Disclaimer: Final Fantasy X, Spira, blitzball, and all related characters and locations are owned by Squaresoft, with the exception of a few original characters who will be noted as such. This is a work of fanfiction, meaning that it is both created by a fan for no purpose other than entertainment, and it is fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely fictonal and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
And...Miyu's back! Actually, it turns out you're gonna find out a lot about her past, too, just because I kinda like her. Please don't sue me now; I'm almost done with writing the whole story...
Author's Note: The narrator of this story is Al Bhed, and some dialogue and idiomatic phrases have not been translated into English. Translations of all Al Bhed phrases can be found at the end of the chapter in which they appear.
Green Eyes in Overdrive
by flame mage
round 4: Rook
**********
The dark veil felt heavy over my face, and the long robes flapped behind me like sails. I'd snagged them on at least eight branches by the time the Moonflow wharf was out of sight, and although the robes concealed way more of my flesh than my normal skintight blitz uniform, I felt strangely naked without the long boots and gloves. My eyelashes brushed against the gauze of the veil every time I blinked, another strange feeling. I missed my goggles, and especially their sharpening and brightening lenses. My swirled pupils had dialated as far as they could, but it still wasn't enough to see through the dark as well as I would have liked to.
Tysh, how did the Yevonites *wear* crap like this?
Bickson was carrying the sleeping Naaga for the moment, since we'd had to leave our Chocobos at the opposite bank of the Moonflow. She was dressed the same way I was, as a shrouded Yevonite pilgrim. Bickson was wearing the same kind of thing, although without the veil. Naaga's lips were parted and her head was hanging back. Even asleep, she looked afraid.
Naaga was slowing us down, but the dirt path was deserted, so we were able to move more quickly than we otherwise would have. We still had several hours of darkness by the time we reached the grotto that I instinctively knew was the entrance to the town of the Guado.
I'd never been there, but Bickson had, and between his knowledge of the city and the letter I had from Miyu telling me where she was staying, we were able to find the tree-dwelling where the goalie lived.
Unfortunately, she happened to be living with Navara, the captain of the Glories. If you've never met Nav...tysh, I'm not sure whether you're missing out or the luckiest blitz fan alive. Doesn't every family have the perpetually drunk crackpot uncle who rants about taking over the world? That's Nav, except that Nav doesn't need to get drunk. He's a crackpot all on his own.
So I was not looking forward to dealing with him, especially since he knew who we were, which was why I was really hoping that Miyu would be the one to answer the door.
Of course, Miyu didn't answer the door. That would be a clear violation of Murphy's Law, which says that whatever can go wrong will, and at the worst possible time. In this instance, that meant that Nav had to answer the door, and he had to be wearing little Adamantoise jammies, and he had to be in a really freakin' bad mood.
"What do you want?" he scowled, rubbing his eyes with two scrunched brown fists.
Stay silent, Bickson had warned me at least seventeen times on the way over. Don't speak unless you have to, and when you do, be as demure as possible. I'd nodded while trying wildly to translate the concept of "demure" into Al Bhed. It didn't really work. I thought about trying to ask what the hell he was talking about, but it really didn't seem like the time.
"In the name of Yevon, we greet you," Bickson intoned, bowing. His foot shot out from underneath his robes and connected with my ankle. I got the message and imitated him, gritting my teeth.
"We are pilgrims who have devoted our lives to the service of Yevon. We have come to Guadosalam to pay our final homage to Maester Seymour," Bickson continued.
"Our whaa?" I hissed at him under my breath. He kicked me again.
"However, we are weary from the trials of our journey." The Goer shifted Naaga's limp body in his arms for emphasis. "Our sister suffers from exhaustion. In the name of Yevon, we humbly beg for shelter for the night until we are able to continue." He bowed again.
"Oh, you have come to venerate the body of the Maester, nyah?" asked the goalie. Something tricky-looking was gleaming in his beady little eyes. I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
"Yes," Bickson replied simply. "It is our most fervent wish to--"
"Then you know that Maester Seymour's body is in Bevelle!" Nav cackled with glee.
"Hela kuehk, kaheic," I muttered to Bickson, who turned to glare at me.
The Guado was watching me now with those calculating black eyes. "Now, you will tell me who you really are, nyah?"
