Twinflame

K'ile's reply to the Lalafel was brief, his brow dropping and his lips straightening into a line. "The man is dead." K'aijeen stopped pressing so hard against Thal's grip for a moment, just staring at the grown and shivering, ready to bolt again at an instant's notice.

"Roegadyn's smart. And right." K'ile sat up and pointed, like a jerk. "That's K'aijeen and Thalen. I would know. I'm the girl's uncle, and she's always been into some really evil stuff. So. There you go."

K'ile watched the Lalafel walking away, his ear twitching. He wasn't sure if that Roegadyn could kill K'aijeen alone. She looked like she might be blind. "I didn't do anything wrong! I haven't done anything!" K'aijeen struggled, her voice that of a child about to be punished for another child's wrongdoing. "I've never done anything at all! It wasn't me! I've never done anything!"

When Thal took hold of K'aijeen, she made a choking screech and kicked against him as though he were trying to pull her into a fire. She heard the Roegadyn's words and sensed the crackling power the woman began to draw on. She'd sensed that before. She'd sensed it when her body had been burned through, right before... K'aijeen screamed and pried at Thal's grip. "She's going to kill me! She's going to kill me! I didn't do anything wrong!"

"Heh." K'ile found a rock and crouched on it, ears twitching. If these two did intend to start a fight, he wasn't going to stop them. K'aijeen pulled away from Thal, talking two almost imperceptible steps back. "Don't. Don't. I should run away. I should be running."

"I'm kind of with the Roegadyn." K'ile said. "I mean, I've known that Voidsent Necromancer for a long time, and the whole death-will-always follow bit sounds pretty accurate." K'aijeen shook her head and pushed herself against Thal, shivering. "Don't trust them."

K'ile paced off to one side, not wanting to stand in between these two groups. He sensed high tensions and kind of hoped he wasn't wrong about that. "He had K'aijeen with him when I ran into them. A pretty violent pair." "They're going to kill me." K'aijeen pulled on Thal's shirt some more. "We need to run away. They're going to kill me."

When the Roegadyn spoke, K'aijeen stiffened, straightened, inhaled a quick breath. She grabbed Thal's shirt with both hands and pulled herself flush against him, hissing, "She's going to kill me! She's going to kill me!" "Oh, yeah." K'ile Tia said with a jovial shrug. He gestured over his shoulder. "You're looking for these two. Yeah, we got in a fight, so that was me, the injured guy. Kind of embarrassing but I'll own it."

"You're a bit west for that, and we don't look too fondly on outsiders. Most of us don't anyway. I'm K'ile Tia." He walked gladly toward the Lalafel and the Roegadyn, separating himself from those other two Miqo'te as far as he could. He smirked down at the Lalafel. "I know you from someplace, right? I don't go to Ul'dah a lot. And you're looking for the K's, so..."

K'ile had smelled the approaching strangers long before their arrival, grateful to smell something other than the stink of death rolling from his unburied family. As Thal stopped in his tracks, K'ile kept walking right past the man, lifting his arms over his head. "Hey there, strangers!" He recognized the smell of one of them, the Lalafel. He didn't run across a great many Lalafel, otherwise he'd likely have forgotten. He didn't remember where he'd smelled the Lalafel before, but even as he tried to place it, he would not let himself believe it a coincidence. "Strange to run into people in the middle of nowhere. I bet you're looking for something, aren't you?" K'aijeen pinned herself up against Thal's back, well away of how she looked. She cast about for some hole to hump in, but couldn't find any, so bundled her rags up tighter around her. She recognized the Lalafel's voice. She'd heard it before. She didn't know what to expect from that Lalafel here, however. And the other... There had been another, hadn't there? She'd barely caught a glimpse before Thal had blocked her away.

At the urging, K'aijeen walked alongside Thal. She pouted, mostly to herself, "I wanted to go home." "The home you're thinking of doesn't exist any more." K'ile said, stretching again and then walking behind them. "Not since the Calamity. Not since the famine. I've been looking for it and trying to bring it back. Everyone else has too, but it isn't there. The whole tribe, even the exiles, are all just trying to go home. But the home we're thinking of? None of us will ever go home again."

K'ile made an ick-face at that. "I should've stabbed you in the head. Oh, but you've got some creepy Gridanian mask. Put it on so I can pretend you're someone else." "I'm not disguised." K'aijeen prowled behind Thal. She peered around the man to glare at K'ile with suspicion.

"If someone spends all their time walking around with their hands out waiting for generosity, they can never use their hands to fix their own problems." K'ile stretched his limbs, letting the sun fall over his chest and arms. "Ul'dahns never do anything for free. It's always debts that you can't pay. That's how they work."

