Another so-so gesture. "Wakka and Lulu know to give me my beauty sleep but they'll probably come knocking here soon. We do have a jungle to cross to get to the temple."

"Exciting. ...hey, is it okay if I ask more questions?"

"Sure," he says, and yawns hugely. "Might help wake me up."

"When I mentioned Auron showed up in Zanarkand, you said that the dead sometimes stay, but that seems different than what you meant about fiends?"

"Oh. Yeah. So, uh..." He stretches his neck and back, loud popping noises coming from his joints as he thinks a bit. "Some people, if they have unusual amounts of willpower and an unusually strong connection to the living world, manage to retain their senses of self even after they die. So they can pull themselves together, and reconstitute a solid body for themselves out of their own soul. These people are called unsent. It's... not an unappealing concept, but I'm not sure I would be able to hold onto that frame of mind if I died after killing Sin; I might be too happy with my accomplishments to muster a strong enough desire to stay in the mortal world."

"...huh. I don't think Zanarkand had that."

"They're pretty rare, and often move on when whatever unfinished business kept them here gets... well, finished."

"And you think Auron could've been like that?"

"...okay so there's a weird thing, here, and you should probably treat it with about as much secrecy as your Zanarkand story." He pulls himself up some more, sitting up. "And I'm not even sure it's true, it's just a hypothesis."

"Ooh, plot developments," says Azym, sitting up too.

Zei snorts and shakes his head. "So, uh, interrupt me if any of this is news to you. Summoners go on a pilgrimage, visiting many temples across Spira, where they commune with the fayth to get their aeons..."

Azym raises a hand, then says, "This isn't news to me, but I don't actually understand it. I don't know what fayth are or how the aeons work or why they're different than other regular magic."

"—okay! Exposition detour. Aeons are, in a pretty fundamental sense, fiends."

"...spirits of the dead sticking around in monster forms? They seem friendlier."

"Yes, because they died voluntarily. A thousand years ago, as the story goes, after Sin showed up and destroyed Zanarkand and looked ready to destroy Bevelle, the princess of Zanarkand showed up in Bevelle to teach them summoning. Unclear how she survived Zanarkand's destruction, but anyway. The way it works is that someone who has an intense and deeply felt desire to vanquish Sin can sacrifice themself and channel that desire as they die. They bind their souls to statues, and are called fayth.

"When a summoner passes a temple's trials and enters the Chamber of the Fayth, we talk to them and—we merge with them. We join our spirits and try to get our hearts to resonate, to deeply understand each other and to combine our desires. If this succeeds, if we can find that resonance, it stays even after we leave. And then through that emotional connection, a summoner can call and empower that spirit's aeon. So, aeons are fiends, in that they are created from and fueled by the deeply felt emotions of the dead, but they are also unlike fiends, in that that's not all they are, they are also fueled by this emotional bond between summoner and fayth."

Azym spends a few seconds digesting this, a faraway look in his eyes. Eventually he says, "That's—I want to say beautiful. If I were reading a story about this, I would say it's beautiful. Two souls becoming something larger than the sum of their parts through the shared desire to rid the world of suffering..."

Zei laughs a bit and shrugs. "Somewhat more poetic than I put it but I suppose the reality of it is actually pretty poetic, isn't it?"

There's a knock on the door right then. "Ya gonna take a while?" Wakka's voice calls. "We need to get going."

"—right," he murmurs, then raises his voice to be heard through the door: "We'll be out in fifteen minutes!"

"...we? Yevon help us, be quick about it!"

And the sound of his receding footsteps can be faintly heard through the door.

Zei grins and shakes his head. "Alright, quick morning shower and washing of clothes and teeth and then let's go, no time for me to tell you the deeply speculative thing I meant to."

"Now that's just rude," opines Azym, but he's also getting up. "—also, washing of clothes? What about the laundry spell?"

"It's not as thorough. Shower spheres are enchanted to deal with dirt much more completely."

"Huh. Alright, then."

Showerwards!