"I..." Cred. We'd never gotten around to coming up with names, and I couldn't think of anything that didn't sound too Al Bhed. "My name is unimportant," I murmured quickly. "I have sworn not to use it until I achieve spiritual purity through Yevon."
"Which sect of Yevon did you say you belonged to?" he asked.
My mind whirled. In one breath, I spat out, "The Holy Yevon is Our Father and Savior Forever and Ever Amen church." He was staring at me. "It is a rather small group of believers not far from Kilika," I added. Bickson added another bruise to my ankle when Nav wasn't looking. I was gonna have some real trouble shooting when I got back in the sphere. *If* I got back in the sphere.
"Is that so?" Nav was cackling again. "Well, if you wish to venerate a Maester, I will take you to one in the morning. We shall see if he has heard of such a sect, nyah? Oh, he will make me a Maester myself for exposing the treachery of unbelievers, and then I can take over--"
"Navara! What are you doing?" Miyu was standing in the doorway that led to the back of the house, one hand braced against the frame. She was wearing her long white nightdress, but she hadn't taken off the forbidding metal mask she wore for games. The overall effect was eerie.
"Oh, Miyu," Nav laughed nervously. "Haha...just greeting some...pilgrims."
"They are pilgrims?" Her face turned toward us, and I saw her inhale sharply as she recognized Bickson. Quickly, she recovered and said, "Then in the name of Yevon, it is our duty to offer them shelter. They appear to be very tired." She crossed the room swiftly and took my hand in both of hers. "Will you be so kind as to accept our humble hospitality?" she asked.
"Yes, and many thanks to you," I replied.
"Then it is settled. Navara, they may stay in my room for the night and continue on their journey in the morning. Please, follow me." She turned and led us into the back.
When the door was shut behind us, she sighed and asked, "All right, Linna, why have you come to Guadosalam? You must know how dangerous it is for you here."
"Hang on a sec," I replied grouchily. "This thing itches like hell." I flicked the veil off my face and shook my hair out. "We need your help," I told her when I'd finished.
"To what end?"
Bickson took over, setting Naaga down on the bed. "We can't explain everything, but we think someone is trying to kidnap me. The rest of the old Spirals have disappeared. Someone's already come after me, and they almost hurt Linna and Naaga in the process."
"So we came here, hoping we could hang out for a few days until we can figure out what's going on," I continued.
Miyu rested a hand on either side of her mask and jerked swiftly once. It came off, and she settled herself like a bird in a wooden chair in the corner. Her eyes narrowed. "Who do you believe is behind this?"
"The temples," I replied softly.
She gasped and the metal mask clattered to the floor. No one picked it up. "Are you serious in these accusations?"
"Yes," Bickson answered.
"Then you have blundered into the lion's den, my friends," she moaned. "Guadosalam these days is a hotbed. There is much unrest with the death of the Maesters at the hands of the summoner Yuna and her guardians."
"Fryd?!" I almost yelled. Bickson's hand shot out to grab my wrist and pull me down to sit next to him on the bed. Miyu looked around warily, making sure Nav hadn't heard. I clenched my jaw. Stupid, stupid, busting out with Al Bhed like that!
"Yes," Miyu said when Nav didn't fling open the door and demand to know where the green-eyed thing was hiding, "Had you not heard? The summoner, the pillar of Yevon who is supposed to be the most spiritually pure of all Yevon's children, was a traitor. It is said that she and her followers murdered the Maesters Seymour and Kinoc in cold blood."
"Oh, Yevon," Bickson breathed. His fingers slipped away from my wrist and curved into the invisible oval shape of the Yevonite bow. Like it was instinct.
"Why are you so freaked out?" I asked him. "I didn't even know you knew that Yuna chick."
"I didn't," he answered numbly. "But she was a summoner."
He fell silent, and I looked at Miyu, whose expression was equally somber. She said, "You see, Linna...the summoners are Spira's only hope in the face of Sin. Yevon depends absolutely on them. With the marriage between Summoner Yuna and Maester Seymour, we all believed that she would defeat Sin, as did her father High Summoner Braska before her. Yet she betrayed him and Yevon and all of us."
"If we can't trust the summoners...what's left?" Bickson asked, more to himself than to either of us.
