He spares a moment to be grateful for the unnecessarily showy technique he'd been performing just a second earlier, for having thrown him up and out of the water, and another moment to be grateful for the slowly falling metal beam he's holding onto. Tōkan is not sure he's going to survive the night, but he has a much better chance of doing that if he's not in the over thirty thousand tonnes of water as it stops being able to hold its weight.

One final moment to be grateful for his own upper body strength as he pulls himself up onto said falling beam, and he's running.

In retrospect it is perhaps not the best idea for him to run along an unstable metal beam that used to hold the half-ceiling of the blitzball stadium as it collapses, he thinks to himself as he jumps off it and onto a piece of said half-ceiling with a desperate dash. He is really really not sure he'll find a way... down...

No use worrying about it. He runs, away from the giant whatever-it-is that's inside the water bubble, and keeps his eyes peeled for any further structures he can jump onto as the ceiling slowly curves down into becoming a wall.

He really, really should have thought this through a little bit better.

On the other hand, the antigrav effect is now here, too, and there are pieces of debris lazily floating up from where they used to be pieces of the street leading out of the stadium. Once again, no use worrying about it, and he jumps.

(Of course, the antigrav effect also affects him and so he feels much more courageous about such jumps, and there's a small—well, okay, not that small—part of him that's thrilled by this. Antigrav obstacle runs should have been invented as a sport, this is really cool.)

Somehow, by some miracle, he manages to find enough handholds and floating landings that he makes his way to ground level, and despite his excitement he's happy to be on firm ground again. Now all he has to do is keep running and...

...is... is that...

...what the fuck is Auron doing here?

"I see you're still alive, boy," says the man, who'd just been... standing there... leaning against a half-destroyed statue, ignoring the panicked people running past him. Almost like he'd been waiting for Tōkan.

"What the fuck," Tōkan breathes, stopping his mad dash to stare at the man and...

...well, stopping is not great because even though he's still rather high adrenaline this gives him time to notice the burn in his muscles and his lungs from the unfamiliar exercise.

"This way," says Auron, ignoring the question and starting to walk... towards the ruins of the stadium.

"Are you fucking mad? I'm not going after the monster."

Auron grabs a one-handed sword out of a hidden bag inside his coat. Its blade is made of some sort of crystal, light blue coloured and shimmering in the twilight of the emergency lights being activated all over the place and the glare of the electronic billboards. "Take this," he says, pressing the sword onto Tōkan and letting go of it so that the boy has no choice but to accept it. "And follow me."

"I... I've never used a—why do you have a sword—" But too late, Auron is already walking, and Tōkan feels a moment of spite trying to tug him towards the... probably safer direction of away from the monster.

On the other hand, Auron is acting mightily suspicious and goddamnit this is the most exciting thing that's happened to him in his life and he might die anyway even if he flees so he might as well die while trying to figure out what the hell is happening.

He runs after the red-coated man.

He continues walking, almost leisurely. At this point, most of the people who would flee have fled, and whatever tragedy the thirty thousand tonnes of falling water from the broken blitzball stadium would cause has already happened. He doesn't go directly into the stadium itself, but rather takes a detour around it, vaulting over debris with agility that belies his age.

Or apparent age, anyway, it's not like Tōkan really knows how old Auron is.

He follows, eyes darting between his environment for safety and the floating monster for curiosity. It's stopped actively shooting, now, and seems to just be letting its passive antigrav effect completely wreck the surrounding city.

"You're keeping up," Auron observes with a disdainful tone that suggests he expected to be disappointed. Which is not the same as being positively surprised, of course. He's very good at that tone. "Maybe you won't die after all."

"Going after the kaiju means I won't die? You realise that makes no sense."

"I won't kill you. It would defeat the point."

"...how does that engage with literally anything I said."

Rather than replying, Auron uses a series of increasingly tall pieces of destruction to jump up to a broken elevated highway. Or at least it used to be elevated, now it's basically a ramp.

