On the bed are a couple of people one of whom is currently performing enthusiastic sexual services for the other, who is pulling his hair! The one with his mouth available yelps when Dottie lands.

"-sorry," Dottie says, in English, scrambling to get off the bed. "My bad!"

The recipient yanks the giver's hair to pull him off and grabs a sheet to fling over both of them; he does this haphazardly enough that his partner is now lazily cosplaying a ghost but it gets the job done. "What the fuck! How do you even make that mistake! Learn to teleport!" he exclaims.

"Escape gone wrong," Dottie explains (?) as she covers her eyes and backs away.

"Are we still in California?"

"- no, this is not California." He adjusts the sheet so his sub can see. "How old are you? You don't look twelve."

Dottie is going to avoid assuming genders, here, because it's none of her business. She can't smell it, though, so they must mask well. Masking usually doesn't last during- she is not thinking about what they're doing, nope. Chaste thoughts, keeping those eyes shut tight.

"Nineteen. Does my age matter? My Escape overshot, landed me here. Does one of you want to spot me a duet?"

"Spot you a what?" asks the one with long hair.

"A duet. Does one of you want to chant with me so I can get out of your hair? You probably want it as much as I do, right, that should make it easy."

"...chant with you?" says Long Hair in bewilderment.

"Look, dude," says Short Hair, "if you need a few bottles of Ensure to teleport away, or a phone call to get picked up, we can help you with that, but we don't belong to your religion, or anything."

"...okay. Not trying to cause any trouble, here, but if I say, 'chanting and singing is how magic gets done', you would say...?"

"Bullshit, I went to magic school," pipes up Long Hair.

"Right. I'll just- step outside- and when you're done getting dressed, I'll take that phone call."

Dottie turns around, opens her eyes long enough to find the door, and steps outside to wait. Hopefully. They're being surprisingly polite, really, she's not sure when that's going to stop happening.

A couple minutes later they emerge wearing pants; Long Hair is also buttoning a shirt. "You can borrow my phone," he says, offering it out of his pocket, once his hands are free from buttoning.

Great. Dottie takes the phone from Long Hair, Who Went to Magic School.

"My alpha, Jackson," she explains as she dials his number. "Oh, I didn't introduce myself. Dottie Matson."

"Huh, that's my name too," says Jackson. "- not Dottie, obviously, Jackson. Your dom has you calling him your 'alpha'?"

The phone rings and rings.

Next to how weird everything else here is, this guy's name also being Jackson doesn't rate.

"...yeah. Most alphas like that. Where did you say we were, again?"

Dottie waits for someone to pick up. Jackson is probably mad at her, given how they left things. She'll leave a voicemail if she needs to.

"Hello?" says a strange voice on the phone.

"Illinois," says Brian.

"...hello? Is- is Jackson there? This is Dottie, his omega."

"I'm sorry, you have the wrong number," yawns the voice, and hangs up.

Great. That's- this could be some kind of elaborate sting operation, but Dottie does not think anyone high up in United States law enforcement would have it in for her. She hasn't done anything- Jackson has, and maybe they're interrogating him right now. He'll get off easy, though. No one would arrest an alpha for defending his omega.

"Is there someone I can talk to about- teleportation accidents?"

"You want me to call Lockdown for you?" asks Jackson. "...you shouldn't eat anything if you're still having accidents."

"I was trying to leave, I just got my aim wrong. I don't know what 'magic schools' are like in Illinois, do you two have a good Reverse? Another Escape might work, but it's obviously dicier."

"...I'm gonna call Lockdown for you," says Jackson, holding out his hand for his phone.

Sigh.

"Thank you," she says politely. This was more or less the end goal, wasn't it? To end up in a completely different situation, which very well might kill her. It doesn't feel like a victory, but somehow she doesn't think she'll be able to enchant anything under these conditions. Neither of them seem very receptive.

"Do they have any betas on staff?"

"Dunno what that is," says Jackson, looking up the number. "But they'll lock you down so you don't have any more teleportation accidents and then you can get into a virtuality that doesn't let you slip like that, if you don't want to go be an accountant or whatever."

"Do you have virtual reality that stops magic?"

"...were you in the woods or something instead? Who does that?" says Jackson, shaking his head.

"I was in L.A., trying to get out of a sticky situation, so my alpha and I Escaped. Doesn't look like we got lucky enough to end up in the same place."

