Tylendel has also been doing a lot of staring into space, but he eventually catches her eye, notices that Vanyel is failing to eat, and starts prompting him. 

Oh good. 

:Are you okay?:

:Huh, what?: He glances over at her. :Mostly just nervous about meeting the Queen. That she'll - be upset with me: 

:I guess that's fair. Well--I'm on your side, no matter what happens.:

:I know. I'm glad: 

After lunch, the afternoon is mostly relaxed. More sitting around together in the suite, talking; Vanyel and Tylendel go for a ride with their Companions at one point. 

Late in the afternoon, Savil announces a message through her Companion that the Queen is headed this way. 

Oooooh gosh okay Lucy is just going to tug a comb through her hair and smooth out the wrinkles in her dress a bit and just. This is fine! But a Queen, gosh.

Queen Elspeth, when she arrives with Lancir, does not look especially Queen-like. She's a small, thin woman dressed in the same Whites as Lancir, no crown, greying dark hair pulled back from her lined face into a bun, and she looks tired and distracted. 

When she focuses on them, though, it's a little bit like being regarded by a five-hundred-year-old redwood, or a mountain. She's got presence. 

"Elspeth," she says, nodding. "You must be Lucy?" 

"Yep! That's me. I can demonstrate the shapeshifting if you want but probably not all the way because I'd have to take off my clothes first." 

Just because Lucy is nervous about the idea of meeting a Queen doesn't magically give her tact. 

Elspeth chuckles. "No need – I am not in doubt of that part." She takes the seat that Savil offers her. "So. Tell me a little about how you came by this ritual for returning the dead to life? Tylendel, by the way, it's excellent to see you alive and healthy." 

Tylendel twitches. "Um, yes, thank you?" 

"...So, my other shape is the one I was born with, and I couldn't really interact with people until I learned how to shapeshift. So, when I was sixteen, I outgrew the house--I mean literally, I got so big that the house broke apart around me. So after that Wilbur and I just sort of ran away, since everyone in town who didn't hate us was dead anyway, and I took up hiding in forests and hunting invasive megafauna while he went into town to get things like books. This went on until a little after I turned eighteen, when I figured out how to shapeshift and started wanting to interact with people, which I had never really been able to do before aside from Wilbur and Mother and Grandfather. Only I wasn't...great at it, on account of the lack of practice. And mostly it was fine? I'm pretty, I look like the relevant socially-advantaged ethnic group, people mostly just thought I was odd and it didn't become a huge problem.

"Only, some people are on the lookout for people who are...odd. Which wasn't a problem either! It was actually good. Eliza, she used to be dead too, she noticed that I was weird and cornered me alone and asked me questions until I broke down and admitted everything, at which point she explained to me how she used to be dead and her husband--well, they were only engaged at the time, technically, they didn't get married until after she came back--her then-fiance went slightly mad and hunted down everything he could find out about an ancestor of his who was supposed to have practiced magic, um for context magic is kind of, people either don't like it or don't believe in it--anyway he hunted down enough stuff to know that the rumors were true and his ancestor had been able to raise the dead like the rumors said, so he took the instructions left behind to resurrect his ancestor and then get him to help him resurrect his beloved, so then she was alive and he was uncrazied and okay and stuff, and then they figured out that even though the magic was legit the ancestor actually was evil, like, he had owned slaves when he was alive the first time, he thought it was a grand old time to, like, instead of raising people to give them back to their loved ones he did it to interrogate them for knowledge, and he had no problem with murder like even without planning to bring them back, so Teacher played along until they could get him in a good position and then Eliza hit him with a lamp. And then they restrained him and gagged him and looked through all his stuff and found out who his partners-in-crime were, uh, there were these other guys from way back when he'd been alive the first time who were also evil, that's who I mean, and then they killed him again and put his ashes on a shelf so they could bring him back if it was ever safe for him to be alive and he couldn't hurt people and stuff. 

"So that's basically how things were when they found us, like, they'd left their hometown and gotten married and stuff but they were still trying to figure out what to do with the co-conspirators, and Eliza brought me to meet her husband, oh his name was Joseph I usually just call him Teacher, and he was like 'so how do you feel about people not being dead anymore' and I was like 'I think that sounds awesome,' and he started teaching me and Wilbur how to do the thing, and the magic calls on Yog-Sothoth, who's our father, so we get to cheat at it. But I'm better at it than he is, he's more of a, um, theory person? And I'm more of a practice person. And then the four of us wandered around for a while, spent a few months in Innsmouth where there's a buncha people who aren't human, that was neat, oh! 

"And--I don't think I've made this clear yet--we found out while we were in Innsmouth that people who die older come back young anyway. So you can just go on forever, not just definitely as long as a human lifespan."

Elspeth takes in all of it with great composure, nodding and making listening noises in the right places. It's still...kind of a lot, having her full attention. 

"I see," she says finally. "Lancir already walked me through the, er, safety of the ritual and the ways it can occasionally go wrong. Your impression is that nothing went wrong in Tylendel's case?" 

"...Yes. It's, um, if anything had gone wrong, it wouldn't be some kind of subtle difference in his personality, it would be...not psychological...and not subtle..."

"I understand that. Also, Taver has spoken with Gala, and he both vouches that Gala seems to be herself in every way, and conveys that she says the same of Tylendel. Being in his mind, she ought to know, I suppose. Still, I did want to come by myself."

She smiles. It makes her look a lot younger. "Congratulations. It's a very impressive feat, and you've done a great deal of good for Valdemar already, as well as for these two youngsters. I do hope to take you up on bringing back others, which I hear you're interested in doing?" 

"Yeah! I wanna get everyone, someday, but of course there's a lot of people who're going to have to sit on a shelf until we've built a world secure enough that they won't be able to hurt people in it."

Elspeth gives her a Look. "...Young lady, do you have a plan for building such a world?" 

"Well, no, I'm nineteen and terrible at any social interaction that doesn't fall into one of 'close friend you can tell anything to' or 'potentially malignant stranger; lie your ass off.' I figure, you know, if people get to live forever it'll either happen organically or I can figure out how to chivvy it into place later."

"...I do wonder if the world would be wiser, overall, if we had longer lives to build it with." Elspeth sighs. "I - had gotten used to the idea of my own death. I suppose your arrival might change that as well." 

"Well, I can't make you not die in the first place, I can just fix it after. But very closely after!"

To Lucy's surprise, Elspeth smiles. "Perfect. That solves the succession issue. I'm not excited to be Queen forever, you know." 

"Isn't abdication a thing anyway...? Not that I'm not happy to be convenient."

"It is but the Council would be obnoxious about it." 

"It's because she's a good Queen," Savil says helpfully. 

"Oh, come on, Darvi's more than ready for the job."