"Sure. In Milliways, as long as the door's closed, time doesn't pass on the other side."

"All right. So... a while ago I started having weird dreams. Dreams where I'm other people. Living normal lives - I dream about being these people and going clothes shopping or trimming my fingernails or eating pears or something, it's random. There's three people, but I get two of them more than the first one. And when I wake up, I can remember the dreams, like they really happened to me, but a long time ago - twenty or a hundred years or more. They all lived in this town that I'm going to go to; I checked, and it's a real town, and it's where the dreams think it is. And a while ago I had a dream that makes me think that maybe these people were real, and I'm their reincarnation, and that if I go to Lapis I'll find their old house, and a golem one of them left there, and some saved money and old notebooks. ...And maybe the guy that they all married, because he reincarnates, too."

"Ooh. That sounds amazing!"

"Yeah. I hope I'm not just being silly."

"I think if your dreams gave you information you couldn't possibly have known that turned out to be true you're probably not being silly."

"I might have heard that Lapis was a real place separately and forgotten about it. It's a good-sized, old city, it's not unreasonable to have heard of it."

"I dunno then."

"If the dreams are just dreams, well, I'll be in a new city with a little savings and a decent servantmaking education, it'll be okay. If they're not just dreams - then I'm all set for life, and maybe my opposite number will show up soon too. I miss him."

"...I hope he's real then."

"Me too."

"When you find out if we find Milliways at the same time again will you tell me what happened?"

"Sure. Is that likely?"

"I don't know. Mama says some people find Milliways at the same time a lot but some people only ever meet anyone once."

"Well, if I find it again, or my reincarnation does and remembers you, then I will definitely update you on the story."

"Okay! How will I know it's them?"

"All four of me have wound up with the syllable 'bel' in our names. I'm Sylvibel. I have no idea how that happened because we were all named by creche workers, but it is still a thing that happened every time. We look a little alike, I think - not overwhelmingly, you wouldn't notice if you weren't looking for it, the second time around I was a boy, but still. Other than that I'm not sure."

"Okay. A 'bel from the world with no parents."

"Yep."

"...Do you want to know anything about my world? I've been asking all the questions."

"I already know that you have animal-type reproduction and people with weird powers," Sylvi points out. "But yeah, tell me about it."

"Um, okay, it's the year 2030, as counted from the birth of a religious figure no one in my family cares about. We have mutants, who are the people with weird powers. We sometimes get nifty cosmetic extras, like my hair." Her hair is lavender. "No one knows for sure how long we've been around but we really emerged into the public eye almost seventy years ago. My grandparents--Mama's parents--were involved with that. They're pretty famous. Then a while back Mama and her sister my aunt Emily went on a multi-universal jaunt and came back with a bunch of other people like Kodiak and Dr. Aspen and also some nifty technology."

"Oh, I figured your hair was dyed that way. Did they jaunt through here? That sounds dangerous if you can't know when you'll get doors."

"No, this is my natural hair color. Some of the jaunting was through here. A lot of it was trying to get back home after aunt Emily's normally reliable Milliways-door-getting quality temporarily abandoned her."

"That sounds like a nasty surprise."