Author's Note: I actually have to apologize for this chapter. The dialogue was never meant to go on this long, but what was supposed to be a brief meeting with Gippal somehow expanded beyond expectations. The timetable states that the party's supposed to be mauled by fiends by now. Instead, we get an Al Bhed messing around. Next chapter things should be back on track.

I'd also like to thank anyone taking the time to read this fic; thank you for all your comments. Believe it or not, they're actually encouraging me to finish this faster than I would normally. If anyone's looking for pure pr0n, I'm afraid you'll have to go elsewhere... *watches everyone disappear* ... Well, that solved that.

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"I don't understand Nooj."

This is me, sounding frustrated in the common tongue. It is the only one I know, but it is not good enough for once.

I do not comprehend why. It has always worked before. Then the world became composed of red eyes glaring, brown eyes cooly amused, and green eyes dancing with Al Bhed swirls; now nothing makes sense, and the maesters seem more sinister by the day.

I am stuck repeating the same tactics over and over because I don't know how to keep them from being mistakes.

We have pitched camp to wait out the noon. The radiance of the sands is already glaring enough to make my eyes water to look at them, so I avoid anything but the most sidelong of glances out of the small cluster of rocks the Teams are using for cover support. Even the briefest second of exposure leaves me with flarespots spattered across my vision, and I must blink them away before I can see again.

Gippal and I try to peg the canvas shroud down. He is the mechanical genius and I am not, which in this case extends to basic survival skills of rigging cords. I should know how to prepare the lean-to by now, but my hands refuse to work properly during this clouding of my mind. Thankfully, he does not reprimand me when my half of the shelter keeps falling down.

"It's a signature style," he nods instead, hands on his hips as he surveys the lopsided structure. "Lemme tell you, no one's going to see that and think it belongs to anyone but us."

When Nooj and I crested one of the dunes to find several of the Teams held back to look for us, neither of us could think of what to say in excuse for our falling behind. It was Team Four that came to our rescue again, the leader giving a jaunty wink as he sauntered down the ridge and proclaimed that he'd stolen the mighty Nooj's cane to taunt us both. He'd circled the group beckoning for applause, as ribald as any blitzball star before one of the instructors stepped forward and struck him across the head.

No one has an answer for why the instructors made us start such a trip at night instead of the evening, but I think the official label is that it is another exercise. Everything they have done seems to be engineered for maximum discomfort. Trying to mark days by risings and settings of the light is useless by now. All we do is get lost.

The sun hurts my eyes. Gippal has flopped down to sit against the side of the stone outcropping where we stacked our pack supplies, and he is playing with the side of the canvas tent nearest to him.

For a moment I do not know if he heard me at all, so I repeat what I said about Nooj.

"No kidding." The reply is slow off his tongue. He takes his time before continuing, finger poking again and again at the cloth flaps. "What about him happened this time?"

For the first time in a great while, I hesitate. Not from wanting to choose my words correctly, for I customarily pause out of habit, but because I really do not know what to say. Words are necessary because I no longer trust what my eyes are telling me. It doesn't make sense.

"Maybe... I don't really know what's going on. Not just with Nooj," I explain, pulling up my knees as I sit beside the Al Bhed. I look down into the canyon formed by my thighs and calves and stare at the miniature desert below the arches of my legs. No insects move. There is nothing for me to obliterate if I felt like playing at being Sin. "With this whole test. I thought it was a great opportunity--not having to serve in the Crusaders first, advancing ahead of them anyway. It was... supposed to be just like skipping ranks. I liked that chance," I confess. "Being able to cut through the usual route and just get where I wanted, if I stayed aware of all the circumstances. I was good at that. But now..." And I hate my voice, the way it sounds, but Gippal makes no sign of reaction to it, "now I don't even know what I'm accomplishing by being here at all, except to get all confused."

Gippal's fingers have become bored with the shelter and are now wrapped into the straps of his carrier pack. "Don't wanna hear you say something like that, Baralai," he replies without missing a step in the rhythm of his play-tugging. He is not looking at me. "If you lose confidence in yourself, then who am I gonna ask for a translation when the directions don't make a lick of sense?"

"I still couldn't put this together," I protest, waving towards the demi-tent. In reality, I suspect Gippal knows how to do it perfectly from long experience judging from how deft his hands were, but he is kind enough not to make this fact obvious.

The Al Bhed lets me know just how stupid I am being by mumbling a sound in his mouth that's a cross between a snort and a chuckle. "Tispycc." Unable to find an appropriate toothpick, he wets a piece of string on his lip for lack of anything better to stick in his mouth while he talks. "I'm not talking about the tent. I mean that you're my friend. And you know things that I don't, so I kinda need you to be there when I'm getting over my head on something and don't realize. Got it?" Fingers roll the black strand, making it writhe while he plays with it.

