As soon as he steps out of the Crusader barracks, though, Zei walks up to him and presses two dark red spheres made of the same nonmaterial the temperature spells and the laundry spell (which he did eventually grab) were made of.

"Power Spheres," Zei explains. "They can enhance your strength and defense and healing factor."

Tōkan blinks as he accepts the spheres. "Uh. Thanks? Also, what."

"You'll figure it out." Then Zei rummages inside a bag and grabs a light-blue sphere. "Shower sphere. Place it above your head and activate it and it lasts about ten to fifteen minutes."

"Oh, so that's how you guys deal with no indoor plumbing."

"Some places have indoor plumbing! And they also use shower spheres! But yes it does make the situation in tiny villages on the whole less bothersome."

"Let me try these first, I only have two hands..."

They feel different from the spell ones from earlier. Not physically, but—metaphysically? It's weird that he has this sense that just never sensed anything until he started interacting with this magic.

The mental motion to use a Power Sphere is also not identical to the one attached to the other spheres. It feels more... malleable? He can redirect the magic. And he also has a weird intuition for directions he can do that towards but they don't feel like three discrete categories like Zei said; more like a continuum, kind of.

But he doesn't want to try new things on his own so after some thought he thinks he found the motion he needs to perform to enhance his "defence". It's more like making his body hardier and more resistant to damage, but he supposes defence is as good a word for that as any.

Both spheres are consumed, and he nods to himself. "Strange."

Zei has been watching Tōkan's face while he worked on that, and once the spheres are consumed he says, "You really haven't done this before, have you. You weren't actually pulling my leg. You just—somehow learned how to breathe underwater without any of this?"

"I wasn't pulling your leg," he nods. "I don't know how you do it but the way we learn it in—uh, back where I come from—is by working on our ability to hold our breath and then once we're good enough at it we start inhaling small quantities of water and then holding our breath—it's very uncomfortable but straightforward, teach your lungs how to get the air out of the water."

"That makes absolutely no sense. Are you sure you're human? No guado ancestry?"

"Brother I am not sure of anything."

"...fair, I suppose." He offers Tōkan the shower sphere. "We'll be leaving for the beach in half an hour."

Tōkan accepts it. "My thanks," he says, and then he goes to the shared loo to use it and to... uh... wait there's an area in line of sight of the public toilet place where it seems like the dirt is wet even though no water source is immediately visible? That might be a location where people typically shower.

Upon getting there, he notices Crusader Gatta taking his own shower.

"Say, don't suppose you want to demonstrate how to use one of these to me?" Tōkan asks when he's close enough.

    Gatta doesn't quite jump, but he does tense up at the unexpected noise (Tōkan thinks Zei was definitely bullshitting him when Zei called him loud) before relaxing when he sees who it is. "You... don't remember? Sin's toxin?" the boy guesses.

"Something like that. Zei mentioned I have to just, uh, lift the sphere above my head and turn it on...?"

    "The sphere has single-use versions of a combination of spells!" Gatta says in his explanation voice. "It will stay still in the air and generate magic water that is better than normal water at cleaning! You still need to scrub."

"...sounds straightforward enough," Tōkan nods, undressing and placing his clothes on the same square stone where Gatta left his, then lifting the sphere above his head and—yeah, it sure does have a mental motion he can do there to activate it. When he does, it starts emitting a steady shower of warm water onto him, and the sphere feels like it's literally locked in place—he can't budge it. "Interesting."

Gatta steals glances at him when he thinks Tōkan isn't looking, but he's very very firmly in the Too Young category in Tōkan's opinion so he studiously ignores it. After Gatta's shower sphere runs out and disappears (as does all of the conjured water, which leaves him completely dry), he gets dressed and goes off to join Luzzu in guarding the gates to the village while waiting for everyone else. Tōkan finishes a few minutes after that, and joins the main contingent: the blitzball team, the summoner, and his guardians.

"Slowpoke," says Zei as soon as he arrives.

"You can't have such great skin and hair as I do if you rush through your showers," he replies primly.

    Jassu, one of the blitzball players, walks in front of Tōkan with his arms folded and peers. "Your skin is not that great," he declares after a few bemusing seconds, and Tōkan laughs.

"You just don't have the eye for it."

    "I think you're just making stuff up."

"Maybe you just need to look at my skin from closer up than that."

Wakka pushes a stammering Jassu away from Tōkan. "No flirting within the team! It's the rules."

"I'm not officially on the team!"

"Wait 'til later!" Wakka declares. "For now we focus on the game!"

    Luzzu comes over from the gates, does a headcount, and nods. "We're all here. Let's go." He and Gatta go ahead of everyone to clear the road of most fiends, but with this many people going in the same direction it'd be easy to deal with them anyway.

"Are fiends that much of a problem here?" Tōkan asks no one in particular.

"They're not," says Lulu quietly, "but Luzzu is using them as field training for Gatta."

Oh she speaks! In his presence even! He feels like he's been Accepted.

"Besaid is far enough away from the rest of—well, everything—that most fiends that form here are pretty weak."

...why would stronger fiends exist more in some places than others—actually this is probably a dumb question that he'll ask later, when he's expositing on his backstory.

The party spreads along the path, with the blitzball players in the vanguard and the summoner and his guardians lagging behind by a bit. At some point Kimahri shows up out of nowhere, and just quietly stalks them as they walk.

When they get to the zenith of the short hill, Zei stops walking for a bit to just look at the village from this vantage point.

"Stay as long as you like," says Lulu when she notices this, and she, too, stops walking.

Wakka, of course, also stays behind with them, although he goes over to the stone monument and kneels in front of it.

Tōkan is getting increasingly certain that this pilgrimage is a lot more dangerous than the priest led him to believe.

He leaves Zei to his contemplation and walks over to where Wakka is to examine the stone monument in more detail. It's sufficiently ruined that it's unclear what it was originally meant to represent, and honestly looks only like rocks that were vaguely purposefully put together in a weird way.

Monument

Wakka notices him and, without looking up, says, "It's an ancient custom. People leaving the island pray here for a safe trip." He takes a deep breath then adds, "My brother didn't pray. On the day he left. Said he'd miss his boat."

Man what part of "not touching this with a ten-foot pole" does the plot keep missing? "I'm sorry," Tōkan says, and he does mean it. He was very young when he lost his parents, so he can't really know what that's like, but he did just lose literally everyone he's ever known literally yesterday OKAY NOT THINKING ABOUT THIS RIGHT NOW.

When Zei pulls away from looking out at the village he also kneels in front of the monument, and Lulu mimics him.

But he only stays there a moment before standing back up and saying, "Onwards, then."

