Anton shook his head once, very slightly. "Hopeless was never able to project. He was a vessel for everyone else. It made him--fluid, in some ways." Reserved, restrained, until he had the Dead Men; they'd been his anchors, his way of reminding himself of his identity even when he reached out to others.

"I was," Anton acknowledged. "In my world magic has a rejuvenating effect. People such as I live to be centuries old." Anton himself was over five-hundred, had already started going grey; middle-aged, for a sorcerer. "The war was against a rather impractically powerful and charming zealot. He wanted to open our dimension to his dark gods. We objected. So the war ran. You're a mental therapist?"

The description was altogether too much like Hopeless's initial explanations of his odd habits, the way he talked to people, the way he sought out their inner beings. The deja vu was strong, now, and so was the nostalgia and the resigned, long-held wistfulness of regret. "People like you--" And him. "--are accepted, not feared, in your world?"