[The idea that Liem must have some specific reason to be here, assisting the Kenoma in his own way, makes a small frown crease his brow above the dark glass of his lenses. He focuses his attention on patting down another bucketful of wet sand, tamping and smoothing it into a more uniform shape, but his thoughts are still on what Amos said. After a while of this, he speaks quietly.]

I don’t disagree. I think there must be some cosmic design at play, beyond even that of the Regent.

[He’s heard that the Regent was the one who plucked each of them from their respective worlds, and that they have intimate knowledge of each aion they’ve chosen. There must be a reason that the Regent chose to bring him here, at the very least. But while the Regent is now Liem’s patron, they aren’t his god. He wouldn’t have accepted the Kenoma’s design simply because the Regent wanted him to.]

I just don’t know where I fit into it. Being in the Regent’s service is… very different from what I did in my homeland.

[And yet, it’s not different at all. The war threatening on the horizon; the need for not just soldiers, but agents willing and able eliminate unorthodox threats for the sake of order, for the sake of authority… those things are almost exactly the same. The difference lies in his own reluctance to commit to violence for a cause he doesn’t fully understand.]

But this… This is something simple. Straightforward.

[Doing something nice for children with no families of their own—children who are like he’d been, since the day he was kicked out of his uncle’s tenement flat. They still need care while the apocalypse looms, and he happens to have quite a bit of free time these days. It simply makes sense.]