"There are things in the plants that are helpful and you can get them at higher concentrations to do more good than just the plants themselves. We've got something called aspirin that has the relevant stuff from willow bark in it. Stuff like that. And if you're very, very careful and your utensils are very, very clean, sometimes you can take a very diseased organ out of a body and stitch the whole thing closed to save the rest of the person."

"Wow. That's, uh, gross, but I guess if you don't have magic you have to do something."

"It's not as terrible as it sounds, I'm just--trying to avoid talking up science too much."

"Aha."

"So, my sister is considering Science Healer as a possible career, at least partly because a lot of their implements are made of metal and partly because, you know, healing. It is a helpful thing to do."

"Yeah. If I were... temperamentally suited to divine magic... I'd probably want to pick up at least a little healing knowhow. There exists arcane healing but it's much more obscure and advanced."

"That sucks, but therapy is a form of healing too."

"I know. This is kind of emphasized in my curriculum. But it is seldom a very dramatic form of healing because brute-forcing stuff in people's brains is almost never a good therapeutic decision."

"Oh god no, you can kill people like that."

"...I'd probably have to be trying to kill someone. They did teach me how to knock people out as a self-defense measure but it didn't count for a weapons policy exception so I took Arcane Defense anyway. Basic Knife is a joke."

"If you hit someone's mind too hard you can break it. I almost killed the person who carried me as a fetus because there was literally no barrier between their brain and my random baby emotional projections. Papa had to install one."

"...My mom and I did not have that problem, I'm naturally a pure-defense telepath, but even if I'm already extending myself into a mind I guess my oomph doesn't work the same way as yours? Like, I could mess someone up very badly by being careless but I don't think I could carelessly commit subtle-art murder."

"Well, it's never happened since then. No one's had to put any barriers between me and anyone else since I was born, I think it was just a feature of how my kind of telepathy interacts with pregnancy. It's hard to tell; we haven't seen a lot of cases quite like mine."

"Subtle arts vary a lot. I think some people pregnant with subtle artists have some mental contact, but I haven't actually heard of it being dangerous. I bet Professor Winters would know, though."

"That being one of your subtle arts teachers?"

"Yeah. She has more clinical experience than most of my others."

"I don't think it would be terribly relevant, considering how different our respective telepathies seem to be."

"Yeah, but I'm curious now." She pulls out a notebook and writes this down.

"Fair enough. So--you didn't seem terribly surprised that I have two fathers, is that something your magic does?"

"...No? I assumed at least one of them adopted you or failing that it was a science thing."

"Science thing. Ish. Mutant thing, specifically. I was just curious, since--magic."

"Nah. I assume if it were doable without unsafe levels of experimentation some elves would have figured it out before now."

"Makes sense. We were a complete accident, which is why I hesitate to label it a science thing."

"Science doesn't have accidents?"

"Science does have accidents, but I'm having trouble imagining an experiment that would produce babies by accident when it was trying to do something else."