|| || Everything ached.
His body. His magic. Probably his mind too, though he could not think straight enough to be sure of it.
The fog inside his head was only just beginning to clear. Kuja became aware that he was laying on something not quite hard nor soft.
His eyes made a fluttering attempt to open. The crystal. Trance. Delirium. Death. Iifa. The insult of having his final chance at peace torn from him by his successor, as though the whelp hadn’t already taken everything else away. He made an attempt to jolt upright, only to immediately regret it as pain scorched across his skull, leaving him unable to stop the trembling whimper which slipped the wrong way up his throat. Pathetic, Kuja. Useless to this world. One hand clutched to his temple, and it was tempting to claw beneath the skin and puncture his his throbbing pulse, to let it seep free. Physical pain was not something he was used to feeling…. But at least the wetness gathering at his lashes helped his eyes slowly adjust to the dim light of the lamp nearby.
Awareness crept in. He noted that whatever he had been laying upon was softer than he’d first thought. He noted that his hair was in a dreadful state. That his tail was exposed, flicking, flexing, tapping at the soft-ish thing he sat upon. His lips were chapped. His magic waned. He wanted to wring Zidane’s neck. He wanted tea. Perhaps whatever that was lingering beside him would fetch tea… …Beside him? Yes, he noted another presence. One that was not quite a presence. The silence did little to enlighten the fallen angel much further.
“…This …Is not the tree,” he said.
█▐ It was the first time he’d heard Kuja’s voice, and the thought was a surreal one. In that moment, Kuja ceased being an idea that Garland had built into him. Kuja began being a person. A very real person, with breath and a voice and flickering blue eyes struggling to focus on the ceiling.
It was a tragic kind of beauty.
“You are in the Black Mage Village,” the Sentinel stated. He had yet to get a coordinate map of Gaia to update his system--Black Mage village was a very recent place, but its existence only served to remind the Sentinel of how out-of-date his knowledge was. Twenty years had past while he slept. He was still processing that fact.
Inwardly, he braced for whatever Kuja’s reaction to this would be. He had reason to doubt the genome had ever been told about the Sentinel; Garland was secretive and manipulative, and the less any of them knew, the more power he had. Kuja had turned against their creator. Of course Garland would keep the protector secret from the very genome that could use him.
It was a strange thought, though. Garland had kept him a secret. So was he real? Who was he, to tell Kuja what he’d been made for? What was he chasing, by doing this?
The Sentinel was nothing but a series of blank lines, of calculations and sharp irises sitting against the wall in the shack watching Kuja with a clinical accuracy. He sat and made his calculations, and made them again. Checked himself at every step. And he still had no idea how to proceed in this sort of situation. Garland had never prepared him for a scenario like this one.
The Sentinel, which had been little more than a computer for the majority of his life, had to do something new. He had to learn.
So he made an educated guess as what to say.
“You are safe here. I have secured the location.”
