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Personal log, stardate unknown. Unknowable. After several weeks in this strange place called Milliways, I am still no closer to finding a way to return to my own timeline. It has become increasingly clear the guiding force or forces that brought me and the other inhabitants of the anomaly here wish me to either serve a greater purpose or receive some sort of lesson. I do not enjoy being treated like a student, and yet I cannot say that, compared to other such experiences, that this one is as unpleasant. Jim feels better being able to at least record his impressions. An echo, no doubt, of a career spent keeping records of his every experience. He pauses and wonders about the irony of a veteran instructor at the Academy being the student now. I remain determined to find a way home, but I am quite certain that what I want will not resolve the situation..

Jim turns off the recorder and stares out the window. At least, as chaotic as that view is, he can understand what he's seeing, name some of the phenomena. But at the same time, he longs to be out there. It would be, to paraphrase a book he still fondly recalls, an awfully big adventure.

[ooc: slowtime possible for work]

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"Words. Numbers. Often a combination of both. And often in further combination with fingerprints, retina scans and voice identification." Which would count as music, as he's seen in his life.

"Oh!" she says, not very helpfully. And laughs. "I'm sorry--it's all a little technical for me." She glances down at his recorder. "We don't have much technology in my world."

Her voice is hesitant, and she turns her head so her hair drifts over her right eye as she speaks. If it's to hide it, it's counterproductive; it only draws attention to the strange pupil on that side.

"Then how does your sphere work?" He notices the strange eye, but holds off on asking about that.

"It's, um, a suspension of pyreflies in water," she says, touching it briefly again. "There's a, flow of life energy through the world and living things. In Spira, the energy forms little... packets. We call them pyreflies."

"They can be used to store memories--sounds, images."

The idea of an energy field permeating nature, or a world, is one that crops up every so often. But it's usually dismissed as wishful thinking, or poor science. That such a world could exist would be noteworthy. Assuming its timeline has the same physics.

"Can I see?"

"Mm-hm." She hands it to him carefully.

There's no glass or crystal sealing it in--the water has simply solidified into a thick gel, faintly warm with a slight give to it.

The interior moves very slowly and gleams and sparkles a little more than a simple globe of water should.

"And this energy simply stoes data?" He can't really see anything out of the ordinary. It's almost as if it's magic. Which is of course impossible.

"It does, lots of things," she says. "It reacts to memory and consciousness, so you can attach things you want to record to it."

"It can read thoughts?" This is beyond anything Kirk can hope to explain.

"Not, read them," she says. "It isn't conscious. It just reacts. With training, pyreflies can be used to do lots of things, and as a summoner, I have a special gift to manipulate them."

"And anybody can use a sphere, with a little practice," she adds. "You just have to know the right glyphs."

"Glyphs? Symbols?" Kirk hands the sphere to Yuna. "Can you show me?"

Yuna pauses for a moment, then slips a string of polished wood and shell rosary beads out of her voluminous sleeve. Each bead has a glyph carved into it.

"You turn it on," she says, tracing light over the surface of the globe; it begins to glow, shapes of colored light moving inside. "And then--you can see, in there, that's the recording I just made." Her face is visible, refracted and misty blue.

"These are east and west, to go forward and back, but then we can also go up with north, and then--" The image is replaced by a field of glowing sparks, each one tracing a glyph. "And then you just pick the one you want. This is, um, us fighting a Vouivre the other day," she says, tracing E. The image in the sphere is now of a group of armed people around a giant lizard of some kind.

"And then you pick what kind of playback you want--Thunder gives you light and sound, so--" She traces the last glyph over the sphere, and the image is projected into the air above it as a hologram, the battle against the dragon-like creature coming to life.

"Of course, if you just want to play the most recent recording, it's easier."

"I see." Obviously, he doesn't. It makes little sense that beads and water (with an enegry field, granted) could be used this way. Could combine to create holographic displays that are still not commonplace in his time.

Someplace in the rear of his mind, a tiny voice colaltes and sorts the data and wonders if maybe he's finally gone beyond anything Clarke's Law can explain. The voice tries to speak up but goes unheard.

"These are common?"