And that's incredibly upsetting to think about directly, so Dottie immediately steers her thoughts away from that. If she's in this state for more than a day she can start worrying about how to get good porn and start denning.

"You're not making sense," says Brian gently. "Did you hit your head when you fell?"

"Look, one of you must be able to chant something useful- Gift, everyone knows Gift."

Dottie chants the first few lines of the most common Gift charm; everyone and their mother knows that one. To Brian and Jackson, it sounds like someone with mediocre singing talent but above-average voice training singing about fairy godmothers. Nothing much happens, but it's pretty enough.

"Maybe I should call a hospital," says Jackson uncertainly.

"No, still has to be Lockdown, he did teleport," Brian murmurs.

...okay. Escape normally works by changing you into something that handle the situation you're in, or by changing some element of the situation to free you. Dottie knew she was overtaxing it, but whatever situation she's in now is not exactly safer or less complicated than the previous one. She's less immediately at risk of dying, that's nice, but whatever "lockdown" is, it doesn't sound good. The safest thing to do when surrounded by complexities that she's not ready to deal with and with people who mean her harm is- Dottie touches the back of her neck. It's not quite as effective as an alpha doing it, but- her postures relaxes slightly and her expression becomes slightly more vacant.

"Whatever you think is best," she says agreeably.

Jackson dials. "Hi, Lockdown? I - you did, okay. - wait, what? - okay - so did someone else - okay, thank you -"

Blandly polite lack of reaction.

Dottie waits for someone to tell her where to stand and what to do.

"Did you say Swan? No, I met her is all... yes sir... do you have her number - yeah, got it - thanks."

Jackson hangs up.

"Lockdown says you... aren't... an eclipsed?"

"I have no idea what that means, so no."

"What... are you, then?"

"I'm a chanter. Most people wouldn't call themselves that unless they did it professionally, though, since everyone can do it. That's not true in Illinois?"

"It's not true on... Earth..."

"...Illinois, in the United States of America, in North America. On Earth. Third rock from the sun. That Earth?"

"Yeah-huh."

"I'd love to talk to somebody who knows what's going on. This is- kind of above my pay-grade. Escape- that's one of the chants that chanters use- is supposed to do things like turn you into a bird when you're falling or a mouse when you have a tight squeeze- loosen ropes if you're tied up, stuff like that. I'm pretty sure I, uh. I'm pretty sure it did something bigger this time."

"Yeah, uh, I'm supposed to take a picture of you and send it to somebody who works with Lockdown on eclipses and volunteered to figure out what your deal is. The picture's so she can talk to you, she doesn't live in town."

"Alright. Is there anything you need while I'm here?"

Dottie hopes they don't ask for the obvious thing. Since they're probably casual, there's a chance they'd jump on a relative stranger, but so far neither of them have looked inclined to push the issue. She's probably strong enough to take Long Hair Jackson.

"...no? I guess if you're not eclipsed it's safe to feed you," says Jackson.

"Yeah, you can have, like, what do we have, rice pudding, and leftover Chinese..." says Brian.

Well, that's nice and friendly. Maybe 'lockdown' is part of...this Earth's...law enforcement and so they're both behaving themselves- or maybe it's related to the masking. They could be suppressing, not just masking. (She probably hasn't suffered a psychotic break. She's never looked up the symptoms of a psychotic break, though, so how would she know. Just because Dottie has never heard of this, doesn't mean it never happens. It's not like she would hear about Escape working like this, if it ended badly.)

"I'll take Chinese, thanks. I wasn't really expecting to wake up in a discarded Twilight Zone script but so far you all seem friendly."

"Go get him some Chinese, Jackson," says Brian, and Jackson runs to microwave sweet-and-sour chicken and fried rice. "I'm gonna - go get the rest of the way dressed -" He retreats into his room.

Alright. Dottie goes to examine the place on a surface level. If there's any differences, they're not very obvious. They speak English, they have an Illinois, but the culture here is clearly very different- maybe some kind of alternate history premised on different developments in suppression? Dottie doesn't know the details of pharmaceutical suppression for alphas, but she knows they're not as effective as the ones for omegas. Maybe that would be enough to give you this- if a bunch of alphas had to deal with lower sex drives, it might spread to everyone after a while. If she's here for more than a couple of months she'll probably need to find some kind of sex addicts support group - unless her credit card is somehow still good here.

