Belrun is so close to getting this damned flu strain to calm down in this one egg. She copies the change across to a few more eggs' worth, iterates, writes everything down, and Fetches the egg that is getting scary into her pot of simmering water before it makes a break for it. It's getting on toward dark and if she keeps working she's going to have to do it by candlelight, and she doesn't like that - it's already too easy to bump into things when she can see them. She calls it a day and closes up the lab for the night and heads out to walk over to the university cafeteria. It's a nice evening, and it's Flatbread Night, and she's in a generally good mood.
Vanyel has carted over several more boxes to a table, and is now going through one of them in more depth.
"Did you know," Vanyel says with considerable pride, "my Companion was a mathematician in a past life? This sort of makes sense, it's come up in relation to talking to Leareth. Fandessa, Chosen in four-seventeen."
"Cool! Just for kicks I wound up looking up who Amshalan's Companion used to be, too, and found her."
"Ooh! Fandessa's Companion was Beltrin. Did you see any Heralds with names like that, I don't recall. A stallion, so it'd be a man, unless Heralds sometimes switch sex when they come back as Companions..."
"I don't know them to do so but I suppose if they did it occasionally I wouldn't know! I don't remember anybody who sounded like that off the top of my head but there were so many..."
Vanyel nods. His cheerful expression fades. "Also it looks like she was Chosen the same year as, er, another Herald, who I think came back and was a Companion at the same time as her too, they were friends. Herald Galia."
"I, uh, don't know if this helps but the corollary of this research project we're doing is that - his, his information is almost certainly in storage somewhere however that works - even if most people's isn't? And obviously we don't know how to get it out of storage, let alone out and in a human body and not a Companion body, or in less than a hundred years, but - probably not gone. Since he was a Herald."
Vanyel shivers, accepts the hug for thirty seconds or so before pulling away. "Thank you," he says tightly. "Did you - need me for anything else today..."
Welp she's not sure she handled that well but alas. She makes sure she has all the interesting information about Sayshal and so on written down, puts things away neatly, lets herself out.
:I appreciate how it's impossible to trip over my own feet when I am borrowing yours instead:
They're having a conversation about students they taught in the past (none of them have teaching duties at this point, Keiran and Katha are too busy with their current roles; Savil has mostly taught mage-work and there aren't currently any mage-gifted trainees.)
Savil thinks to try to include Belrun in the conversation after a couple of minutes. "Say, have you done any teaching? I feel like I should know this..."
"Yes, I taught microbiology at the university. But the students were older than the typical trainee."