A/N: Hello. Thanks to reviewers Channa and That Mysterious Reader for their feedback on the last chapter.

Next week's update may be delayed since I will probably be busy, so fair warning. However, the next chapter will be a lot more eventful than this one. Overlook any mistakes or awkwardness - though if there are any glaring errors, please point them out - as I don't have a beta reader and, due to some complications, wasn't able to proofread this chapter as thoroughly as I usually do.

Keep in mind that your reviews directly correlate to how motivated I am to write and, in turn, how quickly you get updates :).

It was a fair-weathered evening, the field oddly clear of monsters. A faint breeze blew across the land, the air pleasantly cool and the sky so bright that the tall, white tower in the distance was barely visible. Looming ahead was the silhouette of a House of Salvation, and even further behind it, the endless yellow sand of the Triet Desert could be seen.

The party had set out in the early hours of the morning, stopping briefly to stock up on some supplies in Iselia while Rai and Lloyd waited just outside. The moment had been an awkward one after their interaction last night; neither had really known what to say. Rai had been oddly nervous, remembering Lloyd's promise not to let the issue go, and he'd found himself hoping fervently that the other wouldn't bring it up again. Thankfully, Lloyd had been silent, so they'd just stood there until the others had finally emerged from the village.

Now they were several hours away, making good time - in fact, they had almost reached the nearby House of Salvation where they'd be stopping to rest. Kratos and Raine walked side by side in the lead, conversing softly, and Lloyd talked animatedly to Colette, who giggled and put in the intermittent comment. Genis occasionally made sarcastic remarks, but it was obvious he was having just as much fun as the other two.

Rai brought up the rear, his attention fixed on his surroundings. The last thing he wanted was to be taken unawares by a monster or bandit. Akira had been silent ever since the nightmare last night, so Rai was on his own with his muddled thoughts.

The land was clear and flat, so even though they were many miles away, Iselia was still visible behind them. Rai couldn't help but continue to glance back at the village uneasily. What he'd found out on the trip to the Desian ranch was still on his mind; the Desians would be invading Iselia soon in search of the special exsphere. It wasn't supposed to happen yet, not for days yet, but Rai didn't know how accurate the information he'd received had been. He kept expecting to look back to see nothing left of the village, or a faraway fire dancing in the forest.

And then, on his twenty-seventh time glancing back, his heart nearly stopped. There it was - a faint plume of smoke rising from the location of Iselia - and if he squinted, he thought he could make out flames.

They were too far away to hear anything. He hoped fervently that none of the others would turn around - none of them had done so for the last three or four hours, so probably they wouldn't - but then he caught part of the conversation ahead of him and his heart plummeted.

"We're almost out of sight of Iselia now, probably," Genis was saying. "Want to get a last look at it, Lloyd? Sure you won't be homesick later?" His voice was teasing. Lloyd shoved his friend lightly, giving his usual response.

"Shut up, Genis!" Despite the words, he was already turning his head to glance at the village. "You're right, it is pretty far away now ..."

His eyes widened slightly and Rai knew he'd seen the same thing. The swordsman stopped dead in his tracks, startling Colette and Genis, and they stopped too.

Kratos turned around, probably having heard the lapse in footsteps, and Raine followed his lead. "What's the hold-up?" his sister asked in her clear voice.

Lloyd raised his hand to point in the direction of the village, his voice quavering. "It's - look - "

"Just keep going, Lloyd," Rai said firmly, turning away from the view. Lloyd stared at him in absolute shock.

"What are you - talking about? We've got to - we've got to go back - "

Colette seemed to have collapsed into a quavering puddle on the ground, and Genis was white-faced. Raine looked shaken, too, but she spoke up promptly. "Lloyd, Rai is right. We don't know precisely what's going on back there, but there's nothing we can do about it. By the time we make it all the way back, whatever is going on will probably already be over - "

Rai sat down, returning his gaze to the sky and tuning out the conversation. He focused on trying to return his heartbeat to normal. Raine and Kratos would surely convince Lloyd to keep going, and there was no way anybody could know that Rai had known something was going to happen, or blame him for anything. Even the Desian Rai had spoken to hadn't known who he was giving information to. Why was he freaking out over something like this, unlike himself? He had no reason to be nervous; all he had to do was pretend he'd never heard that information in the first place. And as for whatever had happened to Iselia - there was nothing he could have done to prevent it. The Desian had said they wouldn't be able to destroy it entirely, right?