"Sorry about ruining the mood," Dottie says to Jackson. "Thanks for not kicking me out straight away. Is that related to the whole 'eclipsed' thing?"

"...what, not kicking you out? No, we're just not assholes?" says Jackson.

Not kicking her out and not trying anything- maybe if everyone is on suppressants all the time, they just don't want to. Dottie will definitely need to make some money and hire a sex worker, but she can also relax, here, which will be nice.

"Glad to hear it. I don't think I caught your- dom's name."

"Brian," says Jackson dreamily, pulling the plate out of the microwave and adding a fork before presenting it to Dottie.

"Someone's got it bad."

Dottie takes a bite; Chinese food is the same on any Earth, apparently, which is comforting.

"Ignore me if this is too personal, but is it common around here to mask at home?"

"To what?"

"To mask your pheromones. I can't smell anything off either of you."

"...we're not, uh, moths, or whatever it is that has phermones. Are you a moth? Or something?"

"I'm human. Humans give off- well, we still call them pheromones, although it's not really the same thing, I think. I'm not a biologist. They're pretty important, back home."

Star Trek, maybe, not Twilight Zone. Do they...not have gender? Or different genders, whichever.

"Humans don't do that. ... on Earth." Jackson grabs a rice pudding out of the fridge and starts eating it pretty quickly.

Okay. So they eat more than humans, they don't have the same genders...whatever eclipsed are, they have those. She'll save those questions for the...Lockdown officer.

Dottie does make small talk. What's Jackson doing later? Is there any TV they would recommend? What's Jackson's favorite food?

"I have a doctor's appointment later... I like cop shows and baseball. I'm not picky, I like most things, but my favorite's probably donuts, you?"

"I'm more of a sci-fi sort of girl. I can be kind of picky about food, but anything salty is a safe bet."

"You're a girl?"

"See, this would be one way pheromones can help. Yeah, I'm an omega."

"...I don't know what an omega is but you don't look like a girl."

"Is it- the clothes, the hair...I can change my presentation if none of you have working- sorry, that's. Sorry."

"The hair looks kind of - uh - dom but you cut your own hair, a little? It's more, like, your jawline and your shoulders..."

"Okay. It's going to be an issue if no one can tell I'm an omega, which...might not be what you mean by 'girl'. What do 'dom' and 'girl' mean to you?"

"Dom is a role, they like being in charge. Girl is having, uh, a vagina? And estrogen and stuff."

Okay. So 'dom' means 'alpha', except that 'girl' means...having a vagina. They usually don't get this nitty-gritty on Star Trek.

"So if I say 'boy', 'man', 'guy', that means...?"

"...having a penis? Uh, and testosterone." He gets another rice pudding.

"Thanks. You've been really helpful. It's a lot to adjust to, landing in a place where almost everything is the same- I mean, you guys have microwaves and rice pudding- but some things are completely different."

"Like you being a girl with a five o'clock shadow?"

"Yeah, like that."

Dottie will try some companionable silence on for size. Hopefully she hasn't just fucked up first contact for her entire planet- that's probably not a crime, but it seems like the kind of thing a trigger-happy judge could tack onto her sentence if she's getting arrested anyway.

"Oh, right," Jackson realizes after his second rice pudding, "I was supposed to send a picture of you to Isabella..." He pulls out his phone and snaps one.

Right. Dottie had managed to completely forget that in her haze earlier.

"So, this Isabella works in 'Lockdown'?"

"No, she's a precog, but Lockdown works with precogs on eclipses and I guess she's on their internal chat or something and was like 'sounds weird, I'll check it out'."

"A 'precog'? If that's what I think it is, that sounds pretty cool. Do you have a lot of people who can predict the future?"

Also, there's a mention of 'eclipses', which means- something. Eclipses give people magic?

"Some, yeah, it's pretty popular."

"What about you? Not your thing?"

"No, I work in virtuality."

"Do you mind telling me more about it? It sounds pretty sci-fi to me."

"Oh, uh, virtuality's where eclipsed who don't have magical control yet go. If somebody like me boosts a VR setup enough it can fool their magic, so it doesn't actually set anything on fire or whatever in real life, and they can like, go to virtual school and stuff while they figure out how to be safe."

"That's way more badass then I thought. So you're stopping a bunch on uncontrolled chanters- eclipsed, sorry- from hurting people? On my Earth, the only thing people want to use VR for is gaming."