Tōkan is fit enough to easily follow him.

No, that's a lie, he's fit enough to be able to follow Auron at all, but it's not easy, and by the time they reach the top of the highway-ramp as it connects to a more intact part of itself he's panting heavily. Auron, the bastard, seems completely unaffected by the exertion.

Auron offers no help, but the weakened gravity should be enough for Tōkan to be able to get up onto the actual highway on his own.

If not, well, Auron was wrong about the boy, and it's better to find out earlier rather than later.

He does in fact succeed, but when he gets there he leans forward onto his knees to breathe and says, "You bastard, how the hell are you even—" He pauses.

Something... changed.

Something's different.

Oh. It's quiet. The sounds of destruction and screaming and sirens have stopped. He looks around and—

—everything's stopped. Everyone, the people running in the distance, frozen in mid-air as they flee. Auron himself, frozen, his coat paralysed in between the seconds.

And between him and Auron is... a small boy. Can't be older than twelve, by his height, wearing a sleeveless hooded robe of some kind that goes from a purple hood covering his head and obscuring most of his face down to a black frayed skirt that doesn't quite reach his bare feet.

"It begins," he says.

Tōkan sloooowly raises a very sceptical eyebrow. "Very ominous. Am I the protagonist?"

The apparition doesn't smile. He merely shakes his head, then says, "Don't be scared."

And then he's gone, and time is passing again.

He staggers in place at the sudden reassertion of normality and Auron is still walking, so he rushes ahead to follow.

Auron stops in the middle of the highway and looks in the direction of the kaiju. The place they find themselves at has an especially clear view of it, no buildings blocking the sight, but it still looks like just a giant bubble of water with some ill-defined black-grey silhouette in it.

"Sin," he says, once Tōkan catches up. "We called it Sin."

"Who's 'we'? Wait, you were already familiar with the—" It's suddenly hitting Tōkan that he met Auron when he was very small and never once thought to question where Auron came from. No one else knew him, but Tōkan kind of just... assumed... he was from the other side of the island or some such.

And the confusion at not having thought about this earlier reemerges. Why... didn't he...?

The creature starts slowly moving—and it's very definitely towards them.

"It's almost time."

"...wait, are we actually—is it actually—coming here—dude, have you considered dropping the mysterious mentor style?"

"You'll understand someday why I did this. Why I came here." He turns around and looks directly at Tōkan, for the first time tonight. "Why I'm here."

"Why—do you mean—" The water sphere is now fully visible, haloing Auron from behind, and something clicks in Tōkan's head. "Are—Auron, are you the giant monster, somehow—?"

The glasses and the high neck of his coat make it hard to see the small satisfied smile, but Tōkan has been around Auron for long enough to recognise those small tells. "You'll do fine. Hold onto that sword. You'll figure it out eventually."

Okay uh. Actually. Maybe. It was a terrible idea following Auron all the way here? Maybe Tōkan should, uh. Run?

But he can't. He can't, because now the monster is close enough that he can directly feel himself dragged by its gravity and worse of all he can feel it getting stronger.

He won't, actually, be able to run.

So he stands there, frozen, sword in hand, watching as the whatever-it-is—as Sin approaches, feeling his weight slowly get reduced to zero. And then it's negative, and he's being actively drawn towards the creature.

Auron seems immune to the effect, and just watches this happen, following the boy with his gaze, the small satisfied smile never leaving his face.

And the last thing Tōkan says is "Motherfucker" before he gets engulfed by the water and loses consciousness.

He wakes up, and honestly he had not been expecting to. Giant monster who has some weird relationship with his mentor slash father figure slash actual adoptive father shows up and destroys his country, but not before he's eaten by it. Also he noticed himself thinking about a bunch of things he hadn't thought of before that he really really would've expected of himself.

Zanarkand is nice and all but it's also terribly boring and when the most exciting thing he can do is be a blitzball player he really really really would've expected his younger self to have been at all curious about... anywhere that isn't Zanarkand.