Tōkan is relieved that Kimahri did not participate in the whole kneeling thing, either. He'd have felt a lot guiltier about it if he'd been the odd one out.

He's also kind of curious about the whole "how dangerous is this pilgrimage, really?" thing but probably the boat will be a better location for this kind of question.

The way back to the beach is uneventful—if there were any fiends prowling the road, the advance party has dealt with them. When they get to the docks, they're empty save for the party and the people manning the boat. It's still early, and probably most villagers who didn't sleep in after last night's bonfire figure they've already said their goodbyes and it'll only make it feel harder to be here when Zei leaves.

Tōkan is told that the boat is going to Kilika Island, which is part of the same archipelago that contains Besaid itself. There's another temple there which Zei plans to visit to get his second aeon, and after that they're going to Luca, where hopefully they'll find someone who recognises Tōkan and that will help with his memories.

Yeah, right.

The boat is sufficiently unoccupied that everyone can have an individual cabin for themselves if they want to rest. The trip will take about half a day; they should arrive in Kilika just after sundown.

"Alright, boys!" says Wakka to the Aurochs (plus Tōkan) who are assembled on deck. "We got all day long with nothing at all planned. Know what that means?"

    "That we can rest and relax for a day?" asks Keepa.

"Funny! No. We gotta practice. Now that we got the new guy here you need to get working together. Got a feeling that we have a real chance this year!"

        "You said that last year," puts in Botta, but he withers under Wakka's glare.

...this team is a bit dysfunctional. That'll explain why they've never won a tournament, if it's been like that.

"If I may," he says, stepping forward and turning around to face the rest of the team. "Do you guys like blitzball?"

    The team could not have been more offended if he'd tried. "Of course!" cries Jassu and "Yeah!" says Letty and so on.

Tōkan was obviously just using this as a rhetorical device, so he just nods and continues with, "And why did you join the team? The team specifically, I'm sure all of you could've played amateur blitzball for fun whenever you wanted."

    Now that question gives them more pause. "I wanted to play in Luca," Jassu says.

        "The stadiums are free to use off-season," reasons Datto.

    "...I guess," Jassu agrees, and folds his arms to think some more.

    "I wanted to win," says Letty after half a minute of silence (when it became really clear that Tōkan was waiting for actual answers and Wakka was not going to rescue them). "I... wanted my name to be up there."

        Keepa nods, looking awkward for admitting it to himself, and Datto says, "I don't care about the personal glory... but I want Besaid to get the trophy."

            "Competing is fun," says Botta. "Tryin' to see who's best. Only..."

"...only?" prods Tōkan.

            "...only we suck."

"Hey, now—"

But Tōkan raises a hand to interrupt him.

"You guys suck, you say. What's that mean?"

    Once again they're not expecting this question. "It means... we aren't very good players?" tries Jassu.

"What's a good player?"

    The team looks simultaneously like the answer to that question should be obvious and also like they have no idea how to actually say it. "You know what it means," Jassu says after a few more seconds of silence. "We don't have as much—skill—"

"You know what I just saw, a couple of minutes ago?"

    Now he's wary. "What?"

"A whole team of competitive blitzball players who think they're not good enough and who still don't want to practice to get better."

The collective flinch is painful to watch. The only one who doesn't look ashamed or upset is Wakka, who instead looks pensive.

    "I mean, what's the point?" asks Botta, his face scrunching up in—something like anger, or disappointment, or... "Practisin' won't help. It's hopeless. We, we keep tryin' to do our best and our best just ain't enough."

"That so? So do you guys think the, the, help me out here—"

    "The Luca Goers," suggests Keepa.

"The Luca Goers don't practise? Do you think they just laze around all day and then win by Yevon's providence?"

        "...well..." starts Botta, but Tōkan interrupts him.

"I'll tell you here and now that even without any memories or knowledge I know that the Luca Goers actually spend a ridiculous amount of time practising. Now, what do you think their captain would say if you asked them what they're trying to do when they practise and play?"

            "...to win," says Letty.

"Fucking right that's what they'd say. No one cares about their best. No one cares about people trying very hard and then that not being enough. People care about winners. And winners try to win. When a winning team starts a day's practice, they don't go into it satisfied with doing their best."

        "What can we do, then? If not our best?" challenges Botta.

"Win. Your best isn't some, some immovable goal that you reach and then go 'well here I am, at my best, guess that's all I can do'. Your best should be something that changes all the time! Because you're trying to win, because your goal is victory. Every time you pass the ball, you don't do your best; you try to win. Every time you shoot into the goal, you're not doing your best; you're trying to win. Every tackle, every movement, you should always have this in mind: you want to win. What does victory look like? Is it better to try to stop that fielder right now or save your energy for later when you're in a better position to pass your ball to your own fielders? Is it better to try to prevent the other team from scoring at all costs or to sometimes accept it as a necessary part of the game and try to make up for it later?"

"The game has a time limit. At the end of the time limit, the team with the most goals wins. It's not the team that did their best to not let the other team score. It's the team that scores the most. Blitzball is, fundamentally, a proactive sport. You want to always be on the offence, to always be looking at the field and thinking about what your next movement should be to win.

"And people who are trying to win just become better players. Their best will change, because they'll always be improving, do you see? They break their own limits, they push beyond what they thought they could do, they find the extra mile they can go.

"So what do we want?"

    Everyone is quiet again, but Letty says, tentatively, "To win?"

"Say it louder, I can't hear you."

    "To win!" he cries.

"Louder! And all of you together!"

    "To win!" the whole team shouts.

"Fucking right you want to win! Our goal here is victory! And what do winners do when they have an important tournament coming up and a lot of free time?"

        "...practise," says Jassu with a slight grimace.

"No! Not '...practise.' The correct answer is 'practise!' You want to win? Then act like it. You think you're not good enough right now? Then become someone who is good enough. And you can only do that if you try. So, what are you going to do now?"

    "Practise," the team tries.

"Can't hear you!"

    "Practise!" they shout again.

"You're gonna practise and you're gonna do better and you're gonna win. Understood?"

   "Yes, sir!" they say in unison.

"Good. So, before practice, I want all of you to go to separate cabins downstairs and spend ten minutes by the clock thinking about things you want to do. Not just ways to improve from where you are now, I want you guys to come up with moves you always wanted to learn but never did. Go wild, list twenty of them if you want. Back here in ten minutes sharp."

The team... looks incredibly confused by this suggestion but after a couple of seconds of looking at each other awkwardly decide to obey.

"Hey, uh," starts Wakka after everyone else's gone. "That was really good."

"No kidding," says Zei, who somehow has mysteriously appeared leaning against the wall to the bridge.

