I don't know what happened in that sphere of water, or how I got out, or if it just got tired of me being there and dumped me in a random location, but the next thing I knew I was waking up in a ruin, gripping a piece of plywood and floating in the water in the midst of a quiet rain storm.
"Hello? Anybody there? Auron?" I don't know what I was expecting. It was clear I was alone. But still, I felt like I had to do something. "HEEEEEYYYYY!!!!" It was just me and my echo.
There was a temple off to the distance, so I decided to swim there, and hope that it wasn't as abandoned as I felt like it was going to be.
I swam around for a while, and found a few places where words had been carved into the wall, but I couldn't read the language. Nothing here looked like Zanarkand, and I began to worry that maybe I had been swept off to a foreign country, where no one spoke my language. But then again, this was an old looking temple, so maybe it was just some...crazy monk writing on the walls.
I eventually got out of the water and onto what looked like it would be an easy path into the temple, but naturally everything crumbled around me and I fell right back into the water. Just my luck. At least blitzball had made me about as comfortable in the water as I was on land, so it was less of a problem and more of an annoyance. At least it was just an annoyance until some fiends decided I would make a nice snack...but I wont bore you with the details. Let's just say the smaller fiends attracted the bigger fiends, which attracted some kind of mega monster that swallowed up three fiends at a time. I don't think I've ever had to swim so quickly in my life. Eventually, I got away from it, and found my way into the temple. Sorry to be anti-climatic, but there are bigger parts of the story to tell.
When I finally got inside, I realize I had made it out of the frying pan and into the freezer...I thought I was going to die in that place. It was cold, drafty, and in ruins. On top of that, I was soaked, and my stupid blitz uniform wasn't exactly warm or heat absorbent.
I must have literally spent three hours looking for a way to start a fire. It was a temple—may have been in ruins, but still a temple—so I managed to find some old withered plants, then used some rocks to try and get a spark going...and after three hours, I finally got it. Just in time to decide that I was hungry. It was a rough night.
I had another weird dream, or maybe it was a flashback, of Auron visiting me at home after we lost a big game.
"It was a bad call. You're team lost because of you." Auron said, as though there was no way that could possibly be offensive.
"You came to say that?" I scoffed.
"I thought you would be crying." Auron retorted.
"Who me?" I shot back.
"You did cry." That little kid appeared out of nowhere in the corner of my house.
It startled me so much I snapped upright, and woke up...just in time to see my fire go out, and a nasty looking fiend scurry down the wall. My sword was too far away to get to in time, I would have been toast...but then the doors burst open, and several people in strange looking jumpsuits/wetsuits came in, and a boy who face was almost completely covered by the mask of his suit pulled something out of his pocket. It was only after he pulled the pin out of it and threw that I realized he had just tossed a grenade in my general direction. I ran like hell to get away from the blast, but the fiend wasn't so lucky. The guy pulled his mask off, revealing a rather young looking face with big blue eyes possessing strange swirls around the pupil.
He didn't exactly look like he was trying to fight me, so I let my guard down, and fell to the ground.
"Whew, that was a close one." I sighed, then someone from his entourage grabbed me from behind by the hair and yanked me to my feet. "Hey! Lemme go!" I fussed, thrashing around until they pulled bayonetted guns out and pointed them into my chest. (Just so you know, I had Sora help me translate everything after, so that I could properly retell what happened here...I didn't even know what was going on at the time, but it suddenly makes so much more sense now...)
"Fryd'c drec? (What's this?)" One of them asked, probably speaking that same language I saw scrawled on a stone outside.
"Y fiend! Eh rilyh teckieca! (A fiend! In human disguise!)" Another one of them said in response to him
"Oayr! Ed ec! (Yeah! It is!)"
"Cruimt fa gemm ed? (Should we kill it?)" The one behind me, holding me by the hair, pulled out a knife and held it to my throat. I didn't know then what they were saying, but the message was pretty clear.
"Fyed!" (Wait) The guy who threw the grenade said, walking over. "Fnyd ev ed ec risyn?" (What if it is human?)
"Drao yna dra cysa eh taydr. (They are the same in death.)"
"E vunpet ed! Fa pnehk et fetr ic." (I forbid it. We bring it with us.)" The boy said sternly, and the guy behind me dropped his knife slightly.
Whoever this guy was, and whatever he was saying, I knew I wanted to be by him, and not these other guys...that is until he stepped forward into me like he was going to hug me, and said "Cunno." (Sorry) Then punched my lights out and walked away, leaving the last thing I saw to be the guys with knifes picking me up and carrying me off with them.
When I next work up, I was on my side on some metal ship in the middle of the nowhere on the ocean, with two guys with guns standing over me. I stood up, only to have one of them kick me back down.
"Ced tufh, oui! (Sit down, you!)" He commanded, as if I understood him.
