Avedan, meanwhile, is going to keep sleeping like the dead. It was a long night, he likes his sleep, and also his rest continues to be mercifully dreamless. To add to the effect, the bed is really comfy. If Sylvi and Charp think he is not capitalizing on this while he can, they are sadly mistaken.

Charp isn't going to become irritated if it must continue monitoring the teakettle for a while, and Sylvi doesn't particularly require his presence for her catching-up reading. She is now through the broad-strokes summary story of her lives and is looking up little details in the order they catch her interest.

"You're welcome, sir," says Charp brightly. "I'll fix you some breakfast too."

"Thank you," repeats Avedan, sipping his tea and smiling. Charp is his favorite golem. Absolute favorite.

"Good morning," he says, now that he is not a zombie, wandering the house in search of tea instead of brains. "How'd you sleep after the obvious?"

"After that was fine. Lu on her way to the theater without her zebra - did she still have the zebra when she met Kidan?"

"I haven't gotten their meeting yet. But I - think so?"

"It's funny how each of the four of us have favored different servant types for locomoting - Aly with her puppet scooter and Kib with his golem chair and Lu with her various quadrupedal pets and my horse thing is an automaton with swappable instruction sets in a dial on its neck. Since you can't really ride a shine I guess next time'll be a repeat."

"Obviously the only answer is to invent a new type of servantmaking. To avoid a repeat."

"Well, that'd at least put me in company with my illustrious past."

"... Yeah, I know that feeling. I'm just looking back on the things Kidan and Aydanci did and I'm wondering how I'm supposed to live up to that."

"You might have it worse than me. I mean, storks, yes, but Kib mostly frontloaded a lot of effort on the one golem, fantastic piece of work though it is - since he expected to want one that'd last and be good and personable for future selves - and Lu's project didn't work."

"I could probably work on Kidan's a bit more, but most of what he wanted to do got done. I still want to do something with automating the creation of golems, but it's going to be difficult to live up to 'getting rid of slavery for the most part' and 'making the pox go away and then for an encore inventing vaccines.'"

"I bet you didn't find Lapis until your current age half because your past selves traveled more than mine did," speculates Sylvi. "Kib moved to Lapis within a couple weeks of meeting Aydanci, Lu moved into the cache when she found it except for her detour to hunt down Kidan - so a good high proportion of my dreams are about the city except for two childhoods and a few little vacations, and yours are probably all over the place."

"Yeah. I'm actually not surprised Kidan wasn't able to find Lapis on his own, Aydanci spent a lot of time in Lapis, but not much of it was outside after Aly died. Except the quarantines and meeting Kib and throwing vaccines at various governments."

"Oh, yeah, that makes sense - poor Aydanci," sighs Sylvi. "Poor you."

"I'm all right," he assures. "He was, too, after he found Kib, just - not inclined to go outside much anymore."

"According to Kib there was a long awkward period before Kib learned the 'does not care about partner gender' thing because Aydanci never asked Kib if he liked guys and Kib assumed that having married Aly was decent evidence in favor of Aydanci not 'til he got the right dream."

"Wow. Haven't got any of that yet. I did get their meeting, though. Last night."

"What was it like in - non-note format?" Sylvi wonders. "...Also, because it's going to bug me if I don't know for sure, are we on-pattern for Lu's hopes and dreams and suggestive comments here?"

"They were awkward, I'd say. Aydanci was sort of - resisting the urge to scoop Kib up and sob on him the entire time. And - I'm not sure?"

"You are not sure of what your sexual orientation is?"

"Oh. I thought you meant the -" Awkward pause. "Other - nevermind." He coughs. "Yeah, sexual orientation is exactly the same as Aydanci's and Kidan's."