Like here, probably. He thinks he's somewhere that isn't Zanarkand, and given that this somewhere seems to be "hanging onto the exposed parts of the partially submerged ruins of something with water in all directions" he should probably be focusing more on survival than figuring out what kind of freaky mental magic effect must have been keeping his whole damn country from wanting to leave its tiny tiny island.

Also, his sword is there. Convenient. He places it in a pocket that's bigger on the inside then tries to figure out what he should... do... to stay alive.

(These ruins are not Zanarkand. He did not get thrown into the future, he would recognise the architectural style.)

Half submerged ruins, in the middle of the night, the sky covered by dark menacing clouds that make it very hard to see. He pulls himself onto the landing provided by the little bit of stone that's not submerged and looks around.

It really is very hard to see anything but another convenient (?) feature of his environment might be the clouds. If this is a lightning storm...

It is! That's thunder, and it illuminates the area well enough that he manages to spot the main building of wherever he is, half of it being actually not submerged! And maybe he could use what little moonlight is filtered through the clouds to navigate but this is probably a reasonable situation in which to use the little flashlight attached to the hips of his shorts. Its battery is probably going to be something he'll want to save, but it should last long enough.

Also? It's fucking cold. Not having Zanarkand's constant weather and temperature control around sure makes being permanently shirtless somewhat more of a problem. A problem he never thought about before because, again, somehow he never thought of leaving Zanarkand.

(Would wearing a shirt be worse, if it's wet and cold and would stay wet and might risk hypothermia? He doesn't know.)

With the flashlight on, he dives into the water and starts swimming towards the main building. The water is also freezing, but the movement soon warms him up, and he practised underwater breathing so he doesn't need to come up for air and deal with the thermic shock. He can just stay submerged until he gets close enough to his destination. It's not the shortest of swims, but he's literally a high performing player of a sport that's played entirely underwater. This is very much something he's trained all his life for.

Eventually he gets to the building and swims back to the surface to better look for entrances. His flashlight is powerful enough that from this distance it illuminates most of it, and by following the architectural cues from the way it's shaped he has a guess for where the main entrance should be. And indeed, he dives back into the water and after a couple of false starts due to debris in his way finds the entrance. He swims through it and, as luck would have it, it seems like the "ground floor" of whatever this building used to be is elevated, with a flight of stairs leading from said entrance up and out of the water.

The mostly destroyed stairs are still sufficiently whole to lead him to the building's main chamber, which... is nothing like anything he's ever seen before. A circular room, its ceiling three stories up. The concept of stories makes sense here because it seems like there are side rooms with further stairs that lead up to more side rooms, all of them hanging over and looking into this open central chamber. The ceiling is not intact, but it's intact enough that the very center of the room has been completely spared from the rain.

It's a good place for a fire, if he can find the materials for it. Convenient, again. He hopes reality will continue to be convenient for him like that.

But before anything, he grabs shoes from within his bigger-on-the-inside bag, because walking barefoot around here is just begging to get him to cut himself on something and he does not want to deal with an actual wound in addition to being stranded in the middle of nowhere. He tries to shake his feet dry as well as he can, and wonders if the risk of hypothermia from wearing his sodden shorts is higher than the risk of tripping and falling naked onto sharp rocks as he puts his shoes on.

...also, while he's considering risks that Zanarkand would usually have protected him from, he grabs the sword again. This place might have fiends and even if he doesn't know how to use a sword it's better to have it than not. He'd rather have a gun but you can't win them all. This also decides the matter of the shorts—he does not want to be any more defenceless than he needs to be.

He really, really should've packed a shirt or something into his bag.

Tōkan walks through one of the side doors at random and starts exploring. His flashlight is definitely needed, here, as the moonlight has no way of getting to these side hallways and spiral stairs going up around the cylindrical building. He explores them methodically, trying to look for flint or maybe plants or old wooden furniture that isn't wet.

