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."

"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."

"Good, it'd be really awkward if you didn't get along."

"Yeah, it would. When's he visiting?"

"The weekend between semiquarters. Spends all day on a train to do it. He's a good brother."

"Awww! He sounds it."

Here's the bus! There is room for them to get a seat-and-a-kneeler again. Pet pet.

Eeee! Sadde likes kneeling by Isabella and being petted by her.

"But he didn't make you get lo- If you don't want to talk about this you can just say that."

Sigh. "I'm sorry."

"...but you do have to be clear one way or the other."

"I'd rather not talk about it. For—now, at least."

"Okay. Um. Seen any good movies lately?" she asks lamely.

"Yeah, I actually saw one before dinner yesterday, me and Alex sometimes find movies that have the same start time in each town and sync up. It was that one about mages in space? The special effects were really good. Alex kept complaining about the romance."

"Not the romantic type?"

"He's really not. Admittedly, the actors had no chemistry."

She grins. "Did the movie deal at all with extraterrestrial eclipses?"

"Nah, the entire expedition team was already mages, didn't touch it."

"Just mages? No psions?"

"Not in space. One on the ground doing communications and tech."

"What were the mages actually doing there?"

"Initially, exploring Venus on a lower tech budget than regular astronauts would need. In acts two and three fighting aliens."

"Of course. Aliens in Venus." She giggles.

"Yep. Aliens with weird alien magic."

"Weird how?"

"It was sort of unclear but they seemed to manipulate luck."

"That... sounds really far-fetched."

"Yeah. I didn't say it was a great work of cinema."

She giggles. "So how come I'm your first—prospective sub?"

"I find plans to make everyone immortal intensely attractive."

She beams widely. "Thank you, ma'am. But surely that's not the only thing you find attractive? Otherwise our meeting is even more serendipitous than I'd previously assumed."

"Sure, I find other things attractive. I don't find most other things motivatingly attractive. I like how you look at me, but it wouldn't be a qualifying feature on its own. You're cute and the gender-swapping thing is rather imagination-provoking but that wouldn't do it either. But you want to make everyone immortal and you have my attention."

"That's what the dates are for."

Sadde moves her head a bit, rubbing her cheek against Isabella's lap with a blissful smile on her face. Haaaaaaappy Sadde.

Pet pet.

"I have no idea how having you on a leash would affect my balance. Entirely amenable in principle, though."

Yep. That is a very happy Sadde with very happy fantasies.

Isabella laughs and pets her some more.

"I'm not sure; it seems to be a case of 'neither can tell if it is in fact under their kind of magic or not'. I'll work on it myself, once I have precognition well under way, in case it can be healed psionically, but I might not get anywhere so I don't want to frontload the effort."

"I am planning on being a healer..."

"You can give it a try too when you get there."

Isabella leans down to kiss Sadde's head.

Happy squirming.

Sadde follows her and tries to see what's so interesting about cacti.

"...how does a friendly cactus differ from an unfriendly cactus?" she wonders.

"The friendly ones have spines but unless you actually squeeze it they're unlikely to stick you. You can pet them." Isabella pets a cactus.

She giggles and pets one, too. "Okay this is kind of adorable. So the unfriendly cacti stick more easily, I see."

"Yeah, and some of them have little tiny barbs that stick in your skin and you can't even tweeze them out."

"Yeah that sounds really unfriendly. How do you get them off you if you can't tweeze them out?"

"I think you have to wait until you shed that layer of skin, actually. Maybe you can peel them out with duct tape."

"Sounds unpleasant." Pet pet the friendly cactus.

Sadde probably doesn't think cacti are as interesting as this person but she can appreciate them a bit more than she did before. She reads the things.

It's not a very big museum. Even if they read all the things it will only take a couple hours to see everything. There is a gift shop with tiny cacti and cactus-themed objects and books about cacti.

Sadde does not, in fact, have money. She wants to buy Isabella a tiny cactus and she does not have money. This is a thing that will need to be fixed.

Good.

"Like I said, better than it sounds. Especially the flowering ones."

"Yeah. They were pretty. And I never thought I'd find myself enjoying petting cacti. New experiences with the gorgeous dom, I hope we make this a habit."

"There are only so many tourist destinations in this little nowhere town, so don't get too attached to the novelty."

"I didn't necessarily mean new tourist destinations."

"Ah."

Happy shiver. "I really like it when you look at me like that."

