"Can anybody stick the paper to them?" Jackson asks, typing.

"It's possible, but it'll depend on what I end up working out - it needs to be activated each time and I could make one that self activates, but I don't know if I'll be able to get it to sense when it's touching an eclipsed, and the design I'm used to breaks if it's active when not touching someone - though making them deactivate on removal is a lot easier. I can probably create other ways for it to activate itself, but 'will only activate when touching an appropriate target' has the best safety margins and is the most reliable."

"Maybe a kind that works on kids," suggests Brian, while Jackson types more.

"I'd have to define 'kid' well enough to it, but that might be possible actually..." she muses. "There's some other things I can do but they mostly would involve secondary activation seals that'll run down their lifespan faster than the hindrance seals proper, which could cause logistical issues, and that would introduce some risk for false positives and negatives..."

"False how? People can tell if they eclipse or not," Jackson says.

"From the seal's perspective. It might activate when it shouldn't."

"Oh. Well, probably you should talk to lockdown people about that."

She nods. "Depending on how much they want to pay upfront for research, I might want to find somewhere to crash or another job while I'm poking at development, though, if they are interested..."

"Places that hire eclipsed usually do a contract thing where they pay you for some R&D but then you have to work for them a while."

"That'll end up depending on the contract, then, as well as how it's enforced - I'm under existing contracts back home, and new contracts would need to not conflict and to be fairly time-limited, or I'd need to be able to get out of them easily. Admittedly 'easily' includes 'I leave for home without fulfilling it and if our worlds are in contact no one makes this a political issue.'"

"I wouldn't expect it to like start a war or anything."

She shrugs. "I'll read things before I sign them, regardless."

"Yeah, that's a good idea, I kind of didn't but like I work for the government so it probably can't be that bad," says Jackson, "somebody would've noticed and complained by now."

Wow 'contracted with the government' and 'it can't be that bad' are incredibly incongruous statements. Not the most ridiculously so of ones she's ever heard, but, like, pretty up there. Especially sans the usual 'government propagandist' smile. Maybe random distribution of magic users in the population prevents the accumulation of power her world's had? Or disrupts it - you'd either need a government nearly all the randomly selected superpowered people want to defend, to aggressively cull young eclipsed who look likely to cause issues, or just end up with anarchy.

Or her priors don't apply very strongly to this world. Jackson is an eclipsed and doesn't seem to be part of anyone's army.

Maybe they're all adorably non-violent? That'd be a nice break from the other magic aliens she's met.

She nods. "I might disagree about what's a reasonable contract, anyways, and it'd be nice to know that up front."

"Yeah, that makes sense if you don't know basically what would be boilerplate."

Small smile.

"So looks like my first pass employment opportunity might be talking to people who do lockdowns?"

"Yeah, if you can do it by sticking paper to people that's probably faster and less of a scramble than having psions do it."

"It'd probably scale better, at least, though hindrance seals are likely to be slower than how fast I could react if I was physically near someone needing lockdown - once I figure out how to lock someone down with my magic system, anyways, which'll be preliminary to a lockdown seal."

"I mean, people eclipse all over the world, the good thing about paper is that you could give it to anybody," says Jackson.

She nods. "If 'eclipse-related emergencies' tend to trigger all at once it'd be a big deal, yeah, though seals can be hard to truly mass produce - for a 'worldwide' scale I'd have to spend some time simplifying it more than usual so I can make each one faster... Though if eclipsed are rare enough it might not take me long to make more seals than there are psions trained to do lockdowns."

"Yeah, they're all at once. Some lockdown psions can work remotely, but not most of them. And they have to get it all done fast 'cause the other way to keep an eclipsed kid from causing disasters is to not let them eat and they've mostly already been kept away from food a couple days before the eclipse. Or get them into a virtuality but not everybody wants to go."

She nods. "...Hm, I can induce starvation states very quickly with healing magic, if that would affect the thing 'not letting them eat' does. If there's an eclipse soon and if especially which kids might cause disasters are fairly predictable, I could distribute the thing that lets me cheat at 'who am I touching' beforehand and then meaningfully be next to everyone affected as quickly as a seal could, as long as that number's not higher than... Under reasonable constraints, probably a thousand if I'm not doing much else. - That strategy should also work if I get the ability to do lockdowns but not the lockdown seal before the next eclipse. Wouldn't be sustainable without me on the planet, of course, but seal development can take years."

"There's not one super soon, I don't think. Also we don't usually know everyone who'll be eclipsing in advance so you'd be touching a thousand random kids and probably only one of them would eclipse."

"I was imagining it'd get to the kids the same way whichever seals would, I am not physically capable of making one seal for every child in even a fairly narrow age range on an entire planet."

"What happened to a kid in my virtuality was he got super hungry and was trying to pick the lock on the fridge at night and then a cop barged in and cuffed him because a psion saw he was going to kill all the plants in Mississauga."