Avedan, meanwhile, is going to keep sleeping like the dead. It was a long night, he likes his sleep, and also his rest continues to be mercifully dreamless. To add to the effect, the bed is really comfy. If Sylvi and Charp think he is not capitalizing on this while he can, they are sadly mistaken.

Charp isn't going to become irritated if it must continue monitoring the teakettle for a while, and Sylvi doesn't particularly require his presence for her catching-up reading. She is now through the broad-strokes summary story of her lives and is looking up little details in the order they catch her interest.

"You're welcome, sir," says Charp brightly. "I'll fix you some breakfast too."

"Thank you," repeats Avedan, sipping his tea and smiling. Charp is his favorite golem. Absolute favorite.

"Good morning," he says, now that he is not a zombie, wandering the house in search of tea instead of brains. "How'd you sleep after the obvious?"

"After that was fine. Lu on her way to the theater without her zebra - did she still have the zebra when she met Kidan?"

"I haven't gotten their meeting yet. But I - think so?"

"It's funny how each of the four of us have favored different servant types for locomoting - Aly with her puppet scooter and Kib with his golem chair and Lu with her various quadrupedal pets and my horse thing is an automaton with swappable instruction sets in a dial on its neck. Since you can't really ride a shine I guess next time'll be a repeat."

"Obviously the only answer is to invent a new type of servantmaking. To avoid a repeat."

"Well, that'd at least put me in company with my illustrious past."

"... Yeah, I know that feeling. I'm just looking back on the things Kidan and Aydanci did and I'm wondering how I'm supposed to live up to that."

"You might have it worse than me. I mean, storks, yes, but Kib mostly frontloaded a lot of effort on the one golem, fantastic piece of work though it is - since he expected to want one that'd last and be good and personable for future selves - and Lu's project didn't work."

"I could probably work on Kidan's a bit more, but most of what he wanted to do got done. I still want to do something with automating the creation of golems, but it's going to be difficult to live up to 'getting rid of slavery for the most part' and 'making the pox go away and then for an encore inventing vaccines.'"

"I bet you didn't find Lapis until your current age half because your past selves traveled more than mine did," speculates Sylvi. "Kib moved to Lapis within a couple weeks of meeting Aydanci, Lu moved into the cache when she found it except for her detour to hunt down Kidan - so a good high proportion of my dreams are about the city except for two childhoods and a few little vacations, and yours are probably all over the place."

"Yeah. I'm actually not surprised Kidan wasn't able to find Lapis on his own, Aydanci spent a lot of time in Lapis, but not much of it was outside after Aly died. Except the quarantines and meeting Kib and throwing vaccines at various governments."

"Oh, yeah, that makes sense - poor Aydanci," sighs Sylvi. "Poor you."

"I'm all right," he assures. "He was, too, after he found Kib, just - not inclined to go outside much anymore."

"According to Kib there was a long awkward period before Kib learned the 'does not care about partner gender' thing because Aydanci never asked Kib if he liked guys and Kib assumed that having married Aly was decent evidence in favor of Aydanci not 'til he got the right dream."

"Wow. Haven't got any of that yet. I did get their meeting, though. Last night."

"What was it like in - non-note format?" Sylvi wonders. "...Also, because it's going to bug me if I don't know for sure, are we on-pattern for Lu's hopes and dreams and suggestive comments here?"

"They were awkward, I'd say. Aydanci was sort of - resisting the urge to scoop Kib up and sob on him the entire time. And - I'm not sure?"

"You are not sure of what your sexual orientation is?"

"Oh. I thought you meant the -" Awkward pause. "Other - nevermind." He coughs. "Yeah, sexual orientation is exactly the same as Aydanci's and Kidan's."

"That's all I meant by pattern, I wasn't hitting on you unless you want me to be hitting on you."

"Ha, okay, uh - thank you?"

Charp chooses this moment to appear with Avedan's eggs and toast.

"...Nothing that's floating to the top of all the very general wondering about who this person I have apparently married three times actually is, but you could give me your biography and I would listen with interest?"

"Uh - I'm not really sure what to say? I grew up in Karsvatch?"

"Niaham for me. Seven years creche, then got a teacher and lived with him and his other apprentices and his wife."

"Nine years creche for me. I'm getting the feeling you specialized in shines?"

"I picked up some woodcarving for my support craft, and I can program automata too, but yeah, mostly shines."

"I know next to nothing about shines, I specialized in golemwork and some automata."

"My teacher didn't have a lot of cash lying around, is why shines - save on materials while we're short on fine motor control - and I stuck with 'em."

"Ah, that makes sense. I had the mental visual of little apprentices, chasing after dots of light and it is incredibly adorable."

"Well, I can't chase a shine that's really booking it," clarifies Sylvi.

"Well. No, but it would still be cute."

"I grant you that. Anyway, I can puppet big flocks of them for displays, I picked up pocket money doing a lightshow for a few years, but I think there's a lot to be done in using them as cheaper-than-golems, more-finely-controllable-than-pets servants that can still sense their environments more than not at all."

"I look forward to seeing what you do with them!" says Avedan, sincerely.

"Me too - but I'm stalled while I catch up on all this stuff, I think."

"Yeah. Perfectly understandable. No pressure, I will not make faces at you if you don't manage something momentous within the next week."

"Oh, good."

"Now, two weeks," he teases. "That would be different."

"Aieee! I read fast but I have three lifetimes of obsessive notebooking to peruse!"

"Fine, fine. Three weeks. Consider yourself lucky."

"Man, I end up with the taskmaster reincarnation." She sticks out her tongue.

"Bwuahaha. I expect visible improvements of the world at large within the next month, or else I will make faces!"

"Oh no! Not faces! I'm not even partially inoculated because you don't very strongly resemble your past lives!"

"Yeeees. All part of my evil plan. You will do exactly what you were planning to do anyway!"

"But I will do it under scrutiny. Oh no."

"Scrutiny with offers of assistance. The worst of all things."

"Shines are a bit like automata in the programming," muses Sylvi. "I was surprised at how easy programming the horse was, actually."

"Ooo. I might have to pick up basic knowledge of shines, my teacher liked having things be there and concrete."

Sylvi reaches for a spot of light on her desk and plants her finger at its edge and tugs on it. It separates, only to be immediately replaced with more sunshine, but persists where she dragged it. "There you go. Puppet shine. Play with it, get a feel for it. When I'm caught up on notebooks or bored sick of 'em I'll walk you through basic shine syntax."

"Thank you!" says Avedan, grinning. He retrieves the book of math, opens it to where he left off, and starts playing with the little shine as he reads.

"I didn't use to travel a lot - uh, but I wasn't very comfortable living with my teacher anymore after I turned in one of my co-prentices for raping the girl down the street, so I moved out in pretty short order once Public Order saying he was convicted didn't soften them up on the subject. And then I thought I might as well go to Lapis."

Avedan blinks. "Wow, they - were upset with you for that? I'm so sorry, that's terrible."

"Various combinations of thought I was mistaken, thought I was being too hard on him, and thought I ought to have sided with the household over the neighbor girl," sighs Sylvi.

"... Too hard on someone for rape by turning them in to the authorities," says Avedan blankly. "And - side with the household over the victim of a crime? What?!"

"I didn't have prolonged conversations with them about their reasons for being annoyed with me, so I can't be very detailed about same," says Sylvi. "I determined that they were annoyed with me and put my belongings in my horse and got some camp gear and left."

"Well I'm - genuinely sorry it went that way. It was idiotic of them to be annoyed with you for doing what is essentially the right thing."

"Thanks. I don't - miss them a lot, or anything, I'm mostly fine about having to move, I'm just kind of disappointed in them."

"Yeah. That makes sense. I'm - rather disappointed in them, too, and I don't even know them."

"Well, if they hadn't been - awful about it, I wouldn't have been in Lapis this early and you would have had to wait for me, although I'm not sure if that would've made it easier to handle or not."

"True. I also would have been attacked by parrots for longer, having to find a password and all."

"Charp has the password, it's just only supposed to distribute it after whoever finds it and reads the letters intended for them and engages it in enough conversation to convince it that they're invested in figuring out the thing."

"Well, yeah, but in the meantime I would have still been attacked by parrots."

"Oh no, the horror?" giggles Sylvi.

"The terror. The absolute gut-wrenching terror."

"Parrots are very frightening," says Sylvi sagely.

"Especially when attacking people."

"It wasn't really very - attack-y. They land, they cling, they tug."

"But it's a much better story to say that 'I was attacked by a horde of parrots' instead of a 'horde of parrots landed on me, clung to me, and tugged in a direction I wasn't expecting to go.'"

"That's true. Do you optimize all the summaries of your life for what makes the best story?"

