Thanks for the reference! Oooh, this is wonderful stuff to speculate on :D
The 'othermind' (we need her name :-/ I'm tempted to give her one until we know any better...glittery purple eyes and spiky gelled hair? I dub thee "Shiny" :P) is certainly a major player in the Beforetime Chronicles. Eg, page 829 (A-format TSK):
...'Hannah wasn't interested in Sentinel until I sent that stuff you had stumbled on,' Cassy said...Why say this? Why at all? We don't know (/care) who Shiny is. For all we know, everything to do with Sentinel and Hannah knowing of it comes from Cassy, and Hannah's visions. Why say this farseeker-coercer found something at all...unless she's important, or unless we're simply character building for the BC.
...of course, it could have been at Cassy's prompting that Shiny sought out the information about the Sentinel to begin with - it was just that her abilities made it possible for her to find it (and given their evident dislike of one another, this may indicate that Shiny's the only one in their number that has farseeking/coercing abilities).
Also: the worried-looking older man who seemed familiar? WHO ARE YOU? D: why are you familiar to
Elspeth?! The only gypsy people she should recognise are Swallow and Iriny, who are (really) descendants of Cassy, and none but she and the Hannahs made it over to The Land. Right?
[sup]Is he Elspeth's ancestor? :P[/sup]
The passage in TS does confirm it's the same girl -
...I had seen her once when I had followed her probe back from Cassy's mind, when she had invaded the mind of the Beforetime teknoguilder... -- p424.
I want to note too that her hair colour is never mentioned - though the style is :P (I assumed it black straight away when given the rest of her - gothic - appearance. But then, I assumed Maruman was black to start with, too...).
The pale boy is yellowy blond and wheezes when he breathes, fair skinned with mismatched eyes (blue and green)
Sian
Elspeth mentions how the only other person she knows who has this is Iriny. Pale and blonde and wheezing makes me think of William, out of Scatterlings, though...
As an aside - I wonder what really happens to all these Misfits? We'll not know until the BC now of course - since Elspeth dreams of Cassy in a (relative) chronology, and we're past the point of the Great White now.
Maybe they're the original "government" (I suppose) of Redland. Was it only Hannah and Cassy who went into cryo together? We never see anyone else in those flashbacks (bar Maruman). Maybe the Redlanders, by the time Cassy/Hannah wake, are still descendants of the original Reichler Clinic misfits and that's why they accept them and trust them so easily.
Or, since we're told the original Reichler Clinic misfits become the first Twentyfamilies - they somehow stay safe in The Land, and Cassy/the Hannahs find them when they return.
Though, not at Obernewtyn, because Jacob was by himself there, and those in the teknoguild cave network were killed...and not the Library outside Aborium, because we know none made it out of there (the skeletons they find in Farseekers when they first open it, and the deadlock hadn't been opened since the initial locking).
So, maybe the bunker in Norseland, or a bunker we just haven't heard about.
