting on their side, though, and doing reasonable if perhaps not sufficient work to even the odds.

Damn it.

They can hold on for one more second, while he takes out another cluster of the flying turret-things, and then he'll have enough soulspark to repeat his flicker-flurry, in the convenient gap in Sin's carapace that he made earlier. Then he'll fuck off back to the ship and start helping them out.

This creature is different from the small ones, looking more like four insects that refuse to respect the square-cube law were grafted together than a single cohesive thing, but they coordinate as if they share a brain. As soon as Emil arrives, it summons a sphere of purple energy in front of itself that starts attracting everyone towards it like gravity's decided to change direction.

"I hate antigrav shit," says one of the fighters, sinking his sword into the deck to try to hold on.

"Me fucking too," says the one who'd been speaking earlier at the same time as he summons a forcefield between his party and the gravity anomaly.

What a coincidence. Emil also hates antigrav shit. He hadn't encountered it before, but some hates are very rapid-onset.

The problem is that, despite appearances, he's not teleporting when he flicker-strikes, just moving very quickly. And moving very quickly requires leverage on himself and on the ground, absent solutions like wings; and he has none of these things at this time.

So he's going to let go of the ground completely, move toward the singularity at his terminal velocity, and stab it.

There is... nothing to stab, unfortunately. It is not physical.

Fortunately (?) it doesn't last very long, anyway, and a few seconds after that (during which more small adds showed up) it winks out, and regular gravity reasserts itself, just in time for one of the insects the big one is made out of to lob a ball of foul-looking green slime directly at Emil.

He finds his feet quickly, though not quite quickly enough to avoid being slimed. Still, he's on fire again within a moment, and if the slime's going to do anything to him it had better do it quickly, before it evaporates and he starts macerating Sinspawn.

It burns—

—but this guy casts some kind of spell on him that completely heals the burn a fraction of a second afterwards.

And now this guy is joining Emil in dishing out the hurt, though he's... noticeably less effective at it. Perhaps unsurprisingly.

Belts dress lady also focuses on it, using elemental magic.

And everyone else focuses on the adds.

Emil is very good at killing monsters. He is especially good at killing monsters that spit large quantities of smaller monsters at him. This is, in a significant sense, his element. He doesn't get tired with the flames running through his blood; when he's injured, it lasts for bare moments; every iota of his being is focused into a killing shape.

Eventually, the monster dies.

And a few seconds after that, the harpoon gun that's connected to the cable attached to Sin snaps off its setting on the boat just as Sin is turning to the side again as it's been doing now and then, its momentum sending it flying straight in Emil's direction.

It never rains but it pours.

He slashes the gun off of the cable and grabs on, trailing behind Sin like some swashbuckling reprobate. If he can get up the rope and onto Sin's back again, he can try harder at killing the damn thing.

Sin promptly ejects the bit of its carapace the harpoon is attached to.

Dammit.

Emil crashes into the ocean at the kind of speed that would traditionally make such an impact extravagantly lethal. His energy shield splinters, as it's meant to in such a circumstance, and he attempts to tread water in the turbulent wake of a kaiju.

He's not actually that good at swimming.

And so the kaiju vanishes into the distance.

The waves calm down once it's off the scene. Emil has swallowed and inhaled an upsetting amount of seawater by that time, but it's not going to kill him any time soon.

He starts swimming towards the ship.

The ship has resumed moving under its own power, and its destination is in fact the direction Sin was going in, so Emil will reach it soon enough. At that point it's starting to get dark, though, so he might want to call their attention somehow lest they fail to see him.

Fire. Lots of bright, teal fire.

(Not the kind that'd burn the ship. Or boil the water, for that matter. It only burns him, and that much only enough to hurt, not do any real harm.)

Yeah that's enough. They divert course the tiny amount they'd need to be able to stop close to him and throw him a line.

He clambers up onto the deck, then, once situated, retches a significant amount of seawater over the side.

"I'm sorry," he says.

His sword flickers with turquoise flame and says "He apologizes. For not being able to kill the apocalypse monster."

The little group from earlier is all present, minus the flying creature that had shown up midfight. "He is completely forgiven!" one of them chirps with cheer so fake it circles back to being genuine. "Happens to the best of us."

"Are you guys... okay?"