But why should it matter? There was nobody he cared about in that village; they were all ignorant, narrow-minded humans...

Lost in thought, he was taken completely aback at Genis's sudden words. The younger half-elf was crouched next to him - when had he approached? - and spoke in an undertone. "Rai - did you know something about this?"

His heart nearly stopped, and his mental voices froze in the middle of their heated argument. What? On what basis was Genis saying this?

"What do you mean?" he asked, outwardly calm as he flailed to put the pieces together.

Genis just stared at him for a few more moments. Then, "Never mind. I guess not." He looked tired and a bit sad, probably because of what was happening with the village, but he got to his feet and walked back towards the rest of the group, where Lloyd seemed to have conceded the point to the others and Colette had gotten her emotions back under control.

What was that all about...?

The altar was tall, with a glass dome at the top that allowed the sunlight to filter through as if conveying a divine presence. The group had arrived at this House of Salvation about an hour ago, and the rest of the group was either resting in the room that the priest had gladly provided or outside on their own. Colette had excused herself and come here; surprisingly, the dome was almost completely empty, save for one priest who was praying before a statue of the Goddess Martel.

She knelt before the Goddess and closed her eyes, feeling tears spill from her cheeks as she appealed to the deity. Martel had been one of her only respites throughout her life; there had been so many secrets, so many trials, and so many rules, but she could always tell the Goddess anything, no matter what it was. Ever since she had been a little girl, Colette had prayed multiple times a day, and she believed strongly that the Goddess Martel resided within every human being, guiding them and protecting them.

She started by apologizing to Her Grace for having neglecting her prayers for the past few days. She prayed for Iselia - for the safety of her father and her grandmother, and for Dirk, and for all the other people in the village. She prayed for the Desians, that they might find the right path. She prayed for the success of the Regeneration, and for the Goddess to give her courage. She thanked the Goddess for all the blessings that she had.

As she finally finished, wiping the last few tears from her eyes, she remembered something Rai had said the other day - that she shouldn't blame herself for things she didn't have the ability to change. After her conversation with the Goddess, she now felt sure that the best thing she could do now for the people of Iselia was to carry out her duty as the Chosen to the fullest. Meanwhile she would pray to Martel for their protection.

Another thought occurred to her; it was a good thing that Lloyd had come with them after all, since it meant he had escaped whatever happened in Iselia, and was safe. Then horror flooded through her as she realized that the safety of the rest of Iselia paled in comparison to her happiness at Lloyd's safety. She was a horrible person for this - she couldn't prioritize Lloyd's life or happiness over that of the whole village, but...

Tears were welling up in her eyes again, but she blinked them away. She had to be strong. As the Chosen, she would protect not only Lloyd, but everyone else as well. And she'd do it by doing her duty without complaint.

Where was Professor Raine? Raine was her closest confidant, but the older woman had been busy for the past few days. She remembered the other day, when she had broken down in front of Rai, and felt a wave of embarrassment. She'd been feeling really down at the time, and the Professor had been outside with Kratos. Initially she'd just wanted to ask Rai how much he knew about the Journey, because she'd had a hunch he might have picked up on something, but things had gotten out of control...

Still, she had been both surprised and grateful that Rai had actually put up with her, and had actually tried to console her despite his obvious discomfort. He really is a good person, she thought firmly. She'd cried all over his shirt and practically squeezed him to death, and he still hadn't been angry.

I wonder why he's so hard on himself?

The night was clear. So far away from any large settlement, it had a different feel; the darkness was pure black, with not a single torch to light it anywhere the eye could see, and the sounds of the wildlife were audible but soothing.

This late, almost every member of the party was seemingly asleep, although it was doubtful that Kratos had really been sleeping. Rai had tossed and turned for the past three hours before deciding that if he was going to stay up all night, he might as well do it outside in the fresh air rather than inside in the stuffy heat. So he was now reclining in the grass not too far away from the House of Salvation, staring up unseeingly at the starry sky.

Why was he having such a difficult time sleeping? Rai had always suffered from insomnia, but today it was especially bad.

