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."

How horrifically undisciplined are their twelve year olds.

...Never mind, she was on a team with Naruto and Sasuke. Their twelve year olds are quite possibly amazingly disciplined.

"...Oh, just occurred to me - I can have more points than I can have active, a thousand is the number of simultaneous points I can affect so the number of kids I could lockdown in a short amount of time - there's trade offs that usually start getting very prohibitive if I have more than... Something like a hundred thousand points? But if I'm not doing anything complicated or monitoring people those trade offs don't matter."

"I don't really know how they'd wanna handle this. Do you write English same as you speak it?"

"The language I can write uses a mix of logograms and syllabaries, I'm not sure if that describes English or not."

Jackson shakes his head.

"Then, yeah, I don't know it."

"...I guess I could email the lockdown people for you, or -" Phone bleep. "Oh, Isabella wants to telepathy you? Can I take your picture so she can do that?"

" - Sure!"

Jackson takes a picture of her with his phone. And then there is a telepathic voice! [Hey, I thought this might be faster than trying to get Jackson to type in full sentences. I'm Isabella.]

[Hi! I'm Sakura. And, yeah, telepathy's very efficient.]

Her thoughts are very fast. Normal humans cannot think that fast.

[- so he wasn't super clear on whether you're a mage or a psion but I'm going to guess psion.]

[Technically neither, I'm a shinobi - different magic system entirely, doesn't split like that.]

[...uh-huh. How'd you get here?]

[Experimental teleportation technology was, it turns out, experimental.]

[Teleportation technology?]

[...I'm not sure how much got filtered over, direct telepathy was a very good idea actually. So my magic system runs on a sort of energy that's omnipresent on my planet, but that concentrates in living organisms, and concentrates more strongly in cognitively complex organisms. You can make technology that interacts with that energy, like any energy. There's magic techniques that let you teleport, and there's existing technology with dimensional effects, and I was part of a team trying to combine them. However I'm not sure how useful that technology will be to import here here since most of it requires you have the same sort of energy as us to activate, and I haven't felt any in my vicinity.]