"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."

"And of course that works."

"Well, I don't cheat on tests. Can't vouch for anyone else."

"Can't someone do like a temporary lockdown or something?"

"I can't personally describe the sensation but I've heard that once you've had your magic for more than like a day lockdown's really uncomfortable. Not optimal test-taking conditions or something you casually do to students without proof."

"Oh. Yeah doesn't sound nice."

"Training wasn't that bad. I mean, sure, I missed food and my folks but I got a lot of reading done and I could write them letters and they made sure the virtuality had stuff to do. Did you wind up in a really bad one...? Didn't make any friends in it somehow?"

"Yeah, something like that."

"I..." Sigh. "Don't like thinking about it. And it'd ruin the mood. Or, well, any hypothetical mood that might show up after we stop talking about things that are marginally awful."

"Mm. Okay." Scritch. "Alex has been relentlessly teasing me about you. You're likely to be caught in the crossfire when he visits."

"I somehow cannot bring myself to think this is a bad thing."

"I thought you might benefit from the warning anyway. He may also make some token attempt to determine if you're good enough for me or something."

"From our interactions so far, I'd expect you to be able to determine this to your satisfaction, so I'd assume this is more for his own peace of mind, which gives me a model of your relationship that's really cute."

"Well, that's why I said 'token', he doesn't really think I can't tell. He just might want more directly available evidence than my say-so."

"That's fair. I kinda like him already."