"No, I'm basically just being contrary."

"Oddly enough, I haven't run across any warnings about you being contrary, just prudish and prone to self-neglect."

"Well, being contrary simply to be contrary is something of a rare occurrence for me. So."

"Are you being contrary to yourself?"

"Yes," he laughs. "That is exactly it. I will go do things just to be different from my predecessors. I am in my rebellious teenage phase."

"Counting by lifetimes, you are three, not thirteen."

"Fine. I'm a spoiled toddler. Happy?"

"Quite," Sylvi giggles.

"Good. Hold onto that, because toddlers are annoying."

"I haven't spent much time with them. In, as far as I am presently aware, any incarnation."

"I haven't, either, but my master informed me - toddlers, definitely annoying."

"... No," he says, after some thought. "It was annoying and painful."

"I'd bet. But I mean - are you going to get a hotel?"

"Doesn't seem worth the trouble." He pauses, and then adds tentatively, "... Plus you might have a bad dream again."

"I might. But it - usually it's not bad ones."

"I know. But still."

"You might have a bad dream too - wake you up and hug you likewise?"

"Yes, please."

"Will do. I'm gonna turn in now."

"Mhm. I'll be up in a bit."

Up and flomp and zzzzzzz.

Kib rolls over and wakes up and frowns and throws on slippers and tromps over to Aydanci's room and knocks.

Kib stares at him, half-frustrated and half-affectionate, then says, "This time around I'm gay. If this information should happen to be of interest to you."

"A-yep. Or you could describe it as 'still attracted to men', whatever, not the point, if I had not had the dream I just had until I was forty would I have continued until then to figure you for straight on the grounds that this one time we both distinctly recall you married a woman?"

"'s not grounds for me being straight," points out Aydanci, not really up to par conversation-wise. "Just to have married a woman."

"Well, sure, I know that now. Aly needed it explained, why wouldn't I?"

"Would have been rather... Mmm - presumptuous? 'Byyy the way, I'm not straight. Also, 'm single.' Didn't want to pressure you. Just - glad you're alive."

"You knew I was single by the time I moved into your house - there's ways of asking gently - and - and are you going to kiss me or not?"

Kiss!

"Yes. Dreams happen at night, my dear." And then Aydanci is pulled down for more kissing.

Well, how convenient, Aydanci didn't have the brain for a snappy retort anyway.

"I think," murmurs Kib, "that I managed to miss you, but I'm not sure how."

"I definitely missed you," replies Aydanci with a laugh.

"Well, here I am. Conveniently," kiss, "gay."

He can't even think of an intelligent response to that! Only kisses. All of the kisses.

"...Sorry, sorry," she says, retrieving the parrot. "Um, I don't even know where to start - look, have you been having weird dreams?"

"Uh." Blink, blink. "Sometimes? Why?"

"I - have - also? And uh - look, I'm - did any of the dreams you've had feature a guy named Kib discussing reincarnation, because that will make things a lot easier."

"If I recite a lot of names of things I shouldn't have any way to know about will I tip the balance from 'crazy' to 'on to something' heavily enough that we can have this conversation somewhere other than the middle of the street? Aydanci, Aly, Kib, Charp - um - storks - there was a magpie? - work with me here."

"I've been having the dreams too and I was so worried you wouldn't reincarnate because you'd never done it before but - but the parrot recognizes you and - and - hi." Her eyes are a little watery.

"Hi," he replies, lamely. "Are - are you okay?"

"Yeah - uh - Charp says Kib fell down the stairs when he was seventy-six, if you were curious?" She swallows. "Do I get a hug?"

Lu hugs him hard. "I'm so glad it's you too, I didn't know until just now that it wasn't only me but I looked just in case -"

He hugs her back, bewildered.

"Kib was going to send birds out looking when your dreams would've started, like when you were sixteen or so, but he didn't last that long, so - but you're still older than me, did you not get enough dreams about Lapis to find the place?"

"I've. Been busy."

"That's actually how I found you, there'd've been no chance of tracking you down if I had to comb the whole planet parrots or no parrots - I heard about - the slavery thing is your project, right?"

"I'm. A little overwhelmed?" he manages in a squeak.

"Okay. Um. Hi. I - remember being Aydanci?"

"I also remember Aydanci being married to a boy called Kib, and a woman called Aly," adds Kidan.