Tōkan nearly jumps out of his skin when he hears Zei's voice. "—you could stand to be louder! Maybe wear a bell around your neck or something!"

"But this was much funnier."

"Bah."

"Say," Wakka begins, "was that... rehearsed? Or..."

"N...ot exactly." It's the kind of speech he'd have given to his team, if his team had been this bad at self motivation.

"Gettin' any memories back?"

His first idea is saying that he remembers being a captain but there's like actually zero way Wakka doesn't know most of the captains around, or at least the ones that tend to go to tournaments in Luca. It would just raise more questions than it answered, if he said something like that.

Man he really doesn't like keeping this deception up. Maybe the protagonist will be able to help figure something better out later. But for now he can just spend a while looking thoughtful then shrug.

Wakka shakes his head in sympathy. "Well, they're more motivated than I've ever seen 'em. And I could learn a thing or two from ya. To win..."

You know what, Tōkan kinda does not like it when other people do his thing at him. It's kind of uncomfortable. Damnit, Zei, stop correctly inferring his thoughts and feelings from his body language and background knowledge!

"When's the tournament anyway?"

"In a week."

"—you're kidding me. Okay. Got my work cut out for me here."

"They can do it."

"Oh I am taking it as a point of honour now that this team will at least make it to the finals."

Wakka grins. "They can win."

"That's the spirit!"

When the others return with their lists, Tōkan takes a moment to seriously read them all and ask questions about their motivations and what they currently think they can do. Once he's satisfied with the idea in his mind of what the team thinks they can do, he asks each of them to do some exercises with the blitz ball, increasing in complexity and difficulty as each of them got the earlier ones right. He includes various different types within the same "difficulty bracket" to try to suss out specific strengths and weaknesses of the whole team.

General assessment: they're better than they think they are. It's kind of interesting to see, he can tell when they're holding themselves back for fear of being too daring or too risky, and if he pushes them in the right way they even surprise themselves.

Specifics:

• Datto is their best shot by far, and also the best at enduring tackles from other players. His thing is raw strength, though, and his actual aim isn't that great so when shooting from far enough or trying to pass the ball he's not that great. He's also kind of not the best at hand-eye coordination.
• Letty can take a beating but he really shines in accuracy. That boy can hit a seagull with a blitzball from a hundred meters away.
• Jassu has a mean streak, and is really good at faking opponents out and figuring out how to slip past their defences and grab the ball. He's kind of a garbage shot though.
• Botta... is kind of a Jassu-wannabe. He's about as good as Jassu at the whole figuring out how to get the ball from others thing but less good at pretty much everything else. The one thing he's better than Jassu at is special techniques: he has memorised a whole host of those, and a lot of them are ones Tōkan has never seen before due to being literally magic.
• Keepa is their goalkeep but he's... actually not very good at it. He mostly relies on his wide frame to throw his whole self in front of the ball when he can, but he's not super agile and takes a bit to move. He can, however, take one hell of a beating.

Okay. He can probably work with this. He doesn't think he can make this a world-class team in a week, but maybe, just maybe, they can figure out some strategies that will work, especially if he can get them to actually improve at all in anything over the week. Although he expects most of the impact he can have on the team is motivational and not actually technical. Well, whatever works. Hopefully he can watch recordings of past games when they get to Luca to figure out what they'll be up against.

By the time they break for food, Tōkan has started going over some standard formations for pairs and having everyone other than Keepa rotate out and play against each other using those formations so they can get a bit of a feel for all of them and what they work best with. They were familiar with most of the ideas, but not all, and were not at all used to this kind of practice. At the same time, he starts working with Keepa to level him up in... well, being a goalkeep. He's done enough of this kind of thing with his own team's goalkeep—he was the best shot there—that it's pretty much muscle memory by now. Keepa is worse than the Zanarkand Abes's goalkeep was, so he has to start slower, but despite his quiet he's actually very determined and diligent when motivated.

Tōkan tells them to take an hour after food but then he expects everyone back on deck and ready to blitz.

"You know, that was kinda hot," says Zei after he once again unreasonably quietly shows up, sitting next to Tōkan with his own food.

Tōkan doesn't jump, this time, but it's through active effort.

"Don't you play?"

"Yeah but I'm really not a very competitive person. At least... not in that way."

"So in what way are you competitive?"

"Kind of with myself? I want to be able to prove to myself that I can do... whatever it is I'm trying to do. And do it well. But I don't care so much about joining active competitions like that. I was just subbing in for Wakka because he's... kind of not in a great headspace, right now."

"Don't tell me if he wouldn't want me to know."

"He's probably fine with it," Zei shrugs. "Chappu—his brother—went on a mission with the Crusaders last year and was killed by Sin. Wakka heard the news just before the tournament started and it kinda messed him up. And now he's coming with me to guard me and is distracted by the game while thinking it's detracting from his responsibilities."

"...that does sound like a mess to untangle."

"Yeah. It is."

Tōkan looks out into the sea from where he sat down to eat on the deck and hums thoughtfully. "I'm from Zanarkand."

Zei chokes on the strange fruit he's eating and has to get some water to down it. "Beg your pardon?"

"The place I'm from. My country. It's called Zanarkand, and it was big and bright and it never slept and we had machines do most of the heavy work for us and almost all of our time was spent however we wanted to spend it. No one was really poor. Fiends were rare, and a big deal when they showed up. There was no magic, no aeons, nothing like that.

"I was born and raised there. I lost my parents when I was very young, and ten years ago a man named Auron showed up and sorta-kinda adopted me for no reason. He was a dick. But he did... sort of... raise me. And then two days ago, or maybe it was three, Sin showed up out of nowhere—we had never heard of it, or I hadn't—and destroyed Zanarkand. Or at least I assume it destroyed Zanarkand, it sure was doing a great job of wrecking the port and nearby neighbourhoods. I didn't stay to watch, you see, because Auron led me towards Sin, said a bunch of cryptic shit that implied he had some weird relationship with it, and then Sin ate me."

Now Zei is just... staring. Not saying anything, not really... showing much. He doesn't interrupt Tōkan, though.

"I woke up in the ruins of a temple. —temples weren't really a thing, in Zanarkand, and neither was Yevon. I only found out it was a temple later, when a bunch of Al Bhed showed up and very conveniently rescued me. One of them was a girl named Rikku. Said they were on a self-assigned recon mission to explore some ruins. Sheer luck that they ran into me before I starved, or so I thought. I helped Rikku explore these weird underwater ruins, too, which somehow still had power to run even though they were at least several hundred years old.

"Then Sin showed up again and ate me again. And then when I woke up by the beach and Wakka found me.

"You got my story, now. That's all I know."

