In the morning, Sylvi's up first, having suffered no worse in her second chunk of sleep than eighteen-year-old Lu tripping and skinning her knee because the pet zebra she usually rode was getting reshod and she had to walk to the theater to meet her friends. Charp sets about making breakfast as soon as she stirs. It puts a kettle on to boil for Avedan's tea and fixes eggs and toast with jam for Sylvi. She reads more of her notes while the food cooks, and Charp delivers to her at her desk. It's all just how she likes it.
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.
Well. He has to get up eventually, he can't stay here literally forever. Unfortunately. Or possibly fortunately, he's already started to get bored of doing nothing. He shuffles up, yawns, and goes looking for tea, and is then pleasantly surprised.
"Thank 'ou, Charp," he says sleepily, smiling a bit.
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I grant you that. Anyway, I can puppet big flocks of them for displays, I picked up pocket money doing a lightshow for a few years, but I think there's a lot to be done in using them as cheaper-than-golems, more-finely-controllable-than-pets servants that can still sense their environments more than not at all."
Sylvi reaches for a spot of light on her desk and plants her finger at its edge and tugs on it. It separates, only to be immediately replaced with more sunshine, but persists where she dragged it. "There you go. Puppet shine. Play with it, get a feel for it. When I'm caught up on notebooks or bored sick of 'em I'll walk you through basic shine syntax."
Reading ensues. Charp makes lunch. Sylvi remembers to unpack her horse when she realizes midafternoon that she wants a shower; her horse contains in its central compartment, along with the shampoo she went looking for, some small automata with their instruction cartridges removed, changes of clothes, a few days' worth of travel food, and notebooks.
He looks at Sylvi curiously when all of his things are put away. "Do you travel a lot, or was it just to get to Lapis and explain the dreams?"
"I didn't use to travel a lot - uh, but I wasn't very comfortable living with my teacher anymore after I turned in one of my co-prentices for raping the girl down the street, so I moved out in pretty short order once Public Order saying he was convicted didn't soften them up on the subject. And then I thought I might as well go to Lapis."
"A-yep. Or you could describe it as 'still attracted to men', whatever, not the point, if I had not had the dream I just had until I was forty would I have continued until then to figure you for straight on the grounds that this one time we both distinctly recall you married a woman?"
Kiss! All of the kisses.
It's likely to be very familiar for Kib, too, aside from the height difference.
"If I recite a lot of names of things I shouldn't have any way to know about will I tip the balance from 'crazy' to 'on to something' heavily enough that we can have this conversation somewhere other than the middle of the street? Aydanci, Aly, Kib, Charp - um - storks - there was a magpie? - work with me here."
"I -" He takes a deep breath, and then rattles off an address. " I don't know how long it'll be? I'm - in the middle of things here and didn't even think the dreams were real, just bizarrely specific, and I was extremely busy and real people matter more than whatever strange things my head spits out at night, but - apparently the dreams are real, too. And I need to think."
He's still asleep, when Sylvi wakes up.