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Luke matched Ray's surprise. "What, like, permanently?" This was certainly the first he had heard of it.

This was all news to Luke, though he supposed it might have been at least in part his own fault for insisting that Dove never speak to him or Rosie again - though even if he had been involved in the matter of finding Yuri, it wouldn't have changed the fundamental situation that Yuri had left without telling anyone. He got the impression that he shouldn't take it too personally.

"I guess I thought we were better friends than he did," he said with a halfhearted laugh, though he wondered if there wasn't more to the story than it seemed. Finding out seemed an impossibly daunting task; he'd have to take leave from his work, not to mention putting aside his personal life, to go off to Grande Ile and try to track down a single person in the entire country, all on the possibility that at the end of the trail he would discover that it was indeed that simple and that their friendship really had been one-sided. Maybe he was better off not knowing.

That just didn't seem accurate to Luke's impression; Yuri had always exhibited a lot of selflessness and patience, he thought, and had never seemed to ask for or expect anything in return. Or maybe he had expected something in return and, upon not receiving it, had decided to cut ties and leave. He had a hard time thinking that the person he knew was actually so callous and self-possessed, but perhaps time had changed him... Ray certainly wasn't spinning her description out of pure imagination, after all.

In the end, the result was the same: Yuri had gone to Grande Ile, and Luke had no means of reaching him. Dwelling on it and mulling over the endless possibilities of what could have changed would achieve nothing. If the opportunity to speak with Yuri arose, he could puzzle out the situation at that time, but until then, he wasn't going to let it weigh him down indefinitely.

The perspective he'd gained through losing sight of himself was so freeing sometimes.

"Oh, yeah, I've got time," he replied with a nod. "It's a bit of a trip coming out here, so it'd be a shame to turn around and head back right away anyway."

He nodded his assertion, "It still takes a while, for sure, but it's nothing like going by foot." He certainly was glad that he had acclimated Leste to flying with a passenger.

He followed at Ray's gesture, pausing in front of the Serperior as she addressed it and waving a greeting in return. "It is summer," he said. "It's as good a time as any to sleep all day, if you've got the time to kill."

He smiled sympathetically at the Serperior; he'd had his own share of boredom-induced naps, though those primarily took place in hospital beds for him and often went hand in hand with medication-induced naps.

He gave a nod towards Ray to acknowledge her return and tilted his head in curiosity at what she said. "Why are they being 'unpleasant?' The heat?" He supposed if he were stuck in hot, humid subterranean caverns for the vast majority of the working day he would probably be a bit ornery himself.

He moved to follow, though he raised a brow at what she said. "Still? All that was an awfully long time ago, wasn't it?" He'd still been carrying a cane at the time, so it had been at least half a year ago. "Are there still complications from it or something?" he hazarded.

Well, he supposed that would make sense... He imagined that the officers would quickly become suspicious of one another if one were to be outed as a Rocket. "I guess I can't blame them," he said, "but it seems like it's just going to make the situation worse if they suspect and begrudge one another until the end of time."

"What do you mean?" he said, frowning in consideration.