"Don't worry, he'll be fine." Ion's voice jolted Jade out of his reverie, and he realized he'd stopped paying attention to the outside world while his eyes were pointed at Ion's face. Quite often people would ask why he was staring at them and he'd had no idea he was and didn't regard them as worth noticing, much less examining. However, he had been examining Ion when he started asking himself the question that Ion had somehow divined.

The idea of other people actually understanding what was going through his head: he'd love to blame it on their seventh fonons but he'd disproven that theory. There simply wouldn't be enough to go on.

Ion, and Luke, actually understood him. Even his own sister was barely starting to and Peony, who was the closest anyone had come before then, put it down to Jade being odd. He didn't understand Jade, Jade didn't understand Peony, but they both knew the other person was odd and accepted this. It was people thinking they understood either of them that caused problems. For instance, Asch had thought that Peony wanted to marry Natalia when/if Asch died. A normal person in Peony's position, saying those things, would have. Peony didn't work that way.

Perhaps it was the lack of preconceptions about how people thought that allowed the two of them to understand him better in a few months than his best friend did.

People learned how to interact with others very early on. Replicas missed that age period, along with walking and talking, and had to play catch-up. Ion and Luke thought that Jade was easy to understand. Jade was logical. Other people weren't. The 'they're odd, but I like them enough to work at getting along anyway' attitude that Jade had thought was the best a monster like him could get was the view Luke and Ion, as non-monstrous as it came, applied to almost everyone but Jade. They had to rely on resonance to tell what people wanted because they couldn't interpret the hidden signals any more than Jade could.

Under the circumstances the worries he'd had were inevitable: anyone would worry. Yet, anyone else would have been put off by his inscrutable face and thought he was too inhuman to possibly be worrying about others. Luke and Ion saw past that.

It reminded him of when he'd met Gelda Nebilim. It had been love at first debate. Finally! Someone intelligent! He'd let Saphir hang around him because as idiotic as he was regarding everything else at least he knew his third fonon from his sixth. He felt like he'd been surrounded by idiots and had finally found members of his own kind. They spoke his language!

He'd planned out proposing to and marrying her as soon as he came of age so that he could keep her with him, he'd been that pathetic. He'd wanted to be just like her.

And then he'd killed her, trying to be like her, trying to impress her. He'd lost the only person who understood him and even if he knew the replica wouldn't be her at least if he made one there would be someone else like her, someone else like him, and he wouldn't be alone.

And here they all were.

Ion and Luke didn't have that drive to fiddle with things and see what happened that marked a true scientist, but they, and Asch, cared about his researches and knew what he was talking about by necessity, even though they didn't share his mindset.

A half-mad escapee and a big baby with the power to destroy cities. When Peony had ordered him to Baticul he'd been very seriously considering killing them if there was any way he could get away with it, and perhaps even if he couldn't. He hadn't wanted the world to end because of his idiocy. He'd waited, so that he could gather information on them and gain enough trust that he could abuse it, and he'd ended up being studied and giving trust as well. Peony and Nephry said they were the best thing that had ever happened to him, and at first he'd been angry. How could they forget Professor Nebilim? Of course she meant more than anything to him!

Gelda had made him realize that other people could be friends and forced him to consider the results of his actions, although he hadn't learned soon enough. If he hadn't known Gelda he would have gone with Plan E, that would have been the most reliable way of taking them both out.

Oh, yes, Ion would be watching him still and waiting patiently for Jade to respond somehow, either with words or whatever had told Ion he needed that reassurance. "Thank you."

Ion smiled, and Jade realized he'd said thank you for an emotional platitude. Or, it would have been a platitude if almost anyone else had said it. Ion had said it only because he had reason to believe it was true.

Jade had known the truly nice (Nephry, Peony), the highly intelligent (Gelda, Dist), and the actually sane (Luke, Ion). They were all endangered species, but the world needed sane people the most.

If anyone but Ion and Luke tried this with him he'd treat them like he normally treated those who demanded his guidance. Except that Ion and Luke didn't demand. They didn't beg for lessons, they followed his example and thought he was wonderful for providing it even though he was just being himself, not some sort of object lesson. They liked him for him, he didn't have to bribe them by going on dreadfully boring outings and trying to ape human or proving that he was intelligent and useful enough they wanted him despite the fact he was a monster.

While creating a replica world and destroying every memory particle in existence (and the people containing them) was absurd, Jade could understand it in terms of wanting more people like these two. Van, however, had tossed Luke aside when the smart thing would have been to mold the impressionable one and turned Sync into Sync the Tempest. Van was insane, cruel, and had most likely suffered severe brain damage during the experimentation on Hod.

He wanted to kill him, but he doubted Asch would even leave enough to bury.


On the day the actual bridge repair crew finally got there and was pressed into service restoring the ford/landship crossing Arietta the Wild arrived in tears. "Anise, baby Ion! Sync and some horrible people killed my mommy!"