"We barely use it for that, it's not good enough without a psion on it and with one it's expensive, but the government covers control training."

"You seemed worried, earlier, when you thought I was an out of control eclipsed. How bad does that get?"

"...like without precogs? Uh, millions of people could die."

"Millions? Right. Has that- right."

Dottie falls silent, trying to imagine a disaster of that scale.

"I mean I don't think it ever actually happens. Sometimes littler accidents slip in, like, Indonesia or wherever, but if Borneo were going to flash freeze our precogs would cover that."

It's not really less horrifying that it's so casual, but- sure. Kind of like hunger in Africa or coups in South America. Not like she can do anything about it besides feel sick to her stomach that the world is full of misery and cruelty.

Dottie would like to move to happier topics- speaking of video games, Dottie is curious how similar those are- and hey, what games does Jackson like to play?

"I don't really like video games much but Brian has Halo and some Mario games for playing with his nieces."

"Do they come over a lot?"

"Some weekends, yeah, his sister's a nurse and they go to school during the week but if she works a weekend they come here a while."

"They're not too much of a handful?"

"Not if Brian lets them eat junk food and play Mario and ride around on me like I'm a horse, nah."

"You and Brian seem pretty serious."

Dottie...waits to see how that goes over before asking what she actually wants to ask.

"Yeah, we aren't married yet 'cause we'll be able to have a fancier wedding after some more saving-up but yeah."

"That's nice. So you're- compatible, then. Your roles."

"Yyyyes? He's a dom and I'm a sub."

"Cool."

That's probably enough invasive questions for now. Jackson doesn't seem the type to want to deal with problems like "these aliens have a much more destructive magic system and I'm sad about that" or "if I go home I might be arrested" or "no one here has genders and I'm probably going to have a very long dry spell". Dottie politely inquires about various inane topics while they wait for this Isabella to show up.

Eventually Jackson realizes he has not successfully sent Isabella the picture, and he does that, and then promptly enough:

[Hello, Dottie?]

Dottie startles, which presumably Isabella doesn't see.

[Isabella! Sorry to interrupt whatever you were doing- it sounds like eclipsed who work Lockdown have their hands full.]

[Only during eclipses, and this isn't one, I just lurk on their company chat when I'm bored at my regular job. So you're, uh, from an alternate universe? And used alternate universe magic to get here?]

[That's about right, yeah. We call it 'chanting', and people who do it professionally are 'chanters'. Not very evocative, I know, don't blame me for that one. I used a pretty standard charm- chant is the general term, but charms are chants that you cast cooperatively. Escape is the name of the chant, but we usually call the charm Freedom. I was in a bad situation and needed a way out, so I Escaped. Ended up- interrupting Jackson and Brian, and eventually they decided to call Lockdown.]

[Yeah, that would have looked like you were an uncontrolled mage teleporting accidentally. What other chants are there?]

[We only know eight, although scientists say there could be eighteen in theory. Gift, Escape, Divert, Reverse...Aid, Heal...Arouse...and Quell, I always forget Quell. It's not my strong suit. Gift will be really useful if no one here can chant. I could help you with if you want to try, but you might need to hear it.]

[I assume those mostly do what they sound like but not all are obvious from the names?]

[Oh, sure. It depends if you're singing it as a charm or a curse. Most chants- except Reverse- can be chanted either way. Charms are based in positive emotions, mostly, and curses come from negative ones. Gift gives you the personality trait or skill you value most, as a charm, or as a curse, it gives you something that wish you had that someone else does. Either way, it's temporary and watered-down. Their virtues we write in water. The Aid charm is called Relief- calms you down, takes away your worries. The Aid curse is called Vigilance- makes you more afraid, noticing more threats and dangers. They're all things like that- Divert, Heal, and Quell are probably the weirdest. Quell can put out fires, calm a storm, and calm people down, Divert does luck but especially when it comes to probablilties. The classical example is arrows in wartime, but it applies just as well to gunfire or rainfall. I'm mixing up charms and curses here, if you want a more thorough explanation I should probably write this down.]

[I'd appreciate the written version when it's convenient for you, yeah. And some people do this professionally? But if anyone can, what's their advantage?]