"That... makes no sense in so many different ways."

Snort. "You're telling me."

"Zanarkand was destroyed a thousand years ago."

"So I've been told."

"After having spent a long time in a big war with a country called Bevelle, which I notice is entirely lacking from your description."

"...right. So actually ha ha weird thing it never even occurred to me in my two decades living there that other countries might exist. I noticed a bunch of stuff that I somehow completely failed to think about until the day Sin attacked. I had never thought about—the world at large, what could exist outside my tiny island, about exploring. Even though I really really should have."

"—tiny island?"

"Really? Of everything I just said, that's the part that stands out to you?"

"Unless you meant it figuratively, Zanarkand was not on an island."

"...wait, what? No I didn't—well, it wasn't tiny, I think, I guess I don't really know how big other islands are, but. Zanarkand was very definitely on an island."

"Zanarkand is north of here. Past Mt. Gagazet, at the northern tip of the mainland. It is reachable by foot. I guess maybe a thousand years ago it may have been an island but I don't think I have ever read any historical records saying that."

"Well, points for the 'I made the whole thing up in my head' theory, I guess?"

"I think," Zei says slowly, "that what's going on here is a lot weirder than that."

"Brother I went from an airhead jock who may or may not have been mind controlled into never wondering about the world at large to a fantasy land with magic and giant monsters. Think my weird meter's broken now."

"...Sin doesn't let us explore much farther from the mainland than Besaid. Ships that try to go out farther either never return or, when they do, have inevitably been attacked by Sin."

"...are you saying my Zanarkand is—real, exists somewhere out there, or existed before Sin attacked, and it just—for some reason—no I don't know what you're saying."

"I don't know what I'm saying either! Maybe it was actually Sin's toxin, but—you were a captain. Weren't you. Of a blitzball team, back wherever you're from."

"...yeah. The Zanarkand Abes, we were called."

And here's that pang of homesickness and grief that he has to push down again because—because he should not start hyperventilating and crying right now, probably, it would—not do.

"Wakka tells me you did a shot he'd never seen before. He described it to me, I'd never heard of it before either. He knows every captain of every team that competes in Luca, and there's no way you would be—captain of a team that doesn't. Not with that level of skill."

"...so my Zanarkand's real, maybe destroyed now but it was real until a few days ago, and we were all mind controlled to never leave, and then for some reason—you said Auron was your father's guardian?"

"Yeah. Died ten years ago with my father when they killed Sin."

"—wait shit how did I not think of that, it's not that the pilgrimage is dangerous it's that killing Sin also kills you. What the fuck, dude."

Zei laughs, weakly, mirthlessly. "So no one told you? Yeah, killing Sin has also killed every high summoner. It's the Final Aeon, it's not the same for everyone, it's personal to each high summoner and—it's more powerful, much more, since it can kill Sin. But it also kills the summoner at the same time.

"—not that the pilgrimage isn't dangerous, mind you. Summoners do die pretty often during it, when they don't give up. But it's not the reason I was treating it as goodbye, last night."

"What the fuck, dude! And people just—just go do it anyway, knowing they'll die even if they succeed, and then the monster is gonna come back anyway?"

"...well, yeah. I'm just one person. I'm one person, and Sin kills so many more people than that. If I die and the time Sin stays away for saves two people's lives, that's already worth it."

No it's not, he thinks, but he can't really—argue. He doesn't know why he feels so strongly that way, he understands the maths Zei is pointing at, understands that, in the large scheme of things, even a trade of one for two like that is worth it. And it's probably a lot more than that, isn't it? If Sin is gone for even a year, that's, that's, who knows how many people will get to live who wouldn't otherwise?

But there's still some part inside him that's horrified at the thought, that's rebelling against it with all his might. It, it's, it feels wrong that that's the best they can do, that throwing promising altruistic people like that at the monster hoping this time it won't come back is, is, that's...

"Mind you, I do want to win."

"—huh?"

Zei looks out at the ocean, too, and doesn't turn to look at Tōkan when he speaks. "Five times. Sin has been killed five times. Once by Lady Yunalesca and her husband, Lord Zaon. She was the one who taught us the arts of summoning and how to stop Sin, or so the story goes. I was named after her husband. And then four other people. Four other people, in a thousand years, managed to reach Zanarkand and get their Final Aeon and kill Sin."

"...okay?"

"That's not a statistically significant sample. Even if I save two people, that'll have been enough. But—five people did it. What are the odds that I'll figure something out that they didn't? Actually quite high, when you think about it. Or maybe I'm full of myself, I don't know. But—that's not a maybe, I am full of myself, I do think I'm special, and I do think I can figure something out. Or that there's a chance. I'm—I'm really smart, I'm driven, I'm curious, I'm studious, and I really, really want to win. I don't want to try my best, I want to win.

"And that was already true before the mystery of the century just landed on my lap as if by Yevon's providence." He gestures towards Tōkan for a moment when he says that.

"That's really hot."

Zei laughs. "You're stealing my lines."

"Kinda wanna give you a blowjob again."

"You'll get indigestion. Wait an hour after eating before strenuous physical exercise."

"Mark my words, I will get your cock in my mouth, just you wait."

"You're so romantic."

"I have a lot of practice."

"I'm not going to say I'm not tempted, but probably later, you have a team to teach."

"We still have like half an hour, come on, grill me on my tragic backstory."

Zei laughs. "Honestly you're such an out of context problem that I have no idea what to even ask. You had no recognisable magic but you could spontaneously develop underwater breathing. Your whole country is on an island but named the same as a country that was destroyed a thousand years ago, here, and is now holy grounds. No summoners, no other countries, definitely no Bevelle you were in a war with, you might have been mind controlled somehow. No Sin."

"Oh! And let me show you something..." He rummages inside his bag for his pocket computer and shows it to Zei. "If you tell me this kinda tech doesn't exist anywhere that will go a long way marking me as not having made it all up in a toxin-inspired hallucination."

"...what, uh, is it?"

"It's a pocket computer! It can—or could, when it had charge and a connection to the network—be used to communicate with people anywhere in Zanarkand, or access various, uh, 'places' that are not like physical places, I have no idea how to explain this to people who don't have it. You can play games in them too?"

"Yeah uh we absolutely do not have anything like that. What kind of—infrastructure—would you even need, we have computers and terminals and stuff but they're all local to individual cities and definitely not pocket."

"No clue. I think there were towers that relayed information through the air? I never really looked it up."

"Well. This is definitely not widely available, and as far as I know not available at all, anywhere."

"'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.

...seriously? They're getting loot from the fight? Maybe the genre he should be thinking of here is a video game of some kind, that would explain some of the absurdity of this whole scenario, it's just lazy worldbuilding.