"Is the sword talkin'?"

"Yes."

The sword translates quietly as they speak, then responds: "He's fine, physically. Emotionally, he's no worse than he always is."

"Excuse me!"

"No."

They don't seem to know what exactly to make of all of this and again it seems like talking falls to the one guy. "Are you hungry? We have food downstairs in the cabin, and then we could talk? You guys are the weirdest thing that's happened recently—uh, positively so, just, unexpected—and I don't know if you know more about how or why you're here than we do? Oh, I'm Zei, by the way, and these are Lulu," belt dress lady, "Wakka," redhead, "Azym," black-haired guy, "and Kimahri," lion dude.

"I am Oni-Goroshi, Demon-Slayer, and this is my wielder, Emilianus. You may call him Emil."

"I'd take some food," Emil says. (He doesn't feel hungry, but he rarely does, these days, and that doesn't mean he can just not eat.)

"Oh, titles, goodness. I suppose I'm Lord Summoner Zei? ...I don't like using the title. And these are my guardians. Except for Azym, he's just some guy." He starts to lead the way down to the cabin.

"Excuse you, I'm—"

Pause. "Just some guy, yeah."

Lulu squints at him.

"Let's not even get into titles."

"They haven't even gotten around to working out what yours should be yet."

"I didn't care for any of the candidates. I'm with Azym, in the 'some guy' corner."

"Somehow I think you're not telling the truth."

"—wow I've never seen her jump into humour so fast."

"Hm."

And presently they are in one of the rooms, a little bit cramped due to the number of people, but Kimahri stays outside standing guard.

And they have food. Travel food, nothing luxurious, but food: some nuts and dried fruit, hard bread, juice. "Thank you for the help in the fight earlier," Zei says. "It would've gone... a lot worse without it."

Emil takes some bread and some juice. "...you're welcome, I guess. I still wish I could've done more."

"You think you coulda killed it? Killed Sin? On your own?"

"It's... what I am. I was made to destroy things like that. But it had me on the back foot most of the time, and it didn't seem like I exhausted its supply of cheap tricks. So maybe I couldn't. Yet."

He shakes his head. "That ain't gonna work. It'll come back. Not until we atone for our sins and live the right way. It's the teachings."

At least one person looks very uncomfortable with that assertion.

If anyone else is, they're better at hiding this discomfort. "Even if we stop it only for a while, that'd still be worth it. It's why we're here. And frankly, Wakka, if Emil of no titles kills Sin even for a year I don't actually give a shit that the teachings say only summoners are meant to be able to do it."

"...I s'pose."

This is not by any means the most inconvenient reaction someone has had to the idea of Emil eating a major figure of their religion! He is not going to push it!

...hey.

"It's called Sin?" he clarifies. "I think you said before, but..."

"Yeah?"

"Second god I've met by the name. The other one is... a friend, I guess. Weird coincidence."

"Your... translation magic is interesting. Sin is not a 'god', I think. It's a monster, and according to the teachings it's a punishment."

"Mm. It's close enough to the gods I know that I could... use the same techniques against it, that I've used against them. But I understand if no one's inclined to worship it."

"What would that even do?"

"There do exist people who believe that praying to Sin, rather than Yevon, is what will protect them."

"Crazy stuff. Worse'n Al Bhed."

"...you know what I mean."

Not touching whatever that was.

"That's a familiar story," he says instead.

"People will do anything to make sure the tiger gets their neighbor instead of them," Oni-Goroshi says flatly. "What is to be done about this Sin? You were fighting it when we arrived; did you have a plan?"

"How... much background should I assume you have about everything?"

"I have no reason to believe I am from this planet. We seem to both be human, which is more than nothing, but..."

"Another planet. Alright. Sure. Uh. Do you want the version with history or just the practicalities...?"

"I vote version with history."

"That sounds better to me, too."

Zei looks at Wakka.

"...oh, alright, alright," he grumbles, grabbing one fruit as he stands up. "Need to check on the boys anyway," he continues, walking off.

Azym lifts an eyebrow at Zei once Wakka's shut the door behind himself.

"He knows I'm going to get uncomfortably close if not outright cross into heretical stuff and we've reached an understanding about how we deal with our theological disagreements and that understanding includes him leaving when I'm going to get into them combined with me being less obnoxious about getting into them than when I was a kid."

