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[miniroth]

"Out of ambit currently."
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[unsheathedfromreality]

[It is not, by far, the first time someone's gone silent on Illarion only to break that silence in full fury.

He waits patiently through the intervening interval, attending to a few small matters that require little thought. He wraps up the last of these when his Relic pings with a new message--picks it up, and reads the response through Iskierka's eyes.

Oh, little one.]

No.

I think you are all too aware and it's crushing you. [QED, as they say in the Empire.]

Whether or not you believe it, you deserve a say in all of this. The opportunity to make mistakes without condemnation and to discover what a person with your nature is and can be.

But I can't help you in that way either without knowing what you are and who else affects you.

Ignorance in those matters did nearly get me (justifiably) shot.

[miniroth]

[And that's the tamed version, subject to rewrite and walking away and rewrite and reconsidering and more. What would it have been without an hour's filter?]

It was not justified. Mr. Valentine means well, but he knows what I become, and his dearest friends are my victims. He seems to believe that by acting thus he can prevent it, but he is fourteen years too late. His counterpart in my time still sleeps, content to leave me to my fate.

Objectively it is better for you to make whatever assumptions you'd like about my nature. Those that find out tend to make encouraging noises about choices and then disappear, or threaten to kill me if I misstep. As if they could.

[unsheathedfromreality]

[Much less coherent, certainly. But that, too, Illarion has been subject to.]

Unjustifiably shot then. It remains that it would have been much less likely if I and Mr. Valentine had known more about each other.

[The added information on Sephiroth's self-appointed guardian and not-father is tucked away, but not followed. Not now. Vincent's failings, perceived or actual, are aside from the point.]

Objectively, it is not. I'd assumed you were like one of my own people, with a part of you outside the realm of the visible. Until we witnessed you rip yourself in half and survive it because, I can only assume, my instructions on summoning an Omen were very incomplete.

This is also something I'd like to avoid, in the future.

[miniroth]

I am very much not in two pieces.

Well I am now but not like that, I'm pretty certain if I tore myself in half I'd be in hospital at the least, picking myself out of a crater courtesy of Thirteen's resurrection at worst.

[unsheathedfromreality]

[...hm. Yes. Okay.]

Are you free to continue this conversation in person?

There is something I need to explain.

[miniroth]

Yes with caveats, if you're very far away it's going to take a while to get there and I have classes at 8 tomorrow morning.

[unsheathedfromreality]

There's a little-used park in Willow, not far from the Prancing Pony.

[He describes the location.]

Is that close enough?

[miniroth]

I know it. It'll take a couple of hours to get there, I'm not designed for speed in the air but the cover of dark might help if eyes linger.

[unsheathedfromreality]

It will help.

Swift flight, and safe.

[He'll be at the park well before Sephiroth arrives, to scout it and speak with any curious spirits to send them on their ways.]

[miniroth]

It does indeed take him a couple hours to arrive; he's utterly silent when airborne but paid for it in raw swiftness or the ability to ride thermals well. At least it gets him his evening cardio, and the trip back might even be enough between the two to get him to actually sleep for more than a couple hours.

He's alone this time. Vincent's been more elusive lately, tending to whatever matters he had to handle, and Sephiroth hadn't asked him to come via relic. He's armed as he had been before but that's no surprise; there's a circle or two of a clearer spot to come down, and he's a good thirty feet off the ground when the wings disappear. Dropping that distance is effortless, gravity's hold nebulous and associative at best. He might have well been stepping off a low stair for all that it doesn't jar anything.

No wings means risking no eyes. The not-omen, so recently forged, is not immediately visible, at least not to normal sight.

[unsheathedfromreality]

Mindful of how his blacks blend into the night, Illarion's picked a place to wait where the inconstant light of moon and stars catches in his white hair. He does not bother straining his ears for Sephiroth's approach, nor employs Iskierka's eyes; his other, stranger senses will be more reliable in the dark and hush.