[Anyone can do it as long as they have a co-chanter. There's not a lot you can do on your own. Professionals are people who have- either they have a regular partner who they have a lot of chemistry with, or they're self-aware enough and versatile enough they play well with anyone. Thing is, chants are powered by shared emotions. To Escape, I needed my alpha- oh, speaking of alphas, I might need some help understanding how roles work, we don't have those. To Escape, I needed my alpha to co-chant with me.]

[...no roles? Gosh, okay. Uh, we used to conflate role with gender a lot? Do you have gender or are you, like, hermaphrodites or something?]

[That was how I noticed the confusion. We use the same pronouns as you folks do, but the underlying physiology and society seem vastly different beyond some stereotypes. If I say 'alpha, beta, omega', that doesn't mean anything to you, and if you say 'dom, sub', that doesn't mean anything to me, but if you say 'he, they, she', we've got some common ground. I'm not sure how or who to ask about everything else.]

[Okay. So you have an 'alpha', who is your romantic partner whatever the details might be, and you usually chant together.]

[That's right. Alphas usually go by 'he', betas by 'they', and omegas by 'she'. It, uh, only took a few minutes of talking to this Jackson to figure out that 'she' here means something a little different.]

[Okay. You prefer 'she', then?]

[Maybe. I'm working on that. If it's going to read differently here, that matters. No one's going to be able to tell that I'm an omega, apparently. Besides role, you have gender- what does gender tell a person about you? Same with role, if that's not rude to ask.]

[Uh, women are the ones who can get pregnant, doms are the ones who like to be in charge. Women are more likely to be subs and men more likely to be doms but it's not overwhelming - historically that was more conflated though.]

[That's an interesting way of doing things. If someone has long hair, is that a signal that they're a woman, or a sub? Or both, because of the history there?]

[Long hair signals sub. - in this country, not in all of them, it's cultural. I guess women might be more likely to have long hair even if they're doms, I don't know the statistics - or to have long hair if they're switches, who do assorted mixed signals.]

[How would I signal 'woman' and not 'sub'? I don't want to deal with people here knowing what role I am. Jackson mentioned my jawline and shoulders were off?]

[Yeah, uh, being male or female is more biological than role so just changing how you dress or groom yourself or stand won't actually do it. I guess if you had enough money you could get cosmetic mage work done. Short of that... making sure you are always clean shaven, and maybe throwing on some jewelry, I think I see more women wearing jewelry regardless of role now that I think about it.]

Dottie files that away for later. She could probably make some changes with a sufficiently motivated co-chanter, but that's not likely to happen here.

[Thanks. I'll look into that.]

She goes to ask either Jackson or Brian if she can use some paper. Theoretically, her phone should work for notes, but she doesn't want to run down the battery- and besides, she's not sure how much phones rely on satellites even for the apps they ship with. That's a question for later. She turns off the phone for now.

Jackson fetches Dottie some paper and a pen. [Is it cool with you if I book you a flight out here? I can get you a hotel or you can crash at my place, depending on how reliant on a native guide you expect to be.]

[Everything seems pretty similar to my Earth, besides role and gender. I think I could use a crash course on what to expect there, but I can run my own errands.]

Dottie does not have any money, unless bank accounts work across universes. Hopefully there's a secret government agency that Isabella works for which has funds for magical aliens.

She starts writing down what she can remember about all the known chants. Some are easier than others- she uses Gift, Escape, Divert, and Arouse often enough, but it's hard to be sure she's covered everything about Quell.

[It mostly shouldn't come up if you aren't trying to date locally. Or I guess if you need certain kinds of medical attention you'll need to know how to explain what you've got going on to a doctor but I couldn't tell you what that might be.]

[Fair enough. Do you have a doctor you'd recommend for this kind of thing, or should I just Google it? ...do you have Google? This is a really lazy alternate universe premise if we have the same corporations.]

[We have Google! It should serve you well.]

[Great. I don't think I'll find everything I'm looking for, but that's an answer in itself. Speaking of things your Google doesn't know, I think I can try to talk about chants. Should I go one at a time, or do you want to just list superpowers you've always wanted and I'll tell you if they can do those.]

[One at a time's good.]