"And you're... fine with it?" Azym asks Lulu.

"My understanding with Zei is not the same as Wakka's."

Such are the perils of faith, yes.

"I'm listening."

"Alright, so... I guess I'll start from the beginning.

"A thousand years ago, there was a great war between the two most powerful nations in the world, Zanarkand and Bevelle. They used terrible weapons, and developed even worse ones, machines that could take lives like nothing. So the story goes. I'm going to be vague, because there is very little all sources agree on, and I'll leave the speculation for the end. Something sources definitely don't agree on is why the war was happening in the first place.

"This war escalated, until eventually it got to the point where the weapons being built were risking destroying the world itself. Then Sin appeared and destroyed Zanarkand. The princess of Zanarkand, who survived this somehow, travelled all the way to Bevelle, and told them that Sin was our punishment for letting things get that far, but it's not clear who exactly is doing the punishing, and we can all probably agree that the people responsible for all of that are certainly no longer the ones being punished."

"Certainly."

Not that apocalypse monsters are a justifiable response to basically anything anyway.

"The person whose teachings that was from, according to Lady Yunalesca, was a man named Yu Yevon. No one really knows who he was. Some sources say he was the leader of Zanarkand, Lady Yunalesca's father; others say he was a powerful summoner, and Sin was summoned by him, but those are definitely heretical; others still say that he was merely a wise man, and Lady Yunalesca his messenger. It doesn't matter. Nowadays, 'Yevon' is his philosophy of diligence, agape, hard work, self-restraint, the joy in small things.

"Yevon is actually the teachings of summoning. You both might've seen Valefor? The winged creature who was fighting on our side? She is an aeon, one of the powerful beings I can summon to aid in my fight against Sin.

"Lady Yunalesca said that, once we had atoned for the sins we had committed, practised Yevon's teachings and lived it as a society and attained purity, we would be rid of Sin. Until then, it can only be temporarily defeated, and only by summoners."

"Eugh."

"Societal purity is a terrible idea," his sword contributes. "Almost universally. I really cannot recommend against it enough."

"Hmm."

Azym looks at Zei out of the corners of his eyes.

"Summoners go on a pilgrimage. We stop at as many temples of Yevon as we can, and we commune with the fayth—people who sacrificed their lives to keep their souls encased in stone and be used as aeons in the fight against Sin. We train, and we study, and we commune with as many fayth as we can and thus gain the ability to summon as many aeons as we can. This pilgrimage ends in the ruins of Zanarkand, where summoners learn—somehow—how to summon the Final Aeon. Unlike all other aeons, those are individual to each summoner, no two Final Aeons have been alike. And then we summon it in battle with Sin, and it and Sin and typically a very large area of land surrounding us are destroyed together."

"—that sounds a lot less survivable than you made it sound when you explained that to me."

He shrugs.

"I would like it on the record that I dislike this plan."

"I, also, dislike this plan." He looks at Lulu, then at Emil again. "Time for some heresies.

"Lady Yunalesca was the first summoner to defeat Sin, a thousand years ago. Since then, four other summoners succeeded. Four. In one thousand years. My father was the latest, ten years ago.

"I think I can do better than that. I think five is not a very large number of people, I think people haven't tried enough things, I think the fact that no one knows what the fuck happens in Zanarkand to give people their Final Aeon," another glance at Lulu, then back, "is insane. I cannot operate under this informational environment. But I am not planning on summoning the Final Aeon and pitting my life against Sin's. This happened five times, and failed five times, and I simply do not believe that the only way to get rid of Sin is to make sure literally everyone is pure. Sin is a monster. Sin is a creature. There was a point in Spira's past before it existed, and humanity was not pure then, and it began existing, and it makes no sense for the requisite criteria for it to stop existing to be the purity of heart of all peoples.

"And if it is, I'll find another way anyway. It is, quite simply, not that bad to be impure. There is no sin anyone could ever commit that would justify Sin, and we do not deserve Sin, and so I will make sure we are rid of Sin even if we are still 'not pure'."

"I'm with you on all points. It... might be time to tell you why I think I might be such a game-changer, here?"

"Please do, I'm all for game changers, let's cheat our way to the end."