Especially when the youth he's waiting for presents a much bigger cross-section to those senses than he would to the ordinary eye.

"Over here," he calls, as Sephiroth touches ground; lifts a hand to draw attention to himself.

[miniroth]

The same viper's pupils that made countless people nervous back on Gaia serve him well enough at night, and even if there hadn't been some manner of lighting for the spirits to enjoy, spotting Illarion would have only taken a few more moments. but beckoned it's even easier and the teen heads in his direction, expression guarded, a certain tenseness to his stance that suggests he expects a fight, if not a physical one.

"You wished to see me?" .... "So to speak."

When the guard hound does make his appearance, in a boiling of black smoke up from the shadows, he doesn't likewise approach, attention turned outward and not towards Sephiroth and Illarion. There's an obviousness to the way he moves, rustling leaves, the occasional snap of twig, that suggests an effort to be noticed in the slow, wide patrol he sets to. A guard dog does little good if nobody knows it's there, after all.

[unsheathedfromreality]

"So to speak," the shrike echoes, with a hint of laughter beneath his tone. He has noticed the tension in the youth; perhaps a little levity will ease it.

Perhaps not. But no harm in trying--and what he plans to lead with, besides, is not an obvious continuation of their earlier scuffle.

"You'd said you were studying engineering, yes? You're well-versed in geometry now, I'd assume."

A tiny sneak tag

[miniroth]

That's .. not what he's expecting, and combined with the thread of laughter he's sure had been there, he's suddenly uncertain for entirely different reasons.

"Not extremely. Most of my education here has been catching up to where I should be at my age, such things are a waste at Shinra." No point in learning complex math when he'd never need it. "I'm told I'm doing well with only a semester working on it."

sneaky bedtime tags! me too

[unsheathedfromreality]

Mmm. That's unfortunate, and lowers Illarion's already subterranean opinion of Sephiroth's creators. But of course, a weapon didn't need such things, and so on and so forth in all the justification that would pave Shinra's path down to Hell.

"It's sufficient if you understand there are three dimensions to space, as you're experiencing it--but that there could be more than three. Does that make sense?"

[miniroth]

"Yes, though Kuma Lisa teaches there is another to the physical world, time." Which also makes sense as it could be perceived and moved through, just not backwards without sufficient speed.

In fact.. "Mrs Wolf says there are ten, and could be as many as twenty six dimensions of space, just we humanoids are limited to the first four in most realities." It's not something studied, but told to a young class as an interesting fact.

[unsheathedfromreality]

That recitation gets an approving nod from Illarion, though his lips quirk wryly at humanoid. Even the spirits here saw "humanlike" as default--it makes him wonder at the vicissitudes of Generation's dream, that he's been in two worlds now where most humans saw themselves as first-and-only.

Or maybe he's been missed by whichever of the Fox's sisters preferred nonhumans.

Though it's hardly relevant here. "Very good. She's largely right on that, but my people are an exception to that rule.

"This is not something we speak of widely; I offer it to you in trust, as part of my explanation." He has faith it won't go farther than Sephiroth, it's clear.

[miniroth]

Sephiroth had taken it as some evidence that non-humanoids might be able to perceive more than those, as opposed to the dominance of humanity throughout the universe. But it did indeed seem like it was mostly humans here.. or beings in a humanlike shape and humanlike size.

"..I don't keep dangerous secrets, no matter who asks them, if it seems wise to tell another," he says slowly, vaguely aware of the occasional commercial in amongst his telenovelas that warn of adults asking kids to keep secrets. "But if it is not, then I will abide."

[unsheathedfromreality]

While it is not precisely the answer he would like, it is an answer Illarion very much respects. "If I become such a threat to others that sharing this aspect of my nature will protect them, you have my blessing," he says. "And my understanding, if I ever return to myself."

That said and affirmed, on to the lesson. "My people--I--exist in a fourth dimension of space. What you see here," he taps himself on the chest for emphasis, "is a small part of me, the ((in-self)). What can't be seen here is the ((out-self)).