Anyway, he helps the Crusaders however he can, and as more sinspawn arrive to replace the ones they kill he tries to push them towards the little crowd they have.

Sin swerves suddenly again, and the force of the pull is enough to rip one of the harpoon guns off the deck. It swings wildly for a moment, but Zei casts some sort of shield spell into the air that the thing bounces against before it's lost to sea, so no one is harmed by it.

Speaking of harmed, Zei is clearly the party healer. The four close range combatants are not managing to fight the fiends unharmed, but he's pretty on the ball to protect them when he can and heal them when he can't. Occasionally one of the sinspawn will throw an energy projectile from the spikes of its wings at someone else, but those are rare enough that Zei has managed to intercept and fizzle all of them so far.

"Do we have an actual plan here?"

"Keep Sin occupied as much as we can!" Wakka calls back.

    "It's the best we can do," says Luzzu.

That... feels utterly hopeless but they'll know better whether this kind of thing ever actually works. Presumably it does, sometimes?

...but it is the best they can do. He'll offer what support he can.

Despite the fate of the first harpoon gun, the second one takes much longer to give out. In the meantime, they're just playing a stalling game, with Sin sending more of the fiends attached to its ?⁠skin? and the group dealing with them and trying to convince the monster that going for Kilika is not worth its trouble. It's a long, drawn out, exhausting fight, but... it's all they can do.

It's not enough.

The second harpoon gun manages to stay intact for over an hour, and the boat is definitely going much faster than it otherwise would as it's pulled by Sin. If it really is going for Kilika, they'll arrive there sooner than expected.

They might not arrive to anything, though. The second harpoon gun stays intact for over an hour, but eventually snaps, and although Zei tries to cast the same shield spell from before he's too tired, too slow, and as it swings wildly it hits Tōkan square on the side and pulls him with it.

Tōkan didn't even see it coming, but he really should've. And it hurts less than he'd expected. He goes underwater and watches as the gun passes by his head above the surface of the water.

He... kinda can't move. He might've broken something.

This is not looking great for his life expectancy.

There are more sinspawn underwater, and they certainly don't want Tōkan's life expectancy to be longer than a few more minutes.

Zei and Wakka jump into the water, though, and while Wakka distracts the fiends Zei casts a very heavy duty spell on Tōkan.

Oh. He can feel his legs again.

Magic is really fucking cool.

Wakka and Zei help Tōkan swim up to the surface, then get back onto the boat, where all remaining fiends seem to have been killed.

Also, Sin's fin is no longer visible in the distance.

"Did we do it?" he asks from where he's lying on the floor. "Did it—work?"

    Luzzu shakes his head. "We won't know until we get there. But we did our best."

Their best doesn't matter. Did they win?

No.

The trip still takes several hours—without Sin to accelerate them they can only go so fast—but no one really has the heart to do much of anything other than mope around. The Aurochs eventually resume a little bit of practice, mostly to work off the nervous energy and restlessness than to really practice. They can't fight, they only watched helplessly, and—it was the first time, for all of them, seeing Sin from up close. It always does something to you, seeing it for the first time, getting the understanding of what Sin is, what Sin does.

Kilika Village—or what's left of it—is visible from a distance. Visible enough that they know they didn't win. The village goes well into the woods—most of it in fact is not by the coast, it is not a smart idea to build settlements too close to shore when the local kaiju likes to come by water—but enough of it was by the beach and Sin came with sufficiently little warning that it's not a surprise to see shapes that are distinctly corpses floating in the water amongst the debris.

One of the crew cries out when he sees it, and falls to his knees to sob into his hands. Another one kneels beside him to wrap an arm around him.

The silence is oppressive. No one talks, everyone is barely breathing. The only sounds are the smooth glide of the boat along the water and the distant noises of the crashes of the waves.

Zei is standing at the bow, back so straight it hurts to watch. He's holding his staff for some reason, a white-knuckled grip that almost looks like he's trying to snap it in two.

At the sight of the boat, some of the people who were trying to pull the bodies from the water to the beach or deal with the debris stop what they're doing to help moor the boat. They send little wooden rafts to fetch the passengers on the boat, but Zei just vaults over the railing into the water and wades towards some of the people.

"I'm a summoner," he says. "Let me help."

    "Lord summoner," says the person closest to him, looking startled, "we still don't have all the bodies for a Sending—"

"I know. Let me help," he repeats. "I'll help find the bodies and clear debris and whatever else. Point me at where I can be useful."

...yeah. That's—that's good. A good idea. Tōkan follows Zei to do the same. The Aurochs and Wakka and Kimahri and the Crusaders and the boat's crew all join them, so soon enough they are all coordinating to deal with—all of the everything. Lulu stays on the beach relaying requests and serving mostly as communication liaison.

They seem to be prioritising recovering the bodies, even those that aren't... whole... but Tōkan doesn't question it. Whether there's a practical reason or a purely sentimental one, these people have just—had their life upended, destroyed, changed forever. They deserve to have their wishes respected.

Tōkan can sympathise.

They work well into the end of the afternoon and by the time they've determined they won't be able to find any more bodies or relevant belongings the sun is setting. People at the beach have been hard at work putting the bodies into adorned coffins, each one individually carved just then and there with the name of the deceased. A few of the coffins stand empty, but that was only to be expected. All of them have good luck charms for the Farplane and flower garlands attached.

Very few people talked, beyond the strictly necessary. The mourners all worked, with whatever they could. The grief was palpable in the air, thick enough to cut with a sword, but no one cried all afternoon. Not even the children.

When most of the work seems to be done, the locals start pushing the coffins towards the sea, where they float lazily on the water. Tōkan is still not questioning their customs, not talking, just helping, but it still strikes him as very odd. What's the point of recovering the bodies only to put them in boxes then return them to sea?

But as the villagers all start clustering around them—around Zei in particular—he gets his answer in the sound of drums.

Zei's feet are bare, and as he steps onto the water he does not sink. Walking on the surface, he makes his way towards the rough center of the coffins, and starts—dancing.

The drums aren't coming from anywhere. Or they're coming from everywhere. Or they're coming from the sea—from the dead. For a few seconds it is just the drums, and the waves, and Zei's dance, twirling his staff from one hand to the other and extending his arms out and up, slowly rotating in place and lowering the tip of his focus to touch the surface of the water.

And then the song. It starts at the same time as the lights begin, wisps of white and rainbow emerging from the sea, from the earth, from the coffins. Voices emerge from them, old and young, man and woman. The voices of the dead, singing in unison, in mourning of their own deaths. More and more of the wisps appear, spiralling up into the heavens, not all at the same time and not all in a rush, but all relentlessly upwards.