Except he's not sure what flint looks like or, more precisely, what properties a rock has to have to work as flint. He grabs some likely candidates, as well as some old and dried plants that he finds in vases. He doesn't grab all of them, mindful of any future people who might find themselves here somehow, and when he finds an old wooden dresser that he takes apart with his sword he only grabs half of the total wood there.

When he returns to the main room, still unmolested by any fiends, he starts trying to set a fire up: wood, thankfully dry, and the even drier leaves and branches that used to be decoration. Then he lays out every rock he found and starts testing them for ability to generate a spark.

His life turns out convenient again, and he gets a fire.

Tomorrow he will need to figure out how to feed himself. He has no idea how he'll do that but it's very unlikely he'll be able to do it tonight, while it's dark and stormy and cold and he can't properly see very far and gauge his options. And also he's just fucking exhausted, if his kaiju trip counted as sleep his body isn't acting like it and he'll have more success in the morning at quite literally anything he might think of trying.

So he strips naked, stretches his clothes out on the floor to dry, and then stretches himself out on the floor to dry. The sword is close to his hand in case he needs it, but he's starting to relax with the warmth from the fire chasing away his chills and worries.

He sleeps.

Tōkan doesn't sleep for very long.

He'll blame his failure to think about how the fire was definitely going to attract a fiend on the mental exhaustion. In hindsight, if anything was going to do it, it was that.

But he will only think about that later. What he thinks about now is that something woke him up, and he doesn't know what it was or if it was just a nightmare and an overactive imagination, but he reaches for the sword hilt a couple of inches away from his hand and tries to quietly look around for whatever it is his instincts are screaming at him about.

Then he rolls to his feet just in time to avoid being impaled by a fiend whose legs are blades. He doesn't have a lot of time to really pay attention to any other details of the fiend's anatomy, however, as it immediately leaps for him and he has to dodge again. He had ever seen a fiend before, Zanarkand used to make quite the spectacle when the occasional one appeared on its shores, but fighting one is entirely new and he is, uh, naked in more ways than one. Probably buying time and tiring the creature out is his best bet.

Fiend

...or not. He's not sure whether fiends actually get tired, and maybe he should be fighting? Maybe Auron knew something here.

Okay. Let's think about this. Uh, think about this while still dodging the fiend and trying not to get skewered.

A plan starts to form in his head. Or maybe this is best described as him noticing a pattern. He can run faster than the creature, despite its four limbs; it's sort of always teetering nearly off-balance, and it never really stops moving, as if it needs its momentum to stay up. However, its leaps are powerful enough to make up for it, and the only real way Tōkan has of avoiding a direct collision when the creature does that is by dodging, changing directions at the last second so it flies past him. And it's dextrous enough to be able to quickly regain its footing and go back on the offensive.

But not that quickly. Each time it leaps, it needs a few seconds to find its feet and resume chase.

Which looks like an opportunity.

He makes a sharp turn towards his clothes, lying on the floor next to the fire, and after he grabs them he immediately veers to the left and turns around to watch as the fiend flies past him. He stops running for a second to catch his breath, watching it, then says, "Come oooon, bet ya can't catch me!"

Sure. Taunting the monster is strategy, too.

It leaps, again, and this time Tōkan moves only a fraction of a second before predicted impact, but he leaves the clothes he'd been holding behind, in the air where the fiend will definitely collide with it and get itself into a tangled mess.

And it works. The momentum and the weird lack of coordination of the thing plus the shorts that are now on its face and entangled with its limbs give Tōkan enough of an opening to strike. He jumps with a "Hyaaaa!", holding the hilt of the sword with both hands, and strikes down onto the fiend.

(Rest in peace his shorts. There is no way they are surviving this encounter. It's a good thing his bigger-on-the-inside bag is not attached to them.)