"Well, yeah, if you mess it up and end up bringing death to the tribe?" K'ile paused to glare at Thal. "Yeah. That's evil, in the end." In frustration her tried to force the shirt off, but it got tight between one shoulder and his neck when it was half off and he got stuck with on arm up and his head conceal. She shifted and growled and struggled and pulled and his tail shook behind him. "Damn this thing!" "Ul'dah for now then." K'aijeen said, calmly. "Those people will help too. They'll take us home." "We don't want a bunch of Ul'dahns pushing their way into the tribe! This has come up before." K'ile threw the shirt down at Thal's feet. "Well-meaning Ul'dahns wanting to protect us with their weapons and give us food like we're hungry children."

"Go die!" K'ile continued with his sisyphean labors. "Some more. Better." K'aijeen reached the ground and stumbled as her weakened limbs failed to stop her momentum completely. After she caught herself, she straightened and shifted her back and shoulders oddly, as though putting her innards back into place. She put a hand over the wound on her throat and frowned at Thal from beneath her tattered veil. "You're never going to take me home, are you?"

"Yeah, fine. The damn thing just gets in the way anyway." K'ile pulled at the shirt, but it didn't come off as easily as it had gone on. There buckles on the arms and chest to hold the white armored plates in place, and he pulled at these in frustration. "... Twelve damn this Ul'dahn... overdone... Why do they need metal buckles anyway?" he crouched and worked at them in frustration, tail whipping around behind him. His ears twitched and growled, stretching his limbs on occasion to test the looseness of the chest piece, but he really was going to have to undo all those buckles. K'aijeen, meanwhile, began down the side of the rock ledge. "I wanted to go home."

"Hey, you're the guy in charge." K'ile waved a hand over his shoulder, not looking at Thal. "I'm just your cowed prisoner, a Tia in distress waiting for his huntress to rescue him. I've got no power myself." "Get them from Highbridge instead of Drybone. No one knows us there." She pointed at Thal and then at K'ile. "You take his clothes. That will cover your body." K'ile pulled at his collar. "The one time I wear a shirt and it's a liability. I knew it."

"Better to just take chocobos." K'ile looked away. "They stink and they get us off the ground. Cover your bodies and our hair and our tails and then we'll all look the same to the Amal'jaa." K'aijeen's ears stood up and pointed behind her. "You want to get us back to a town so you can send the Immortal Flames after us again." "Ul'dah's a town, too. Just a bigger one. That's where you want to go."

K'aijeen ducked her head at Thal's question. She curled forward and became even smaller, her tail moving slowly behind her. "I'm not very clever. I don't know how to hide things or sneak places. The other me could help." "Oh, the other you. Great." K'ile shook his head. "The Amal'jaa hunt by scent or tracking. We can't just put hoods on and travel at night. We'd need to disguise ourselves visibly, and disguise our scent, and leave no tracks. And that's assuming the Amal'jaa don't just bite the moment they can't find us."

"No, I'll go to Ul'dah, long as we don't take a thousand years getting there." K'ile pressed his ears down again. "The Amal'jaa won't wait forever, and when they realize where we're going they might figure out what you plan on doing. Even if it won't work, they'll think it might and decide to hurry their plans up."

Scowling up the hill, K'ile huffed, "People. She knows of people? Look at her. Look at what she's done to you. What kind of people do you think she knows?" K'aijeen huffed down at him, "They're good people." "I wonder what your definition of 'good' is. Looks a bit off."

"The only other place to go is the Shroud, and they'd kill us as poachers as soon as we put up our first tents." K'ile shook his head. "Like we want to fight for territory with a bunch of Menphina's night-walkers." "There are people in Ul'dah." K'aijeen offered silently. "I know of people who would say 'yes' to helping."

"At least the Amal'jaa understand that the world is made of real things, not words and gil and dyed clothing." K'ile slid the rest of the way down the rocks, evidently having no fear of the Sun Drakes. "People need food, community, shelter and protection to survive, all things which the Ul'dahns are failing to provide to uncountable numbers of their own people."

"And I say you've got too much faith in the Ul'dahns." K'ile pointed at Thal. "That city called drybone is where they dump the corpses of their own people, unwanted, so they don't have to look at them. They have no time to care about the disease and defense of their own children. They won't care about yours."

"Don't posture at me. Anyone can die at any time if the right person gets it in their head to kill them. I think the fact that it took a plotting Roh, two zombies and divine intervention to beat me means I'm doing something right." K'ile's tail whipped a bit faster than Thal's tail.