She's met the people in her dorm already but that's not nearly enough. One of the points of even being here at all is networking, right? Right. And the fact that the dom toward whom she's making a beeline right now is cute as a button has nothing to do with it. Nope.
"Excuse me?" she asks, managing to sound very small despite standing up while he's sitting down. "Is this seat taken?"
"-Uh. No, not taken." He makes a few expressions very fast then says a bit lamely, "...It's yours if you want it."
"No, I actually didn't come because of some family trouble, but it got resolved recently."
"Nice. My first - thing - isn't flashy and impressive at all, mages are much better at that."
"We are," she agrees, "but honestly psion stuff is so much cooler. What's yours?"
"I can, uh, think fast. Slow down the rest of world according to my own perspective. Not a huge amount of speed-up and not forever, yet."
"—wow. That's incredible. I'm officially envious," she says, looking up at him through her eyelashes with obviously a lot of respect.
He does the rapid-expressions thing again. "Yeah, it's been surprisingly useful. Everyone else has more traditional starter stuff like mind-phone, or eidetic memory, or lucid dreaming. So. Thanks for saying mine is cool too. You have shapeshifting?"
"Specifically sexshifting," she corrects, "because that was pretty important to me when I was small. But I've been working on more generalised biokinesis, both personal and on other people."
"Huh. It puzzled me as a kid how an eclipsed could do this specific thing but not a bunch of other similar things. Until I became one, it makes sense now. I'm working on eidetic memory, then lucid dreaming, probably. The trifecta of brain-bootstrapping."
She beams. "Yeah, see, that's sort of why it'd be amazing to be a psion. If it weren't for the gender thing I'd definitely prefer to be one, but on the other hand it's pretty great to do biological stuff."
"I think mage-psion jealousy is probably about as normal as everyone else wishing they were eclipsed. Biokinesis is a good thing to aim for - more general than healing, though if you learn medicine you could certainly do that too."
"Yeah, healing should be a strict subset—and the final aim is no-upkeep mass-scale immortality. And then maybe pair up with a psion with postcognition and roll out resurrections."
Terry's eyes light up. "Woo, that'd be something else alright. 'No upkeep' and 'mass scale' are probably the challenges there. Not sure what I can go for in the medium term, maybe precog, that's very employable, but long-term I want to fix virtuality."
"Like... You know how tons of eclipsed just get their powers shut down, because virtuality kind of really sucks? Make it suck less. Make it so more people can put up with it. Improving the tech around it - either just better ways to keep up with freinds and family, robot that goes to school for you or something, or maybe get it down to augmented reality instead of virtual reality. Either way, if it's less unpleasant to be stuck in virtuality, even more people learn to control their magic than now."
"-Says the mage who wants to do global immortality and eventually resurrections."
He's really not sure what to do with that look! Or the slightly warm fuzzy feeling it gives him.
"And it's a good goal, a good dream. You should- Yeah."
Isn't the teacher going to show up soon? Where's a distraction from being flustered when you need one?
"Ah, yeah uh. Pre-calc and stats, bio, English Lit, and this 'alternative materials art' thing. I'd be taking more but that would get in the way of finishing eidetic memory."
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