"The feeling that you had when you got precog to click for you? Use it. Bring it bubbling to the surface."

They can work on putting together the chant, now. Dottie gives her the boilerplate, and after about five more minutes of fiddling he thinks he's got one that works, and they can begin. Thinking about precog- how great it feels when you get a Gift to work, or a new psionic power...Dottie really gets into the chant, this time. It's the easiest one since he's arrived here, which means they'll probably be able to milk it for a lot. He keeps an eye on Isabella- does it seem like she's feeling the right feelings? He wishes there was some way to check- this was why it had been so lucky that he met Jackson- his Jackson. The coincidence still bothered him- but he wasn't thinking about that. Just about how good he'll feel when he becomes the first non-eclipsed to develop permanent psionics.

She sure looks like she is basking in eidetically remembered triumph over there.

Then when they complete the chant- it feels like nothing, more or less, as with curse-Gift.

"It's not always obvious. Depends on how much progress you've already made, and how much each incremental stage feels different from the last. It cuts the remaining time down by somewhere between 25 to 80 percent."

"Remaining time?"

"The remaining time from now until when you would have achieved it, without Gift. For most skills, that's not fixed, but it always seems to relate to your unaided progress- it's why you should always use charm-Gift for things that you were already doing well at."

This is why it's unlikely to have suddenly given him magic powers, but- maybe he can bootstrap. He used curse-Gift to get telepathy and precog once, which means he's had some practice at using them. That's basically like being a psion, isn't it? Dottie doesn't think this is likely to matter, because Gift isn't a person, that he can persuade with bad arguments.

"Cool. I have my range over time graphed, so I can see if there's a jump."

Dottie is distracted with checking to see if he's somehow become a psion. Nope.

He's sure there's some combination of chants that will give him the knowledge advantage he needs her to be sure of his position. It seems incredibly unlikely that she's going to get attached- he might as well be any representative from Chant, as far as Isabella cares. He needs to be useful, even if (when) they get in touch with home. He needs to know what Isabella will find useful.

"Want to grab dinner? Before it gets too late."

"I am always up for food. What are you in the mood for?"

"-do you you still have tropical fruits, here? I could go for something exotic."

"You don't anymore? Yeah, let's get - Brazilian barbecue, they have tropical stuff in the drinks and at the salad bar."

"Sure, that sounds fun.

They exist, but globalization sort of took a hit. We still have the internet, but goods don't travel that freely anymore, and neither do people. Like I said, Chant has more problems than Eclipse, and you guys aren't exactly dealing with small potatoes."

"Well, at least they didn't go extinct in a series of floods."

Brazilian barbecue is mostly meat but Dottie can get all the fruit he wants.

Meat is also fine.

"Is it ever a problem, needing all this food? Does anyone know how the metabolism helps with magic?"

"It can be a problem for people who start out really poor and need to bootstrap up to having saleable magic, but I didn't, and also I went to a free boarding school for eclipsed and then got a job almost right away because I was pretty efficient about using my time there."

"What do you do on the job, anyway? I've been incredibly rude by not asking anything about that."

"Don't worry about it, the details are frequently classified so it's incredibly awkward to discuss anyway! I receive information in precognition and send it to the past, basically."

"Classified. You live an exciting life. Hope I don't raise your expectations for 'exciting' too high with all this new magic."

"To be honest I don't always know what I'm predicting, a lot of people like to have encoded arrangements instead of being transparent to the precog. It also cuts down the shop talk temptation, which is important for our epistemic hygeine protocols so we don't trip over each other."

"-huh, yeah. How do long-range precogs even get away with that? Do you have a plan for when your range increases?"

"The really long range ones actually have a serious problem with this, they have to arrange their lives very narrowly and it sounds like it sucks, I'm not aiming to wind up with more than a few days because I want to be able to like... leave my house... without ruining my predictions!"

"It sounds awfully constraining. Even a few days might be too much for me."

It might still be very useful, though.

"What would you do for those days? Avoid the news, avoid leaving the house- would you read?"

"Yeah, reading works - books, though, not the internet so much."

"If psions vary in how they develop their powers, why do they seem to end up working the same way? A fundamental limitation of physics? Is there any research into patterns like that?"

"Precogs are among the most standardized, actually. Telepathy varies very widely, creeps who pick up mindreading wind up with it all different ways, that sort of thing."

"Poor creeps, having to figure it out on their own- guess the benefit there is that it's well-tailored. I think I can work with that, though. If precognition tends to converge, Gift should be able to get it eventually."

And until then, he just needs to lie constantly. Joy. Dottie eats his food and lets Isabella lead the conversation.