Owen closed his eyes again, thoughtful. He'd been fishing around the furniture and finally found his horns, which he snapped and clicked back into place. Breathing a sigh of relief at his senses returning, he said, "Mergo is someone who prepares far in advance. When he was first summoned, he treated it like a duty, and didn't try to make relationships he knew wouldn't last, especially if they, you know, got killed off, or they couldn't handle what was going on, you know? Kind of like what happened to some of the people here, I heard. Used to be more of you, right? And then they had to go, and echoes of them were left behind whenever Diyem was around, or something..."
He realized he was rambling and stopped. "Mergo tried to prepare for everything. He tried to analyze the weaknesses and strengths of everyone on our team in case we went rogue or got possessed, things like that. Other me said that actually happened here, too." Owen smiled fondly. "I remember how he wanted to put all of that to the test when he challenged me when it was all over. We left craters in the fields when we fought... And it was clear that he was exploiting weaknesses I didn't even know about. I think he wanted to prove that he could handle threats like this back home, even if he lost his memories of it.
"He, uh, he lost in the end. He took it pretty hard. I kinda had an idea of how to deal with foes that Teleported a lot, so I did a trick with my Bestow technique... I think other me did something similar here?" He shrugged. "Not that he's all serious. He also made sure to keep up morale by setting up parties, or getting us all to go to therapy to manage our Blacklight, things like that. It's kind of weird to think about him starting parties and team-building things because it's the utilitarian thing to do, but... he did organize a few of them."
