"A summoner and his guardians," says Luzzu, looking at the crater with raised eyebrows. "Very impressive."

Zei ducks his head and demurs, "It's in the job description," echoing his own earlier words.

Luzzu shakes his head. "So it is. Well, we will inform the villagers of this, they will be grateful for your help. Yevon be with you."

As he turns around to walk back to Kilika Village, Gatta follows him in a cheerful march while singing, "Young Crusaders gather 'round! We'll beat Sin into the ground!"

Kimahri and Wakka rejoin the group, and after a few exchanged words to make sure everyone is okay and some minor healing they set off once more.

Lulu and Zei grab one small glass vial each, from one of Lulu's pouches. The vials are filled with a blue—well, it looks like blue mist, but it behaves more like a liquid—and they each drink theirs to the last "drop".

...it would be suspicious to ask, probably. And given that it was only the magic users who drank the potion, he suspects it's something to help recover magic energy or something.

Azym hangs back once again as they resume walking to lock steps with Zei. "So, why didn't you get Valefor?" He's mostly curious—the ochu was tough but with their numbers and coordination it wasn't really hard to kill, so Valefor would have probably been overkill, but overkill would have saved them some time. He's sure Zei had a good reason, though.

He did, yes.

"A few reasons. Valefor is not the best combatant for closed spaces like jungle clearings like this, most of her attacks are area attacks rather than concentrated ones and it would've been hard to coordinate with the three of you. But the main reason is that aeons can only exist in one place at a time—if I'm using Valefor, she will not be available for other summoners to use."

"—huh! So summoners just... share?"

"Mmhm. We can sort of—feel?—when we try to summon, if an aeon is available—but anyway they're best used as a last resort sort of thing, only when we really need them. If I call an aeon whenever I feel like it then someone else might have need of them and not be able to."

And all summoners are people who have been explicitly chosen by the fayth themselves to be the kind of people who won't do it frivolously. What an interesting system.

"Don't you have to train with them, though, to know best how they work and to have good tactical understanding of stuff?"

"Hmm, yes as far as that goes, but most of them have been around for hundreds of years and will just be much better than any given summoner at battlefield tactics. Most of what summoners and their guardians need to do is learn how to be what the aeons need, really."

"...huh. Can they speak?"

"Not in aeon form."

"So—how to be a game piece that plays well when the only clue you have about the overall game strategy is the behaviour of another piece."

"Yeah. Pretty much."

"But that still means you have to train sometimes."

"Yeah, sure, we just limit those times somewhat and let the aeons leave immediately if they feel a call elsewhere."

"—oh, they can do that. Okay. That makes sense."

"Sometimes I forget most people do not work as closely to the temples and summoners," Lulu pipes in, somewhat quietly, "and don't know the workings of these things as deeply as we do."

—oh, a ready-made excuse, thank you, Lulu, now he doesn't even need to come up with one.

"That makes me feel less bad for my ignorance."

"Don't."

"Never change, Lulu."

"I would not have anyway, but thank you for the endorsement," she replies dryly.

"So those spheres," says Azym, moving on to the next question. "How does that all... work? Where do they come from, why was one of them yellow?" If this is a very well-known thing he supposes he'll have to claim that he still hasn't recovered all of his memories but it feels like specific minutiae of combat that he's not necessarily going to be expected to know.