"There were primitive shamanic rituals going back as far as we can trace them."

"Crossculturally?"

"Yeah, though very different ones."

"If they work here why were they never discovered here?"

"Maybe you don't have necromantic energy? We don't have eclipsed but we do have eclipses, so magic clearly can vary across worlds for no apparent reason. I shouldn't check now, I end up pretty out of it for a while after."

"What's necromantic energy and how does checking get you out of it?"

"It's the energy a ritual draws on, or any other necromantic effect - if you call a spirit it can only stay for as long as you have the energy to maintain it. Does your magic not draw on anything? I guess you have the calorie thing, that might be it? - and checking involves... you can think of it like meditation? and then I'm tuned to the energy around me for a while, it's really distracting."

"Yeah, we have a calorie thing. I guess that'd explain it."

"Does everything you can do use the same amount?"

"No, some things are cheap and some are expensive and you get more efficient over time as you work on a thing."

"Huh, that makes sense. You don't eat more than baseline if you don't do magic, right?"

"Right. Well, except that control training will tend to give you a very keen appreciation of food."

"That's the VR thing? What's it like?"

"It's... like being trapped in a low resolution environment with a bunch of other recently eclipsed kids with internet access, occasionally being allowed awareness of your very hungry physical body for the bare minimum of exercise to not atrophy?"

"We don't have VR, I'm just curious. All I'd heard was that they stick you in there to make sure you don't melt everyone's brain or something, I didn't even have that much detail."

"I think there's places where you can demo it at, like, tech conventions, but it's not really good enough to be recreational."

"The best I can say for ours is that it technically exists."

"Ours'll get better as more people work on it. And it has compounding returns, since more people will stick out control training as the VR gets better."

"It'd have to be a lot worse than I'm imagining to be worth not being able to do as much as eclipsed seem to be able to."

"Not everyone's you, Daria."

"Yes, but still -"

"It's a lot of effort up front, people eclipse when they're about twelve, some parents don't want to let them, some people try it and can't take it - and you come out able to do some tiny things, you need to invest a lot more to get any good powers."

"You can do it later if you want, right?"

"Yeah, you can. Some people do. People get locked up, finish high school, go into training. It's not necessarily a bad plan, but depending on where you're coming from could make you more vulnerable to predatory loan schemes - see, eclipsed can't do anything worth money, right away, but if they have any work ethic at all they can guarantee they'll be able to later do fantastically valuable things, but the company's taking a gamble on the work ethic part so competition hasn't driven the lending schemes toothless."

"Are there any skills almost everyone picks up? If someone needs something that no one has, how would they go about getting someone to develop it?"