"What do you mean?"

"You might like, I don't know, reading people's letters or old newspapers or things like that, primary source stuff."

"Oh." Pause. "Yeah, actually, that could be fun. If a bit time-consuming, what with my wanting to be a healer. And doesn't post-cognition basically cover that more neatly anyway?"

"Only if you get a lot of range. You can start calling yourself a postcog if you can get five seconds; most people don't go past a year or two."

"Hmm, fair enough. I suppose most psions don't luck out and start dating a nice mage that will make them immortal so they can learn all these things eventually."

"It's true." Smooch.

"It's, uh... When we met, you said you joined school to network with other eclipsed and stuff, but I don't... see you doing much of that?"

"I'm not making a lot of friends, but I'm making a lot of acquaintances and accumulating plenty of contact information and notes on who's specializing in what."

"Oh. Huh. I suppose that'd work."

"I'm not trying to find people with whom to take over the world. Besides you. I'm trying to find people who I can email in ten years and go 'hey! Myeisha! How far did you get on fire element stuff? I found a think tank that needs some help and your time would be tax-deductible'."

"Yeah. That hadn't occurred to me, the... just making acquaintances thing. Anyway, what would a think tank do with a fire elemental?"

"Experiments with fire, I assume. I don't have a specific idea for that one."

"And is she? Working with fire?"

"General elementalism, all four."

"Huh. Is there a reason to do those four specific elements instead of, like, wood and metal too, or whatever?"

"They're classics? I haven't asked her about wood and metal, I know they're done but they're not considered a form of elementalism in the West."

"It sounds a bit arbitrary, they're not even really elements, they're just... stuff."

"Well, they're not chemical elements, no. They do represent most of the not-alive-or-previously-alive stuff you can run into walking around in a pre-tech era though."

"Yeah but... can't elementalism be subsumed by something else that's more general? I mean I'm not even sure how I'd go about doing stuff like that, everything I've ever done was to living things, most of it to my body."

"I mean, people specialize different amounts. It's kind of arbitrary that there is a popular amount for 'earth, air, fire, and water' and not a popular amount for 'magnetism, radioactive metals, grass, and mollusks' but she's not going to learn slower by specializing, she will learn fewer things faster."

"...mollusks," he snorts.

"Mollusks!"

"That might be about the most useless thing one could specialize on."