In general, it was probably a side effect of the nature of his thoughts. He'd pondered it many times, wondering how his thought process compared to that of everyone else. Even though it was a futile thought to entertain - because after all there was no way for him to look into the minds of others - it was a recurring one. His thoughts were so fragmented - almost completely independent from each other, tackling so many different subjects at once - that he often thought of them as various voices with different personalities. He'd started to realize, though, that this had become much more pronounced after he'd discovered Akira inside his head - it was like he'd lost some of his ability to coordinate the various threads.

The most dominant voice was his "rational" voice, the one that he usually allowed to give the most input. It was more synchronized with his main thoughts than the others, and he often allowed it to seep into his actual speech and actions. He usually let this aspect of him take full control whenever he felt out of his depth and unsure, because it was logical and straight to the point yet still unfailingly polite and distant. There were a multitude of other voices as well, which he mostly kept under the surface. The "emotional" one - nicknamed W - was one as well, though he usually tried to quash it as much as possible because giving it any leeway had rarely led to anything good in the past. He did tend to push his emotions over to it when he let the rational voice take over, though. Then there was also the cynic, the whiner, and the jealous, and another one he liked to call "captain obvious" or CO for short, since it supplied random facts and details about the surroundings or what was going on with the other voices. There was a 'future' voice, which constantly thought about his next moves, and an annoying 'past' voice which dwelt on his mistakes and over-analyzed what their possible consequences could have been.

...That didn't even cover all of them.

He supposed this was why he'd so easily dismissed Akira as a figment of his own thoughts at first. He'd been thinking of him as the 'sarcastic' voice, but it turned out that this voice was a lot more than the others, considering that it appeared to be very dominant and able to project its own opinion even over all the others.
Sometimes the emotional voice or others were able to take the forefront of his thoughts, but he always fought hard to keep them from ever taking control of his actions. Akira, however, had been able to take control on his own, almost as a separate, alien being - that had been what really convinced Rai that this was something else, not simply another of his voices.

They were still active now, of course. Each one was babbling about something of its own. He usually found it best to ignore them, even though he was always somewhat aware of each one in some part of his mind. Now he zeroed in on each one, temporarily bringing them to the forefront of his mind.

W was currently whispering about how he was a horrible person for letting the Desians attack Iselia, and had been for the past six or seven hours; it was getting harder and harder to ignore. Hurriedly, he pushed it away. The rational voice mingled with his own thoughts, deconstructing and analyzing the correctness of everything his main consciousness was currently processing. The cynic was still giving a running commentary about topics relating to Rai being crazy and none of the party really caring about him (this had been a trend for the past few days now), and the whiner was complaining about how everything was always so difficult and why things couldn't just be easier. The jealous one was in a heated discussion with the past voice about whether they'd been right about the way they'd handled Kratos; it thought they had been, and that Kratos deserved it since he was always favoring Lloyd, and the past voice was playing devil's advocate. The future voice was in the middle of planning out specifically how they could go about ascertaining what exactly Genis had meant earlier today. Last of all, CO was making announcements about the precise color of the night sky and the average number of stars contained in each unit (where one unit was the amount of space enclosed by the gap between two trees above).

That was another thing that was different about Akira, he mused, letting the voices fade into white noise at the back of his mind as he split into a separate train of thought again. While the other voices were always active, saying something constantly, Akira only piped up occasionally, even though he was always present in his corner of Rai's consciousness. It seemed like since Akira wasn't truly part of Rai's own thoughts, he could keep his thoughts separate, and only project them to Rai when he wanted to speak to him. Presumably he still used up Rai's energy, though, since he was occupying part of Rai's physical brain.

Yeah, you're pretty spot on about me so far, Akira said suddenly, proving that he'd been listening. And yeah, I use up some of your energy. Hey, with all those other voices, what's one more? ...But you know, I don't think it's a good idea to keep pushing your emotions to W. I mean, what if he explodes eventually?

Rai didn't respond. A question by the cynic had caught his attention. It was a standard philosophical question - "is anything even real?" - but he realized it actually had quite a bit of relevance to his life. After all, if he - Akira, anyway - had died, but now existed in some other plane of existence, that called into question not only the credibility of the original reality and the new one but also the guidelines that define reality in general. Not only that, but if something like this - reincarnation, for lack of a better term - could happen once, why not again? Did that mean if he killed himself now, he'd just wake up again somewhere else? Or maybe none of this was real in the way he thought it was - maybe it was a hallucination, or a dream - but if that was the case, what was its point? How could he logically justify taking anything seriously - why did anything matter? And if it didn't, why the hell was he trying so hard?

