- and what happens if they proceed with this as planned -

While they're trying to make substitutions, Dottie explains how the lyrics of a chant affect the outcome.

"The more words you put in, the more you can control the effect of the chant. If it's too free-form, Gift will just pick something for you. You should mention the reasons you want to fly, and since it's about envy, add something about how great your powers are and that it's still not enough, without being able to fly."

She also explains the tradeoffs between precision and speed. A longer chant, containing more words, will often have a more specific effect, but longer chants make it more difficult to sustain emotion throughout, which means more precise chants often require multiple attempts.

Isabella has done processing about wanting to fly before and can just use that so she doesn't foul her precognition by varying her own actions too much.

Then they can give it a try. The process of chanting itself is boring, but as long as Isabella can sustain envy of mages who can fly for the length of the chant- they finish the chant.

[...it worked. I'm going to try talking to Jackson with my mind. Let me know how flying goes.]

[Will it cut out suddenly enough I should stay close to the ground?]

[-no, almost four hours for this one. Get low around hour three, just to be safe.]

Well, then she will fly in precognition for a little while and make sure it works and then rerun all that just so over again. [It works! It's, uh, kind of poorly personalized - eclipsed design our powers as we develop them and this one was apparently developed by someone who thought of yaw as an intuitive concept or something - but I am flying.]

Meanwhile, Dottie asks Jackson:

"Hey, if I had suddenly copied Isabella's telepathy, would you mind if I tried talking to you with it?"

"...copied it?" says Jackson.

"Yeah. I've been talking to her and we just figured out that she can use my magic. It needs at least two people, which is why I couldn't do anything until now. Now I have telepathy, like her- not as good as hers, and only for a few hours. I want to try it out."

"Uh, yeah, okay."

...well. It doesn't just happen by wanting to talk to him. Dottie tries a few more things (shouting, whipsering), apologizing to Jackson that it's taking a few tries, and then- if she thinks about it like mailing something to Jackson's address-

[-testing, testing, 1, 2, 3.]

[I can hear you,] confirms Jackson.

Dottie will telepath with Jackson for a bit. She mostly lets him gush about his boyfriend, if he wants to. She's curious if she can glean more about how dom/sub relationships work without asking directly.

Jackson loves his dom very much! He was in an abusive relationship with a rando who picked him up on the sidewalk one day at the time and didn't know how to leave and Brian walked him through it.

...Dottie won't pry, but she's curious about the abusive relationship. She tries to formulate a question to get at the topic when she hears Isabella's voice in her head.

[I'm glad you're having fun. I ended up copying something like your telepathy, although it's hard to use for a similar reason. That might turn out to be a pattern, with Gifts from eclipsed. Do you want to hear about the other chants, now that we know it works?]

[Sure, hit me.]

[Okay. Escape is the one I used to get here, and it's one I tend to use a lot, so we'll cover that next. As a charm, Escape is called Freedom, and it's all about excitement and wonder. It's the kind of thing you feel when you dream of space travel, or a bookshelf full of things you've never read- untapped potential that you can't wait to explore. As a curse, Escape turns into Exile- fear, terror, anything that makes you want to run away instead of towards something. Freedom is nicely broad: I've used it to squeeze through small spaces, increase my running speed, and once, turn into a lizard. Don't ask me 'why a lizard', I don't know. Exile- Exile sends things away from you. I've heard of it used for things as minor as pest control, or things as major as pollution mitigation. Escape is one of the most flexible chants, along with Divert and Quell. Gift, Reverse, and Heal have a lot of varied uses, but they're fixed, we know all of them.]

[You know all of them meaning -?]

[For Reverse, it's kind of obvious. The way it interacts with each chant is different but that only leaves a limited number of combinations. It never varies per chant. Gift does nothing besides copy, so even though the options might be infinite, the effect of the chant is just that one thing. As for Heal- we've only been able to find a very small, very narrow set of things that Heal can do. Balm- that's Heal's charm- can heal breaks, cuts, or tears in bone, skin, or muscle. It soothes muscle soreness and tooth pain. It allows for easy, painless euthanasia. Bile- that's Heal's curse- I didn't name them, this one is based on outdated medical practice- Bile cures diseases, blocks bad habits, and keeps people alive indefinitely, in intense pain.]

[...is the intense pain obligatory? How often do you have to re-chant?]

[Yup. The intense pain is part of the deal. Bile only has to be re-chanted every eighty years. There are a lot of bureaucratic steps before you can go for it because not everyone who tries it can handle it. We've had a few Balm-assisted suicides that way- nothing else can kill them. There are people who can handle it, and we've got scientists who are studying that- seeing if it's physiological or psychological- but not a lot of conclusive evidence yet. What's healing here like? Or are you all just muddling along with the vagaries of nature?]

[We have nonmagical medicine which gets better all the time and there's mages who do healing for cases too urgent or difficult for that.]

[Do you have...organ transplants? Blood transfusion? Genome sequencing?]