"Can you blame her for going renegade?" I shot out before I could think. "How would you feel if someone told you that you had to die just to get rid of Sin for a couple years? You do what you have to to survive."
"But each time we can hope that perhaps this will be the one!" Miyu cried. "I truly believed that Lady Yuna would bring the Eternal Calm. I thought perhaps we had atoned for our sins."
"Atoned for your sins?" I scoffed. "Why are you guys still having trouble with this? It's been a thousand years. What kind of god would punish you for something stupid your ancestors did ten centuries ago? Your Maesters are dropping like flies. Your priests are out to get you. What the hell IS left, Bickson?!" He didn't answer. "Miyu?!"
"Hope," the goalie replied dreamily. "Hope is all we have.
"It is said," she continued, still sounding out of it, "that it is because of the machina that we have not yet been forgiven."
I stared at her. "So that's it. It's all the Al Bhed's fault. Or are you forgetting that the Crusaders use the SAME DAMN MACHINA as the Al Bhed?!"
She snapped back into it like a rubber band, her cheeks flushed pink with anger. "I am not accusing you, Linna! I am attempting to help you, or are *you* forgetting *that*?"
"Look, if you got a problem, we can leave right now." I started to pick up Naaga. "I'll go find the airship. They'll never catch us." My green eyes were glinting. "But they'll track us here. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday soon, those priests'll be knocking on your door, Miyu. What are you gonna do?"
"Linnie, what's wrong?" I looked down. Naaga was rubbing her eyes underneath the veil and blinking up at me. "Why is everyone yelling? Is everything okay?"
"Yeah, it is," Bickson said forcefully, looking at me. "We're all gonna calm down now and figure out what to do."
"All right," Miyu agreed. She took a deep breath, a la Rin. "My apologies. We must deal with the matter at hand."
"So what, exactly, do you propose we do, Mr. and Ms. Brilliant?" I wanted to know.
The Goer sighed and looked out the window into the night. "Talk to Reppi."
*****
It took me a while to remember that Reppi was dead. As soon as that clicked, I spent a while muttering about psychic mumbo-jumbo and pseudo-spiritual hokum and why Moonflow sucks, but it did me no good. Bickson and Miyu were determined to go to the Farplane.
So the next morning, the two of them took a field trip, while Naaga and I sat around the house. And did nothing. Which I hated. The Glory and the Goer, apparently the new arbiters of undercover operations, had decided that being pilgrims just wasn't a good enough cover for us, and that it was too dangerous to even let us out of the house in Guadosalam. Nav was out running around like a maniac in circles around town and revealing his top-secret plans for world domination to anyone who could stop him long enough to open their mouth, so the two of us were alone.
We were sitting in a combination kitchen/breakfast nook that was drastically different from the one we'd been in the day before. Everything in Nav's house was actually carved out of the inside of a hollow tree. The table, as well as the curved wooden benches that slid around the outside of the nook, had literally grown out of the floor. Miyu had left us a plate of food, but it was all Guado stuff, the kind of stringy bread with red beans that only they seemed to be able to digest. A search of the cupboard revealed several varieties of crunchy bugs, but I thought this was more of a Nav dietary quirk than a Guado one.
"Linnie, I can't eat this," Naaga whined, banging a piece of bread against the table. Nothing much happened to either the bread or the table.
"Don't complain. It's better than MY cooking." Now, I decided, was probably not the time to tell her I'd rather try to consume my own right arm. I selected a stick of bread that didn't look particularly congealed and bit off a tiny chunk. "See?" I asked, trying to sound encouraging. "Delicious."
She was still watching me skeptically. I put the bread down, spat the chunk out with flawless aim into the carved wooden trash can in the corner, and sighed. "It ain't working, is it?" I asked.
"Nope," she agreed, setting hers down next to mine and brushing off her hands like she'd just touched something foul. "Why are they going to talk to the dead goalie girl anyway?"
"Hell if I know, Naaga," I answered. "Miyu says the images in the Farplane don't even talk back. Maybe they think she'll send psychic messages or something like that."
"Either way, I think it's stupid! What do they want to do, tell them who killed her?"
"Don't be a twerp. Bickson says the fiends got her," I snapped. Then I stopped. "Fiends never leave a clean kill."
"What?"