"Good," purrs Isabella.

Squirm squirm.

"Do you have plans for the rest of the evening?"

Sadde can hope. "Ma'am?"

"Do you very much want to spoil the surprise?"

"Nnnno. No, I like surprises."

Smile.

Squirm.

"Are you completely done with it or is this a draft?"

"It'll be always a draft by nature, but I don't think anything about it will change without, ah," she clears her throat, "external input. One way or another."

"All right then, run along and fetch it for me."

"Um. It may be that I'm not creative enough to think of sufficiently limit-breaking things, given my complete lack of previous experience. Just like there are probably other things I'm interested in and would like to try in the future that I haven't listed, there are probably limits I don't know I have which will come up when I try one of those things and go 'yep, that is not going to be a thing.' But um. Yeah I couldn't really think of anything else."

Isabella sighs. "Should I come up with examples of things that I imagine you'd want to rule out or should I just suggest an amendment?"

"...this sounds like a both."

"If I went spontaneously insane and decided to attempt to get pregnant when you were having a boy day, nothing on this," she waves the paper, "rules that out. You didn't rule out interfering with your classes - a little or a lot - yet I assume you'd object if I turned out to think it was entertaining to keep you tied up throughout key moments of finals week. You haven't been a mage long enough to have a reasonable expectation that you could self-heal anything that came up if I decided the fact that you're not that masochistic is more of a loose guideline since you didn't put it under 'limits'. I don't even see a safeword on here - I didn't ask for one in particular because as it happens I think pretend refusal is deeply unsexy but you didn't know that."

"Hmm." She thinks. "A lot of those things are, like, actual abuse? So I suppose you're right that I assumed there are certain things you wouldn't do, but they're the sort of things that, if you were the type of person to do them, you'd do whether they were in this list or not. And the safeword—I haven't really come up with one and was expecting us to do so once the need became apparent."

Isabella shrugs. "I mean, as it happens, I am not planning to do those things. But there have been on-campus pregnancies and nobody was prosecuted. Every now and then somebody will get teekayed to the health center with the most spectacular injuries and it'll be written off as a night of fun gone awry. There are makeup test dates and I know they're not all used for illnesses and family emergencies."

"Right. I know. What I mean is that, the sort of thing that's, well, generalizable from those examples is the sort of thing that is known to be actual abuse, people discuss them in health class, there are pamphlets about it, et cetera, so if you were the sort of person to do them then having them on the list or not would not actually stop you from doing them if you so desired. Or also, I'm not sure how to create a generalizable rule or limit that would cover these cases that wouldn't end up just being 'do not be an abusive dom.' Though it occurs to me that setting a safeword in advance should pretty much preemptively solve all misunderstandings and sort them from actual malice."

"I was going to propose the addition that I will consult you on anything likely to have effects other than interesting memories more than six hours later."

"I mean, I'd still need the safeword—or, I suppose, in this case just mere denial—if I objected to something that fell into that category anyway, but I suppose that's a reasonable addition."

"I do realize that it can't all be codified and I will be a little careful with you regardless even within the parameters, but," shrug.

"Just not too careful?" she asks, sounding a little hopeful.

"With appropriately recalibrated care over time as I learn how you are."

Squirm, plus a noise she usually suppresses when in public. "Thank you, ma'am."

"I couldn't find a good expression for it. Anything not strictly corporal? Denial of privileges, for instance, or other types of psychological slash emotional slash other punishment."

"What do you mean? And what do you think I should do to perfect it?"

"It's not a thing that needs perfecting, I'm just letting you know that not everything on the list is happening if we happen, so you can make informed choices. And I mean I can't help but imagine us going out and having lunch with Alex and you having some kind of embarrassing medical emergency."

"I'm better at shapeshifting than that but I understand what you mean. I mean, those are interests, and uninformed ones at that, I'm not actually particularly attached to any of them. ...um, how does that relate to misgivings about monogamy?"

"...It was premature when I asked the question and it's still premature now but if I collar you and then we don't break up anything I'm not doing is also a thing you're not doing. And if we were going to break up over something predictable I'd rather, just," shrug, "predict it."

"Oh. Yeah no I don't think you should worry about that. I'm—well, sure, the fact that you're incredibly hot is what caught my attention in the first place, but just like my interesting gender-swapping or the way I look at you aren't enough to be determinant of your wanting to potentially be my dom, your interesting cane and the way you look at me aren't enough for me either, and neither are sexual and relationship interests that are wholly theoretical. None of the interests listed there is individually sufficient nor necessary for a relationship."

"Okay, good." Pet, pet. "The other obvious no on here is that I think it's a bad idea to hit you for things that have in fact actually pissed me off. I'm sure everyone who gets carried away thinks they have it under control."

"Yeah, that's fair."

"If I'm pissed off I won't lay a hand on you at all." Pause. "If I'm really pissed off perhaps you won't lay a hand on you either."

Shiver. "Yes, ma'am."

Smirk. Kiss.

Kiiiisssss such kiss! Shivery and somewhat noisy kiss.

Ooh! Good! Yes. Yes very good. She is happy with this development. Look, even more happy noises!

The first instance of teeth is actually an accident, but with a reaction like that Isabella's not about to stop.

Isabella is so great. Such a great prospective dom. Sadde is very happy. So very happy. Such happy noises and squirming and being pleased.

"Thank you, ma'am. You are, too."

"Unless you believe I should spend more time thinking about specifications and details of the list, as soon as you want, ma'am."

Isabella puts her palm to Sadde's cheek and looks at her fondly. "Day after tomorrow," she decides. "We could go swimming."

"Yes, ma'am. Sounds delightful, ma'am." I will see you in a swimsuit, ma'am. And then less than that, ma'am. I may be melting, ma'am. I am not certain, ma'am.

"Yes, ma'am. Thank you, ma'am." Pause. "AM or PM?"

"PM. I have classes, even though you don't."

"Right. See you tomorrow, ma'am." And she gets up, steadies herself, and leaves.

"See you." And Isabella watches her go.

She goes, her knees wobblier than they were before Isabella looked at her like that.

And the following morning: breakfast!

Isabella's there! Jackson is kneeling at Roger today.

Ugh. No. Sadde won't—later. He walks to Isabella and sighs, "Good morning, ma'am."

"Good morning. How are you?"

"Alright. A bit disappointed that I did not seem to have enough of an effect on Jackson. You?"

"I'm all right. Do you often have the experience of curing people of their bad behavior overnight?"

"No, but I had hoped he'd grokked what I said."

"What did you actually say to him?"

"That kneeling by everyone has undesirable social implications that he might not want to... imply. To achieve his goal of actually being someone's."

"Maybe he's just intolerably impatient."

"Maybe," he sighs again. "I'm going to go get my food, be back in a bit."

"The omelette station's worth the wait if you like omelettes."

And she scritches him, eating her own omelette.

"I don't have a lot of friends and I usually use mealtimes as a convenient time to talk to Alex."

"Oh. That's fair, I suppose. Hope I'm not interrupting anything."

"No, it's all right. There's only so much to catch up with him on after all of one night most of which was spent asleep."

"Like what you dreamt of and such."

"What makes you think I tell my brother that?"

"I mean, sometimes I just dream about taking over the world but he's well bored of that one by now, he's known me all my life."

"You, too, huh?" he asks, still a bit unsteady.

"I, too, wish to take over the world? And do something sensible with it?"

"Yes."

"Yes. Me too."

"Oh, lots of things. Did you know that it's pretty easy to mess with time perception in dreams? Subjective hours and hours."

He swallows. "I—I'd thought that was a myth."

"Well, maybe it is for regular dreams, I never remembered most of mine when I was little. But lucids? Yeah, hours and hours."

Swallow again. Lick his lips. "What, um, kinds of things did you dream about, then?"

"What did you dream about last night?"

"I—um. Many things. I don't remember them all." Pause. "You."

"What a coincidence."

"Is it?"

"Yes. Yes it is."

"It's fun." Pause. "Way down on my priority list, but a known thing that psions can do, is shared dreams."

"Oh. That's a thing. A nice thing."

She laughs at him and strokes his hair.

Shrug. "Good morning Alex, what are you having for breakfast, what, you slept too late again, no it's omelettes, at least get an apple from the cafeteria lady who likes you or keep granola bars in your backpack, or pop tarts if you must - that sort of thing."

"Your brother typically miss breakfast?"

"About half the time. He sleeps really lightly. It's worse if he has an alarm. So he wakes up five times during the night, and by the time it's almost time to leave for school he's short on sleep and Renée usually can't bear to wake him any earlier than she has to. She packs him extra lunch, which in theory he could eat earlier in the day, but the bus route's full of potholes so he doesn't like trying to eat on the way and then his teachers are jerks about letting people get things from their lockers or eat in class -" Shrug. "You know how if you're away from a place for a long time - even just a grocery store or something, or a friend's house - you come back and, even if you were really trying to keep in touch, they've changed all these things and didn't think it was important to tell you and the place isn't familiar anymore? Alex and I drown each other in detail so that won't happen, we try to live on top of each other as much as we can across state lines."

"I know I've said this before but you two sound really adorable. And an implication of that last sentence also belatedly occurs to me."

"Alex does not want - and I am not in the least tempted to give him - any pornographic details," Isabella assures him. "But he knows that I like you and what I like about you and where we have gone on dates and I have quoted some of your non-pornographic remarks to him and so forth."

"Alright. What do you like about me? Um, other than gender-swapping and looking at you a certain way and wanting to make everyone immortal?"

"I can't do pictures yet - I'm not actively working on communications, so all my progress is purely from practice and that's slow - so I have put some effort into describing what you look like. And when I mentioned you wanted to make everyone immortal Alex's immediate response was that I'd better propose immediately... I can't reproduce my exact words and don't know that I'd want to anyway though."

Sadde grins widely. "I really like Alex."

She laughs.

And: om nom omelette.

Omnomelette. And she ruffles his hair and goes to class.

There are some on-campus jobs if you're into that sort of thing. He could tidy art studios. He could tutor people, if his test scores are good enough. He can work in the dining hall or the library. If he knows computers he can work for tech services.

One would go to the library and ask a librarian.

Naturally. So he goes to the library.

It contains books. And librarians.

"Hello, can I help you?" says the librarian.

"Yeah, I heard I could work here?"

"There's some student positions open. How old are you?"

"Sixteen."

"All right, here's a form -" The librarian gives him a form and one of those little library pencils. "Just fill that out and give it back to me."

A form! He can fill one out, that is definitely one of his skills, is filling forms out.

Problem: for "role" it has checkboxes not a write in slot.

Shrug. Check both.

Assuming he does the same thing for "sex", that's it for problems with this form. At the bottom he is to sign his name to a paragraph asserting that he will take his job seriously, not abuse its privileges, fulfill associated responsibilities, etc.

Yup and yup. Signed.

The librarian doesn't look closely enough at the form to notice doubled checkmarks, just tells Sadde to come back on Saturday morning for orientation.

Jackson gets food, over those seconds. Lasagna.

More seconds?

Ugh. Sadde might just end up with negative social capital if he interacts exclusively with Jackson for the first few days of his stay, but whatever. Is Jackson too far for Sadde to just call him over?

If he's willing for the entire cafeteria to hear him he can definitely get Jackson's attention!

Ugh no. He'll just get up and quickly scoot over to Jackson until they're close enough that he can get Jackson's attention without literally everyone hearing him. "Hey, Jackson. Come have lunch with me?"

Jackson pauses to consider this offer, then goes over to Sadde's table. He even sits in a chair without having to be told!

Oh good! "How're you?"

"Fine," says Jackson. He takes a forkful of lasagna.

"Done anything interesting since I last saw you?"

"Not really."

"Mmhm." Eat eat. "I got a job at the library."

"Why?"

"'Cause I don't have any money."

"Does your dom not buy you stuff?"

"She's not my dom yet, we've only been on two dates, but I mean, I can't have her buy me literally everything I want or need. And sometimes I might want to buy her stuff, like yesterday we went to this cute little cactus museum and there were cute little cacti in the gift shop and I wanted to give her one."

"Oh."

"What'd they say about that?"

"Didn't. The librarian barely looked at it, and I didn't want to draw any attention to it, I'm sure it'll be lots of fun Saturday morning when I come for training. I might have to demonstrate both things, won't it be nice."

"...what, are you going to bring in me and Isabella or something and act different at both of us to prove you can switch?"

He laughs. "I could just act differently at them. Honestly I have no idea what they'd take as enough evidence, there are subs that can act at least somewhat dominant and vice-versa. They might just go 'oh he's confused' or something, which is of course just typical."

"How sure are you you're not? I read somewhere that lots of people think they're switches before they're twenty and then realize they're not."

Shrug. "I'm sure I'm not confused now. Just because someone's a switch when they're a teen and then not a switch when they're older doesn't mean that they weren't a switch then, there's no reason why my role should be fixed forever. I know that right now I'm a switch, and what I'll be when I'm twenty is completely not the library's business, since I won't actually be here by then. And I'm already pretty sure I won't settle as boy or girl at any point, I've been both since I was little, so it'd be... in-character not to settle as one role or the other, either."

"But you couldn't shapeshift before you were a mage..."

"I still knew I was sometimes a girl and sometimes a boy, regardless of what my actual body looked like."

"Seems like a weird thing to pay that much attention to."

"Well, I think we've established that I'm a weird person," he laughs.

"Yeah."

"What's it like?"

Chew chew swallow. "Hmm? Being a switch? Uh, what's being a sub like?"

"...Do you not know? Like, some of the time?"

"Yeah but not what it's like being just a sub all the time? I basically just... feel like myself, neither way to be or act feels terribly different than the other. Relationship-wise, I want Isabella to dom me, and if she was a sub—okay that's impossible, um, if I were courting a sub instead, I'd want to dom them, and outside of that sometimes I feel like a dom and sometimes like a sub and all the time like me." Pause. "But all the time long hair is very bothersome."

"I just keep it in a braid," shrugs Jackson. "It's not a big deal. I can't really imagine wanting to dom somebody? It seems like it'd be really hard and - tiring, I guess? And nobody to look out for you and maybe somebody you have to look out for, so like being single only worse. But it's nice that there are doms." Pause. "It'd be nicer if any of them wanted me."

Nod. Pat pat Jackson's shoulder.

Jackson closes his eyes and leans into the pat like nobody has touched him with anything friendlier than a shoe in the last several years.

...that's heartbreaking. Thinking he'll regret this, he asks, "So, uh, do you have any family? Parents, siblings, and stuff?"

"Yeah? I have moms and two little sisters."

"You see them often?"

"I mean, not when I was in virtuality. I went Christmas, I'm going for Thanksgiving."

"Oh." Maybe Sadde won't regret talking about family because Jackson is deeply incurious. But in any case, that might explain how they don't notice it. Maybe. Sigh. "Do they live far?"

"I'm Canadian."

"Oh! Yeah, that's pretty far."

"And Canadian Thanksgiving is earlier," he adds. "I don't know why you have Thanksgiving and Christmas so close together."

"I don't, either. I mean, I don't see the point of Thanksgiving much, so."

Shrug.

Jackson's sort of plodding through his own food. When Sadde finishes he scans the rest of the cafeteria population.

Sadde props his head on his elbows and looks at Jackson. "Looking for someone?" he asks, pretty sure he knows the answer to the question already.

"If you're gonna leave I might go sit somewhere else while I finish eating."

"I'll wait until you're done."

"Okay." Nom.

Sigh. The therapist has probably not talked to Jackson yet, it's been too soon. He'll ask in a week.

Jackson eventually finishes eating. "Bye."

And Sadde knocks on Isabella's door, again precisely on time.

And Isabella opens the door. "Hello there."

"Hello, ma'am."

Isabella kisses her. "Did you remember your swimsuit?"

"Then off we go." Tap tap tap. "How have you been?"

"Pretty good. Magic and books, mostly, and I got a job at the library."

"Oh? What are you going to be doing there?"

"I have nnnnno idea! Training's Saturday morning."

"They'll probably just have you reshelving. Maybe they'll teach you to fix the copy machine, that would be exciting."

"For a given value of 'exciting.'"

"Well, yes."

She giggles. "And you?"

"Magic and classes and lucid dreaming."

"Oh." She looks down and bites her lower lip. "Nice dreams?"

"Of course."

She laughs. "Yes, I suppose that's obvious."

"Well, some people enjoy self-composed nightmares in the way one might enjoy roller coasters, but not me."

"Lucid dreaming about an actual roller coaster could be fun, though."

"I just skip to flying."

She giggles. "Once I learn how to do that I could take you flying someday."

"That would be lovely."

"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."

"Go on," says Isabella, pointing at a curtained location. She goes into a different one with her gym bag.

Sadde does not—have goggles or tap tap tap. She beams at Isabella, and bites her lips. "You look very attractive, ma'am."

So she is!

Step step step CANNONBALL.

"Eeep!" she giggles before cannonballing, too.

Isabella comes up for air, the longer bits of her haircut clinging to her face, giggling. She kicks off the wall and makes for the far edge.

Sadde's apparent athleticism is entirely an artifact of years of shapeshifting. She actually can't swim very well, so she mostly waddles along inexpertly, chasing Isabella.