"Will names do?" Annie asks Belmarniss.

"Can. It'd probably take a lot of tries. Helps if you also know what they look like."

"I probably do. Just give me a bit of time."

"They've waited this long."

"Hopefully they landed somewhere tolerable."

"If not somewhere that could send them back with help. Wonder if the Dwarves who bought tickets offplane found ways to not die."

"Yeah. - wonder what happens to Dwarves when they die. People here get an afterlife?"

"Yeah, though only some afterlives are reported to let you just be a regular person forever, the rest warp you eventually or have risks of Extra Death Now With Being Even Deader or both."

"That sounds frustrating. Do you get to pick which one, at least?"

"You can aim but not pick, you get sorted by low granularity behavioral classification. Country we're in makes a point of trying to get folks into Axis, it's habitable enough and lends itself to policy based encouragement."

Nod. "We thought our humans didn't have an afterlife. But apparently some of them get reincarnated." Squeeze.

"If it's just me it's probably an artifact. I'm not native."

"I have no idea if it was anyone else. I wasn't really looking. Did you identify anything it could pair with -"

"Well, at first I thought the worldhopping one had a second trigger but if I didn't hop worlds then no. It could be hiding, though, I didn't figure out what the warmth went with for a really long time."

"Detect Magic. ...well, it shows up and really strongly. There's... six of it, is that the expected number? ...doesn't register as having a particular school."

"Huh. Six is how many pairs I have identified."

"Huh. I guess we could also scry on other humans we knew who died, though it's entirely possible they've since lived and died again or something."

"Or will reincarnate later. I took a long time."

"Still love to check on the kids - I'll make a list, how about that, with people and how much I remember about them, and then Belmarniss can tell us which ones are good bets."

"Probably faster to tell you what helps? The best case is targeting a kid or somebody who could really use an Owl's Wisdom to the face, ideally not a caster, with a lock of their hair and something they own and a picture of them on hand, who you know really well. You can make do with a lot less than that but it increases the failure chance."

"Elaborate on 'could use an Owl's Wisdom to the face'."

"There's three spells that make people smarter, so it's useful to think about there being three kinds of cognitive capacity even though that's definitely oversimplified. Owl's Wisdom makes you better at noticing things, exercising good judgment especially in a non-systematic way, and generally maintaining mental equilibrium. The other two spells are Fox's Cunning - that's the kind I use to cast, it's also the one for memorization and doing math or whatever - and Eagle's Splendor, that one makes you more socially gifted and kinda... shiny."

"How likely is it to succeed with a name and a face, both of them thirty thousand years out of date, but no one is a spellcaster or anything?"

"About half the time you'd probably get somebody like that if they were just on another regular plane but I think something's going on with all these newly contacted planes."

Nod. "I can probably ask Lirnith to remind me the faces of anyone I've forgotten."