[First, I should explain how chanting works. It's- pretty simple, really, but we don't have eclipses, so maybe it's one magic system per Earth. To chant, you learn the right set of words and set them to music, and then chant them with other people. So far we've only been able to find eight. You can chant six of the eight as either charm or curse. Gift and Reverse are special cases. When you're chanting with someone, it's all about the feelings you share. If you're sharing good feelings, you chant a charm. If you're sharing bad feelings, you chant a curse. Reverse is the simplest chant to understand, but that's because it's the same both ways. It always reverses the effects of another chant. That can be intuitive or really surprising, depending on what you're dealing with, but it's basically always what it sounds like.]

[How do you aim it at a particular chant you want to reverse?]

[You combine them. Once you've learned one chant well enough, as long as you can conjure up the necessary emotions, you can learn to mix it with the others. If someone chanted Exile to turn my alpha into a...weasel...I could chant Freedom, or I could chant Exile and Reverse. In that case, they're basically equivalent in function, although other examples are less arbitrary- Arouse and Reverse together are about the only thing that can counteract Arouse. Vigilance could, maybe, but I've never tested it. Some of these interactions I've just read about, but I've tried most of the ones involving Escape. Reverse and Aid are the only ones they teach in public schools- Aid's charm, Relief, has the easiest emotion for kids to understand, and Reverse is the only chant most adults need to know.]

[I'm a little surprised they don't see more common use but maybe the professional class does most of it. Go on.]

[I can try to give you some stats later. Anyway, Aid. Aid's charm, Relief, works on shared relief. This covers- absence of fear, absence of anger, sometimes, it's fairly broad. As long as people are relatively comfortable and calm around each other, they can chant Relief. Relief is one of the more convenient effects, too, since it's self-sustaining. Relief makes you and your co-chanters calmer. Aid's curse, Vigilance, relies on anxiety or worry, people who share the same worry or fear. Lots of kids are afraid of public speaking, or the dark, and so it's easy to teach it to them early- when it's active, a Vigilance chant works like a threat sensor.]

[Relief sounds like kind of a catch-22 unless I'm mis-estimating how calm you'd need to be to start it.]

[A charm doesn't just take your individual calmness as an input, it reads your collective calmness. When you're working a charm, it's a straight addition of what you're all feeling. Curses usually take the average. Relief works really well when you have a few students and a teacher; without the teacher, you'd be right. They don't usually need a teacher for Vigilance, because kids are scared of lots of random stuff, but they can find a teacher who worries enough for the fearless kids, too. Reverse- Reverse takes ages to sink in. Reverse uses elevation. Kids are bad at that, but they need everyone to have that chant in their back pocket, so we worked on that all through elementary school and middle school. You can't really cast that one as a curse; if you try, you just get Divert's curse, which uses Schadenfreude. That's one of the theories of how they discovered Divert, actually.]

[Elevation?]

[The feeling you get when you see people doing good things for each other. Kind of like gratitude, except you feel it when it's not helping you. I've never been great at it- kind of a saintly sort of attitude to take, really, but Jackson is pretty good at it when he's not being a jealous prick. Oh, that's another tick in the 'massively suspicious coincidence' column, my alpha's name is Jackson, too.]

[I don't know if that's very suspicious unless you also know an Isabella and a Brian and so on. I do not know a Dottie.]

[It's not that I don't believe in coincidence, it's that if you asked me yesterday whether alternate universes were real, I would have thought it was a fun idle musing. Freedom is supposed to take you somewhere safe-]

That is a possibility she hadn't previously considered. What would happen if her co-chanter was feeling quite a lot of fear while Dottie was leaning on him to cast Escape? She would have noticed if they had cast Exile- probably. If she hadn't been falling at the time, she would be sure of that. It's not impossible for a chant to shift during chanting. She's never been stupid enough to let it happen before, but she's been pretty reckless the past few days...

[Sorry. Just realized something about what Jackson might be getting up to while I'm gone. Freedom should take you somewhere safe, but I might have screwed it up, I was feeling pretty stressed out. Where were we?]

[You'd explained 'elevation'. Were you not safe on landing? Do you need a doctor?]

[I'm not hurt, just- worried about what's happening back home. Not sure I can do anything about it just yet. Actually, instead of explaining all of this now, maybe I should start teaching someone. On my Earth- let's call it Earth-C for chanting, for now- on Earth-C, everyone can learn to chant. Not everyone learns it to my level, because of the emotional requirements and because you can only chant with someone else. I'm not a professional either, but I- it helped me feel safe, growing up. Middle school was hell. But I can't think of a reason why I shouldn't be able to teach you.]

