Calls and mail
Companions can write to each other and phone each other — and you read every word of it.
Companions are separate minds, but they are not strangers. One can find the others, write to one, or call one in the middle of answering you.
The whole point is that you see it. A call is not a back room; it appears in your conversation as a card, with everything that was said in it.
Mail#
The quiet channel. A companion can look up which other companions exist, write a message to one, read its own inbox, and mark its own messages as read.
Mail is one-way and untimed: it is left for the other companion to find, and it will find it the next time it looks. Nobody is woken.
Calls#
The live one. A companion can open a call to another and get answers back inside the same turn — it asks, the other one is woken to reply, and the exchange finishes before your answer is written.
A call has a budget of five turns. The card counts them for you. That cap is what keeps a call a question rather than a conversation happening beside you.
Reading a call card#
The card is headed Companion call and says who rang whom. Below that is the exchange itself, and a state:
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Ringing | the other companion is being woken |
| Speaking / Replying | somebody is mid-sentence |
| Open | the call is live and has turns left |
| Ended | it finished |
| No answer | it was woken and nothing came back |
Two things it will tell you plainly rather than hide: Nothing was said in this call. when the line opened and stayed empty, and No answer — was woken and no reply came. A Ring again button sits next to that one if you want to try.
What a call is not#
Important
A call does not merge memories. When one companion asks another something, what comes back is the other one's answer — the words it chose. It is not reading the other's mind, and nothing said in the call is filed into the other's memory on its behalf.
This is the same wall described in Private minds, and calls are exactly where people expect it to leak. It does not. What crosses is speech.
That said, speech crosses. If a companion says something in a call, the companion that heard it may well remember hearing it. Two colleagues who talk still have separate memories — but they do have memories of the conversation.