[X can't help smiling. Ilda has that effect; as painful as recounting those memories are, she sees the good, she fixates on the good, and her excitement is near infectious.]

You don't need to apologise. The best stories are the ones you can interact with. [Juuuuust saying.] Where was I -- right, pretending to work for the villain. There was an odd thing that kept occurring in the months after that rescue. Even accounting for grief, and reason, and time, X still couldn't trust Unlucky. Even after knowing the truth, even after knowing how old he was and how hard he was fighting to try and make the world a little better for everyone living there, I still couldn't... X still couldn't. It got to a point where X realised on his own that something strange was going on, and he asked Unlucky what it was.

And, well, to make a long story short, it was still that villain. X had a name, back then, and the villain had magic that could influence everyone in that magical world through their names. Subtly, nothing grandiose or showy, but consistently. It made it hard, to trust anyone trying to tell them anything the villain didn't want them to hear.