"You--both of you," with a nod in the direction where Casimir was last audible, "--appear much the same, with more of yourself lying in directions most can't see. That's what I touched, that startled you so much."

[miniroth]

As Illarion speaks, part of his thoughts aren't on what's being said so much as what scenarios would require it being told to someone else. Not much really comes to mind right away, especially if it's true that most of Illarion is invisible to normal senses, including things like touch. Fighting something that can't be perceived would be.. difficult, and in another dimension, an impossibility to really even conceptualize ...what good would it do, except to someone who could also interact with it?

"I see." He does not. He can only see what's in front of him. "..Is everyone like that?"

[unsheathedfromreality]

"No. Very few people here are like that, outside Thirteen and her iterations."

The God of the Nine Houses and his Lyctors could see him at his full extent, but weren't themselves that extensive. Of all the rest of the people he'd encountered... There was the youth's guardian, but that is not Illarion's secret to share--whatever it was he'd sensed in Vincent.

"It was how I knew you were something other than human; it's your mother's blood, I'm guessing." The inhuman mother.

[miniroth]

"But your whole species is." It was wildly improbable that Jenova just happened to be one and he was speaking with a member of her uncanny, space-faring kind. There was no point in asking what that looked like, when he couldn't even describe accurately what happened exactly when Illarion had touched him. Touched some part of him he couldn't sense.

And if it were that obvious, then Illarion knew as soon as they crossed paths in the desert.. "..Likely. She's a shapeshifter, so the stories say. My other genetic donors were ordinary humans. I don't look right for human, to those with sight. But not... terribly so."

[unsheathedfromreality]

"Yes. But we are also the unnatural result of tampering with something better left sleeping."

To draw none too fine a parallel between them.

"Is she also capable of splitting herself?"

As Illarion asks, Iskierka wisps into being, her wings flashing pale in the moonlight as she drifts off after Casimir. She's got eyes not for the other (faux) Omen, but the tether she'd seen between Sephiroth's halves when he'd split. Might it have atrophied by now?

[miniroth]

Finding Casimir wouldn't be hard even without looking for the link between them, making noise, but not too much noise, is still the name of the game. And.. It's still there, reinforced and deeply veined in the odd golden light that etches parts of the unphysical forms. They are, and are not, two separate beings, the tether so deeply buried that causing injury to one may well simply be transmitted right to the other. As soon as Sephiroth's attention shifts to watch Iskierka's translucent flight, the guard hound pauses too, reorienting neatly with perked oversized ears.

It's a distraction that allows him to not answer immediately. But he does, eventually. "I don't know. What she's capable of is .. what I've been able to piece together from barebones descriptions of fights that happened years ago to them."

The roiling unease gets worse. It's one thing to know one of his three parents is an inhuman monster, it's another to discuss it - and her - so frankly. "Being beheaded didn't slow her down, and given Reunion at the least being broken into pieces isn't much of a problem."

[unsheathedfromreality]

So--they are still one being, from the strictest point of view, and in a way much more tangible than a Sleeper and an Omen are one being. Iskierka alights in a bush--attempts to alight; more, hovers with her claws clasped around a twig she can't actually perch on--where she can continue to peer down at Casimir. She doesn't do much else beside that.

For his part, Illarion catches the edge of that worsening unease. Can't quite pin its source, but it's a reasonable guess that it's something to do with the current topic of discussion.

He weighs his own need to know--well, no, label it for what it is: curiosity, though well-intentioned--against the youth's discomfort, and silently sets aside many of his questions for later. If Reunion and indeed all the fight against Sephiroth's inhuman mother are in the past for the others from his world, then the shrike would be better-served asking those questions elsewhere. Whether they'd get the answers he needs...

Well. Let tomorrow's problems belong to tomorrow. "That would seem to explain how you," hm, "summoned your companion, then. To our sight, he's a split-off part of yourself."