"...thanks," he says, a little suspiciously.

"How come you draw him like that? With the halo?"

“That’s how they drew Jesus, right?”

He’s filling it in carefully with short strokes, outwards from the head, creating the impression of shining light.

"Yeah. And the saints."

He's so relieved to see the little sketch. He's been trying to hold a position of agonizing epistemic caution: sure, he saw something, but people see all sorts of things, right? Muslims, Buddhists ... he shouldn't really be much more certain in the faith he already had. He could still be wrong -- and then he cries at night, because he feels like a caricature of sinful doubt.

"You're one of the people who travel with him?"

“…yeah, I guess I am.”

Camillo sits right down beside him on the grass.

"Tell me about him."

See? He's being careful. He's not leading the witness.

He puts down his pencil, and turns on the grass to face him, sits up straight.

“What do you want to know?”

He glances over at the punk preacher holding court in the quad.

"...what's special about him? What is he doing? Why are you doing it with him?"

“He heals people.”

He picks up his pencil again, and then drops it, deliberately. This is important.

“There was a girl in my class who had really bad seizures. He made them stop. And Cassiopeia had — she’s a chicken — had a tumor, and she was going to die, and he just…touched her and pressed down on it and then it was gone. He missed his bus. So he could come see her.”

Tumors. Seizures. It's the sort of things people would be wrong about, if they were wrong about someone working miracles.

He saw the halo.

He's so lucky. He's so lucky. He's never wanted anything more than this, his whole life, except to be a saint himself. He's worked so hard to never want anything more than this.

"He's -- does he have a church he goes to?"

Not that it matters, necessarily. It's not like you can't be a Baptist and holy. But it's evidence.

“No. He’s making a new one.”

Like St. Francis, surely. There's nothing wrong with building a church.

...no. That's spiritual pride, isn't it? Assuming what he already knows is right, instead of even trying to listen and evaluate things on their own merits? If this man is trying to found a new denomination, he wants to know that, and decide what he thinks about it. Maybe it's right, somehow. Or maybe he's been sent to set it back on the right track.

"A new church?"

He nods.

“Like — not a building. Obviously.”

"What's wrong with the old one?"

If he brings up the sex abuse scandal Camillo is going to flip. That's not a doctrinal objection.

He scoffs.

“What isn’t wrong with the old one?”

"The Apostolic succession," Camillo retorts, a little snippily.

“I have no idea what that is,” he says, glancing aside at the woman typing nearby. “Go talk to Dorothy if you want to argue about how many persons are in God, or whatever.”

"Three," he says automatically. "Why wouldn't I argue with Z?"

“I mean, you can. But he’s kind of busy right now.”

Z has moved on to sitting cross-legged next to a girl on the grass, listening to her.

"I'm not in a hurry."

This is the most important thing that's ever happened to him. He can miss class.

...well. He can be late for class. There's a quiz at the end.

He nods.

“Why’d you decide to talk to me?”

Does he want to provide them with more fuel for this, if it's a burgeoning schism?

After a moment's indecision, he falls back on honesty.

"You drew him the way I saw him."

He nods again, slowly.

“…I don’t see that stuff. But Kyou does.”

"Who's Kyou?"

He's automatically, unreasonably suspicious of anyone who habitually sees that stuff. Not that he has anything against mystics or visionaries, in theory, but realistically there's got to be a lot more people deluding themselves than real saints out there.