Some of them fan out towards the onlookers, well into the beach, and the song follows them. Some of them seem to almost stop in front of people before resuming their journey up. Not physical, not solid or even gaseous. Just light.

It's the same song Tōkan heard in the temple in Besaid. It was just one person singing, there, and much more quietly, but the lyrics in some language he doesn't understand repeat and sear themselves into his mind now that he starts to grasp their significance.

People cry. After all day holding it back, holding it in, they finally let themselves—fall apart. Let themselves mourn, and wail, and scream. Let themselves fall to their knees sobbing, now that they know the souls of their loved ones are being cared for, are being sent on their way.

Tōkan notices he's crying, too. He's not sure when that happened. He's just been watching Zei, watching the ghastly dance, and the lid he's been keeping on his feelings dissolved like mist. He knew none of these people, but he understands. He understands what was lost, here, and he—he finally lets himself fully acknowledge what he lost.

Images start flashing in his mind, images he didn't let himself see when he was fleeing the monster in Zanarkand. Didn't let himself think, because if he didn't think, then it wasn't real. Only it was. It wasn't just the vague understanding that the water would crush people; it was remembering the faces of his team mates looking up at him as they realised they wouldn't be able to escape like he did. Watching them drain away, knowing that gravity would crush their bodies before they could do anything about it, and looking away from them because he could not do anything either. Watching a woman scream someone's name, holding his head in her lap, his lower body missing. Watching the people be drawn towards Sin's gravity effect and be torn apart by it.

He lets himself feel, for the first time, his loss. Everyone he's ever known, everyone he's ever met, gone as if it's nothing. He'll never return to Zanarkand, and even if he did, it would not be there anymore. It would be ruins and corpses and dead memories. He's crying, and he's not watching Zei anymore, because all he can see is his whole life, being snuffed out by forces far beyond his control.

He's crying, and he's on the ground, and he's shivering uncontrollably despite the warmth. The song doesn't help, the song's doing this, it just feels like death is all the more real. All the heavier. He can't look up anymore because he can't open his eyes. He can't think.

He's alone.

He's not the only one to linger a while after the melody ends. Sitting on the sand, his feet positioned just so that the occasional wave sometimes tickled them, hugging his knees against his chest, he thinks about what his life is like now.

Tōkan likes to think he's hard to knock down. That was something he already believed of himself, back in Zanarkand, but Zanarkand had no hardship. It could have just as well been just a fancy. But he managed to prove it to himself over the past few days. He got pulled off his feet and then hit the ground running, multiple times. He's been rolling with everything, letting the plot take him to the next chapter.

Then the plot forced him to stop and made all of the feelings he'd been fleeing crash into him. He's not very good at stopping to think about things, but clearly that's what he's meant to do now.

But the thing is, he doesn't have many thoughts. He feels hollow, drained, empty. So many adjectives he can tack on, there, because he doesn't have anything else but the flowery poetry that's always at the edge of his mind. A flowery portrait of absolutely nothing, a blank space.

There's no reason for him to think about anything, really, he realises, because he's already thought it all out. He wasn't letting himself mourn his lost life, and he's sure it's not over, he's sure this feeling is going to keep haunting him and hitting him every now and then, but... it does not, in the end, change anything. He does have to follow the plot, he wouldn't be able to live with himself if he didn't, and he doesn't really regret any choices he's made so far. Kind of anticlimactic, but he doesn't actually have any hidden depths that get brought to the surface by traumatic events.

He supposes he understands Zei's position on his own sacrifice on a much more visceral level, now. If he could stop this from happening for even a year, for half a year, for a week—

Is that the point the plot is trying to drive home, here? Because if so, fuck the plot very much, he could've stood to never have this particular scene happen in his story.

Well. Regardless, nothing's changed, he has no new insights, he's just in a lot of pain and very very tired and he needs to sleep. And then tomorrow the plot will resume.

He could do with someone to warm his bed now though and ohhhhhhh so that's what Wakka meant, people who live in fear of kaiju would totally be using sex as a coping mechanism and source of distraction wouldn't they? So he was saying Zei was one of those people, who sleeps around a lot so that he can occasionally forget about the weight of the world bearing on his shoulders? Honestly, legit.

He was not the only one to linger after the melody ended, but he was definitely one of the ones who stayed the longest. At some point tall torches had been lit along the beach, and at some point the sun had entirely set. The light was enough to show him the way to the parts of the village that were more intact, so after quickly casting a spell to deal with the worst of the sand clinging to his clothes and skin he starts to make his way there.

The village has a different style than Besaid, and is bigger. The houses are uniformly wood, which makes sense—even from this edge of the island it's clear that the Kilika jungle is much thicker and more lush than the relatively sparse woods of Besaid. The ground is also covered in wood, though, in a way oddly reminiscent of streets; a boardwalk of sorts, forming paths between the various different buildings.

Probably the rest of his party has been housed at the inn, but he doesn't know for sure, so he asks around for the summoner. They did indeed go to the inn, and he's given directions to it.

It's three stories tall, a cylindrical building with a conical roof, close to the center of the village and larger than all surrounding buildings by a noticeable amount. It also looks to have more activity than Tōkan expects is the norm, probably due to the arrivals and the survivors of the attack who lost their homes.

The inside is lined with tables, most of them only large enough to seat four. Tōkan can easily find his summoner's table by finding the grumpy ronso leaning against a wall next to it, arms folded.

Zei's there, by himself, drinking something steaming out of a mug. The state of the table suggests his other guardians had shared a meal with him before departing, and a nearby table has three of the blitzballers, quietly chatting to each other, also looking like they just ate.

The summoner spots Tōkan before Tōkan spots him and waves him over.

Tōkan takes a seat at the same table after giving the blitzballers a little wave.

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."

"That's a word you could use to describe it." He's taller than Zei, so he placed his sphere higher, and it splashes the water more widely around them.

"What other possible reason could you have for this?"

"None whatsoever," he says, placing his hands on Zei's shoulder and gently turning him around and starting to scrub his back.

Zei is taken by surprise again, but is pliant enough, and when he feels Tōkan's fingers and fingernails against the skin of his back he lets out a startled yelp.

Or a startled soft moan. He's not sure which. He's thoroughly distracted from poking fun at Tōkan, though.

Excellent. "Two-one," he says.

Zei splutters a bit but can't really argue.

"I think we'll have time enough tomorrow to teach the weird foreign guy the ways of magic," he continues. "For tonight, I want to rail you senseless."

"You continue to have such a way with words," Zei says dryly, but it's not like the words aren't having an effect.

"I adapt my words to my audience."