"Hey, that hurts!" I whined, rubbing me stomach where he kicked me. He pointed his gun right in my face and said something in his gibberish language I didn't quite catch because I so busy staring down the barrel of his gun. "Whoa...okay buddy..." I held my hands up, not sure what else I could do. The door to the interior of the ship opened, and that boy from before stepped out with a much older looking guy at his side.
"Caynlr res. (Search him.)" The older guy said, taking the goggles off his face and letting them hang around his neck. He had blue eyes and brown hair, just like the guy next to him, who had punched me earlier.
The punch happy grenade boy came around behind me and pulled me up to my feet, while the other guy began pantomiming what looked like diving and swimming.
"Right...whatever." I said to him, sick of this place already.
"Lyh oui hud cbayg Al Bhed? (Can you not speak Al Bhed?)" He asked, staring at me blankly. He then pulled out a pair of goggles and pointed at his eye, then my eyes, then the water.
"Look, I don't understand." I shrugged at him, all the while being patted down by the younger guy who punched me. I sorely wanted to punch him back.
"Ehcumahla! (Insolence!)" The guy with the gun stepped in, reminding me that they were the ones with the power here, and I wasn't going to be punching anybody anytime soon.
"Fyed. (Wait)" The puncher said, letting go of me finally. "They say you can stay if you make yourself useful."
My eyes went wide, and I forgot all about the punching incident. I was just so happy. "You...You understand me?" I asked dumbly, but it was all I could do to keep from hugging the guy at this point. However, not much about my situation had changed, as the guy with the gun reminded me by hitting me on the back. "Alright! I'll work...or whatever." I sighed, and the boy nodded, and they seamed to back off. I decided to leave them alone, and stick with the guy who could understand me.
"We found some ancient ruins right beneath us. It's not active now, but there should still be some power left. We're going to go down there and activate it. And then we should be able to salvage the big prize!" He explained looking out over the railing of the ship. "Okay, let's get to work!" He said, flipping down the mask of his little wetsuit.
"Roger that...I guess." I said, leaping overboard into the water. I'd rather be in the unknown, out in the ocean, than on that boat with those gun toting, gibberish speaking maniacs. And holding my breath wouldn't be a problem, because my blitz capsules were still working. Oh, I guess I should explain that. In Zanarkand, they developed a kind of medical drug that would directly oxidize your blood, so you didn't need to breathe when underwater. It's a little uncomfortable to not need to breath in and out or feel your lungs expanding to know that you're getting air, but once you get used to it, it feels completely natural...kinda. I still occasionally have to remind myself to breath in and out whenever I'm on land, but I'm sure most people don't have that problem. Regular people, like the kids who just play blitz in high school, college or anyone playing just for fun, they just take the pills, which keeps their blood oxidized for up to 8 hours. But for professional athletes, we get a tooth pulled and replaced with a little sensor than can tell when we're under water, and releases a dose without us having to do anything. I used to be afraid of it malfunctioning, but there's never been a case reported of any kind of failure of the device. They had a lifetime guarantee, and more does in that tiny little tooth than you could ever use up in 10 lifetimes.
I didn't usually have to rely on the oxidant for anything other than blitzball, but I guess it was gonna come in handy today. The guy jumped into the water after me, and began to lead the way to the ruins he was talking about earlier. It looked like it was something mechanical, but like the water had eaten away its outside.
It didn't really matter to me what it was I suppose, as long as those guys up there didn't shoot me.
We swam in through a rupture in one of the ruins walls, and found a control panel. I activated it the way I activated everything. Hitting it with a fist until the screen went blue. Meanwhile the other guy typed into a screen to try to try to activate things the proper way. My way obviously wasn't working that well, so I decided to swim around and explore this ruin while the pro got to work trying to turn on the power. I was looking at some kind of dead generator, and was just about to go poking around at it, when it suddenly sprang to life, with an electrical current running through it. While I was busy thanking my lucky stars that I wasn't touching the electric thing while underwater, my new friend swam up and admired the power flow he had started again. He gave me a thumbs up, and pointed for us to swim back the way we came. We left the ruin and were a few hundred yards away from it when it began to fully light up. It looked like some kind of long forgotten ship. I was actually pretty excited to find out more about it, thinking that at least if this was going to be my new life it was going to be filled with an exciting underwater excavation.
But while I was busy gawking, the other guy had tapped my shoulder and started making for the surface.
"Dryd'c yh yencreb! Dra naluntc fana nekrt. (That's an airship! The records were right.)" The men on the boat were saying as the pointed spotlights down at the ruin.
We pulled ourselves onto the ship, and I shook off the loose water on me while they all went on.
"Huf, ruf du tnyk ed ib? (Now, how to drag it up?)" They all began to head inside the ship, but whenever I got close to the door, the guy with brown hair and goggles turned to stop me. "Oui! Uidseta!" (You! Outside!).
