"We are clones. In the sense of being copies with the same memories."

"Our magic lets us absorb things into crystal," he waves his arms, "and duplicate them later. It's common safety procedure to do that during a dangerous landing."

"Except, something happened to the chunk of crystal with us and instead of creating a single copy, it just kept going."

"It has going like this for... a while."

"Any prospects on fixing that?" He glances at Angel, but she just shrugs. 

Yeah, she doesn't have any ideas on that topic.

"Are you stuck on that island?" 

"Yes, we are. We don't know how to stop the crystal from cloning people, just how to slow it down."

"And it likely has been going for quite a while, the current iteration has been going for three generations."

"But the island looks like it has been populated before? A set of clones might have left, deciding to just abandon the crystal instead of tending to the copies."

Remi frowns, "How limited are your resources?"

"Ah, we can keep ourselves fed, alright. One of the signs of populations are crystals spontaneously spitting food, clothing, etc."

"And give our growth rate we don't expect to be a major problem in the foreseeable future. It's just, you know, really disturbing knowing that you are one of a dozen or so identical instances of the same person."

"Is it. I'm not sure I'd feel the same."

Alex frowns. Angel glances at him and they share a silent conversation, and then she looks back and shrugs. "It might end badly for other reasons, though," she admits. 

"Is it just instances of you or do you have companions besides... yourself?" 

"We have Gabe, which is an alt of him." He points at Kenta. "There are more of the two of us than any other cloned people, but half the population is original, for lack of better term."

"And earlier when he said three generations, it meant that there are people with grandchildren around."

"Uh... do you have problems with... inbreeding?"

"Ah, yeah, that's a concern. But we managed to get people from Milliways relatively early on."

"Not the best selection pool given that they were the people that preferred a random island in an alien world."

"Yeah, but it has helped. I also abstained to have children myself, so have Gabe, who is gay."

"Extremely gay."

Remi leans forward in interest, "You're taking immigrants?" 

"They," Tobir waves at Angel, Alex, and Felix, "Said we should move somewhere else, while we wait til we grow up so we can help more." 

"...That might be a good idea." He sighs, "We were evacuating people through Milliways, before everything went wrong. I don't have the connections we used to, though." Or the spirit for it, frankly. 

"We would love to take immigrants."

"Uh, fair warning. Milliways does not like to be used permanently."

"Or at least our experience is that it gets rid of people that tries. Stay for a few days, get as much out of the place as you can, but permanent plans tend to fail."

They both pause.

"Sorry, we just realized that... it must have happened to you."

He laughs. Not a nice laugh. A bleak one, maybe a little hysterical. He covers his face with one hand and breathes for a moment. (Tobir turns to hug him around the neck.)

"It rather did, yes," he agrees after a moment, voice quiet and half-muffled. 

Yeah. Hug. A little of crying.

The two clones will also provide hugs.

He's not usually one for a lot of physical affection, but if there was ever a time, or a group of people... 

(He doesn't deserve it. He's the only one still alive. He must have done something wrong to be the only one left-)

("I'm so sorry," he murmurs a few times, under the tears.)

(Hug. Crying. Miserable nodding.) 

Angel pulls Alex a bit out of the way, motioning Felix and Kenta after them. "Let's give them some space," she murmurs.

Yeah, he will just leave all the ugly crying.

Felix wants to help, but feels he wouldn't be able to.

Yeah, there's not really a way to help in this situation without, say, resurrection. 

Eventually, Remi pulls himself together. He lets out a deep, shaky sigh, and looks over at the door. 

"We should get your aunt, I suppose," he says at length.