"I'm glad I don't have to get a specialized degree for my telepathy. I'm probably just going to major in education with a minor in something interesting."

"Once I have a day job doing therapy sorted out I might keep taking classes or just self-study in more arcane magic. I like it, it's just not the best way for me to pay rent - the field is booming but anybody who wants to can do it, while subtle artists are a limited supply."

"Makes sense. I'm lucky, mutants who happen to want to teach elementary and high school are in fairly short supply, I know it's going to be easy to get a job here when I've got my degree sorted."

"Lucky."

"Yeah. It's nice knowing what I'm going to do as an adult, Emily has no idea except 'maybe a doctor I guess'."

"A doctor?"

"You know how our therapists aren't telepaths? Our healers aren't magic."

"...How's that work? ...Druid healers use plants, sometimes? They also use magic but sometimes there are plants."

"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."