I slammed a fist on the table. "Fiends are always trying to create more fiends. I remember this! It was like the only part of biology class I really paid attention to! When fiends attack a human, if they kill it, they always leave a part of the body behind. They think it's a reaction of the Moonflow inside the fiend, that it has to give the prey a chance at being Sent or something. But they never found a body, or even part of one. She couldn't've been killed by fiends."
Naaga's eyes were as wide and round as blitzballs. "Are you sure? What if she became a fiend herself?"
"Even if she became a fiend, she'd still haunt the grounds where her body was. When someone killed the fiend, the body wouldn't disappear. Bickson told us she disappeared on the way to Macalania Temple, right?"
"Yeah, so?"
"So people go that way all the time. I was there like two months ago, and I didn't see any corpses lying by the side of the road. It's too cold to snow most of the time up there, so it's not like the body would've gotten covered over. She'd still be there, so someone would have seen her and reported it so the temple could've gotten someone out there to Send her."
"What happens if someone did Send her?" Naaga asked, starting to poke the bread again. "Or if whoever found her wasn't a Yevonite?"
"If she got Sent, those two fanatics'll be able to see her in the freakin' Farplane. Maybe something in their memories will give them the answer. And why would a non-Yevonite be on the road to the temple?"
"You were."
"Shut up, bihg. If I'd seen a dead body, I sure as hell woulda wanted to get it outta the middle of the road. I'd leave an anonymous note at the Temple or something. No matter how stupid I think Sending is, it gets rid of dead things."
"Linnie?"
"Yes?"
"I think the Farplane's stupid."
"Join the club."
We sat there in silence for a few minutes, contemplating the transience of earthly life and the condition of the breadsticks, and then Bickson and Miyu burst through the door.
"So?" I asked, twisting around in my seat to look at them. "How'd it go? Did you gain any vital knowledge from the spirits of the dead?"
Bickson sunk down on the bench beside me and rubbed his temples. When he looked up again and spoke, his voice was shaking.
"She wasn't there."
**********
Translations:
nyah - not a word in either Al Bhed or Old Guado; it's just something Nav says a lot. Don't ask me why. Characters will talk like that if you're not careful.
"Hela kuehk, kaheic." - "Nice going, genius."
"Fryd?!" - "What?!"
bihg - punk
And...Miyu's back! Actually, it turns out you're gonna find out a lot about her past, too, just because I kinda like her. Please don't sue me now; I'm almost done with writing the whole story...
Author's Note: The narrator of this story is Al Bhed, and some dialogue and idiomatic phrases have not been translated into English. Translations of all Al Bhed phrases can be found at the end of the chapter in which they appear.
Green Eyes in Overdrive
by flame mage
round 4: Rook
**********
The dark veil felt heavy over my face, and the long robes flapped behind me like sails. I'd snagged them on at least eight branches by the time the Moonflow wharf was out of sight, and although the robes concealed way more of my flesh than my normal skintight blitz uniform, I felt strangely naked without the long boots and gloves. My eyelashes brushed against the gauze of the veil every time I blinked, another strange feeling. I missed my goggles, and especially their sharpening and brightening lenses. My swirled pupils had dialated as far as they could, but it still wasn't enough to see through the dark as well as I would have liked to.
Tysh, how did the Yevonites *wear* crap like this?
Bickson was carrying the sleeping Naaga for the moment, since we'd had to leave our Chocobos at the opposite bank of the Moonflow. She was dressed the same way I was, as a shrouded Yevonite pilgrim. Bickson was wearing the same kind of thing, although without the veil. Naaga's lips were parted and her head was hanging back. Even asleep, she looked afraid.
Naaga was slowing us down, but the dirt path was deserted, so we were able to move more quickly than we otherwise would have. We still had several hours of darkness by the time we reached the grotto that I instinctively knew was the entrance to the town of the Guado.
I'd never been there, but Bickson had, and between his knowledge of the city and the letter I had from Miyu telling me where she was staying, we were able to find the tree-dwelling where the goalie lived.
Unfortunately, she happened to be living with Navara, the captain of the Glories. If you've never met Nav...tysh, I'm not sure whether you're missing out or the luckiest blitz fan alive. Doesn't every family have the perpetually drunk crackpot uncle who rants about taking over the world? That's Nav, except that Nav doesn't need to get drunk. He's a crackpot all on his own.
So I was not looking forward to dealing with him, especially since he knew who we were, which was why I was really hoping that Miyu would be the one to answer the door.
Of course, Miyu didn't answer the door. That would be a clear violation of Murphy's Law, which says that whatever can go wrong will, and at the worst possible time. In this instance, that meant that Nav had to answer the door, and he had to be wearing little Adamantoise jammies, and he had to be in a really freakin' bad mood.
"What do you want?" he scowled, rubbing his eyes with two scrunched brown fists.
Stay silent, Bickson had warned me at least seventeen times on the way over. Don't speak unless you have to, and when you do, be as demure as possible. I'd nodded while trying wildly to translate the concept of "demure" into Al Bhed. It didn't really work. I thought about trying to ask what the hell he was talking about, but it really didn't seem like the time.
"In the name of Yevon, we greet you," Bickson intoned, bowing. His foot shot out from underneath his robes and connected with my ankle. I got the message and imitated him, gritting my teeth.
"We are pilgrims who have devoted our lives to the service of Yevon. We have come to Guadosalam to pay our final homage to Maester Seymour," Bickson continued.
"Our whaa?" I hissed at him under my breath. He kicked me again.
"However, we are weary from the trials of our journey." The Goer shifted Naaga's limp body in his arms for emphasis. "Our sister suffers from exhaustion. In the name of Yevon, we humbly beg for shelter for the night until we are able to continue." He bowed again.
"Oh, you have come to venerate the body of the Maester, nyah?" asked the goalie. Something tricky-looking was gleaming in his beady little eyes. I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
"Yes," Bickson replied simply. "It is our most fervent wish to--"
"Then you know that Maester Seymour's body is in Bevelle!" Nav cackled with glee.
"Hela kuehk, kaheic," I muttered to Bickson, who turned to glare at me.
The Guado was watching me now with those calculating black eyes. "Now, you will tell me who you really are, nyah?"
"I..." Cred. We'd never gotten around to coming up with names, and I couldn't think of anything that didn't sound too Al Bhed. "My name is unimportant," I murmured quickly. "I have sworn not to use it until I achieve spiritual purity through Yevon."
"Which sect of Yevon did you say you belonged to?" he asked.
My mind whirled. In one breath, I spat out, "The Holy Yevon is Our Father and Savior Forever and Ever Amen church." He was staring at me. "It is a rather small group of believers not far from Kilika," I added. Bickson added another bruise to my ankle when Nav wasn't looking. I was gonna have some real trouble shooting when I got back in the sphere. *If* I got back in the sphere.
"Is that so?" Nav was cackling again. "Well, if you wish to venerate a Maester, I will take you to one in the morning. We shall see if he has heard of such a sect, nyah? Oh, he will make me a Maester myself for exposing the treachery of unbelievers, and then I can take over--"
"Navara! What are you doing?" Miyu was standing in the doorway that led to the back of the house, one hand braced against the frame. She was wearing her long white nightdress, but she hadn't taken off the forbidding metal mask she wore for games. The overall effect was eerie.
"Oh, Miyu," Nav laughed nervously. "Haha...just greeting some...pilgrims."
"They are pilgrims?" Her face turned toward us, and I saw her inhale sharply as she recognized Bickson. Quickly, she recovered and said, "Then in the name of Yevon, it is our duty to offer them shelter. They appear to be very tired." She crossed the room swiftly and took my hand in both of hers. "Will you be so kind as to accept our humble hospitality?" she asked.
"Yes, and many thanks to you," I replied.
"Then it is settled. Navara, they may stay in my room for the night and continue on their journey in the morning. Please, follow me." She turned and led us into the back.
When the door was shut behind us, she sighed and asked, "All right, Linna, why have you come to Guadosalam? You must know how dangerous it is for you here."
"Hang on a sec," I replied grouchily. "This thing itches like hell." I flicked the veil off my face and shook my hair out. "We need your help," I told her when I'd finished.
"To what end?"
Bickson took over, setting Naaga down on the bed. "We can't explain everything, but we think someone is trying to kidnap me. The rest of the old Spirals have disappeared. Someone's already come after me, and they almost hurt Linna and Naaga in the process."
"So we came here, hoping we could hang out for a few days until we can figure out what's going on," I continued.
Miyu rested a hand on either side of her mask and jerked swiftly once. It came off, and she settled herself like a bird in a wooden chair in the corner. Her eyes narrowed. "Who do you believe is behind this?"
"The temples," I replied softly.
She gasped and the metal mask clattered to the floor. No one picked it up. "Are you serious in these accusations?"
"Yes," Bickson answered.
"Then you have blundered into the lion's den, my friends," she moaned. "Guadosalam these days is a hotbed. There is much unrest with the death of the Maesters at the hands of the summoner Yuna and her guardians."
"Fryd?!" I almost yelled. Bickson's hand shot out to grab my wrist and pull me down to sit next to him on the bed. Miyu looked around warily, making sure Nav hadn't heard. I clenched my jaw. Stupid, stupid, busting out with Al Bhed like that!
"Yes," Miyu said when Nav didn't fling open the door and demand to know where the green-eyed thing was hiding, "Had you not heard? The summoner, the pillar of Yevon who is supposed to be the most spiritually pure of all Yevon's children, was a traitor. It is said that she and her followers murdered the Maesters Seymour and Kinoc in cold blood."
"Oh, Yevon," Bickson breathed. His fingers slipped away from my wrist and curved into the invisible oval shape of the Yevonite bow. Like it was instinct.
"Why are you so freaked out?" I asked him. "I didn't even know you knew that Yuna chick."
"I didn't," he answered numbly. "But she was a summoner."
He fell silent, and I looked at Miyu, whose expression was equally somber. She said, "You see, Linna...the summoners are Spira's only hope in the face of Sin. Yevon depends absolutely on them. With the marriage between Summoner Yuna and Maester Seymour, we all believed that she would defeat Sin, as did her father High Summoner Braska before her. Yet she betrayed him and Yevon and all of us."
"If we can't trust the summoners...what's left?" Bickson asked, more to himself than to either of us.
"Can you blame her for going renegade?" I shot out before I could think. "How would you feel if someone told you that you had to die just to get rid of Sin for a couple years? You do what you have to to survive."
"But each time we can hope that perhaps this will be the one!" Miyu cried. "I truly believed that Lady Yuna would bring the Eternal Calm. I thought perhaps we had atoned for our sins."
"Atoned for your sins?" I scoffed. "Why are you guys still having trouble with this? It's been a thousand years. What kind of god would punish you for something stupid your ancestors did ten centuries ago? Your Maesters are dropping like flies. Your priests are out to get you. What the hell IS left, Bickson?!" He didn't answer. "Miyu?!"
"Hope," the goalie replied dreamily. "Hope is all we have.
"It is said," she continued, still sounding out of it, "that it is because of the machina that we have not yet been forgiven."
I stared at her. "So that's it. It's all the Al Bhed's fault. Or are you forgetting that the Crusaders use the SAME DAMN MACHINA as the Al Bhed?!"
She snapped back into it like a rubber band, her cheeks flushed pink with anger. "I am not accusing you, Linna! I am attempting to help you, or are *you* forgetting *that*?"
"Look, if you got a problem, we can leave right now." I started to pick up Naaga. "I'll go find the airship. They'll never catch us." My green eyes were glinting. "But they'll track us here. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday soon, those priests'll be knocking on your door, Miyu. What are you gonna do?"
"Linnie, what's wrong?" I looked down. Naaga was rubbing her eyes underneath the veil and blinking up at me. "Why is everyone yelling? Is everything okay?"
"Yeah, it is," Bickson said forcefully, looking at me. "We're all gonna calm down now and figure out what to do."
"All right," Miyu agreed. She took a deep breath, a la Rin. "My apologies. We must deal with the matter at hand."
"So what, exactly, do you propose we do, Mr. and Ms. Brilliant?" I wanted to know.
The Goer sighed and looked out the window into the night. "Talk to Reppi."
*****
It took me a while to remember that Reppi was dead. As soon as that clicked, I spent a while muttering about psychic mumbo-jumbo and pseudo-spiritual hokum and why Moonflow sucks, but it did me no good. Bickson and Miyu were determined to go to the Farplane.
