Skymoth:

Wait... he didn't notice it before, from a distance, but this close, Skymoth feels like he knows the Tya from somewhere. They remind him of...

They remind him of...

"I, eh, don't like moths very much."

They remind him of a total jackass!

Quote Originally Posted by Memories?
The image that fills Skymoth's mind isn't the Tya's face... except it is, in the same way that sometimes in his dreams Skymoth is someone else, not himself as he is now, or as he was before Luna came to him, but someone else... and yet still himself. The face he sees in his mind's eye is still that of a Westerner, but with a ridiculous teal goatee and an infuriatingly smug smile. It's a punchable face, so eminently punchable...

...and yet Skymoth suddenly remembers what happened when he(?) tried to punch it. The man bent over backward in an impossibly fluid arc, faster than Skymoth(?) could blink, faster than Skymoth's(?) fist, which met only empty air. And then that eminently punchable face popped back up into Skymoth's(?) line of sight, and that stupid teal moustache twitched, and he said

"Sorry, old chap! Better luck next time!"

And as Skymoth remembers(?) those words, they echo and multiply within the small confines of his moth head.

-that grinning face pulling ahead at the last moment in a footrace-

"Sorry, old chap! Better luck next time!"

-that face smiling back at him from the door as the goatee'd man left with the cutest boy at the party-

"Sorry, old chap! Better luck next time!"

-sparring, Skymoth's(?) sword biting through thin air again and again until an unseen blow lays him out on his back, and that face smirking down at him-

"Sorry, old chap! Better luck next time!"

Again and again, a lifetime's worth of humiliations echoing like faded memories.
And now, after all that, they're... back? And they shaved? And they became a Tya? And they don't like moths very much?

Spoiler: OOC
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Solar boooooooond~

Brown Leaf:

Rooster eagerly dips in an answering bow and comes up grinning from ear to ear.

"Brown Leaf! By the Dragons!" he, um, crows. "You're following Yujiro's example now?"

He runs a hand over his bare scalp and looks meaningfully at Leaf's hair. The Yujiro he refers to was a legendary ascetic monk of the Shogunate era who gave away his razor in the course of relieving himself of all his earthly possessions and never shaved again from that day forward.

"It's funny timing, you showing up just now. Zhuchi Thousand Grains, he was the old abbot of the Fountainhead shrine in Sand's Edge Valley, wasn't he? You know that monastery's been destroyed, don't you?"

He waves a hand in the direction of the bathing Brides without looking.

"That's actually what all this is about, sort of. We've finally found common cause! One single, solitary thing the abbot and Resplendent Ibis and the satrap and the Leopard can all agree on. And that's Sand's Edge."

He frowns.

"I'm sorry, this might be hard for you to hear, but while you've been traveling... with Fountainhead fallen and Thousand Grains away... Sand's Edge has fallen into heresy."

He tips his head slightly to indicate the Brides and the Fane beyond as he adds, "The kind even they can recognize. In fact, the herdsmen were the first to notice signs of trouble. Maybe a year ago, weird rash of tiger attacks against guarded herds of cattle. And the news has only gotten worse since then."

He drops his voice to a whisper and leans closer to Leaf.

"The latest is that they've got a prophet now. I heard some of the older monks talking about it a couple days ago."