"But apparently, at least when it comes to healing rich people, there isn't anything exactly short term."

"Well, there would be if you could already do versatile or heavy-duty healings. But if they have to take you while they can't charge huge amounts of money for your services they have to make sure they hold on to you to get their investment back."

"Does anyone even have that at my age? I mean, my two-year detour through gendershifting isn't standard, sure, but I've been working on healing nonstop since then, and besides the way my magic feels I think the gendershifting thing might not even have been that much of a detour."

"No, nobody has that at our age, which is why they're pushing the twenty-year contracts; but if you learn to heal independently I bet you they have different arrangements for twenty-five-year-olds who can cure cancer."

"Enh, but what I wanted was to start healing as fast as possible."

"Healing, or getting money for it?"

"Healing. The standard way to do it has a large security time margin which could be spent working on immortality if I could figure out immediately when I was good enough to fully deploy."

"Well, there's really not a way to tell for sure if you're good enough to deploy, in advance of internal certainty, without trying live subjects, but you could probably find somebody who can fix your mistakes who'd supervise you for a test or two."

"Yeah, what I'd hoped existed was something like that but for a longer time, smaller things, and progressively more of them, but that might not be a realistic desire."

"I think the consensus is that if you don't get it right it's not worth trying again for at least six months, probably longer."

"Yes, aforementioned huge security time margin."

"And unless you can do something ridiculously high-leverage public-safety-ish like a precog..." She waves a hand. "Nobody's going to pay you a living wage for trying something every six months. I guess in theory you could just live with me with my folks until I can avert eclipse disasters and rake in the big bucks, but it's probably a bad choice in principle for teenagers to make life plans on the assumption that their relationships are permanent just because there's no obvious reason why not."

"Prrrretty much. We've been together for three months, it wouldn't be prudent to plan for any length of time farther in the future than that."

"Yup." Hair ruffle.

"But we're totally gonna work out and be together forever," he adds.

She laughs and kisses him.

"It's not like you couldn't pay them back if they'd let you," she points out. "We're going to be insanely rich, we just have some awkward intermediate time."

"I suppose," he sighs.

"I hear you, I wouldn't be super comfortable with the reverse even if it weren't profoundly inadvisable for other reasons."

"Well a lot of my unease about the time between school and being able to blink someone into health stems from said reasons."

"When you're eighteen you can, if you have to, just take out a personal loan from a bank at a predatory interest rate. Some eclipsed do that. It's not the way to optimize your medium to long term earnings but it'll get your rent paid on a place while you learn your stuff."

"I'm not sure I don't prefer just going to college somewhere and then using my untold riches from future magery to pay off whatever student loans I need to. So far sounds like the best option, although working with that sex change company wouldn't be half bad for the interim either."

"Difference between college and a bank loan is that college expects time investment, spreads out the entire shebang. Plastic magery company doesn't look like they want your soul for twenty years signed in blood so they're a solid option too."

"Yeah but college is also fun and lets me get to know new people so there's that. And if we're still together by then—and we will be—whatever you end up doing will probably influence that a lot."