Vanyel blushes; he seems very flattered. :Do you want me to play another one? Er, do you have a favourite sort of song?: 

:Not that I think would translate very well. What's your favorite?:

:Um, my favourite song is kind of sad. I can play it if you don't mind that: He can probably manage to do it without crying, he's got enough residual good mood from the other songs. 

"Mm," :Not today, I don't think. You should pick something, though.:

:All right: He casts his mind around. He can go with Two New Heralds. That's not a romance song, particularly. 

:Pretty. Does that happen often, people from outside of the country being Chosen?:

:I think it happens occasionally but it's really rare?: 

:That makes sense.:

Vanyel nods and then fails to think of any other conversational topics, and sits there awkwardly. 

:I'm really curious how Choosing works,: Deskyl directs at Savil. :Sith don't have much choice about it, we're trained by whoever finds us or sent to the Sith academy and chosen by a master there. It sounds like things are fairly different here.:

:The Companions Choose: Savil explains. :They get their Call, toward people who have the potential to become good Heralds, and they find and bond with those people. Who then end up in Haven, usually, and get apprenticed to a graduated Herald and learn what they need: 

:Huh. That's more similar than I was expecting.:

:How much context do you have on what Companions are?: it occurs to Savil to ask. 

:Not very much.:

:Hmm. All right. This is - pretty important to understand why Valdemar is the way it is: She sits back, sips her wine. :So, I told you about the Founding, why we have Companions at all. Companions...are magical beings. They have access to a kind of Foresight – er, people here occasionally have a Gift we call Foresight, which sees the future, I don't know if the Force does anything analogous. The kind of Foresight humans have is either short range, flashes of what's going to happen in minutes or candlemarks – useful on a battlefield, that – or long-range, tends to be vaguer dreams or visions about events in months or years:

Savil stops, thinks; she's never had to explain it to a non-Valdemaran before.

:What Companions have is different: she sends finally. :They're...tied into something bigger, something that King Valdemar co-created with the gods who answered his prayer. There's the Web, which alerts us to hostile magic happening within Valdemar, and the Death Bell, which rings when a Herald dies, no matter how far away they are. And - there's whatever tells the Companions who to Choose, and gives them other, er, hunches about the future. Our history shows a pattern - trainees with rare Gifts tend to turn up a few years before they'll be needed. Companion births often increase a decade or so before there's a need for more Heralds period. The Companions...generally can't or won't tell us the what or why of this, but the pattern is definitely there:

She pauses. :Does your Force do anything like that?: 

:We have precognition, yeah. Everyone picks up danger sensing, which is an instinctual sense of how to avoid injuries, a little like your short range Foresight. Longer range precog is a rarer skill to focus on - we can all do it, but it's not very reliable, usually. That's at home, though, your time streams would have to be more stable if you're seeing consistent effects years ahead like that.:

:Huh. That's interesting: Savil shrugs. :Long-range Foresight is much less reliable than the short-range kind, and it's also hard to interpret. But, yes, events years in the future can show up in a Foresight vision, and then happen – or almost happen, but be averted because we saw them coming. It's – I never thought about whether that was strange: 

:I can't say that it is strange, with only two examples to compare. I might be able to tell by looking, though, or at least get a better idea of the difference.: She does, staying within their shields so that they can watch if they'd like.

The overall structure of Valdemar's reality is – different, in some subtle hard-to-name way that she can't see the edges of.

It is more stable, though it's also unclear that this falls out just as a result of the structural differences. Enough to make it seem theoretically possible for long-range Force precog to sense futures up to a maybe a year away. But that's pushing it. The difference isn't nearly enough to explain a decade. 

:Huh.: She looks around a bit, getting a feel for it. :This is definitely more stable than at home - maybe by a factor of eight or ten - but that's not enough to explain precog a decade out, you'd need a factor of a hundred for that.:

:How strange: Savil frowns. :I mean, I think most long-range Foresight is more like six months out, or sometimes a year. But there are definite, documented, confirmed cases of more than ten years, including one where the interpretation of the vision was realized in advance so it can't have been coincidence. So...I'm confused, is all I can say. Maybe your Force precog works differently?:

:I guess? You'd need a way to cope with the lack of stability, though, and I'm not sure that's possible even in theory. Or not this way, at least - there's a limit a bit like this with speed, actually, that you can't pass with normal acceleration but can work around other ways, it could be like that. It'd have some pretty strange implications if it worked that way, though, I bet.:

:Hmm: 

:How does the limit with speed work?: Vanyel asks, curious. 

:The faster you go, the more energy it takes to go any faster than that - going faster actually makes you heavier, once you get up to the really ridiculous speeds, so you can kind of think of it as needing more energy because of that - and eventually it gets to the point where you'd need infinitely much energy to go any faster, which is impossible. Light can go at that speed, because light doesn't actually have any weight to start with, and it's -: she calls up some imagery from one of her astro classes for him - :the sun is so big that the whole planet is practically a speck of dust compared to it, and so far away that it looks the size it does anyway, and light takes maybe a tenth of a candlemark to get from there to here. Stars are other suns far enough away that the light from them has been traveling years at least, usually decades or centuries, so you can't get there in a human lifetime if you're traveling the normal way - moving at even a tenth the speed of light is a very hard problem, from that direction.: