"And now the meeting is over and I can be as obnoxious a shren as I damn well please, so you, guy who contributed nothing the entire meeting except upsetting a member of my family, get the fuck lost," says Mial to the green man.

"I came in the first place about infant mortality but you seemed to have that covered," says the man. "She's my -"

Finnah relaxes, slightly, on his shoulder.

"So, namelessness and resurrecting the dead," says Mial. "Lazarus?"

"Do you want to be able to line-name yourself?" he asks the spelter girl.

"I have my mother's diary and I know what she was going to line-name me, so I don't think it would be some kind of violation of the meaning of line names if I could in particular," says the nameless spelter girl.

"Okay then. You are now able to dictate your own name and line name and will stay that way until you decide on something," he says.

"Do I have to do them both at once?"

"Having a line name and no personal name sounds like a weird unnatural case that would never ordinarily come up and I'm wary of those, so yes," he says, "the magic won't name you until you have decided on all four syllables."

"Okay. Thanks," she says, and she smiles and departs.

"Now what's this about resurrecting the dead?"

"I want my papa and my sister and brothers and all of the people they would be annoyed at having to be alive without," says the blue opal girl.

"...Okay," says Lazarus. "I have no idea if miracle magic can do this, but it should not be very difficult to check... um. But I will need you to give me exact lists of people you want to try resurrecting, and I might only be able to do them one at a time so I need to know who you would want first."

"...Linnde first. Linnde Adenn, human blue opal thudia - what else do you need to know?"

"Um... if they died of old age and I bring them back just as they were when they died that sounds like a recipe for terrible failure," says Lazarus, "so maybe what age do you think they would like to be brought back as, and if you don't have a good guess then I will just try to pick something reasonable."

"...Thiiiiirty?" guesses Sashpark. "Maybe younger."

"It took an eight," says Lazarus helpfully to Mial.

"While I'm thinking about it, your terminology for miracle units is very stupid," says Mial. "They have shapes. Call them by their shapes. Triangle square pentagon hexagon star cube-star arrow-star, and now never again will anyone have to wonder why the first size of miracle is called a three."

"It's pretty much a complete answer unless you're really interested in the technicalities of a kind of magic that comes from another world and that you can't use," says Mial. "Units of miracle magic come in fixed sizes with associated shapes, yes. And it takes the same size of miracle to resurrect a dead person as it does to miracle a shren, which is to say, big. But I have plenty of them around and I can get more. Who else do you want?"

"Yes, you can absolutely come back later," says Mial. "Grandfather! I bet you can guess what I'm about to say!"