The creature staggers back, and Tōkan presses the offensive, slashing this way and that, making sure to never allow it to regain its balance. It tries to block and slash at him, but he's finding in himself an intuition on how to avoid its parries and dodge its strikes.

Not all of them. He gets cut, a couple of times, shallow lines on one of his thighs and the side of his stomach, but he's definitely got the upper hand for now.

And then there's a fucking explosion somewhere behind him, and he jumps out of the way in surprise.

What now?

Now it seems like five people have blown through one of the walls of the building. All of them are wearing goggles or masks covering their eyes, as well as body suits that seem suitable for deep-sea diving.

Also, four of them have guns.

The girl in the lead—and the only one not holding any guns—examines the situation, and her eyes quickly lock onto the fiend that's trying to recover from Tōkan's assault. With a practised, fluid motion, she grabs two small disc-shaped devices from her belt and launches them in the direction of the fiend.

It tries to dodge, but the little discs seem to have their own propellers or, or something, and they course-correct mid-trajectory and attach themselves onto the creature.

And boom. The two localised (but powerful) explosions are enough to finish the fiend off, and it dissolves into flying wisps of light as it loses its ability to keep coherence.

"Shit," breathes Tōkan, letting himself lean against a large boulder he ended up next to. "Shit," he repeats, "thank you."

The four men spread around the room while the girl walks over to Tōkan, removing her goggles on the way. "You're welcome," she says simply. She stops a couple of feet away from Tōkan and folds her arms, examining him for a second before looking around at the mess.

Tōkan looks up again, still leaning against the boulder and holding onto his sword, and grins. "I would've probably managed, but," and he winces as he looks down at his freely-bleeding wounds. "Ow." He looks up at the girl again and says, "Where are my manners. I'm Tōkan."

"Nice to meet you, Tōkan. And sorry about this," she says, as she grabs a gun-like thing from within a metal backpack-like thing attached to her back. She doesn't give him time to react before she shoots, two small sticky things that remain attached to the gun by long, thin wires.

And as he realises he's about to be tased into unconsciousness he wonders how the hell his life got so weird.

When Tōkan wakes up again, the sky is still dark, but there are enough clouds that it could well be morning and he wouldn't be able to tell.

Also, his hands are bound behind his back and his feet are also bound together. He looks down at his wounds, or the place where they used to be, and sees only thin reddened skin there. These people probably gave him a Potion while he was unconscious, so they're... probably... not all that bad? He feels like knocking him unconscious was entirely unnecessary, though.

He seems to be... on a boat of some kind. The deck under him is hard metal, but his captors were kind enough to place a blanket between his bare skin and it. He looks up again, and sees two people holding guns watching him. The full-body suits are still present so he's not sure they're two of the people who found him but he thinks so.

Boat

One of them says something into a radio, and unless Tōkan hit his head really hard when he got tased he thinks that's a different language.

It had never occurred to him before that other languages might exist.

After a few seconds of a staring contest between the boy and his captors, a door into the ship proper opens and the girl from before walks out of it. She says something to the two men, and they lower their guns and relax their posture. Probably a commanding officer of some kind, even though she's visibly younger than they are.

She walks over to Tōkan and crouches down so she's eye level with him. "Sorry about that."

Also, now that she's up close, he can see that her pupils are shaped like spirals rather than the normal circular shape Tōkan is used to.

"Uh, yeah, all's forgiven, I guess, not that I have much choice here. Hey quick question what the fuck."

She covers her mouth to stifle a giggle and says, "Well, would you have just meekly followed a bunch of Al Bhed?"

"...I'm assuming Al Bhed is whatever... group of people you are? Some paramilitary organisation?"

Or maybe an ethnicity? A species? The spiral pupils are weird.

—now that's surprising.

He's not heedless of her surprise, but he continues: "And yeah, of course I would have. I didn't have much choice, did I? I was stranded in the middle of nowhere and didn't much have a plan for what to do next. Maybe see if I could figure out spearfishing before I died of hunger."