"Ah, I see, so you decided that the best way to seduce me was to explicitly and in graphic detail tell me what you want to do with me and my body parts."

"Yes, and I was not wrong."

Zei turns around and folds his arms, raising an eyebrow and grinning lightly. "Full of yourself much?"

Tōkan places his hands on Zei's lower back and pulls him so they're pressing their bodies against each other. "I'm not wrong," he repeats.

He's not.

Zei is a heavy sleeper, and he's a long sleeper. It's still relatively early, compared to the times Tōkan's Zanarkand used to end a day, but in terms of actual number of hours spent in bed Zei is very much on the higher end.

Tōkan isn't, not so much. He wakes up before Zei, still snuggled up to him—they pushed the two beds together last night—and smiles a bit. Waking up next to someone is always really nice, always makes him feel like everything's alright.

He doesn't feel particularly inclined to actually unsnuggle and get up, though, and opts to just stay there, eyes shut, in a half-awake doze that lets time pass him by.

So when Zei himself wakes up Tōkan is still there to be groggily smiled at.

"Morning, handsome."

"Morning," agrees Tōkan, pulling himself off his own doze and lifting a hand to run a finger through Zei's hair. "I figure we're not too pressed for time or we would've been woken up, yeah?"

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 Tōkan, 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..."

Tōkan 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."

Tōkan 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 Tōkan, 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!

"If you can't tell me the speculative thing in fifteen minutes, can you tell me more about—Lady Yunalesca, you said?" Something about that story felt... off.

"Sure. It's relevant, anyway. But also, take this with a lot of scepticism, history books from a thousand years ago had a lot of flourish in their details and I had to piece the most likely truth from a lot of different ones."

"I will not believe everything you say completely literally," promises Tōkan.

"So, the way the story goes is that there were many machina cities—'machina' is the word in Spiran for machines that are forbidden by Yevon—but Bevelle and Zanarkand were the largest ones. There was a war, and sources definitely do not agree on the ostensible reason for that war, so I don't want to speculate. Zanarkand and Bevelle were on opposite sides of this war, and were escalating to a point where their weapons threatened to destroy the world.

"Then Sin appeared and razed Zanarkand to the ground. Yevon's teachings—as told to us by Lady Yunalesca—say that Sin was our punishment for letting things get that far, although it is unclear who was punishing whom. Also, the name 'Yevon' comes from a person called 'Yu Yevon'. Historical sources also don't agree on who exactly he was, but his were supposedly the teachings that Lady Yunalesca shared with Bevelle."

"—so Yevon is a person. The way everyone talks about him is confusing."

Zei tilts his head to both sides. "Yes and no. Yu Yevon was a person, but his teachings and philosophy are more important than who he was. And his name became metonymous with the philosophy—diligence, self-restraint, agape, hard work, the joy in small things. When people say 'praise be to Yevon' we're not really praising the dude, we are expressing gratitude for good fortune presumably brought about by adherence to Yevon's philosophical principles.

"His teachings were not only philosophical, though. The art of summoning, the rites of Sending, how to defeat Sin, those were all parts of it, too. So, it's a whole bundle of things, really, and trying to look at it from just one angle won't give you the whole picture."

Tōkan nods. "Okay, I suppose that makes sense." As much sense as anything. "—by the way, the prayer sign, the, uh..." He mimics it, arms outstretched to the sides then pulled back in towards his chest in a spiral, ending with his palms pointing up and down at each other as if they're holding an invisible sphere, with an accompanying bow. "In Zanarkand—my Zanarkand—it was just the gesture used by blitzball players and fans to wish for victory."

...he feels a wave of grief wash over him, saying that. Sayu loved using that gesture before and after every game, even games they didn't win, grinning at him widely. Like she was saying that the only victory she cared about was getting to be with the team, getting to do what they did. Like that was enough, and in the deepest of senses, it was.

That was—the most inconsequential thing, but—but yesterday's Sending seems to have pulled a dislocated bone back into position, and now every time he moves that limb it hurts. It's gonna hurt.

His eyes refocus on Zei—they didn't water, this time, he thinks, and hopefully he didn't give much away. It's—having to feel this is fine, he's okay with it, but he doesn't—doesn't want to have it impair him every time—

"...your Zanarkand is so fucking weird. I know you know that, but. So weird."

If he noticed Tōkan's moment there, he did not react to it.

No, Zei totally noticed. Whatever. He just shrugs. There's no... he got what he wanted, right, the fact that his head is still swimming with grief is not actually affecting their conversation so it's... fine.

"—anyway," he continues, correctly interpreting Tōkan as not wanting to talk about whatever just happened in his head there, "Lady Yunalesca is said to have taught Bevelle the arts of summoning and Yevon's philosophy, claiming that only once we all atoned for the sins of those nations and achieved purity as all peoples would Sin be able to be truly defeated. Until then, it would always return. But it could be temporarily stopped by us, at the cost of sacrificing the summoner who did it."

Tōkan has already informed the audience of his opinion about that last bit and will not bore them with a rehash. It doesn't interact particularly well with the state of mind he's trying to recover from, though.

"The pilgrimage ends in Zanarkand. There, we somehow learn to summon the Final Aeon. It differs from every other aeon—physically, no two of them look the same, and in level of power. The teachings do not clarify why, or how—only that a summoner who successfully completes their pilgrimage will be rewarded with the Final Aeon. And when they summon it, it has the ability to pierce through Sin's carapace and destroy it. It also kills the summoner as well as anyone who happens to be nearby, so these fights have historically typically happened in unpopulated areas."

"—ah." A note of—not brightness, exactly, but at least the system is not—inherently rigged. It's circumstantial. "So it's not that the summoning inherently kills the summoner, the Aeon is just so powerful that the summoner is caught in the destruction."

Shrug. "That's the going theory, yes, but no one who's seen a Final Aeon in action has survived to tell the tale, so."

"No Unsent, either?"

"...no, no Unsent, either. This is... probably not a meaningful fact, like I said they're pretty rare, and Sin's only been killed five times."

He shrugs again. "Was just a thought."

Zei nods and spends a few seconds in silence under the water, thinking.

Then: "So, I guess maybe I can tell you about the thing anyway, this conversation was quicker than I'd expected, but... also I think you may need a bit to get recentered?"

"Maybe. Maybe you could center me."

Zei sporfles and looks out at Tōkan from the corners of his eyes. "You're insatiable. Maybe I should invite Jassu with us just to get you down for a while longer."

"I knew he was into dudes. —wait, you're allowed to flirt with him?"

"I'm not on the team even not-technically-officially. Besides, we were raised together, there have been off-season months here and there, you know!"

