"How many eclipsed are there, anyway?"

"Uh, like... point one percent... of people eclipse on their eclipse. Fifty fifty mage or psion," says Jackson. "But I think most of them don't go straight to virtuality."

"Only point one percent? Huh. That'd make - bit less than 7 billion world population in 2006, so 7 million eclipse - about how many of those end up not being locked down?"

"I think most people get locked down. I dunno if most of them get locked down forever or if the locked down ones mostly finish high school then go to virtuality or something."

Most people have terrible priorities, but Daria already knew that.

"Why did you chose not to be locked down?"

"Uh, I don't remember exactly, it was years ago. I guess I wanted to do magic."

"Makes sense."

"Yeah. So... in your world, people hide their roles?"

Mariam had really been hoping to avoid this conversation for as long as possible.

"Not... exactly. We have some people who think like that, but it's considered a pretty niche sex thing."

"Niche? Really? Weird."

"How does your world do it?"

"Uh, practically everybody's a dom or a sub. And you can tell by how they dress and do their hair and walk and stuff. Some people are switches... one in, uhhhh..."

"Ten," says Brian.

"Like one in ten. And there's teeny amounts of nondynamics."

"Well, our world is mostly what you'd call nondynamics, then, and even the people who do have a - role mostly keep that only between them and their partner." She is rather suspicious of how a society set up like that would treat subs, but nothing between Jackson and Brian looks too worrying. They're not the best people to ask, in any case; she makes a note to look into it when they get somewhere with more people.

"...then how do you know it's mostly nondynamics?"

"If you go online, for example, the number of people who talk about that being a thing for them when they can be entirely anonymous and safe is definitely higher than the number of people that talk about it in person, but still much fewer than I'd expect if we were like you and hiding it. Or if I look at my closest friends, where if something like that was going on I'd expect to notice - only one of them has something like that and she wouldn't want it all the time like you seem to."

"...not all the time?" says Jackson, sounding bewildered. "Does... she have multiple personalities?"

Oh god she has no one to blame but herself this time why did she sign up to explain her friend's sex life to the kink dimension people.

"She doesn't enjoy her boyfriend to tell her what to do all the time, but sometime she thinks it's nice. It's maybe a little like how extreme sports are fun for some people sometimes, but even if you really like skydiving or something you probably don't want to do it literally all the time."

Jackson looks like that's the weirdest thing he's ever heard. "Subbing is like skydiving?"

"I mean, not exactly, it was the first comparison I could think of. But yeah, most people have no idea why anyone would want it, some people think it's fun but wouldn't want to do it a lot, a few people center their life around it."

“We don't center our lives around it," says Brian. "There's all kinds of people, just mostly they're subs or doms too."

"Right, sorry. I meant more that very few people make it part of their identity - think that they are a sub, not just a person who subs sometimes."

"Weird," says Jackson.

"You're kind of weird to us too! I have to say if I'd been told to guess some possible differences between our world and an alternate universe I wouldn't have though of roles and eclipse magic. I wonder how similar our world are, aside from that. You're close enough to have, oh, cars and trees and Montana, which implies more of parallel universe sort of thing, but I'm really not a physicist..."

"Who's the President? Was there a Shakespeare? What're some famous eclipsed, what do they do? Some famous doms, subs? Did you have WWII, Vietnam, 9/11? - I can hardly ask you about the outcome of specific murder trials, most people don't follow those - what do people know about the Kennedy assassination, that was a ridiculously high profile case involving a necromancer, though admittedly several years too late to get anything too coherent out of the assassin."