And Isabella opens the door. She's got her hair combed back out of her face with water and she smirks at Sadde. "Hi there."

"Hello, ma'am."

"How have you been today?" she asks, tapping out of her room and shutting the door behind her to lead Sadde out and to the bus stop.

"It has... been an eventful day," she answers evenly.

"Oh?"

"Well, there was the thing in the morning, and I managed to befriend Jackson, who I now believe has depression. And I wrote my list."

"You're early with your list. But I suppose you made it clear you were eager."

"Yes, ma'am." She had somehow managed to forget how great that look is and makes her feel. "And I'm fairly competent at assessing things about myself and putting that assessment into words."

"That's a very good skill to have."

"Thank you, ma'am. It's probably part of how much I like words in general."

"...So you think Jackson's depressed, does depression cause inappropriate kneeling or are there other clues?"

"It's... part of it?" she tries. "Mixing fact with hypothesis, he wants to belong to someone, and depression has eaten his personality so other people don't really like him because there's not much there to like. And I think when he gets bossed around or kicked or whatever it's the closest thing he can get to actually feeling anything, and he's resigned himself to never ever finding someone else so being an unwanted creep kneeling by everyone is the way he can get what he wants. And I don't think it'll ever be enough, because it's not the fundamental problem."

"So you don't think 'find a dom who wants a project sub' would even fix it, he needs some combination of pills and therapy and invasive psionics."

"Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty much it."

"...Therapeutic psionics creeps me out. They learn almost all the same skills as the combatant types who want to go into the army and take out enemies at six miles and they can tell themselves they're being nice. In a perfect world they're really rigid about consent but..."

"I mean, magic in general can be pretty terrible, when you think about it. I don't know if therapeutic psionics is that different from general medical magery. If you can fix someone's internal damage you can also cause quite a bit of it with just as much ease."

"Sure. But if you go nuts and screw around with somebody they have a medical problem. If I go nuts and screw around with somebody it's - it's worse."

"Yeah. Yeah they have a not-being-themselves problem."

"My opinion on the subject isn't wholly rational. Someone who is, say, dead, which either sort of eclipsed can do pretty trivially, is not being themselves either. But I have a certain level of emotional tolerance for the fact that people routinely die - I hope to be past the necessity eventually, but for the time being - which I don't have for invasive psionic tweaking."

"Yeah. Ideally we'd find a way to make everyone immortal and immune to nonconsensual tampering with their bodies and minds but if we're going as far as that might as well wish to be able to bring back the dead."

"Now that would be something."

"Yeah. It—definitely would," she says, her voice catching just a bit there. "Anyway, uh, how'd your day go?"

"Pretty uneventful. Classes, Alex tried to get me to help him cheat on a test, worked on my memory."

"...okay that's something I hadn't thought of, how do they prevent relevantly specialized psions from cheating on tests like that?"

"Academic honesty policies and crossing their fingers."