"Mermaids, huh. - how not the same is it, complete memory loss or something less awful than that?"

Chanai smiles slightly. "Yeah, usually. There's magic you can do to save some of your memories and magic you can do to recover them if you saved them in the first place but you have to do it yourself so you have to have studied magic both times and it's not usually an entire life. And you have to start out as a child again."

"Rough deal! Hopefully with everybody immortal they will all have time to pick up the magic they need to get any salvageable memories."

"Yeah. Anyway, what do you need to be able to conjure bodies?"

"...space to put them in? Specs, if people are at all picky, which I'd expect them to be. Information on local clothing styles if they would rather not wake up naked likewise."

"Wow. How long does it take you?"

(Tyela whistles.)

"Almost all of the time expenditure is going to be in the form of consulting the spec and making sure the space is as expected. I have a volume per time limit but it's so huge."

"...Well, that won't be the bottleneck today."

Wag wag wag wag!!!

Tema returns with a box of miscellaneous containers packed very carefully. She sets the box down carefully and starts carefully unpacking one of the containers. "Hello, everyone, anything change while I was getting these or are we putting some ancestors in flesh now?"

"You'll have to tell me enough about who these people are that I can put them in - at a guess - themselves as they looked at age twenty or so less any obvious physical inconveniences?"

"...This one," Tema says of the lumpy clay jar with the remnants of a paint job that may have been done by a child, which she's decided to unpack first, "is my great-great-great grandmother. She's had a body age twenty or so more than once - she paid for a lottery once when she was very sick. She only paid for girls fifteen to twenty with good eyesight and she complained that her second body was too pale and her skin burned in the sun after that, but I don't think she otherwise liked her original body better. She would have expected that if she ever came back it'd be in a totally new body and that we might not even have been able to make sure it was young and healthy, you don't need to worry especially about making it look like anyone in particular."

"You presumably have had as many as sixteen great-great-great-grandmothers but I suppose if I'm not trying to copy her previous vessels I can just make something up regardless." How's this medium-brown kinda-Burmese-looking nineteen-year-old in a dress just like Tema's but palette-swapped?

Creepy, is how it is, but Tema okays it and Chanai gets to work, occasionally requesting some miscellaneous plant matter from Cam.

"If the plants are magical on their own I won't necessarily be able to conjure them."

"Try it and see."

The plants are not magical on their own.

He can conjure them but they could be low-key magical on their own and not work in the spell! But they can only find this out by trying it.

Winged person: incredibly concerning. Tema: marginally less concerning, though it's hard to be sure it's her; it's been a while and she's grown.

"Well," she says in a different language than the one they've all been talking in (but one she shares with Tema and Chanai and therefore also Cam), "hello."

Wave wave!

Slightly less concerning.

"You had a stroke, couldn't learn that you'd had a stroke - it was obvious, but you just - " Tema shakes her head. "We thought you might as well stay in the attic for a couple years, and then - things happened - and it was more than a couple. Anyway, this alien whose species can conjure matter showed up and can conjure bodies without souls."

"Oh." That's the least concerning explanation of the winged person she could possibly have gotten. "Thank you," she says, turning to Cam and Chanai.

"You're welcome! I'm excited to end aging and disease!"

She smiles.

"Great-gran, these are - Iiii completely failed to get your name, actually I'm sorry," Tema says with a glance at Cam.