"Yeah, if I - reincarnate - next person can't catch up in a human lifetime."

"Well by then hopefully 'human lifetime' won't be a meaningful concept. Huh. How common could this plausibly be without being publicly known?"

"I didn't exactly go around telling everybody I had weird dreams but it's not a secret, you knew, and some people would have more obvious tells, things they'd run across sooner... Not very."

"There are no communities that claim their leaders are the reincarnations of old leaders, even if you wouldn't have been inclined to take that claim seriously..."

"Nope. Concept doesn't appear in religion, I don't think I've even seen it in a novel - not the way I'm doing it, there's a word for 'reincarnation' but it doesn't involve memory continuity and usually involves looking the same."

"Well. Maybe it's just you. Bizarre. Do you want to go back to your realm and track down Aly's life?"

"I kind of want to go track down her notebooks but all I've gotten of the end of her life is, you know, extremely distracting agony, so I don't know where she was living then or who'd have them or if they'd have kept them..."

He nods. "Maybe you'll get a memory to point you towards that."

"Maybe. Before the mid-to-late disease progression so I have an idea of where she'd have gone to be looked after."

"What's the progression of this disease, or do I not want to know?"

"I don't know how easily upset you are by disease descriptions, although you'll be pleased to know it was eradicated when I was little."

"We don't have serious disease here. I find everything about your world upsetting, but I don't think I'll have nightmares."

"Well, that'll make one of us but I have them anyway. It was called the pox, there are other poxes but this was the pox, and there would be one or two lesions per joint - it was mostly around the joints - and on the spine, a few there too, that started itchy and just sort of got worse and worse and deeper and deeper till you could see bone through them and -"

He shudders. "And it was incurable?"

"Yeah. It didn't kill everyone who got it, and not everyone exposed got it, but there was nothing to be done about it - there's a vaccine now, they check babies for marks when they come into creches..."

"I'm sorry that happened to, uh, your past self. If that's what this all means."

"That seems to be the upshot, yeah."

"I am delighted that there's another avenue by which you might not die, though. In case my father can cure aging but not accident, or something like that..."

"Yeah, then you just have to wait six years and go to every creche in the world asking if anybody can tell you what the three questions are, that's easy!"

"The three questions?"

"One of the more askable-of-a-six-year-old commonalities between me and Aly, we - I organize my thoughts by writing them down and the three questions are 'what do I want', 'what do I have', and 'how can I best use the latter to get the former'. I can't think of anything that would be nearly as good a bet nearly as early as six, I didn't have my first Aly dream until I was fifteen or so and it didn't seem like a remarkable pattern until there had been lots."

"Good to know. I'm not sure if 'the reincarnation of Kib' would be a sufficient specification that the Valar could just pull you back."

"Eonwë did not actually say what amount of specification would be enough." Man, if it's awkward that I'm eighteen imagine how weird it would be if I were six.

I am pretty sure I'd stop having romantic feelings for you if I'd raised you from early childhood.

And then one day I would have that one dream and it would be awkward! Let's just see if I can keep this body. However convenient it would be for my social acceptability if next time I landed in a girl one again.