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There is a mystery that's currently unsolved. It's in Avedan's head. It's not like he's going insane (he's quite sure that he's not) but lately his sleep's been pretty eventful. He'd always had dreams (didn't everyone?) but lately, they've been getting more vivid. More lifelike. And, most interestingly of all, more internally consistent.
It's really, really confusing. Avedan is somewhere between wanting to learn more about the internal history present in the dreams, and wanting to understand why they're being so - insistent. He suspects it has something to do with malfunctioning servants, but all of his are working just fine. He checked. Twice. So - maybe someone else's aren't working properly? Or something? He doesn't know, there's zero precedent for eerily vivid and consistent dreams. Avedan tries talking to someone about it, exactly once. They immediately think he's having reoccurring nightmares.
But they're not nightmares. Well. Okay, some of them are, one of the more memorable ones included desperately clutching a woman's hand, begging her to stay with him, just keep breathing, to stay alive. She didn't. If it'd been with someone he knew, he might have thought it was just a simple nightmare. But, no. He's never seen her before in his life. Only his dreams, and not all that often, either. Because there are others, with - happier memories attached to them.
He's started to notice patterns. In - consistent people, consistent places, and most interestingly, consistent personalities. He's pretty sure it's not his subconscious being uncreative (if it were that, he would be naked at work or something) but the bizarre internal consistency his dreams are exhibiting.
It's hard, to figure out if there's a timeline to it all. But there is one thing that's consistent: a city. He does a quick bit of research, finds the city's name (Lapis), and after a bit more research is confronted with the dream's reasonable level of fidelity. As in, it's nearly the same, with exception to what he suspects is construction. And he's never been to Lapis in his life. Just what is going on? He can only think of one way to find out, and that way involves packing up his bags, handing them off to a well-maintained servant, and then heading off to Lapis.
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do_over
if_at_first
"What're you gonna do? I'm not sure if I want to pick up where Lu left off or not given that she didn't wind up with anything concrete and that I went with a different specialty when I was apprenticing."
do_over
"I'm going to have to read all of Kidan's notes to decide, I think, my resources have changed dramatically and that's a factor," he says. Page flip. "... Oh. So that's what he did. He was offended by slavery."
do_over
"Very!" agrees Avedan, with a smile. "Well, now I am free to be very smug about what I accomplished in my past lives, that's fun."
if_at_first
"Kib apparently spent a long time on Charp."
"I'm very complicated, milady," says Charp.
"But did some local-ish infrastructure servantmaking. And Lu took breaks from immortality for the same sort of thing. Lapis is probably such a big and well-developed city half because Aly happened to be brought up here and it was a convenient rendezvous for us again later and therefore it benefits from pilot programs..."
"I'm very complicated, milady," says Charp.
"But did some local-ish infrastructure servantmaking. And Lu took breaks from immortality for the same sort of thing. Lapis is probably such a big and well-developed city half because Aly happened to be brought up here and it was a convenient rendezvous for us again later and therefore it benefits from pilot programs..."
if_at_first
"Yes. Aaaand we aren't publicizing reincarnation because we don't know how it works, why us, whether there even is anybody else, or if it will reliably continue working for us, but apparently neither of us ever found anybody who mentioned the - dreams."
Is she going pink? She is going a little pink.
Is she going pink? She is going a little pink.
do_over
"They might have been embarrassed or brushed them off as ordinary if strange," points out Avedan, completely oblivious to why she is going a little pink.
if_at_first
"Yeah. I mean, I guess Kib might have wrote it off he hadn't run into Aydanci and met Aly's magpie."
do_over
"Maybe. I was tempted to write it off, but the dreams were internally consistent, so I was - confused."
if_at_first
"I was traveling through here anyway when I figured out where they were mostly set - and it's only mostly, no two of me have grown up in the same place, I got bits of Kib's childhood and Lu traveling and so on too. So I swung by. And then parrots."
do_over
"And then parrots," he snorts. "We need to think of something better than being mobbed by parrots."
if_at_first
"Parrots live a long time, I think we'd still be able to control them once we figured out what they were after even if in some life unaccountably we weren't trained as servantmakers, and they attract a lot less attention to our cache - we have a lot of money, apparently - than having Charp comb the world for us would. But if we think of something better then that'd be good."
do_over
"True. Hmm. I'll try to think of something, I think just one parrot would have been fine, it was the - all of them. All at once."
if_at_first
"Well, parrots can still get sick, I imagine they wanted redundancy in case the one and only leftover parrot met with misfortune. They really wanted us to meet. And Lu too, she got parroted," page page, "and went and found Kidan by herself, he was too busy to check out Lapis which did not have any slavery in it just because he was having dreams, apparently."
do_over
"... Huh. I - haven't had a dream about that meeting, I kind of want one now, it sounds interesting."
if_at_first
"I haven't had any first-meeting dreams yet. Just stuff from before and after the getting-to-know-you phase."
do_over
"Yeah, I'm similar. I got a lot from Aydanci's time between Aly and Kib. It was kind of depressing."
do_over
"Yeah," says Avedan, brightening a little. "That must have been what he was talking about, I'd thought it was some sort of revenge thing, which didn't make sense."
do_over
"During the - interim between reincarnations. He was - very focused on eradicating something after his wife died. Oh, I - got that too, that was also depressing. My original thought was that he'd been cheating on her with Kib, and Kib got jealous and killed her or something, and Aydanci was very upset by this fact. But - nope. It's much less dramatic and sounds like something I would actually do."
if_at_first
"Wow. Cheating on Aly with Kib. Nnnope," chuckles Sylvi darkly. "Now there's one way the out-of-order out-of-context dream memories thing can go wrong... I have not gotten Aly's death yet, I'm - not really looking forward to any of the deaths."