"Well I don't mean just physically changed. From what I hear some people didn't... I mean, a lot of us thought we'd always been there, on that world, and only started realizing maybe we hadn't gradually. A few did wake up, new selves new bodies. It was all, hah, pretty confusing."

His bird head is inscrutable, always seeming to be faintly amused, but his other face is distant. The spectral eyes give away nothing. "I mean, I was something many thousands of years old with my own deal going on. Some of the memories went and faded, but not everything."

It feels sometimes like the others just left those identities behind when they left Portland. Which, all right, that's fair, in a lot of cases nothing good happened to those other people. Plenty of bad had happened to that angel, too, and he'd been very different from Julien in a lot of ways. But.