"I am happy to include consulting. I have no inkling what percentage might be construed as standard here, I have access to a lawyer but you might want your own if you think we have a conflict of interest."

"Honestly, I don't have a head for business. I'll take your lawyer, thanks. Speaking of short-term plans- I don't have any money coming yet. Am I drawing down your bank account if I ask for a hotel room?"

"Only in the most technical sense, I make a lot of money. If you do not wish to sleep on my couch I am happy to get you a hotel."

"It might actually turn out to be moderately awkward if I go into heat, honestly. I really don't want to find out if Eclipse humans could confuse my biology, not until I've got a foothold here and can- I don't know, do you have prostitution, here?"

"...not legally. We have... dating sites that in some cases work all right for casual sex, insofar as I'm aware of their virtues, but you might have irregular requirements of some kind..."

"I might, yeah. Mostly it would be- maybe I shouldn't talk about this with you, I don't know if we're 'talk about our sex lives' friends."

"I mean, I don't want to leave you without consultation if you're about to go into pon farr or whatever but I don't personally go in for casual sex so I don't know that much that will be useful to you."

"-I don't think we have 'pon farr' as a concept, but that's not a very good clue. Most of our fiction has ruts and heats in it. I'll probably just need the names of the big apps and sites and I can probably Google until I have the rest."

"Pon farr is a thing an alien species from a show called Star Trek does which is sort of like going into heat. I've heard of OK Cupid - I think that's more dating, less casual sex - Tinder, you might want Grindr actually because that's specifically for queer people, which I assume you aren't in your native milieu but relative to here, you can customize more about what you're looking for and stuff."

"'Grindr', really, that's- well, I shouldn't judge by the name. Sure. I might end up wanting to just shack up with a dom and explain it to my alpha later, depending on how hard interworld travel sounds. We were only dating a few months, and we barely knew each other before that. Anyway, not your problem."

It is Dottie's problem, though. If she is going to go into heat at the usual time, alphas or no, she needs to be ready. She thinks through the possibilities while they- finish sightseeing? If Isabella has anything specific in mind to show off about her city, they can do that, but otherwise she's fine turning in and getting set up in a hotel room for now.

Isabella buys Dottie a phone and tells her how to spell all the named apps so she can download them. Then they can go to a hotel near where Isabella lives.

Dottie will check- himself, maybe, if the hotel people need a pronoun for him, he'll see how it feels after a day of use- himself a room. Hopefully Isabella can roll with it if he mentions this on their way there?

Nothing about the hotel is conceptually unfamiliar, really, but he didn't usually stay in them, so it's somewhat novel. He checks himself in and checks out some of the apps on his phone. Do people mark their gender and role on these apps? He starts with Grindr.

Isabella has no problem saying 'him' about Dottie.

Grindr wants to know his role (there are more options than 'dom' and 'sub', though, he could be 'nondynamic' or 'switch' or, generically, 'queer') and his gender and what combinations of those things he is looking for and what sorts of sex and kink he's into. It wants a picture.

Huh. Dottie avoids the kink stuff for now.. Well, he'll start with 'queer', he can field some invasive questions until he has a better feel for things. Does it let him select anything ambiguous on the gender front?

His options are "male", "female", and "prefer not to say", apparently.

He'll go with 'prefer not to say' until he knows what to expect.

Dottie messages a few people, figures out the TV, and mostly just spends the night moping a little about the particulars of his situation. Maybe he can just become valuable enough that Eclipse's U.S. government will decide that it can't prosecute stuff done in another world and they won't extradite him because there's no precedent for it. At a certain point, around nine, he realizes that he doesn't have Jackson's or Brian's number. He'll have to get that in the morning; it seems like a waste to give up on potential friends.

After breakfast, he'll poke at the app some more and eventually reach out to Isabella mentally- he doesn't have telepathy about it, but maybe she's checking up on him somehow with her cool psychic powers. He's not sure if pre-cognition could do it, with her range, but maybe she has something else for it she hasn't mentioned.

[You rang?]

[Just wanted to say good morning. Right now you're one of three people I know. Busy day ahead?]

[I'm on my way to work, and you should not interrupt me at work unless you have a very dire emergency, in which case I will warn you of it before you interrupt me. If you want I can check in during my many meal breaks.]

[I think I'm good for a day. I'll square away some logistics. Thanks for all the help.]

[You're welcome! Have a good day. I'll let you know when I'm on my way home.]

Dottie talks to some people on Grindr. He'll experiment a little with different levels of disclosure; it only takes a bit of Googling to come up with words like 'hermaphrodite' and 'intersex', so he tries each one out on a different guy. He tells one guy he's non-dynamic but 'queer' is the term he prefers; he tells another guy that he's a switch, same preference. No one needs to hear that he's from another earth or that he has unforseen magical powers, but they can hear about his hobbies if they want those. For his picture, he just takes something tasteful with his clothes on. It's clearly not the most common type of picture, but Dottie isn't really looking to have fun now. He probably has at least a week, depending on how the seasons here are going to fuck with his internal clock.

