:Thanks! It was, uh, an interesting conversation with Shadowgod and I need to be in the habit of pinning Them down with direct questions I guess:

:Were They being cryptic with you? Great: Pause. :Told Yfandes. She said she should have guessed once they knew about the lifebond, but in fairness, I think it was too weird to guess: 

:Yeah, took me a bit too:

Sigh. :Hopefully They're just mysterious out of habit and will get less that way with more practice: 

:I hope so!:

Pause. :Anyway, Yfandes thinks Van has a right to know, but, er, she's worried it'll make things even weirder between him and Stef. Since I don't think it's an especially good idea to tell Stef. She's thinking about how we should frame it: 

:Yeah. I mean, what is there to make weird, he's going to be trying to avoid accumulating more than twelve total hours of proximity till Stef's older, right -:

:...She's concerned it could make it, er, emotionally harder for him to avoid Stef, if he has that association. And that it might be unfair to Stef for Van to spend years thinking of him as - basically Tylendel - when we've got no reason to believe he remembers anything: 

:Right, good point. Ugh. And there's not a good way, even if Shadowgod can do it, to be like 'hey Stef wanna remember your past life' without telling him that he has one and who it was:

:Right. I guess maybe we could ask him years from now? Presumably at some point he's going to find out he's lifebond-compatible with Van: 

:Yeah. I guess Yfandes should maybe keep an eye on what's stressing Van out and if he perseverates on something specific we can be sure isn't going to happen, like a Tylendel-Companion appearing, she can tell him that's not happening, and I guess if he gets fed up and is like "just tell me what's going on"... which I don't super expect actually...:

:She thinks he'd be really angry later on, if he finds out we knew and didn't tell him: 

:Yeah, that's also a fair consideration! I guess I could be like "I talked to the Shadowgod, I don't think there is anything it would help matters for you to worry about for the next three or four years going on, I can tell you the whole story if you want"?:

:Hmm. Yfandes thinks that would be the respectful way to approach it, and also he'll definitely ask you for the whole story right away. - Um, she wonders if it'd help to give him background information on what we know about reincarnation, first? So - he knows how to take it in context, what it even means that Stef is Tylendel: 

:I should ask Shadowgod about that, it's presumably not just like being a Companion:

:Right, presumably not. I would guess that if someone's coming back as a baby, having a different childhood and all affects them a lot more...: 

:Yeah:

:Hey You, what do human reincarnations have in common across their lives, in the general case and in Stef's?:

They are built on the same soul and so will share some traits, though how traits appear can vary because of different experiences. They will sometimes have a few memory-traces from the previous life. Stef in particular has a rather different life-thread from Tylendel because his childhood was so extreme.

:Extreme?:

It would be easiest for you to ask somebody who knows him, for the human angle on what that means. It shaped him strongly.

:Am I a new soul or a preexisting one?:

You are a new soul.

:What fraction of people are reincarnated? How many times do souls usually get re-used?:

It depends on the god. The Star-Eyed likes to reincarnate humans and likely most of her souls have been sent back at least once by now, and some more than once. Some other gods are less likely to bother. I think that about half of the souls in my territory are reincarnated souls, most used once or twice before.

:Is it likely that it will ever be possible for people who want memories of their past lives to get them?: