"I should probably make like a list of stuff I want to do, in order of priority."

"Yep. It's a little hard to pick, though, isn't it?"

"Tell me about it. I've been focusing on more general shapeshifting than just gender swapping, and seeing how I can generalize that to fuller biokinesis."

"Are you planning to do biokinesis stuff other than shifting and healing?"

"De-aging, unless that counts as healing, and other than that, it sounds like it's a pretty small step from being able to heal everything, but I'm not actually sure."

"I'd count it as healing. What is aging if not accumulated damage?" shrugs Isabella.

"Yeah, I suppose. I should actually look into what other people have said about the difference between general healing and general biokinesis."

"As long as you don't expect too much from other people's writings on the subject."

"I mean, no, but not nothing. If most people say 'biokinesis is impossible' then I won't try, if they say 'it's pretty much healing with a little trick' then I will."

"Fair enough. I spent a while tearing my hair out reading other people's description of mental conversations. They were no two alike and none of them resembled the thing I do to talk to Alex."

"How would you describe the thing?"

"Any time I don't specifically want to hedge him out there's a passive connection so he can initiate conversations too. Sort of like a - psionic tin-cans-and-string setup. I can do that because I know 'where to expect him to be', mentally, because I know him so well - other people seem just as often to pick up fully general conversational telepathy, I can imagine getting there but not with this particular set of tin cans and string."

"Huh. So you developed a very specific type of telepathy just for him?"

"Which is probably why I was able to develop it while I was still in training, most people don't wind up with anything that long-range. I think I could use the same principles to talk to other specific, individual people if I knew them as well or almost as well, but I don't, so I can't exactly check."

"Not your parents?"

Shrug. "Maybe? I know them pretty well but not in a - holistic way. Especially Charlie. I don't get a good all-angles view of them because they're my parents and they, you know, parent me."

"Yeah, I suppose that makes sense. What kinds of things do you do to... I dunno, magic? Practice and learn, I mean. As a psion."

"I've always cared a lot about - organizing my mind. I used to mostly do it with notetaking, to get thoughts out of my own head and hold them still so I could look at them. I still take a lot of notes but I've gotten my memory good enough that if I explicitly set out to remember something in the moment it'll usually stay put so sometimes I dispense with that. And what it feels like is sort of - if I can be precise and clear-to-myself enough about what I'm trying to do it'll fall into place, but the pieces accumulate really slowly because I don't know what the next pieces are until I've gotten the first ones all done. Does that make sense?"

"Yeah... yeah, in a way, it does. It's... really itself."

"What does it feel like for you?"

"Hmm... Well, so far I only really have shapeshifting and self-healing... But what it feels like is sort of like moving a muscle, except it's not a real muscle? And it's a bit like... trying to do the splits, but with other parts of my body. And I have to try every day to do it properly, like doing the splits. But the analogy's not perfect, 'cause once you do the splits you still kinda have to hold it together and not move much, whereas this is more like doing the splits is the new way my body is and then returning to what it was before needs as much effort as before."

"...Can you in fact do the splits?"

"...yes, ma'am."