"Let's go for clam chowder. Seafood is kind of unpopular- I'm not sure if that's cultural trauma or something about supply lines, I was probably going to major in lit."

"Huh, I couldn't tell you. This way is a place that has decent chowder." She leads Dottie into a diner. She doesn't get the chowder; she gets a tuna melt, jalapeno poppers, a slice of meatloaf, a milkshake, and banana cream pie.

Dottie decides that she doesn't enjoy clam chowder that much, but it's interesting enough for at least one meal.

"So what were your plans, before I landed on your doorstep? Metaphorically. I landed under much less polite circumstances."

"Uh, work as a precog, network with other eclipsed, find a mage to make me immortal and get that done, maybe co-work with the same mage on figuring out how to resurrect the dead because that's probably a two-eclipsed job..."

"Immortality's possible?"

Dottie shouldn't be reacting like this to hearing that Isabella wants to resurrect people. That's- a good thing, it doesn't mean that the world will never be safe again, that she will never be happy again- she's being melodramatic. The whole point of killing them was that she might finally be able to get through a week without any panic attacks.

"Yeah! It's - not foolproof, but mages can do anti-aging, and that plus precognition against accidents gets you most of the way there."

"Huh. It's probably a strict improvement on Bane, then. Although if Bane scales better, we might want to look into eclipsed for pain management- nothing native to Chant works for it, but I'm hopeful there'll be some nice interactions between our magic systems."

"Yeah, psions can do that. Doing it for anything chronic is dicey because it's hard to hit just the one thing and not all pain and leave people biting their tongues off but some folks have the power."

Maybe if she saves the world, they'll have to pardon her. Especially if her 'victims' are walking around. Dottie needs to change the subject.

"Does your job pay you to improve your skills? Learning magic as an eclipsed sounds about as time-consuming as learning a chant for the first time, but once you're done, you only ever tweak it."

"My job does not expressly pay me for downtime in which to do nothing but hone my skills, but practice counts, so I get lots of improvement in anyway, and also my job has a fair amount of downtime and I mix reading and goofing off so I don't burn out with working on any skills I'm not regularly improving by practice."

"Sounds like a good deal. How do you goof off? Eidetic memory, telepathy...rewriting books you've read on the fly? Chess matches with distant friends. -could you re-watch or re-read anything just on a whim, or does it not work like that?"

"I can pretty much re-read and re-watch things except that it's sort of weird to remember things deliberately in sequence at a steady pace like that so I mostly don't. I read a lot, I play Civilization, I talk to my twin brother, I read and watch things I have not read or watched before."

"Civilization, huh? Color me shocked. Are games like that more fun if you can use precog on them? Could go either way."

"Nah, it kind of ruins it, at least for me."

Nod. Dottie attends to her chowder. Tries not to worry too much about whether Jackson's been arrested. It's not like she can do anything about it, from here. She's not sure if she would try.

Isabella puts away her ridiculous amount of food very efficiently.

Eventually, after food is done and they are back on the streets of New York:

"So my schedule's recently opened up. Any thoughts on how I should be spending my time?"

"I mean, in the medium term, lots of chanting, presumably, but in the short term - working out a business model, I guess?"

"I could rent out my time. Charge by the hour or by the day for co-casting. I'd have to teach the chants, but after that, anyone could distribute them, which puts me at a disadvantage if it turns out magic is transmissible. We should test that next- see if you can co-cast with someone else now that you know the basic principle."

"Sure, I can try my brother."

"Alright. See if you can get anywhere with explaining the basics, first. If he's not syncing his emotions with yours, co-casting gets a lot harder."

And then Dottie will admire New York City while she waits to see how the test goes.

Eventually:

"It doesn't seem to work, at least not remotely."

"Thank you for checking.

I have no spur but vaulting ambition."

Sigh. Dottie closes her eyes for a minute. It's a good position to be in, if you want to get away with murder. It's a good position to be in, if you want to save the world.

She thinks she might want both of those things, which probably says something unflattering about her.

"Alright. I don't see any reason to treat you like a customer, since you're basically- you might as well be a wealthy patron and me a starving artist, for how much you- and Jackson, and Brian- have done for me already. Is there anything you're going to want, going forward, that you want ironed out in a contract?"

"A cut? Call me an investor."

"Wow, I need to hire a lawyer, don't I?"

Talking about this is almost relaxing. It might have been stressful, any other day- having to negotiate with alphas is always stressful, and she would have likely needed to do a lot of that- but it's easy enough to gloss Isabella as a beta and move on.

"How about 10%? Is consulting included? I'm going to need someone to ask questions when I inevitably run into stuff I can't make heads or tails of."