And Amshalan holds onto both of them - somehow, she's disembodied too - and yanks them back, first to the blue place, then fully back to the physical world. 

Leareth is frozen on the spot, breathing in short bursts. Through their bond he feels very panicky. 

Belrun tugs him into her arms and hugs him as tight as she can. Slows down his heart rate for him.

:Thank you: He rests his head on her shoulder, still trembling a little. :It is very pointless to have a panic attack about it after the fact, but - that is possibly the most terrifying thing I have ever needed to do. I hope I will never have to do it again: 

:Yeah, we could have backed off when They first showed up but then we would have had to do it over: Snuggle.

Leareth kind of wants to take the rest of the day off for snuggles, actually. In addition to being very shaken, his head feels so weird from the aftermath of a god fishing his avatar-schematics out of it. 

That is super legit and she will snuggle him all the rest of the day, occasionally squirming a hand free to scribble notes about things.

Leareth is feeling much better the next morning. 

Just before lunch, he goes and finds Belrun in her lab. "I included a part in the immortality-spell for your mouse, to alert me when it was sprung, and I think it has been now. We should check on the mice in question." 

"Huh, it was fine yesterday, I was expecting it to take longer." She goes and looks at mice.

The elderly mouse seems to have met with a mishap involving its water bowl and possibly a dispute with the other mice. 

The young mouse is sitting in a corner of its cage, twitching a bit, while its cagemate sniffs at it. 

She takes the young mouse out and attempts to prompt it to do tricks.

The mouse is super not having it. It seems very anxious and also confused. 

"I am usually having a bad time of it immediately after I return into a new body," Leareth points out. "Maybe you should let it have some peace and quiet to re-orient." 

"Yeah, fair enough." She tries putting it in the same cage where it died, after clearing out the old body, in case the familiarity helps. Gives it a bit of broccoli.

The familiarity does seem to help; the mouse settles down, twitches less. Eventually it goes to sniff at the broccoli and then starts nibbling it. Not very competently, but it figures out proper nibbling behaviour within a few minutes. 

She takes notes on mouse behavior, fascinated.

The mouse remains rather passive and easily startled for the rest of that day, and too confused to be coaxed into tricks. The next morning, though, it's looking much more chipper, sniffing at the bars of its cage. 

Good morning, reincarnated mouse! Do you want to do tricks you knew in a past life? For kale?

The reincarnated mouse gamely goes along with this! Kale is an excellent bribe. It can't remember the entire repertoire of tricks from its previous life, and for a few of them it needs a lot of cueing, but it definitely seems to know tricks that the former inhabitant of the young-mouse-body hadn't been taught. 

Belrun reports this encouraging but perhaps not delighting continuity to Leareth.

"I would have been somewhat surprised if the continuity were perfect! It does seem as though it might be better than my usual baseline, probably because there is no time lag before the reincarnation. Humans have the advantage of notes and friends to provide cues and help jog partial memories into completion." 

"Yeah, that's true enough, I was just hoping it'd be perfect. Oh well. I have lots of notes."

"Well, since we ran one mouse test successfully, and it is not very hard to set up, I could attempt a second one and modify the artifact-link to be - stronger, or maybe 'wider' is a better description, which might help transfer more memories?" 

"I would prefer that. That one knows how to run the little mouse obstacle course," she says, pointing out another older mouse, "and that one doesn't."

Then Leareth will re-design the link and get it set up again by the end of the day. 

"Would you prefer to have your artifact and monkey ready before we move on the Heartstone? I do not think you should be in danger, if you stay here, but - it might attract hostility from the Star-Eyed, and potentially also Vkandis if He is allying with Her on this."