"Oh, speaking of lots of psions I need to work an eclipse next week."

"Have fun, I hope you needn't avert any disasters."

"Work an eclipse?"

"Psions and mages acquire their potential during an astronomical event that we have because our planet is spherical and has a sun and a moon -" Mental image of solar system. "And when we're new we can't control our magic. There's not very much of it to not-control if we're really hungry, so people who are due to eclipse if they're going to - it happens at a certain age - aren't supposed to eat anything for two days prior. Sometimes they do anyway. So I will need to spend some time foreseeing disasters from uncontrolled magic and sending people to be ready to lock the relevant eclipsed down so their magic can't escape as soon as they potentiate; or if we have a particularly bad eclipse, have somebody at least get them away from dense population centers."

"Yikes. Good skill."

"Thanks."

The Valar have not been able to think of any way they could improve on Earth's eclipse handling.

Well, it was nice of them to try.

Everyone bids Isabella good skill.

She goes and works the eclipse. Her range is an hour and the eclipse is instant, but sometimes the disasters are staggered, someone eats after they eclipse because they're twelve and stupid and the reminder slogans are all about the previous two days, someone doesn't tell anybody they eclipsed and eats to shore up the story, somebody does harmless things that don't register until they've somehow managed to teleport into the middle of a nuclear power plant, somebody's psionic poison isn't detectable until it's been affecting people for forty minutes and enough of them have quietly drunk bleach that somebody notices and tells a precog -

(you have to tell a precog, that is what you do if something horrible happens is you always always always tell a precog even though it can't possibly help if it's already happened, you make it inevitable that you will tell a precog -)

- somebody disables the phones in half of Chicago and then freezes all the water a mile around and a hundred thousand people die and no one can call out, Isabella gets it from one of the coordinators she's keeping telepathic comms open with just in case of exactly this, someone sends a just barely realistic distress signal to most of the other psions in the world and Isabella's fooled and distracted for six precious seconds till she gets the correction, someone who couldn't fast or even calorie-restrict for medical reasons causes an earthquake that levels half the Dakotas, someone manifests long-range precognition and is too afraid to call emergency services and just lets it happen and no one can see that at all because they can't backchain and then no one can see her when she causes a seventeen emergency vehicle pileup on the highway even though it's cleared of all other traffic, an illusion impenetrably darkens a blob of Maine and ambulances plow into guardrails, a mage in Kansas starts eight tornados and is picked up by one herself almost instantly, a psion in Illinois unlocks four other eclipsed who were locked down and one of those sets off a plague and -

Isabella is wrung out when she goes back to Tirion.

All okay?

We never catch everything. We caught a lot, it was pretty average.

Hug?

Hug.

Poor kids - I know humans at 12 are older than we are -

They are but they're still kids. They're stupid frightened kids and every time we miss one people die and they usually don't, pretty rare for eclipsed to kill themselves like that, and then they have to sit with that...

We'll come up with something. Wonder if it happens to humans in this world, probably not, maybe we can host all the kids who don't want to take the chance during the key eclipse -

Be a lot of kids to tweak and march through the portal.

Maybe we can figure out how to open more portals, too. I don't like being reliant on one that the Valar can bottleneck if they please.

They're working on that but no progress I've heard of yet.

How often are eclipses?

Sometimes there's four in a year, sometimes there's a year or two gap between them, anywhere in between. The big gaps are bad because that means more people have their birthday closest to the ones on either side of the gap, I'd rather do four eclipses in a year than one.

Giving your planet more moons would presumably make lots of other things worse -

Yeah. Maybe not if they were little. Not clear if it'd even help.

I could ask Aulë about a really little moon, it'd be a cheap test as long as a long-range precog could see if it'd do anything.