"Right, well - those were me, and I remember some of it and I've caught up on their notes about the rest and I have to admit I wasn't expecting to be greeted as a stranger, not with the age gap like this, not when - I'm sorry."

"It's - okay. I'm sorry I didn't give you the greeting you were hoping for?"

"I'm. Give me a bit, please?"

"I -" He takes a deep breath, and then rattles off an address. " I don't know how long it'll be? I'm - in the middle of things here and didn't even think the dreams were real, just bizarrely specific, and I was extremely busy and real people matter more than whatever strange things my head spits out at night, but - apparently the dreams are real, too. And I need to think."

Sylvi is yawning and sitting up. She peers at Avedan; still asleep. She wanders into the bathroom.

And she goes downstairs and Charp makes her breakfast.

And, eventually, Avedan comes wandering down the stairs. He has tea, and then he looks at Sylvi with a complicated expression.

"...Morning?" Blink. "...I got Kib discovering Aydanci was not straight, and some work on Charp and recursive golems and storks, what'd you get?"

"Lu finding Kidan, and then some more of Aydanci being depressing, and Kidan snuggling with Lu." Wince. "... The first meeting was - I'm sorry."

"Well - Kidan apologized, already, but - apology accepted from you too. She was coming on too strong, for that matter, I'm sorry."

"She'd thought he was - I dead forever," points out Avedan. "I understand."

"I didn't say her behavior was incomprehensible, I said I was sorry. Any future instances will have guidelines on how not to spook you."

"Yeah." Pause. "... Can I hug you?"

Sylvi holds out her arms. "Of course."

It's snuggly! Snuggle.

Snuggle.

"They worked it out eventually."

"Careful, spoilers," he snorts.

"Oh no!" she cackles.

"Don't tell me anything else, especially not if they get married or something!"

"My lips are sealed. You will never find out. Except when your randomly selected anachronic dreams tell you."

"No spoilers, dreams! No spoilers."

"What mechanism of learning this information would be sufficiently unspoilered?"

"It needs to go in exact order, of course."

"I am afraid I cannot help you. I am a failure as a 'bel."

"That's okay," he decides magnanimously. "I forgive you."

"You're so good to all of me."

"I am, aren't I." Snuggle, snuggle.

"We are lucky to have yous."

"We're lucky to have you, too. All of you. Collectively."

"Yup! Also - thank you, Charp."

"You're welcome, sir!"

"I noticed."

"Yep. And so on. Enjoy your decisionmaking powers."

"I am extremely excited about them. Er. It's - not likely to be a problem where I kiss you when you don't want to be kissed?"

"Unless you decide to use kisses as a means to steal my dessert or something vaguely gross and awkward like that, no."

"Why would I even..? I wasn't planning to do that. Ever?"

"You can see why I didn't qualify my first remarks, then."

He giggles, a bit. "Aha. Thanks."

"You're welcome. You come highly recommended, you know. It isn't as though you're a total stranger."

"Ha! Thank you. I feel special."

"Well, you're not that special, there've been three of you."

"Hey, there have been four of you, there are less of me!"

"I am tragically commonplace. I would be worth very little as a collector's item."

"Aww, don't say that, all three of me have collected at least one of you!"

"I don't know if that counts as collecting. Aydanci was a collector. You and Kidan are hobbyists. Unless I die and you fetch me repeatedly."

"Pass on that, being a hobbyist sounds more fun."

"I'll do my best to stay alive."

"But then mes would be able to more thoroughly outvote you if it ever came up, because we're all civilized and democratic."

"Aheh, um. Remember the night before last? When I mentioned I had a dream about us being - extremely married?"

"Yeah. Was there weird pillow talk?"

"Nope. I um. Woke up before you did, and er. You talk in your sleep." The awkward is palpable. "And, er. The word choices were still random, but while you were dreaming you said some of them differently."

"Yes!"

She giggles helplessly.

"It was so absurd," he giggles. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, it's - probably some kind of accidental invasion of privacy, but - it was hilarious. Also embarrassing, but - hilarious."

"I don't exactly mind. It's not like I was dreaming about moan-worthy things you couldn't just as easily have remembered yourself months ago."

"Well. Yes."

"So if I were going to be really picky about you invading my privacy I'd be in trouble whether you caught me going," she coughs and imitates her moany voice, "democracy, or not."

"So it's thoroughly in my interest to find it funny instead. Don't worry about it."

"Sure. Thanks."

"You're welcome."