Perhaps surprisingly, Lea understands better than Akito might realize. "And when it seem like everything you know has been taken from you, you just want to hold on even tighter to anything that seems the least bit familiar," he says. Like, say, what had been left of an old friend, even long after they'd stopped being anything like the person he had remembered.

"I'm sure they appreciate that you're paying them back, in your own way," he says. "Though can I ask exactly how? Do you have some kind of water-based magic, for example?"