"MRIs aren't exactly divinatory. The same regions of the brain are active in eclipsed and non-eclipsed thinking about the same things."

"Yeah, but that'd be the first place I'd look. Do you have any way of detecting if someone's doing magic if it's not obviously visible? I can attune myself to the use of necromantic energy in the area, though I don't like doing it much."

"Yeah, psions can do that among other divination." She points out the buffet as it comes into view.

"Does thinking about magic register as magic? I wonder if ours does, that'd be interesting." 

"It'll probably depend in both cases on the way the diviner designed their power. Excuse me," she says to the sub at the host podium, "I didn't see a no-eclipsed sign, is that right -"

"That's right, but thanks for asking, ma'am! We do charge a gratuity after your fourth plate."

"That's fine, thanks. Table for three."

They are shown to a table by the window, invited to purchase drinks separately, and turned loose on the buffet.

Daria, when shown food, suddenly remembers she's hungry. She grabs a plate of the first thing she sees, and then sits, reviewing the latest diagram draft in the hopes that something will have come to her after the break.

When Mariam returns from gathering a more balanced selection of food, she sits next to Daria and reads the diagram over her shoulder as she starts eating.

Isabella gets a little of everything, puts it away very efficiently, and goes back and gets twice as much of half of the things.

When she returns, Daria rips a sheet of paper out of her notebook and slides it across the table. "This is about what it'd look like if I can use you as an anchor, I'm almost certain that should work unless necromancy fails to distinguish between eclipsed and non-eclipsed at all. I can explain what all the parts do, but really all I need something of yours for is to point it in the right direction."

Isabella looks at the paper, chewing on a chicken tender.

Which is an invitation to start explaining how she did something very clever with the differentiation design, right? She points at parts of her diagram and traces figures in the air and explains at length why she made it this shape and not that.

"I have no background in this form of magic. You still haven't explained what it is that you want to do. What is a call?"

"- right, sorry. It's calling up a spirit to talk to it. Well, not necessarily, but most other information you can get other ways. I first want to check if eclipsed keep their magic after they die. Usually past 6 months or so they're too deteriorated to really have preferences, they just latch on to whatever you say, so if they keep their magic I can ask them to do - anything they could do in life, really."

"Spirits are what exactly? Deterioration does - what, in what progression?"

"Spirits are - what exactly they are is debated, but for this purpose 'the impression a person leaves after they die' is good enough. They have the memories and the - cached actions of the person they were, but to the best of our knowledge no ability to form any new memories or opinions or react in any way that isn't a modification of a pattern from when they were alive. Deterioration is loss of all of that. Short term memory goes first, very quickly, then autobiographical, procedural takes a very long time to fade but after a couple centuries a spirit is functionally indistinguishable from any others."

"Why do you think people leave impressions when they die here at all?"

"Tested it. Tried a random pull, got a local who told me he was a switch."

"- psions have tried talking to the dead before."

"I don't really understand how eclipsed work, I can't really speculate. Maybe they tried to target for the person instead of the impression of them? We don't have an afterlife or anything, it's not like it's the person except in spirit form."

"Don't have evidence of an afterlife, anyway, some people believe in one."

"I guess I'm not positive if anyone's ever tried it under a framework that would have noticed that. Diviners have checked for an afterlife but maybe nobody's clocked the hours to check for - this thing."

"It's kind of a weird thing! It was mostly secret in our world until the 60s, I've read the newspapers from back then, it really gives you an idea of what it'd be like to suddenly discover something like this."

"How was it discovered?"

"A couple big public televised incidents, most necromancers decided that they didn't see the point of keeping it secret or realized they couldn't."

"Initially, though?"