"Cool. It might help with making sure I'm giving you everything you need. I'd rather not involve my government until I've researched what yours is like. I think Eclipse might have a...kinder...recent history. There's so much to figure out and I don't want to give up any advantage we have against bad actors."

Sightseeing?

Sightseeing! If their sea level is way up in Chant maybe New York existing at all is a sight.

It kind of is! Dottie hasn't even heard of New York, actually. There was some flooding back in the 1970s that took out the most coastal areas, and they didn't isolate the problem until later. Maybe it was one of the cities overtaken before the turn of the millennium. Lots of people died but Dottie recounts this info surprisingly casually; as a near-miss, where things turned out better than expected.

She's generally intrigued by the skyscrapers! She's never seen any buildings quite like those, really. She'd love to see the most New York parts of New York.

"You don't have skyscrapers?" Isabella asks, plotting a route among the most quintessential landmarks.

"Not- some cities do, but not anything this tall in the U.S. I've never been this close. Mostly stayed in the same town my whole life. They're in a lot of old movies, when they show Gotham. They might still have some in Canada or the surviving parts of Japan."

"Jesus, maybe the cautionary tale will get opposition to carbon mitigation under control."

"I wonder if Eclipse is just dealing with a smaller version of the same problem and our magic sped up the effects. Does your earth at least have climate scientists, or is it not lucrative enough to attract interest?"

"We have those. Quite possibly fewer."

This is interesting but Dottie is not actually a scientist or even mildly scientist-adjacent. If it had been up to her, she probably would have just majored in literature and been a kept woman.

Once they have done some more sightseeing, Dottie can ask Isabella:

"So, do you have any thoughts about what you're looking to get out of all this? You, specifically, not your whole planet."

"Steering power! And I guess I might play the stock market a bit about it."

"Sure. What do you think your planet wants? Who do we need to appease? I have no idea what the balance of powers here must look like- we have one or two powers but nothing like the complexity that must happen when multiple modernizing countries get the internet at the same time. Is the Soviet Union a factor? I don't even know who would be relevant."

"The Soviet Union fell. Russia is still a thing, though. United States is a superpower, China's a big deal, the European Union might or might not have staying power but some individual European countries are still fairly important either way. I think India's probably on its way up, it has a young and booming population and enough of a tech scene to do their own virtuality these days."

"-huh. Chanting is pretty bad at some kinds of things which my guess is that psions would be better at- do you guys have any way of looking at historical events? It's probably not urgent but I'm sure we could get some benefit out of seeing why the worlds diverge- a lot of it seems recent. Were eclipsed less common, earlier in human history? Professional chanters as a substantial chunk of the economy is new, even if there were people who got to fairly high levels of skill before that."

"There are postcogs, but range is an issue with them just like with precogs. Eclipsed have been around for all of human history, we think, but the ability to get to a point where you're controlled and useful instead of uncontrolled and intolerably dangerous is much more recent."

"We should test whether chanters can boost range. What can mages do, if you had to list the things you think are most useful? Maybe focusing on climate-related flooding, specifically."

"There are some mages who study specifically how to control classical elements, including water. And there are telekinetics and teleporters and some people in weather."

"Alright. And are there any areas psions or mages work on that you think could use a range boost, if it's something we can do? Are there other things- what would it take to improve on virtuality?"

"Virtuality is actually improving at a decent clip - you need software engineering and what's basically game design, on the one end, and then tech psions boosting it, and both of those get better every year. The most advanced tech psions can work round the clock, in their sleep, on vacation on another continent, and those ones are mostly working on being able to cover more people if they're not picking up other skills entirely, but the bottleneck is more on willingness to attend at all - for that it would help if we could keep the kids in better health, they're not conscious of their bodies and that means they're not eating solid food for two years, or exercising except when they have stopped feeding them liquid food for two days and insist they go for a fasting walk so they don't atrophy worse than necessary. They have mages patch you up when you pop out but it's not perfect. It would also help if virtuality were cheap enough and popular enough - so, that'll happen in a few years - that people could visit eclipsed friends and family there en masse, instead of just making do with written correspondence."

"Aid might be able to do something about the comfort factor if people in virtuality can chant- we should test that before we doing anything else with virtuality. Healing, which we might be able to replace for any mages who could specialize in something else. Electricity, but only after we've looked into the causes of our climate crisis. Range-boosting postcogs, precogs, and whatever other psions have range issues- the most useful interaction might be with- hydromancers? My guess, based just on what we know so far, is that Quell might be able to boost whatever they do, somehow. Water isn't the best test case, but fire seems- riskier. Maybe we'd want to start with weather, since if it works we're making progress on Chant's climate problem, too. Am I missing anything obvious? Healing, weather, boosting psions who have defined ranges, boosting mages who work with natural phenomena..."

"We were able to chant over telepathy so I guess it's possible people in virtuality can but they cannot use their mouths. Replacing the healing demand would be good, though I think there's enough demand that it would take a lot before the healer wages go down, and some people of course go into the field because it appeals to them for other reasons. Gift for letting people borrow powers temporarily, even if they kind of suck, would be really big, because most people are not eclipsed."

"Yeah, I haven't really thought about what Gift could do here, but copying your magic is promising. One thing we should test is whether I can use it on some of these powers that I've heard of and know exist to come up with something better- at home, no one has gotten chanting to work on fictional superpowers, so I don't think it would, but if knowing they're real changes things- it's a cheap test."

Pause.

"Hope you're making a list of these in your eidetic memory."

"Automatically all the time. Do people use Gift to get better at chanting?"

"Not much. A lot of people find it frustrating to lose mental gifts, and emotional regulation is really the biggest skill improvement there. Singing ability helps a little, so people do use it for that."

"Huh. I'm surprised it helps at all but not a lot."

"We don't really know why it works, but I'd bet on everything reducing to emotional connection, myself. It's kind of hard to isolate factors there, anyway, since no one's invented anything that can measure intensity itself- we're judging by the outcomes. If you have better singers in a chant, it helps a little. I'm sure someone has a list of factors on their base."