Regardless of all the answers to these questions, wasn't he going to die at some point anyway?

No, no. That was just it - he didn't know that. If he could somehow find a path to immortality - and that seemed a hell of a lot more possible in this universe than it had in the last one - then he could postpone answering those questions forever. He would never have to take that chance of being permanently extinguished, if he could just...

That's exactly what I thought, you know, Akira said quietly. But before I could achieve that, I...

You killed yourself?

Akira was silent, and Rai knew he had guessed right. Normally he would have been outraged at that - killing oneself seemed ridiculous - but now, after that last nightmare, it made a lot of sense. Rai shuddered at the thought of his mind slowly deteriorating, at losing the ability to think. He would probably kill himself too. Wait...

Akira. If that disease or whatever you had, if that was genetic...does that mean I'll get it too? He could feel the stab of absolute panic at the thought. For a moment, he couldn't breathe.

I'm really hoping not. After I died, I was told that I was getting a "second chance" - so hopefully that won't happen, this time around? Or maybe the fact that you're a half-elf this time, and have mana in you, could change something. Honestly, I don't know. Anything could happen at this point. As far as I've been able to figure, the soul carries genetic information concerning personality and IQ, and also carries anything else intangible, like memories. So although our genetics are different on some level - you're a half-elf, and we obviously don't look the same physically - we still share most, if not all, of the same genes when it comes to personality and other things. As for the genes that caused that disease...we don't really have any way of knowing.

Shit. I can't believe this. So on top of everything else, now I have to worry about possibility getting some neurodegenerative disease? He realized he was hyperventilating and forced himself to breathe more slowly. Dammit. This better not be a thing. I need to read up on what this world knows about this kind of disease. Maybe there's a magical cure for it here. How old were you when you got that, again?

...Twenty-five.

Okay, I've got time, I've got time...I'm only fourteen now, that gives me over ten years to think of something...but what if the effects had already started before then, and Akira just didn't notice...shit, calm down...

Frantically, he outsourced the thought to his future voice so that it could plan who he should ask and when, and what research he could do in the near future. Maybe he could find some excuse to get Raine to take a look at him. The future voice accepted the new problem with vigor, and he quickly directed his main thought process to something else. Akira didn't comment, and Rai supposed it probably wasn't something his past self wanted to think about either.

He seized on another topic the cynic had progressed through - this world had been a game in his previous life, hadn't it? Didn't that make it unreal by default?

That's what I think, said Akira. I was the one who played this game, so I honestly can't help but thinking of this as not real. At the same time, though, this is really your life. I killed myself - I gave up. I don't really have the right to decide. His voice was bitter. Rai tended to agree, and he knew Akira could tell what he was thinking, so trying to comfort him would probably be pointless.

You've caught on pretty well, Akira said wryly. At any rate, I just think you should do whatever the hell you want to, since this world is just a game and you have no idea how long you'll survive anyway...

I think I should treat this as real. Because to me, it kind of is. If it isn't real, how can either of us be real? With reference to what, exactly, can we define our existence...?

I don't fuckin' know, Rai. Let's change the topic.

...Fine. So about the soul thing again. How similar would you say we are, then?

You're basically me with a different look and a different childhood. Oh, and of course there's what you are.

What?

You're a half-elf, idiot brat? Ring any bells?

...Oh. Right.

Yeah, so that seems to have made you even more of an angsty brat than I was, come to think of it...

Argh! Fuck off, Akira.

Damn, you're picking up my language, aren't you kid?

Akira.

Okay, okay. I'm gone. I'll leave you to brood, brat.

Akira retreated back into the depths of his mind and Rai sighed, closing his eyes. The rest of his voices were still rambling away. The future voice had really gone to town with its new material, but Rai didn't want to dwell on that. CO was finally starting to slow down - thankfully, it was running out of things to report on - but the others were still going strong.

Even if he finally managed to fall asleep, he'd run the risk of another nightmare...

It would be a long night.

A/N: Reviews are great.