"That is so unfair I would never forbid my teammates from flirting—"

—but his brain is ahead of his mouth and he's thinking of all the times he did flirt with his team, with the way Yama just went along with it for the free dinners and never actually went any further than that and it was a lot of fun anyway, with the way Inochi melted under his fingers when they got alone in one of their bedrooms, with the way Hitomi would yell at them to get a room whenever he made Inochi blush but the three of them also had so much fun together, and with the way he matchmade Yama and Sayu, and how he met Hitomi's wife Yua one time and the two of them spent a whole night making sure Tōkan regretted meeting them very much (he loved every second of it)—

He went to Hitomi's wedding, two years ago. She was so happy, he had never seen her wear such a radiant smile, not before, not since. He understood the word 'radiant' as a descriptor of people then, the idea that someone could look so joyous they shone like the sun.

He recorded Yama's proposal to Sayu, six months ago. At Yama's request. Sayu went red as a tomato and took nearly a minute of stammering her "I do" but it's not like anyone doubted she was going to say yes. And when she did the whole team jumped out of where they were hiding to applaud and congratulate them and she meeped and she was crying and she kept punching Tōkan on the arm but she was jubilant, she was so happy that her chosen family was there to share this joy with them.

And Hideo, who was extremely ace, and who watched all of this in such amusement and exasperation. All the times he pulled Tōkan and Inochi by the ear from the locker room so they wouldn't be late for practice, all the times he flirted just to be a little shit, all the times he made Inochi and Sayu blush and laughed at their expense. He was a bit mean, and Tōkan would not have traded him for anything in the world.

Tōkan couldn't stop the tears, this time, they came unbidden and overflowed with no respect for his image or his dignity, with no respect for where he was or whom he was with. He turned around so Zei wouldn't see it, but damnit Zei was going to know, and, and was going to pity him or, or, damnit—

Zei—falls silent, and politely looks away anyway. "We can talk about that later," he murmurs, grabbing his clothes to run the magic water through them and rub them together to get rid of the accumulated grime that the laundry spell was not quite able to get rid of.

Tōkan wants to, wants to, wants to say something, but everything he can think to say is stupid and useless and pure lies like "I'm fine" or "You shouldn't worry about me" or, or whatever. And he's not sure he can even bring himself to actually say any words, so instead he just nods because actually he does need a bit to recenter.

Zei's shower sphere runs out, its water vanishing into pyreflies leaving him and his clothes perfectly dry. He steps into them and walks over to the door and says, "Take all the time you need. We'll wait for you downstairs." And downstairs he goes.

Damn it.

Damn it.

He takes another ten minutes to feel properly presentable. He's still not in the best of moods but he thinks he'll be able to catch it if something triggers him again. At least for now. He's sure he'll lower his guard at some point later and then be overwhelmed by feelings because that's very entertaining for the audience but for now he's... mostly fine.

Zei, Wakka, and Lulu are seated at the table talking about nothing in particular, and no one comments on his tardiness. Zei smiles pleasantly at him and gestures at the food on the table still in the process of being eaten then returns to discussing the finer points of setting things on fire with Lulu.

—oh, of course the people from the world with the rampaging kaiju know how to deal with grief. That makes a lot of sense. He'd honestly expected Wakka to get on his case but it seems he'd underestimated him.

Tōkan wonders idly what exactly Zei told them, and decides to ask later. For now, putting food inside himself is probably a good idea; they have a long day ahead.

That they do.

Once they're done with breakfast, they rejoin the blitzball players and make their way north towards the village gates. Kimahri joins them at some point, though he wasn't inside the inn when they were having breakfast.

Hmm.

Tōkan hangs back until he's next to the ronso. "Do you not hang out with the others much?"

Kimahri looks down at him with... some sort of a facial expression. Then he looks ahead again. "No."

"Why not?"

"I do not want to."

Tōkan should probably not draw any generalised conclusions about ronso based on this one guy.

"I'm curious about how you ended up here. Wakka and Lulu are from Besaid, right, but you seem to not be?"

"I am not."

...he needs a crash course in ronso body language. This looks like he's being stonewalled but as far as he knows this may be friendly.

He doesn't think so, but he'll try not to make many assumptions.

"You are one of Zei's guardians, yes?"

"Yes."

"So how'd you meet?"

"I took him from Bevelle to Besaid."

Zei is from Bevelle? Interesting.

"Ten years ago?" Tōkan guesses. "When his father killed Sin?"

Kimahri remains silent.

He'll... assume that means he's right.

"Why did you?"

"I was tasked to by his father."

Before his death, presumably.

Wait, if Kimahri took Zei from Bevelle to Besaid that means he's the one who's known Zei the longest out of everyone here. Even if only by a couple of months or whatever, he doesn't know how far Bevelle is from Besaid.

Huh.

Tōkan opens his mouth to ask something else but something tells him he should... actually back off, for now. He nods at Kimahri then picks up his pace a little bit after a minute (so it doesn't look like he's immediately fleeing) to join the main body of the group.

Zei's closer to the back of the group, not actively participating in the conversation between the blitzballers, and he smiles at Tōkan then.

"Getting to know Kimahri?"

"Something like that," nods Tōkan. "I don't trust my instincts about anything he does because he's not human and I don't wanna... I don't know, offend, by assuming."

"Pay attention to the tail," Zei suggests. "If you've ever met a cat, it's similar. And he'll take a while to warm up to you, and even when he does he won't really become any more talkative, but existing in his presence and not trying to push too much will make him more comfortable."

"...huh. Okay. Noted."

"Tōkan mentally adds 'befriend Kimahri' to his to-do list."

"That's not that impressive, you know, it was pretty obvious I wanted to."

...because he's used to having more friends than he currently does, i.e. arguably maybe two, and he misses it.

"Someone's prickly today."

...is he? Yeah, he kinda is.

"Sorry."

Zei dismisses it with a hand. "It's fine. You've been through stuff."

"What did you..." Wakka and Lulu can definitely overhear them, but he can't really think of a reason he wouldn't want them to. "What did you tell them?"

"That you remembered what your life was like before, and that when Sin attacked you and took you to Besaid he also hit your friends and family."

Another adept of the "not technically a lie" school of thought, Zei seems to be. But Tōkan nods. "How much should I..."

"We can talk about that later, if you want, but I don't think spending time focusing on it right now is what you want to be doing."

He's... not wrong. And also managed to answer Tōkan's real question without really giving it away.

"I don't," he agrees.

Zei smiles again. "Anyhow, you've earned some of the red spheres from the battle with the sinspawn yesterday. You got your pick between Power, Speed, and Mana."

...he still doesn't really understand how this all works. "Uh, how many?" he asks instead because that might... help?