Zei laughs and shakes his head. "Jokes aside, she's offered to teach me black magic before—that's magic of the destructive kind. The way she explains it is more utilitarian: black magic is made to help you survive and help you protect yourself and your loved ones. It's just a tool, and yes it is inherently destructive as a tool but people like us are... going out on the field to fight. It's easy to feel reasonably strongly about how much you would rather melt that ice elemental than let it freeze you to death."

"I wasn't joking. I am literally a goddess of destruction. Sometimes you need to set someone or something on fire."

"No, but I was, I am very sure Lulu does not actually want to set things on fire as a very terminal value. Despite what she'll seem like when you can actually talk to her.

"Which brings us to a bit of a more practical point: the language we're speaking is seen as rather heretical and I can only speak it because my mother was from the country that does. So we should probably figure that out."

"The... language... is heretical. Joy."

"As I said, I can maintain this effect but I can't expand it to a new language, not without understanding a lot more about how this world's magic works."

"The book I have there," he says, gesturing at his bag by the door, "was my mom's. It's used as a teaching aid, you get some choice sentences and if you pick them carefully you can extrapolate a lot. But I have no idea where I'd find one for Spiran, everyone who isn't Al Bhed just is taught Spiran when growing up and there's an agenda.

"So we could try to go at it the old-fashioned way? With some Al Bhed help. It helps that you look at least half Al Bhed yourself so people might be more forgiving of you not knowing Spiran if we spin it right, but maybe you should just not speak..." Pause. "That's, uh, assuming you're following my party at least for a while."

"You seem to be the ones who're doing something about the giant monster, so it seems reasonable."

"—well, yes, kind of, I should tell you more about that. Short story is that the kind of 'priest' I am is the, uh, solution that Lady Yunalesca told people about. We go on a long pilgrimage, visit the whole continent, and if we survive and don't give up by the time we get to the ruins of Zanarkand we can get the weapon that kills Shiin temporarily and us permanently."

He's doing his best to sound... not exactly neutral about that, but having someone he doesn't need to pretend the whole thing isn't bullshit around is kind of refreshing actually.

"...how about I just stab the fucker and eat its soul."

"Please do!"

"...if you can manage to do that at all and then not be possessed by its spirit."

"It hasn't been a problem before. If we want to complete the pilgrimage and find your weapon as a backup I won't object, I suppose?"

Zei purses his lips, open and shuts his mouth a few times, then goes with, "I'm having trouble prioritising, here. Between what I should be telling you and whether I should be trying to teach you Spiran instead or maybe just aiming you at our local giant monster."

(And about now is when Edmund's shower sphere runs out. The magic water evaporates into wisps of magic—pyreflies—at the same time the sphere does.)

Edmund puts on the clothes he was washing, now dry and unwrinkled. "I certainly don't know how to prioritize the information I don't know. But if I go up against Shiin and lose because I didn't know something, then you lose a potentially valuable resource you could've used more sensibly. And... hmm... maybe we should multi-task, here, and have Oni-Goroshi looking at your book to see if she can get a firm enough grasp of how your magic works to manipulate it? And then we don't worry about teaching me the language until and unless she says she can't make head or tails of it."

"—oh, yes, that'd be great if that worked." He hops off the bed, still naked as a jaybird, and walks over to the door to grab the book from there and hand it to—how do you hand a book over to a sword.

Edmund places her gently on top of it.

"Excelsior," she says drily. "Try not to get stabbed without me."

"Yes, yes."

"I can deal with any stabbing that occurs. —I can deal with anything up to freshly-killed so long as the body is mostly intact, for the record."

"...huh. How dead is freshly-killed? I can recover from most things that leave me conscious enough for mental actions..."

"I think I'd give it a ballpark of up to five minutes? Assuming the person hasn't been Sent by then."

"Wow. That's the first thing I've heard that makes me think that's not how magic works. On - like - a real gut level."

Zei sits back down on the bed he's claimed for himself, gripping the edges with his hands to either side of his thighs and resting his weight on them and on his haunches, swaying back and forth in place again.

"Most summoners—that's the kind of thing I am—specialise in healing magic. At least at first. Our guardians are the ones meant to dish out the hurt, most of the time, except for the thing I should explain about us that lets us hurt Shiin."

"Right. The thing you should explain."

"Mmhm. So, the pilgrimage isn't just a, a spiritual journey, although I'm at least fifty percent sure a big part of it is getting us to meet enough people and see enough destruction that we can work up a right outrage about Shiin. But there's the more practical matters of training ourselves up to being able to do what needs to be done, at the end. Magically, that is.

"There's no good way to describe—actually, I'll just show you. We'll need to go outside, though, if I do it here I'm going to destroy this place and that would not be nice."