"What? Hey! I helped out, didn't I?" I could have fussed all I wanted, they wouldn't have understood.
A few hours passed, and I was just laying down out on the metal deck, waiting for anything to happen.
I was beyond hungry, and about to jump in the water to try and find a fish or something when the arm I was resting my head on was kicked out from under me by the guy who spoke English. He lowered a tray down, with weird looking food on it, but at this point I didn't care what it was.
"Thank god, I was about to eat my own foot!" I sighed happily as I picked up the tray and began to stuff my face. I was shoveling in food so quickly I didn't have any time to sallow, and had to swipe the canteen of water off the guy's belt to avoid choking.
"Hey!" He laughed as I took it and began to chug it. "It's 'cause you eat too fast." He grinned.
"What's your name anyway?" I asked, getting back to my food, but a bit slower this time.
"Sora." He replied.
"Why didn't you say so earlier?"
"I didn't get a chance to. Everyone thought oui were a fiend." He explained with a shrug.
"Uh...we?" I asked, thinking he had said 'we were a fiend.'
"Oh, 'oui'. It means 'you'."
"I see...In what language? Who are you guys?"
"We're Al Bhed, cant you tell?" He asked, giving me a funny look, then his expression changed to one of worry, "Wait, you're not an Al Bhed-hater, are you?"
"I don't even know what an Al Bhed is." I shrugged.
"Where are you from?" He asked, giving me a funny look.
"Zanarkand. I'm a blitzball player, for the Zanarkand Abes. See?" I pointed at the Abes logo on my jersey, but he had a look on his face that told me he wasn't convinced.
"Did you...hit your head or something?"
"Well you hit me."
He rubbed the back of his head, "Oh right. Sorry, by the way. Do you remember anything from before that?"
So I told him everything there was to tell about Zanarkand. About life there, blitzball, and Sin's attack, and about how Auron and I were engulfed in this light. I just said things as they came to mind, but then I started to wonder...
"Did I...say something funny?" I asked earnestly as Sora got quiet for the first time since we really got to talking.
"It's just...you were near Sin...Don't worry, you'll be better in no time." I gave him a look, so he went on, "They say your head gets funny when Sin is near...So maybe you just had some kind of dream?" I pointed at the necklace I wore, with the Abes symbol on it, something that was tangible proof that I wasn't just making this up, and he just looked at it with a confused expression, "A really, really vivid dream? Maybe you've just got the sickness bad."
"What do you mean sick?"
"Sin's toxin. Makes people think crazy things sometimes."
"You sure?"
"Yeah, I mean...there is no Zanarkand anymore. Sin destroyed it 1000 years ago. So there's no one playing any blitzball there." He shrugged, and I started to get a little defensive.
"What do you mean a thousand years ago? I just saw Sin attack Zanarkand. You're saying that happened 1000 years ago? No way." I walked off to the other side of the ship to think for a bit, and after a few minutes of silence, Sora walked over.
"You said...you play blitzball?"
"Don't tell me that ended 1000 years ago too." I sighed.
"No, no, I know what blitzball is. You know, you should go to Luca. Someone might know who you are, or you might fight someone you recognize."
"Luca? What...or who is Luca?" I asked, and he sighed a shook his head, then began pacing as he tried to think of a way to help me.
"Okay, just leave it to me. I'll get you to Luca. Promise."
"You will?"
"Unless you'd rather stay here." He gave the boat a sideways glance.
"Uh, no. No thank you." I said quickly. This boat was bad enough for him, and he was one of the Al Behd. I couldn't talk to them, understand them, or get them to stop pointing guns at me. If he was miserable here, imagine how I felt.
"Okay! I'll go tell the others then. Wait here." He said, making for the entrance of the inner sections of the boat where I wasn't allowed. He stopped short of the door and turned back to me, "Oh, and one thing...Don't tell anyone you're form Zanarkand, kay? Yevon says it's a holy place...you might upset someone."
"Oh...Um...okay." I agreed, though I didn't know what Yevon was or why Zanarkand would be considered a holy place, bu I didn't really give it much thought as he ran off to tell the others about Luca, leaving me completely lost in thought.
My Zanarkand, some kind of holy place? Yeah right, I thought. Since when? Yevon, Sin, Luca? And here I thought Sin had just taken be a few hundred miles away from home, and that I could go back in a day or to. But 1000 years into the future?
Suddenly, waterspouts began erupting all around the ship, and the door opened. A few of them ran out, yelling "Sin! Sin ic rana! (Sin! Sin is here!)"
I didn't need Sora to translate what that meant. The boat began to shake, and everyone grabbed onto a rail as the waterspouts became more erratic and powerful. In hindsight, I probably should have grabbed a rail too. But no. Before I could even process what was going on, I slid off the deck and was in the water, being pulled down in a whirlpool of Sin's creation.