[The sense of mana at the corner makes Kratos straighten suddenly, so that he's already standing by the time the tall figure steps into the alley. The street is as bare as he could find, but he'd thought the mana-signatures were further away than that -- that or the stranger had very good eyes in the dark. And there's something -- strange -- about the man's mana. It moves, but not ... in the right way. Kratos doesn't know how mana works on this planet well enough to tell what's wrong.

[But that is rather diminished when the stranger speaks, and Kratos realises that he's become far too accustomed to knowing all the languages of Aselia, even most of the dead ones. This one sounds familiar; it sounds a bit like the common tongue of the two worlds, whose evolution was controlled over time. It isn't. He presses a hand to his forehead with a self-deprecating sigh. Idiot.

[With a world so large, surely there would be enough languages that it isn't odd he doesn't know this one. Kratos lowers his hand, and looks impassively at the stranger, choosing to speak in the tongue of Tethe'alla from four thousand years ago. He doesn't use it often enough.]

I don't understand you.

[Hopefully, the man will just think he was seeing things -- if he saw anything at all. There was a question in there; it's possible he was asking whether Kratos had seen something overhead.]