"The Farplane," Zei answers. "Which just passes the buck. What's the Farplane? Where is it? Why do the dead go there? I don't know. We'll pass through Guadosalam, later, for the pilgrimage, and they have a portal that leads into the Farplane, although I hear it only looks on it from above and does not actually get to ground level, so to speak. I'm told it's beautiful."

Hmm.

"And that's what you were doing, back there? Making sure the souls of the dead would go to the Farplane?"

Zei nods, sipping more tea from his mug. It's starting to get cold. "It is part of a summoner's duty, to perform the Sending and make sure the dead go on to their rightful destination."

"And only summoners can do it?"

"No. Anyone sufficiently attuned to the more spiritual aspects of magic can learn to do it. It just happens that this job often falls to summoners and priests of Yevon, here." He finishes his tea and sets his mug down. "Summoners are selected for having more aptitude for it, though, so it's mostly us."

"Does killing fiends do the same thing, then, or do they just return later?"

Zei does a so-so gesture with his hand. "Souls are... not a unified whole. It is possible for a single person's soul to have pieces of it in ten different fiends, more, even, if their pain was great enough. And if their pain was great enough, they may return again as fiends even after they're killed. But that is the exception, not the rule, or so I'm told; killing a fiend always inevitably disperses some of its pyreflies into the Farplane, and most of the time it's most of them. Eventually, if you kill enough fiends, the people who make them up will move on to the Farplane."

Azym nods again and looks down at the table to notice that he's eaten everything that was there.

Uh. Whoops. He hadn't realised he was that hungry.

Zei smiles. "Let's go upstairs to our room, then."

Their room is on the third floor. It is indeed pretty large, with two straw beds, a short cupboard with a decorative plant, and an area sectioned off by a wooden divider with something like a drain on the floor and four shower spheres resting on a shelf.

Zei locks the door behind them and makes a beeline for that sectioned off area, undoing his armwraps and taking off his harness and jewellery as he goes along. He's been dealing fine with the sweat and sand and grime sticking to his skin so far, in public, he has an image, but now that he's here he very definitely needs a shower asap.

Azym doesn't move so quickly, stopping to examine the room after he steps in. It's... okay. Still not the level of comfort he was used to, in Zanarkand, but he's not going to complain, he doesn't actually really care all that much.

When he sees Zei start his shower, he hesitates for a second then follows, grabbing a second sphere and placing it next to Zei's.

He's—kinda surprised, but not negatively so. "I see you're very efficiency-minded."

"That's a word you could use to describe it." He's taller than Zei, so he placed his sphere higher, and it splashes the water more widely around them.

"What other possible reason could you have for this?"

"None whatsoever," he says, placing his hands on Zei's shoulder and gently turning him around and starting to scrub his back.

Zei is taken by surprise again, but is pliant enough, and when he feels Azym's fingers and fingernails against the skin of his back he lets out a startled yelp.

Or a startled soft moan. He's not sure which. He's thoroughly distracted from poking fun at Azym, though.

Excellent. "Two-one," he says.

Zei splutters a bit but can't really argue.

"I think we'll have time enough tomorrow to teach the weird foreign guy the ways of magic," he continues. "For tonight, I want to rail you senseless."

"You continue to have such a way with words," Zei says dryly, but it's not like the words aren't having an effect.

"I adapt my words to my audience."

"Ah, I see, so you decided that the best way to seduce me was to explicitly and in graphic detail tell me what you want to do with me and my body parts."

"Yes, and I was not wrong."

Zei turns around and folds his arms, raising an eyebrow and grinning lightly. "Full of yourself much?"