Well. Dottie isn't going to be designing his own powers, he's just going to envy long-range precogs enough that he gets a more challenging to use version of their power. He doesn't know any long-range precogs, but Google is his friend there, too. What's the longest range recorded, and are there any videos of this person showing off for an interviewer? Presumably- without precogging other precogs over that whole time period, which sounds challenging. Maybe there's some trick to thinking about it the right way. He looks for articles and videos about individuals who've pushed the duration to around a year- maybe more, wherever it starts being exceptional enough that there's less than ten of them around.

The longest-range precog is an eccentric Tibetan psion who goes by "Third Eye" and is about seven hundred years old. She will, occasionally, work for money, but mostly meditates in a monastery attended by Buddhist nuns. The monastery used to be in Tibet but she decided to move it to Nepal a few months before the Chinese moved in.

The next longest-range precog is named Francis and he's 225 and he lives in Vatican City and works for the Pope.

The next longest-range precog is named Kenny Park and he works for cash and lives in St. Augustine Beach, Florida. He's 58 and has a range of eight months.

Right. So. Is an inferior version of those going to have less range? More limitations? Or will it be a UI thing, like it was for Isabella? Dottie doesn't know, which is almost exciting. Mostly, it's another obstacle. This will all have to wait. Dottie will try to chant Gift with Isabella later tonight, and he'll try to copy Mr. Park, who can see eight months into the future and doesn't need to live in self-imposed religious isolation. That's enough to work up some envy for.

Dottie messages back and forth with some more promising guys, because even if it doesn't turn out to help with heats, it'll at least relieve some stress until then, and in the background, he imagines all the things you could do with a range of eight months. In fact, if he knows the internet...he tries to search for things people who don't have precog wish they could use it for. Hard to find searching blind, but maybe there's a subreddit for complaining about powers you don't have. If they have Reddit. A surprising number of things have been the same, so far.

There is an r/eclipsenvy.

Perfect! Dottie will read through anything good in there about precogs all day, especially as concerns range. He'll wait for Isabella to contact him at the end of her workday, at which point he'll say:

[Think you have time tonight for Gift? I want to try out some more psionics, and I'm sure you have more magery you want to try out.]

[I'm actually curious if I can use it to bootstrap psionics I don't have! I'm going for some hypercog stuff this time. But yes, I'm absolutely down for it.]

[Great. Let me know when you're ready.]

He chats with the remaining interested parties on Grindr about what they're into; he tries to seem more interested in them than he's feeling, right now. He doesn't look up laws about extradition in case he needs to keep his search history clean for some reason. There are so many different kinds of psions. Bad enough that they could detect lies about it, let alone try something more invasive.

He envies those psions, but especially the precogs. Precogs don't need to feel sick to their stomach, unable to get through a day because they know the people who hurt them are out there, because they can just see that actually, murder doesn't solve your emotional problems. He knew that, objectively, but here he is, post-murder.

It didn't solve everything. It's been a while since one of his panic attacks, though. Dottie thinks about how much easier things would be if she were a precog, how much safer she would feel, how much sooner they would be able to fix things back home- there's so many reasons, and he's spent the day immersed in them. He's got enough to work with, now.

[Did you want to meet up or just do telepathic chanting?]

-there's probably some strategic component here, isn't there. If he's next to her, maybe she can tell he's trying to hide something. Is she better at reading people than he is at putting on a mask?

No, he thinks. He's good enough to fool the average person. It was never a problem before.

Is there an advantage- to answering promptly, because otherwise she might get worried and precog and when she gets kicked out, she'll know he's precogging her.

[If you're not too busy, we could meet up. It's supposed to help with the emotional synergy. If you're not big on the face to face, it isn't worth the small boost I'd get.]

[Your hotel is near my place, do you wanna come to me or vice versa?]

[Is your brother around? I wouldn't mind meeting more people.]

[He's in college but he can visit on the weekend if you'd like.]

He'd love to meet Isabella's brother, unless he's been arrested by then.

[Sure. My room tonight, then, I've gotten comfortable.]

[All right, I'll be over once I get off my train.]

She's up at his hotel room seven minutes later.

Dottie lets her in. It looks like a standard hotel room, except that all of the blankets that would normally be on the bed have been piled up in the corner to form something of a blanket nest.

"I hope you packed enough envy for this one. This could be big. Aim high."

"What's with the blanket nest?"

"-that's weird? How- sorry. Omegas use them to sleep, when we're alone. Even when you're not in heat, it's lonely to sleep without someone next to you. Lying still under some blankets doesn't really cut it."

"Huh, okay. It's a little weird but not in a way that I'd expect anyone to be upset about or anything, though Housekeeping might remake the bed." She plops into the desk chair.

"Sure. I'll probably want to be careful anyway, god knows hotel room floors can't be sanitary. It's just- couldn't really manage that on a bed this small."

And then they can get to work. As usual, there's a little bit of exchanging information first as they agree on a chant, but (Dottie explains) since they've chanted together before, they can start creating a kind of shared lexicon, bits of lyrics they return to.

"I found a subreddit called 'eclipsenvy'; I'll get some mileage from incorporating the phrase, but obviously that puts some limits on rhythm and rhyme scheme. Luckily, there's a traditional verse we use when we want to rhyme things with 'envy' for this one..."

And after about fifteen minutes they have something that Dottie is satisfied with.

"Ready?"

"Ready!"

They chant. This one will take longer than the last one they tried, but after thirteen or so minutes, they're done.

"Mind if I test mine out? I wanted to try out precog."

"- huh, okay, I'll avoid knocking you out of it."

So Dottie looks ahead-

- and sees a future where he goes completely catatonic, which Isabella reacts to by calling an ambulance after a bit.

Well. That's not what he was hoping for, but it's par for the course with curse-Gift- after their previous test, he was kind of hopeful that magic might be more convenient to copy than other kinds of skills.

"Maybe there's a smarter way to copy precog, but what I've got doesn't work. All I see is you calling an ambulance while I just stand there, completely non-responsive. How's yours working?"