"...you know what, okay." She takes out a knife—

Tōkan raises an eyebrow.

"I deserve that," she admits, and uses the knife to cut Tōkan's restraints. "I'm Rikku."

He rubs his wrists a bit and flexes his fingers to restore proper blood flow. "And I'm Tōkan," he repeats. "So, uh... you'd have expected anyone who saw a bunch of, uh, Al Bhed to prefer to fight them or stay stranded than come with them? Should I be worried?"

"...you really don't know?"

"I really don't!"

"Where... are you from?"

"I... expect you won't know it. If I've never heard of you, then maybe... Well, I'm from a country called Zanarkand."

She gasps and falls down onto her ass, then blinks a few times as something seems to click in her head. "Sin's toxin. That's why you don't remember anything and think you're from Zanarkand."

"...wha?"

"Do you... not know what Sin is?"

"I, uh, ran into it recently, yeah. And then hitched an involuntary ride on it and ended up where you guys found me."

"Sin releases a toxin that messes with your head. I've never heard of... forgetting stuff like this, or thinking you're from Zanarkand, but if you were close to it for a long time..."

"...so you're saying you know of Zanarkand, but there is absolutely no way I'm from it, and my memories of my life there were made up by a giant monster's toxins."

"Zanarkand was destroyed a thousand years ago."

That sends a jolt of adrenaline up his spine and makes him sit up straighter. "What the fuck." Did—did he travel a thousand years into the future? Did Sin just actually destroy his home and kill everyone except—except him?

"The toxin's effects wear off after a while, though," says Rikku, apparently oblivious to this alternative explanation to Tōkan's experience. "So you should be fine soon."

"Fine. Yeah. Okay." Well, maybe he did in fact entirely hallucinate his whole life. That's more likely than travelling a thousand years into the future, right?

...honestly it doesn't really matter. Either he travelled into the future or he made up his memories, but worrying about it right now isn't really going to help with anything.

"So. What next?"

"Well..." she starts, but the mechanical door into the ship opens again and a tall man with a blond mohawk shows up. He's wearing long trousers held up by suspenders and heavy duty waterproof boots, and his eyes are covered by goggles, but his muscular torso is bare and showing off purple and blue flame tattoos on his chest and along his forearms.

    "Rikku!" he calls, then says something that sounds annoyed and impatient in his language.

She looks up at him then stands up to reply, also sounding annoyed. The man points at Tōkan a couple of times, looking unhappy whenever he does.

Tōkan has the strong impression that there are more strings attached to being rescued by these people than he'd hoped. O...kay. He'll wait until they're done deciding what shall be done with him, he guesses. In the meantime he'll draw his knees closer to his body and hug them.

It's cold.

They argue for a couple of minutes—the other two Al Bhed that are still there guarding Tōkan don't join the conversation—but eventually the man leaves after throwing Tōkan a glare.

Rikku sighs and turns around. "Sorry about... that... Are you cold?"

He bites down on the snappy reply and just says, "Yep," instead.

At least he's not wet. But the air is still freezing.

"Do you not have... a heating spell?"

Oh okay it seems he's also jumped genres now, it's fantasy too. "I don't, whatever that is."

"Oh," she replies lamely. "I'll—I'll get you one. Do you want clothes, too? We don't really have anything like whatever it was you used on the klikk but we have lots of, uh." Vague gesture at herself and the other Al Bhed. "This."

He doesn't dig their style, actually. "If your heating spell covers not feeling cold and if we're not about to be attacked by any fiends I think I'll pass."

She seems to find something about what he said kinda odd. But she doesn't question him further, and instead gives one of the guards some instructions in the weird language and he sets off.

"So, uh, that was my brother," she explains, "and we're jointly in charge of this expedition. And he's... not happy about helping you without getting anything in return."

"...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."

Tōkan accepts the sphere with growing bemusement. He looks at it for a few seconds then back up at Rikku, confusion plain on his face.