He reads about eclipsed- how they got on before virtuality, what things can eclipsed do that chanter can't (besides work alone, he really envies Isabella that), how they're typically employed. He also looks up local laws and tries to make guesses about whether anything he did was technically illegal here. Eclipsed don't have anything quite like Arouse, based on Isabella's reaction, even if there is some kind of hostile mind control.

The people on Grindr are mostly either startlingly rude or very easygoing about the phrasings he tries. Some of them want to know facts about his genitals when told that there is any ambiguity about the situation.

Before virtuality, most eclipsed were just killed as soon as they reacted to the event or demonstrated any sign of magic power. The world was too poor to invest the resources in getting a useful mage or psion out of it. Sometimes kids managed to escape - especially before accurate astronomy, when they'd as often as not escape by killing everybody they knew before everybody they knew could kill them, since people did not know when to anticipate eclipses and couldn't even see them coming if they weren't in the right place. Then a few years hunting and gathering out of range of anybody - and on a lean enough diet to avoid manifesting long-range powers - would get them into a safe state and they could learn whatever they wanted if they could get enough food during the learning process. Eclipsed adults were very rare before accurate astronomy. After the eclipses could be reliably predicted, sometimes churches or kings or cities would collaborate on rounding up all the kids of the relevant age each time and making sure they went into it hungry, and then sponsor the kid in the wilderness, dropping off food and other supplies until they were safe to return to civilization; at that time the population ticked up, though random farmer children who eclipsed were still usually murdered, as was anyone who seemed like they'd be more trouble magic than they were worth, with all the implied classism and racism.

Psions often work in precognition, virtuality, remote viewing, divination including lie detection, postcognition, hypercognition, non-virtuality psionic tech, psychology, and some military applications including illusions and psychic combat. Mages often work in medicine, transportation, construction, scientific research, disaster mitigation and relief, weather, precision manufacturing, and again the military. Psions can learn hostile mind control but it's definitely illegal (though just being an "empath" is legal).

Dottie can produce facts about his genitals. He has looked up enough on Wikipedia to know that he has most of what people would expect externally from both men and women, both below and above the waist, and will go into exactly as much detail about that as people want to hear. It's- maybe not possible, here, he hasn't actually researched intersex condition in depth. Presumably not every random user of a casual sex app is an expert on human biology when it comes to edge cases like this. If no one bites, that's fine; he mostly wants to measure the spread of reactions. He takes notes about this on his phone.

As for the history of the eclipsed- no major insights, although he doesn't think he's been correcting enough for just how much oversight eclipsed must get. They develop powers at such a young age, and if they indulge in the kind of impulses children have five times a day, they can turn into fonts of destructive power. If chanters were that dangerous alone, they'd need more supervision. Instead- just cut one of them off from people, and you've got the perfect prison.

Dottie really does not want to go to jail for the rest of her his life, which is probably a distinct possibility. All he has to do to avoid that is be so useful to Isabella that she can't replace him with an identical chanter without this particular problem- which will be trivially easy, once she decides to do it. So. What does Dottie have that no other chanters have? What can he do that no one from Chant can do?

One, he's one of the best chanters of Exile in her district. It's not the most impressive rank- not the best in her country or state or the country, but- best in the district. It's not nothing. And if she can get better- if she just wants not to be in jail badly enough, she has something nearly unique to offer. She'll just need to figure out how to spin it so that Isabella wants it.

Two, he's an omega. There's a cause here, for people who want to champion it. If he tells Isabella to help him go to bat for omegas, then his involvement with her on a charitable cause will keep him safer.

Three...three. If he's Isabella's type, there's a third option there. If there's a personal connection there, maybe she would keep him as her personal omega. He has no idea if he's her type, but lying is not really a good way to find out. If he knew how she would react- well. There's a way to do that, isn't there. He need to co-chant Gift with her again. There are limits to how pre-cogs work. He looks for a Wikipedia article about how precog works.

Some people are really into it, actually! Others continue to fall into the startlingly rude category and are like "ew, freak" about it.

Precogs work in slightly different ways because eclipsed design their own powers. The reliable facts are: Precogs can't recurse. If a precog tries to anticipate anything that would involve themselves or another person seeing the future, then (in a manner idiosyncratic to the power) this Does Not Work. Precogs see (one way or another) their own perspective projected into the future, which isn't very limiting because they can have all the other kinds of fancy senses too and those work together fine (precog-diviners and precog-remote-viewers in particular synergize well). Precogs are not foxed by people having free will or anything like that.