"The reason I think Sin is a god – or close enough – is that I got the distinct impression of it as something I could eat. I've killed gods before, about a dozen of them. Then I consumed their essence, made it a part of myself. And they don't come back from that."

"I'm sorry, with knife and fork or..."

"I'm a hell of a knife," Oni-Goroshi deadpans.

"For... complicated reasons... my soul is mostly empty. That means I can suck gods' essence in there, and what's left of my soul will... digest them, in a way. Process out what's them and make it into power for me."

"That... is not how souls work. ...uh, here. You seem to be from sufficiently far away that I'm not sure what to think. Your magic is... not pyreflies?"

"I've never heard of them, so if they're part of my magic I know less about myself than I thought. My magic is –"

He points to a thumbnail-sized gemstone stitched into his right glove, then traces along a thread to another, then another, then finally a fourth. "Virtue Gems. Each one lets me do something impossible, or enhances another one in the same chain. I've got thirty-six of them, in five circuits. Add that to the ambient magic I've absorbed to enhance my body and mind, plus my enchanted gear, plus all of those god-sparks, and that's me."

"You'd probably know it if you used pyreflies for magic. Those wisps of light that faded from dying fiends earlier?"

"No, not familiar. I saw them but assumed it was something about Sinspawn."

"So if you can eat gods how come you didn't eat Sin?"

"They have to be dead first, or close enough. It only keeps them from coming back. And I didn't get Sin, this time. But I'm also probably the most experienced god-killer in the room."

"Ahem."

"Oni-Goroshi excepted."

"Do you have a way to find Sin and, uh, make sure it stays still?"

"No, not yet. This is all just... noting that the problem might have a solution, so far."

"No, no, I'm with you. It's just that, and this is an entirely selfless proposition that has nothing to do with my wanting to stick around the two greatest mysteries of the century, then you sticking with me for the time being might be our best idea."

"Two?"

He hikes a thumb in Azym's direction.

"Him?"

"Oh yes you don't know the half of it."

"That was already the plan! Also I'm deathly curious now but probably don't have enough context to even understand why Azym would be so mysterious."

"You do, actually! Remember how Zanarkand was destroyed by a monster a thousand years ago? Well, this guy showed up back in Besaid, the place we're coming from, claiming that he is from a country called Zanarkand."

"...Sin's toxin—"

"Does not have any recorded cases of entirely made up life memories as exposure symptoms! And they definitely don't have any recorded cases of mysterious unknown technology as exposure symptoms."

—oh, that's his cue, okay. He reaches into a bottomless bag attached to his waist to grab a little pocket doodad with a flat screen made of some glass-like material.

"...he does look Al Bhed..."

"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."

"Sin does not attack every day. It appears whenever we stray too far from Yevon's path, when people build machines too powerful."

"Except when it just shows up randomly."

"Except then."

"And when anyone decides to just try to sail away from the main continent to see if there are any other landmasses on the planet. Which is not actually forbidden by Yevon at all, Sin just apparently hates it for some reason."

"Hmm."

"Sin's goal is not total annihilation of all life on Spira but we don't know what it is. It might in fact be trying to punish development or something for some reason. Mostly."

"...I'll say that it is surprising, if that's how it behaves, that the Al Bhed are still alive. Aren't they all about technology in defiance of Sin? Shouldn't it be stopping by every other week to crush their dreams?"

"For all I know, it is. It's not like anyone knows where their super secret base is, if they have one. Maybe they get away with being too diffuse to target as a group? I'm not sure. It's something I've meant to ask my uncle, if I ever met him."

"Your uncle?"

"My mother's brother, Cid. He is—or was, last I heard—the leader of the Al Bhed."

"I'm sorry does Spira just not have any fictional stories. Could you possibly be more protagonist-coded."

"I... don't have a counter to that."

"...if I unhinge my view of reality a little it does rather seem like you're our protagonist, yes. You don't have any suspiciously shaped birthmarks, do you?"

This prospect cheers Emil significantly. He did not like being the protagonist of his own story; being an implausible side character sounds much better suited.

"...birthmarks? I don't think I have any—is that a—why?"

"In the stories they're a sign of some grand destiny. A crown for a great ruler is particularly popular, or a star for a mage. Once saw a strawberry."