The beads (http://www.driftingheart.net/yuna/info/script.html) don't do anything specific in conjunction with the sphere; but they demonstrate the patterns she's using to control the sphere.

She nods. "There are lots of different spheres--key spheres just hold energy in a specific pattern, to open the locks. But recording spheres like this are pretty common. Expensive, though." She colors. "Mine was a gift."

In the image, a grizzled man in a long red coat hacks at the Voivre with an enormous blade; it snaps down on his shoulder, refusing to release until a ball flies in from outside the frame to strike it in the head.

There's a pale, chesty woman in a black dress, cradling a doll in one arm; she raises the other to the sky, and a flash of lightning flashes down, striking down the dragon. The thunderclap is faint as a fingersnap.

"Nice shot, Lu," says a Polynesian accent.

"That woman manipulated the weather?" The sphere seems minor compared to that.

She nods. "Oh--Lulu is a black mage. She do Thunder, Ice, Fire and Water spells. That was a Thunder spell--it calls down lightning. That's something else you can do by manipulating pyreflies. They can be aligned to the four elements like that."

"That's...unlike anything I've ever heard, to be honest." It does sound like what the old stories called magic. But three must be a ratioal explanation. It's just not an obvious one.

"Do you have any similar skills? Or is controlling the sphere all you can do?"

"Well, I can't do any harmful spells--it takes special training, and I was studying other things. But I can do some--oh, here."

A tiny, translucent Yuna moves into the field of the sphere, towards the man in the red coat; she waves a long staff at him, and a field of sparkling light engulfs him. When it clears, his shoulder is healed.

"I can heal, and do some wards against elemental spells--spells like Lulu casts. And as a summoner, I have a special facility to manipulate pyreflies, to Send the dead and to bring forth beings called aeons. It's--complicated," she says apologetically. "But that's what the pilgrimage is really about."

"It's about...learning to use these energies better?" Long ago, Kirk met an empathic being, a woman who could take his injuries as his own. So the notion of healing being facilitated outside of standard medicine was not unknown. But the combination of factors grew ever stranger. "Or is there a greater goal?"

"There's a being called Sin," she says. It's almost by rote, now, explaining things that no one in Spira needs explained to them.

"It, kills people. It destroyed the civilizations of Spira one thousand years ago, and it attacks our towns and villages if they get too big, or... sometimes just at a whim."

"The only way we have to stop Sin is the Final Summoning, bringing forth an aeon powerful enough to destroy it. With the pilgrimage, I learn to summon lesser aeons, and perfect my abilities."

PRsented with the bigger pictures Kirk decides that Yuna and her people are simply not human. Oh, sapient, certainy. And human-looking. But like so many species Kirk has met, they probably have a completely different DNA. That's all there is to it. And this Sin? A highly advanced (if malignant) alien lifeform, like the Organians or Trelane.

Within that context, it's simply meeting new life. Something he is good at.

"How many like you are on pilgrimages?"

He might not be wrong.

"A few dozen, I think. Maybe less, right now--Sin has only returned in the last year, since the last time he was defeated. Since my father defeated him," she says, her voice ringing with pride.

"It's not a common gift, and not everyone who has the ability is skilled enough to complete the pilgrimage. Or willing to. It's... dangerous."

She waves at the holographic image, which has still, coming to the end of the recording.

"I've faced more than a few dangerous situations. And it's a lot harder for me to simply say 'let someone else do it'. So I think you've chosen the right path.

"Especially if it's also the path your family takes."

"I want to be the one to kill it once and for all," she says, resolute and harder than any girl her age has a right to be.

She slants a sideways look at him. "Do you think I can do it?" she says.

It's funny, maybe, to ask him after she just told him about Sin--but she asks almost everyone. Because every single person helps, even if they know next to nothing about the situation. Every person who believes in her, helps her believe. And in the end, it's all about belief.

He looks at her. She's not much younger than the cadets he's worked so hard to train these last few years. And he knows that young cadets grow up to be trained officers. But not, usually, warriors. So his assessment is limited. Still...

"I don't see why not. But you probably need a lot more training first. And you need people you can work with. Lone warriors charging in often don't return. But a trained unit? That's different.