"...okay." Is the reason people don't like Al Bhed the fact that they're mercenaries? But no, he shouldn't judge so quickly. "Work to earn my keep, got it. Does he already have a job for me in mind?"

She blinks in some surprise and visible relief. "Can you swim?"

"I am—was—a blitzball player." He hopes his mind didn't make up a whole sport. He did in fact breathe underwater when he was swimming to the ruins, that much he remembers happening after Sin.

"Oh! Perfect. That's—" But then the guard she sent on his errand returns, one hand holding a warm bowl of some kind of thick porridge and the other a glowing sphere made of... glass? Or something? It looks like solid water if when water became solid it still looked like water.

Rikku offers him the sphere first. "Here's the spell."

Azym accepts the sphere with growing bemusement. He looks at it for a few seconds then back up at Rikku.

"...you forgot how to learn spells," she concludes. "Um. Just—hold the sphere and focus on it and try to—absorb it? It should be obvious but I don't remember how adults teach children how to do it..."

Genre change confirmed, okay. He... looks at the magic sphere some more and tries to oh yes it's actually pretty obvious what he has to do it's this weird mental motion and then the sphere dissolves into misty light that goes into his chest.

He feels immediately better, his whole body warming up like he's under nice thick bed covers. The wind feels much less biting and uncomfortable, and he visibly relaxes.

"Thanks. Do you just, uh, happen to have these lying around?"

"Yeah, it's standard procedure to bring one-use spells like that one on these trips. Not everyone can cast the personal version and anyway it's always better to be prepared." Here's his porridge.

He accepts it and starts eating it with a pleased hum. "Single use? How long does it last?"

"About half a day."

And speaking of day, the sun has risen by enough by now that it's obviously morning even through the thick storm clouds. It's not raining anymore but it could start any minute.

So he did sleep into the rest of the night, that's good to know. He is in fact feeling more awake than he was before.

He eats the porridge quickly so as not to be more of a burden than he needs to be, and when he's done he asks, "So what do you need help with that could use a blitzball player?"

"Right!" She gets the bowl off him and gives it to the same guard from before. "Come over here," she says, walking over to the metal rail on the edge of the deck.

He gets to his feet and follows, gingerly stepping over to the metal part of the floor, expecting it to be super cold. The warming spell holds, though, and it's not really cold at all.

She points at the water, and while normally it would be too dark to see anything, the boat has powerful floodlights pointed down. They reveal large, vast ruins of unfamiliar style—to Azym, at least.

"We've been exploring ruins around this area for a while, but these ones were a suprise. We knew there was a sunken temple somewhere here—it used to be called Baaj, but it was destroyed by Sin twenty years ago and then abandoned—and that's where we found you. But we also thought we could maybe find more, from the ancient machina civilisations of a thousand years ago. And we were right!"

She sounds very giddy and excited, and a lot younger than when she's giving orders to grown men. She can't be much older than Azym if at all.

Azym quietly registers the foreign word—machina, as opposed to machine, and there's definitely connotations there he's missing—and nods in understanding. "You're understaffed and could use an extra pair of hands to explore the ruins."

"Um. Yeah. Pretty much. Brother and I are the only ones here who can breathe underwater and our breathing masks can't handle the pressure down there. We could go back home and grab better ones but then father is going to be very smug about how unprepared we actually were and he'll be right."

Now that's an emotion he can relate to.

"Well, count me in. I'd be happy to help."

"Really? I mean, great! Okay! I was planning on a quick recon mission before we did anything more systematic, you know, just to have an idea of what we're dealing with. Brother was unhappy that I was going alone, especially because there might be fiends there, but..."

"Sounds like fiends are much more common here than in Zanarkand. Uh, than what I remember as Zanarkand."

"...huh. Yeah they're pretty common everywhere that isn't a city or settlement or whatever."

Azym nods pensively. "Well, I don't have anything else to do with my day—oh! Uh, did you guys grab my stuff? At least anything the klikk didn't destroy."

"Oh right! Yeah, we got your shoes and bag and sword, was there anything else?"

"Nah, that was it. Can I have them?"

"Yeah." She goes grab them herself, and when she returns she is also carrying wearable flippers for him as well as flipper-like attachments that look like they can hook onto her boots.

Azym accepts them with a thanks, wraps the belt attached to his bag around his waist, and puts his shoes in it. He won't need them now, apparently, since he'll be using the flippers.

"So, now?"