So the next morning, the two of them took a field trip, while Naaga and I sat around the house. And did nothing. Which I hated. The Glory and the Goer, apparently the new arbiters of undercover operations, had decided that being pilgrims just wasn't a good enough cover for us, and that it was too dangerous to even let us out of the house in Guadosalam. Nav was out running around like a maniac in circles around town and revealing his top-secret plans for world domination to anyone who could stop him long enough to open their mouth, so the two of us were alone.
We were sitting in a combination kitchen/breakfast nook that was drastically different from the one we'd been in the day before. Everything in Nav's house was actually carved out of the inside of a hollow tree. The table, as well as the curved wooden benches that slid around the outside of the nook, had literally grown out of the floor. Miyu had left us a plate of food, but it was all Guado stuff, the kind of stringy bread with red beans that only they seemed to be able to digest. A search of the cupboard revealed several varieties of crunchy bugs, but I thought this was more of a Nav dietary quirk than a Guado one.
"Linnie, I can't eat this," Naaga whined, banging a piece of bread against the table. Nothing much happened to either the bread or the table.
"Don't complain. It's better than MY cooking." Now, I decided, was probably not the time to tell her I'd rather try to consume my own right arm. I selected a stick of bread that didn't look particularly congealed and bit off a tiny chunk. "See?" I asked, trying to sound encouraging. "Delicious."
She was still watching me skeptically. I put the bread down, spat the chunk out with flawless aim into the carved wooden trash can in the corner, and sighed. "It ain't working, is it?" I asked.
"Nope," she agreed, setting hers down next to mine and brushing off her hands like she'd just touched something foul. "Why are they going to talk to the dead goalie girl anyway?"
"Hell if I know, Naaga," I answered. "Miyu says the images in the Farplane don't even talk back. Maybe they think she'll send psychic messages or something like that."
"Either way, I think it's stupid! What do they want to do, tell them who killed her?"
"Don't be a twerp. Bickson says the fiends got her," I snapped. Then I stopped. "Fiends never leave a clean kill."
"What?"
I slammed a fist on the table. "Fiends are always trying to create more fiends. I remember this! It was like the only part of biology class I really paid attention to! When fiends attack a human, if they kill it, they always leave a part of the body behind. They think it's a reaction of the Moonflow inside the fiend, that it has to give the prey a chance at being Sent or something. But they never found a body, or even part of one. She couldn't've been killed by fiends."
Naaga's eyes were as wide and round as blitzballs. "Are you sure? What if she became a fiend herself?"
"Even if she became a fiend, she'd still haunt the grounds where her body was. When someone killed the fiend, the body wouldn't disappear. Bickson told us she disappeared on the way to Macalania Temple, right?"
"Yeah, so?"
"So people go that way all the time. I was there like two months ago, and I didn't see any corpses lying by the side of the road. It's too cold to snow most of the time up there, so it's not like the body would've gotten covered over. She'd still be there, so someone would have seen her and reported it so the temple could've gotten someone out there to Send her."
"What happens if someone did Send her?" Naaga asked, starting to poke the bread again. "Or if whoever found her wasn't a Yevonite?"
"If she got Sent, those two fanatics'll be able to see her in the freakin' Farplane. Maybe something in their memories will give them the answer. And why would a non-Yevonite be on the road to the temple?"
"You were."
"Shut up, bihg. If I'd seen a dead body, I sure as hell woulda wanted to get it outta the middle of the road. I'd leave an anonymous note at the Temple or something. No matter how stupid I think Sending is, it gets rid of dead things."
"Linnie?"
"Yes?"
"I think the Farplane's stupid."
"Join the club."
We sat there in silence for a few minutes, contemplating the transience of earthly life and the condition of the breadsticks, and then Bickson and Miyu burst through the door.
"So?" I asked, twisting around in my seat to look at them. "How'd it go? Did you gain any vital knowledge from the spirits of the dead?"
Bickson sunk down on the bench beside me and rubbed his temples. When he looked up again and spoke, his voice was shaking.
"She wasn't there."
**********
Translations:
nyah - not a word in either Al Bhed or Old Guado; it's just something Nav says a lot. Don't ask me why. Characters will talk like that if you're not careful.
"Hela kuehk, kaheic." - "Nice going, genius."
"Fryd?!" - "What?!"
bihg - punk