Before he can say anything Zei says, "I'll explain later. For now, are you hungry? And for later, do you mind sharing a room? They gave me a far-too-large one and I suspect they are a bit strained for resources. They'll give you a separate room if you prefer, though, you're coming with a summoner."

...why is Tōkan very sure that Zei seems super uncomfortable? Actually, replaying what Zei just said in his mind, probably the discomfort is from the differential treatment; he seemed fine when he talked about just sharing a room.

"Didn't realise we'd reached that point in our relationship," Tōkan says with a smile that does not quite reach his eyes. "Yes, I'm fine with it. And I am hungry."

Zei gestures at the leftovers on the table, then. "Feel free to take anything, it's already paid for." Bread and some exotic fruit and meat and nuts and butter and some other stuff. He continues to sip from his cup, and from this distance Tōkan can tell it's tea.

He won't waste time arguing about manners or payment or anything like that, then, but he won't rush through dinner either. He feels like this is not a situation to be rushed.

Zei doesn't interrupt him or say anything, so after a few seconds of silence Tōkan says, "So you send the spirits of the dead away."

Zei sets his tea down and nods. "Yes. Lest they stay and become fiends."

"—fiends are dead people. That's why—no, I don't think I quite get it—"

"Magic is pyreflies," he says. "Those wisps you saw coming from the bodies of the dead, that you see coming out of fiends or the spheres. Everything we call 'magic' is just shorthand for—things you can do with pyreflies. Souls are also pyreflies. The world follows precise, exceptionless laws whenever pyreflies are not involved, but when they are they break things.

"Pyreflies interact with emotion at a fundamental level. Even animals' emotions, but people's do it more and more strongly. All magic is done by feeling the right thing, by associating the feeling with the right thought, then pushing it out into the world; the pyreflies do the job of instantiating it." He pauses here, to see if Tōkan takes the next step there.

He doesn't. He just nods along with Zei's words and waits. There's a note of confusion in the back of his mind but he doesn't poke it yet.

Zei takes a few more sips from his mug then lowers it again. "People who die traumatic deaths—and what's traumatic changes from person to person—their last emotions aren't pleasant. Fear. Anger. Guilt. Pain. Loss. As their body dies and their souls leave, they are twisted by those emotions, lost to grief over their own deaths. Grief turns to anger, and anger turns to resentment. They envy the living for having what they cannot, become consumed by these feelings. Eventually, if they are in enough pain, or if they merge with enough other souls, they coalesce into the creatures known as fiends. The more powerful the emotion and the more people who merged into the fiend, the more powerful the fiend. This is why battlefields and great tragedies and sites of Sin's attacks produce the most fiends, and the most powerful ones."

Some of the confusion resolves. "This is why you guys said Besaid's fiends are weaker. It's farther from bigger cities, and Sin doesn't attack as often...

"...but why did Zanarkand not have many fiends? It was—a very big city—"

"Add another mystery to the list," shrugs Zei. "I don't know. Maybe the majority of your dead did not find their deaths traumatic. You said life was—pretty good, there?"

"...I suppose it was. Probably the worst emotion anyone felt when dying was boredom."

"Maybe that's all there is to it. Or maybe not. Your Zanarkand remains an unexplained phenomenon."

"Maybe." He continues eating and thinks about what he was just told. "So—where do the dead go, when they don't become fiends?"

"The Farplane," Zei answers. "Which just passes the buck. What's the Farplane? Where is it? Why do the dead go there? I don't know. We'll pass through Guadosalam, later, for the pilgrimage, and they have a portal that leads into the Farplane, although I hear it only looks on it from above and does not actually get to ground level, so to speak. I'm told it's beautiful."

Hmm.

"And that's what you were doing, back there? Making sure the souls of the dead would go to the Farplane?"

Zei nods, sipping more tea from his mug. It's starting to get cold. "It is part of a summoner's duty, to perform the Sending and make sure the dead go on to their rightful destination."

"And only summoners can do it?"

"No. Anyone sufficiently attuned to the more spiritual aspects of magic can learn to do it. It just happens that this job often falls to summoners and priests of Yevon, here." He finishes his tea and sets his mug down. "Summoners are selected for having more aptitude for it, though, so it's mostly us."

"Does killing fiends do the same thing, then, or do they just return later?"

Zei does a so-so gesture with his hand. "Souls are... not a unified whole. It is possible for a single person's soul to have pieces of it in ten different fiends, more, even, if their pain was great enough. And if their pain was great enough, they may return again as fiends even after they're killed. But that is the exception, not the rule, or so I'm told; killing a fiend always inevitably disperses some of its pyreflies into the Farplane, and most of the time it's most of them. Eventually, if you kill enough fiends, the people who make them up will move on to the Farplane."

Tōkan nods again and looks down at the table to notice that he's eaten everything that was there.

Uh. Whoops. He hadn't realised he was that hungry.

Zei smiles. "Let's go upstairs to our room, then."

Their room is on the third floor. It is indeed pretty large, with two straw beds, a short cupboard with a decorative plant, and an area sectioned off by a wooden divider with something like a drain on the floor and four shower spheres resting on a shelf. Zei locks the door behind them and makes a beeline for that sectioned off area, undoing his armwraps and taking off his harness and jewellery as he goes along. He's been dealing fine with the sweat and sand and grime sticking to his skin so far, in public, he has an image, but now that he's here he very definitely needs a shower asap.

Tōkan doesn't move so quickly, stopping to examine the room after he steps in. It's... okay. Still not the level of comfort he was used to, in Zanarkand, but he's not going to complain, he doesn't actually really care all that much.

When he sees Zei start his shower, he hesitates for a second then follows, grabbing a second sphere and placing it next to Zei's.

He's—kinda surprised, but not negatively so. "I see you're very efficiency-minded."