Something about Gippal's words makes me uncomfortable. It is because they are so open. Experience has taught me by now that he is no fool despite his test scores, so it befuddles me when he is blatant; I look for the lie, for what he must be hiding, and find nothing.

It means that his verdict is much simpler than my own on this whole puzzle. "Y'know," Gippal is saying, never slowing down to watch me watch him. "You've been acting wierd ever since you got hung up on Paine. Can't you just talk to her? I know she's not upset at you."

This is a less sensitive subject than it was a day ago. Talking to Nooj must have scarred something over in me, and if the Al Bhed is judging me, he does not show it. "She's not?"

"Well, uh..." The sand crunches beneath Gippal's feet as he adjusts his heels. "Maybe just a little."

I do not know what to say to that.

We both sit in silence. Eventually Gippal spits out the string after almost swallowing it by accident. He tries to shake it off his fingertip and cannot, the fiber coated with his salvia and clinging tenaciously, and then he tries to wipe it on my leg. When I give him a disapproving look, the blonde only grins at me.

"I thought I insulted her over Nooj," I admit after a while. The weight of the words lessens once I speak them. "I... from the way she was acting, it seemed like she was paying the most attention to him. It should have been safe to discuss Nooj with her, but when I did... no," I catch myself before I start to project theories, find safe ruses to fall back on. "I don't know what I did."

Beside me, Gippal is doing something involving the laces of my boots and mystical knotwork. "Over Nooj?" he questions me, distracted while he performs high ritual with my shoes. "It'd be impossible not to get worried over that guy. He's a nutcase. Paine came asking me if there was anything I could suggest to get his interest going in stuff other than maybe like, fiends, his gun, life expectancy rates, getting splattered, you know. At the time I couldn't think of anything." Unable to keep his position comfortable by continuing to stoop over my foot, the Al Bhed finally moves to roll onto his stomach, sprawling out before me while he concentrates. "If you want, I'll go check him out, okay? If it makes you feel any better. Just do me a favor?"

I wonder if he knows he is risking a broken nose doing that with my bootstraps. "Yes?" Or if I will ever be able to untie them afterwards.

"Have it out with Paine, before you two drive me nuts, yeah?"

Having run out of extra play on the strands, Gippal shifts himself to fish beneath my legs for the smaller support ropes we are using to hang the tent. They are thick enough to slip the laces when he tries to tie them straight together, so he resorts to winding them into the elaborate pattern he has already established between my feet.

I am witness to this without protest. He wedges his head against my knee so that he can reach for the piston cords we are using to attach the canvas to the rock outcropping for support. The tent twangs in protest when he yanks too hard, and he nudges my feet over so that his business is made easier.

For some reason, I permit this. Right now in the haven provided by our deformed shelter, in the shadows cool and calm, I think I can see this whole matter with Gippal's perception, his lack of complication. Our team was fighting with itself. If a machina did not work properly, you took it apart and cleaned the parts, then reassembling it with greater care until all its components ran smoothly with one other. If there was something broken, you fixed it. When people argued, you found a way to get them to them stop.

And then you weave even the simplest pieces of yarn together until they became an ornate whole once more.

"You'd do that?" My own voice surprises me when I finally let it be used. "Talk to Nooj?"

"Hey, we've got to stick together." Gippal turned a smile as bright as noonday light upon me, and reached out to shove at my shoulder. His lacework is dropped without a second thought. "I watch your back, you watch mine. Yeah?"

There is a slow smile moving across my face. I can feel the relief like a rush of water pouring down on me from rain. "Right."

Everything is simpler with the Al Bhed. He is infectious with his honesty. When I am around him for too long, I start to believe that misunderstandings are no greater than grains of sand mixing with machina oil. They are irritants. You can clean them away and keep going so long as you attend to them before the gears grind to a halt.

I am used to subtle arguments destroying the whole; the glances of the maesters to one another are familiar to me, and I have learned to read volumes of disaster pending on the heels of a stride gone too heavy. Bevelle has raised me well for its politics, but Yevon is not the world.

Yevon is not Gippal, and there are more ways to see than I have been taught.

Gippal is up and gone before I can wish him any form of luck. Without his chatter in my ear, I can hear the sounds of the teams dragging themselves slowly around the rest hole, quiet murmurs of doubt and hope mixing in with periodic hushes as the instructors pass by to check on the lighting conditions. Soon the noon will pass and we will have to embark for the rest of our trip to the docks.

I see a hush of grey hair pass by en route to our tent, and when I look up to try and catch it, I am unlucky enough to see only the desert sun. It is Paine, I decide quickly, because I can smell the leather. It creaks as she kneels down to hunt through what sounds like another pack; likely the carrier for her machina, judging from the liquid whisper of a sphere scraping against its receptacle prongs. Buckles clatter. Now would be the perfect time to try and talk with her.

Then I realize I have no idea how to get my boots undone from the wall.