"Really? Bastards!" Anise was about to go into gory detail when Arietta whirled.

"You! You killed her, and my brothers and sisters!" Her tear-streaked face and red-rimmed eyes were full of hurt turned to anger. If looks could kill, Arietta's would have scratched them to death.

"What?" Luke had only just left home for the first time, he'd never killed anybody.

Ion gasped. "But that couldn't have been her! She lives far north of the Cheagle Woods and she never would have been okay with her children eating everyone in Engave!"

"A horrible cheagle burned down her home, so she made them feed my family so they wouldn't starve to death." Arietta was sniffing.

"Mieuuu…" Fluffy (Tear should never have been allowed to name the cheagle, she'd been unable to think of anything but that word and "cute") retracted its head into Luke's item bag.

"That was it!" Arietta pointed. "Anise, let's get them!"

"Arietta, wait!" Ion grabbed her hand. "I'm sorry, it's all my fault! There was a liger queen in Cheagle Woods, and we went to talk to her first, but she didn't act anything like your mother and she attacked me almost right away, so I thought she was one of the ones that you said were always trying to steal her territory. I'm sorry, I should have made Tear use force field and made sure she wasn't her, it's all my fault!"

Seeing Ion so unhappy averted Arietta's wrath, for the moment. "Don't cry, baby Ion." She hesitantly gave him her doll and turned to the ligers that had come with her. After a few moments she sniffled. "She's old, and she was really hungry and she even got sick." Arietta clearly needed her doll back. "She, she really tried to eat baby Ion?" The ligers seemed to confirm that. "Mommy would never have done that if she were well." Arietta sniffled again. "So Sync was you and they were protecting you?"

"Yes. I'm so sorry, Arietta."

"It's okay, baby Ion." Arietta sniffled again, but she was calming down. "Murdering Mommy to hurt me would be evil, but if Mommy tried to eat you she wasn't Mommy anymore. Mommy had to eat Grandmommy because Grandmommy tried to eat us. It's, it's how things are." In the wild, and this was Arietta the Wild. "Anise, why weren't you with baby Ion? You promised me you'd do a good job!" She tried to wipe the tears away, although her face was still marked by them and soot. She had looked all through the burnt place where her mommy had once lived for her. Ion gave her the doll back, and she clutched it even though she was trying very hard to be fine now.

"I was stuck making the cheagles return the food from Engave they stole. I had the colonel and God-General Tear the…" Tear hadn't picked anything yet. "Her," Anise pointed at Tear. "And the Scion of Lorelei's replica watch him for me! I made sure they knew what I'd do to them if Ion even got scratched." She had.

Okay, those were a good group of guardians. Arietta was finally calming down. She was a big girl, she wasn't going to cry in front of baby Ion and make him cry. "Oh, Sync's here."

"He's here?" Tokunaga was in battle-mode almost instantly. "Where!"

Arietta pointed at a mountain. "One of my friends saw him there, although he's probably not there anymore."

"Was anyone with him?" Jade asked.

Arietta didn't say anything, which was a giveaway. "Back to the Tartarus, everyone." Jade quickly rattled off instructions to a minion, who ran to go spread the alert. Arietta's loyalties were to the people who had found and befriended her. Fon Master Ion was dead: Vandesdelca was still alive. She still worked for the Oracle Knights for baby Ion's sake, although Mohs had tried to have her kicked out as soon as the previous Fon Master was dead. She wouldn't betray them to Van, she'd told Van that Ion needed her and so she had to stay with him and only him if Van was leaving, but she also wouldn't fight him, or Sync, who she now knew was another baby Ion, not just a replacement. They were careful not to remind her of the failed replicas that had been thrown into the Zaleho volcano before Van had been revealed and the project had resumed under Jade's supervision.

Killing her mother had made Sync an enemy, until she had found out otherwise. She had told them Sync was nearby since baby Ion wanted to meet his big brother and she wanted to make him hold still so she could apologize for treating him the way she had, but Van was another thing. Unless he attacked Ion she would sit out of any fights with him.

Arietta was, to put it kindly, simple, but at least that meant you knew where you stood with her.

She trailed after Ion, not really knowing what else to do.

Luke stuck close to Jade, knowing that if he did otherwise Jade would grab him and drag him along. "Should I call Asch or go back to Baticul?"

"Not just yet. Can you feel anything?"

"No, not with Ion and Tear so close." Ion and Sync weren't perfect isofons, but they were close, and Tear was also a descendant of Yulia, plus Van's sister. Between that and the seventh fonons that clustered eagerly around them, as well as Luke's own, there was too much static for Luke to sense even fonon clusters that were equally large.

"You can't pay attention to your surroundings or fight well enough with one of those headaches, and it's not a good idea for you to go to Baticul at the moment." What to do…