"'Kay. My Zanarkand's not made up, then." He puts his computer away. "Oh, right, another weird thing, Zanarkand uses the same currency as you guys, my gil seems to just be the same as yours."

"...what! What!!!!! No. What? What???????"

"...really, is that more surprising than all of the other stuff?"

"Yes! How the fuck—your country had no contact with Spira, at all, literally no one here has ever heard of your Zanarkand—and you have the same currency??? That's not just coincidence, I can't just—just—!"

"And that's more surprising than your father's dead guardian showing up there?"

"Yes! Dead people stick around all the time, that's no big deal, he could've just, I don't know, swum all the way there somehow, Unsent don't need to eat, but—"

"Dead people stick around?"

"—yeah? Where do you think fiends come from?"

"I don't! I didn't think to question the origin of fiends at all until now and I wouldn't really have thought they had anything to do with dead people!"

"It's—"

But the ship suddenly lurches to one side and Zei starts sliiiiding—

Tōkan jumps to his feet and grabs Zei's hand while holding onto the rails for extra support.

"Is it fucking Sin, does it just show up places this often or is it after me in particular—"

Other people start coming upstairs onto the deck as a huge fin emerges from the water to the right of the ship. It reaches higher than the highest point of the ship itself and is over half as wide as it.

Definitely Sin.

One of the boat's crewmen runs towards the harpoon gun near the tip of the boat and starts aiming.

"Are you mad?" calls Wakka. "We're gonna be pulled under!"

    "It's going for Kilika! Our families are there, we have to try to divert it." He turns to look at Zei. "Please, forgive us lord summoner!"

"Fuck this shit," says Zei, getting to his feet and moving to the other harpoon gun himself.

    The man takes a second to interpret that but then aims again and calls: "Two, one, shoot!"

Both harpoons get stuck to the creature—not difficult, it's huge—and as the ropes connecting the boat to Sin grow taut the ship lurches again, this time from the acceleration of being pulled by Sin much faster than it had been going.

Three little oval-shaped things shoot out of the fin in a parabola that will land them square on the deck. Then they land, and the oval things turn out to be wings that unfurl themselves to reveal disgusting little creatures.

Fiends

"What the fuck are these?" says Tōkan, grabbing his sword.

"Sinspawn!" Lulu replies as if that name means anything.

"Keep them occupied here, 'Lu and I will try to distract Sin."

And to punctuate that, Wakka throws something—a blitz ball?—in the direction of the fin. It really, really should not have reached that far, but somehow it did, and not only did the fin look like that was an actually significant hit but also the ball just bounced right back to his hands.

Lulu meanwhile starts casting thunder spells at it.

Okay. Using a blitz ball as a weapon. Totally cool and normal and not bizarre at all.

One of the sinspawn starts running at Lulu while the other two go for Wakka. Tōkan makes the executive decision of protecting Lulu because wizards are typically squishy in fantasy and Wakka looks better positioned to defend himself. He takes a leap and lands a cut that servers one of the thing's wings, but it quickly reforms the wing and turns around to go for Tōkan.

Right. Okay. Sinspawn are fiends not actual physical creatures. Good to know.

Kimahri jumps out of nowhere and his leap goes more than three times higher up than Tōkan's. He lands lance-first onto one of the fiends going for Wakka then immediately swivels his lance—fiend still attached to it—to hit the other one.

Zei is no longer manning the harpoon gun and, as more sinspawn start landing, summons Valefor. Then he casts some other spell on each of the combatants.

Support spells, cool. If his feeling's right, that one was meant to bolster physical defence.

He launches a flurry of slashes at the fiend he's currently harassing, and after a few hits it can no longer maintain its form and dissolves. Easy enough, but the problem with these ones is their numbers.

The boat shifts direction as Sin itself swerves, but the captain is doing an amazing job of keeping her as steady as possible under the circumstances.

Valefor starts flying in circles around the sinspawn, creating magic wind to box them into an enclosed area. Once the ones present are sufficiently close to each other, she starts breathing a sort of laser beam at them.

Wakka and Lulu continue harassing the fin, and while they're not actually damaging it very meaningfully the hope here is to bother it enough that it changes its mind about going to Kilika.

Gatta and Luzzu have joined the fray at some point in the chaos, and are doing a pretty good job of keeping the fiends boxed in where Valefor can continue burning their life out. Kimahri helps, the long range of his lance serving as a good backup to the swords.

He also does something extra, though. Something weird. When a fiend looks like it's about to lose coherence, he casts a spell of some kind, and fiends that have been targeted by that spell seem to... partially become spheres? when they die. Some of their dissipating energy coalesces into red orbs like the ones Zei offered Tōkan early that morning, and Kimahri tries to grab them whenever he can.