"...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 Tōkan, 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 Tōkan if at all.

Tōkan 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 hand 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."

Tōkan 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.

Tōkan 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?"

"Yeah, I already told Brother about it and I don't have anything else to do before that." The things she's carrying do indeed attach to her boots, and she walks over to an area on the edge of the deck that doesn't have the protective railing. She gives him a thumbs up and dives.

Tōkan eyes his sword and wonders if they have a holster for it, but probably not. He places it inside the bag but tightens its lips around the sword's hilt so it won't move too much, then puts the flippers on and into the water he goes.

Rikku is waiting for him there, and she leads the way towards the illuminated ruins. She has her own flashlight attached to the neck of her body suit and as they get closer it allows them to see more detail.

The inside of the ruins is... even more unexpected than the outside. The door they go through leads to something that looks like a computer control room, and after fiddling with some buttons Rikku actually manages to turn the computers on. Waterproof and hooked to batteries that managed to last a thousand years. That's very impressive.

The purpose of the building is not immediately clear, but as Rikku said, this is just a first trip meant to get a very rough idea of the layout. The fact that they managed to turn the power on and now the ruins have their own illumination going on is just a nice bonus.

They are, in fact, attacked by a fiend, a large octopus-like creature with a cartilaginous beak. Rikku's main worry is for the ruins, so she and Tōkan coordinate to draw the creature out.

Once it's out, though, it's easy enough to dispatch, with Tōkan playing bait and hitting and dodging the thing (he is so much more in his element underwater like this) while Rikku throws guided explosives at it. It dies without much fanfare, and they soon return to the boat.

"Well, that wasn't so bad! I'd say it went pretty well."

"This is a pretty fun job," he agrees. "I could see myself doing this."

"...you'll change your mind when you get your real memories back."

"Why would I?"

But before she can answer her brother shows up again, and starts asking questions and completely ignoring Tōkan.

Right, then. It's clear only one person here welcomes him at all.

He takes the flippers off and walks over to his little blanket to sit down and wait.

The conversation takes a bit longer than their last one, this time, and Rikku's brother has her draw a rough map of the parts of the ruins they explored on a little electronic tablet.

Once she's done, he goes back inside and she walks over to Tōkan and sits next to him. "He doesn't speak a lick of Spiran and feels bad about it so he covers it up by pretending it's disliking you."

"...ah huh. Spiran, is that the name of the language we're speaking?"

"Right, yeah, memories. Um... well, if you don't get your memories back before we get you anywhere civilised, uh... I should tell you to not mention Zanarkand."

"...really? Why?"

"It's... complicated. And there's no way I'd be able to explain it all. Do you remember Yevon, at all?"

"Nope."

"Well, Yevon is... Let's say that a lot of people respect Yevon's teachings and according to Yevon's teachings Zanarkand is a sacred place, so people will think you're making fun of them if you say you're from there."

"So Yevon is a person...?"

"Yes and no. Like I said, it's complicated."

"Alright. I'll... keep that in mind. Also, civilisation, does that mean you're taking me somewhere?"

"We need to investigate the ruins more before returning but we could probably take a detour to Luca and you might find someone who knows you there. Ah, Luca is where most blitzball championships are held, so if you really are a blitzball player..."

He nods. "That makes sense. If I really lost my memories that's as likely as—"

But they're suddenly interrupted by a heavy shake of the whole ship. Rikku jumps to her feet and looks around in alarm.

    "Sin!" cries a guard coming out of the inside of the ship, running outside to warn them. He says something very quickly in their language, and the others on the deck start running inside, too.

Tōkan gets to his feet, too, but before he can actually follow there's another hit and the ship lurches, and he's still standing on his blanket so it goes sliding out. He tries stepping out of it and holding onto something but his feet get tangled up in the blanket and he's overboard.

Next part of the plot, he thinks as he falls into the water and gets drawn towards the kaiju, losing consciousness once he gets close enough.