[Let's call this one Eclipse and yours Chant. Do we have to be physically nearby, will this need to wait till you're in New York?]

[-we should test it over this channel. Recordings don't work, but no one in Chant has whatever you call this- telepathic communication. So maybe we can try it. Why don't I have one of my hosts text you the lyrics I want you to chant and we can try it. In the meantime, I'll explain the emotional stuff.]

...if anyone is reading Dottie's mind she is going to be thinking about sex with her boyfriend. Take that, potential mindreaders. She'll also think about the chant they should try- Aid is usually easiest in a classroom setting but they might want to try for something which uses the novelty of their situation- Freedom, but she doesn't want to play with that one again, not just yet. They could probably do Vigliance or Gift.

[You could just tell me without the intermediary, I've an eidetic memory.]

[...we should definitely cast Gift. I can envy you your eidetic memory and telepathic communication enough to more than power the chant.]

Dottie proceeds to provide Isabella the standard framework for Gift; this skeleton can (and should) be modified depending on how it is used, although less creative folks do use the generic version to more limited effect. Dottie often peppers Shakespeare references into her chants because she finds them emotionally resonant; if Isabella has anything she can quote or otherwise include that would help her with sustaining the necessary emotions, she's welcome to try.

Speaking of the emotional side of things, [To chant Gift, we want to either work on a shared sense of triumph, or we want one of us to have a serious case of envy. I have envy to spare right now, and triumph seems premature. This is the part where you should probably ask clarifying questions, before we get to the actual magic.]

[I like Shakespeare fine. Can you tell me step by step what to expect?]

[First, we want to get on the same page emotionally. You want to think about what you're envious of in other people. Make it specific- one trait, one circumstance, just as long as it's narrow. Second, we want to start chanting. The chant should be about the gift you envy, so that part we should talk about in advance. The actual style and process of chanting varies depending on the chant- for envy, we usually take long turns, so you're itching to interrupt the other person by the time your verse comes up. Third, during the chorus, you need to- I've never actually had to explain this part before... Third, when we're at the height of the chant, you want to...take yourself out of the emotion. I don't think anyone gets it on their first few tries. We want to make it objective. It shouldn't be your envy, anymore. It's generic envy, that anyone could feel. It's plainly part of reality that the thing you were envying is enviable. Finally, we finish chanting, drawing on the more subjective, personal emotional side again. This is part of why not everyone does it- most people have trouble putting themselves through the emotional wringer like that. And then, when the chant is finished, you'll have a new gift.]

[Mages can fly and that looks fun, how about that?]

[I've never thought about whether Gift could mimic magical effects. It would never be useful to do with chants. Let's give it a shot.]

Dottie suggests a few places for Isabella to make substitutions in the basic chant, where she can mention her envious feelings towards mages, and then they can get started.

- 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?]

[I don't think full sequencing is commercially available yet but the other stuff yeah.]

[We'll have to compare notes on scientific breakthroughs later, in case Chant and Eclipse have complementary trajectories. Let's see, we covered Reverse, Gift, Escape...Aid, Heal...Divert, Quell, or Arouse next?]

[Is Arouse what it sounds like?]

[Pretty much. I don't really want to use it or spread it around, so if you can't think of anything worth using it for, I won't explain it.]

[I mean I guess you could market it to treat sexual dysfunction but probably while there's only one of you it's not the niche you want. I'd like a quick rundown just to get more of a feel for the whole system but you can put it off till last if you prefer.]

[Now is fine. Quick rundown: Arouse's charm, Love, uses ecstasy as the emotion- reportedly, some religious types pull this off but no one I've ever met is religious enough for it. Usually the go-to is drugs or sex, otherwise human psychology doesn't really get there by itself. The curse is War, which uses contempt- the kind of mix of bad, judgmental feelings you get when you think someone is unworthy of your respect. Love turns people on, or it makes them admire you, or both. War pumps up aggression or lowers impulse control. Did Eclipse have- berserkers? They were warriors in the previous millennium who entered altered states. We think they were using Arouse, although we don't have the records to confirm it.]

[I don't believe we had real ones, but there's mythology and fantasy tropes.]

[-huh. We don't have any special advantage in learning history, so maybe they just seem more plausible to us. Anyway. Divert and Quell- Quell uses contentment as a charm and anger as a curse. Quell's charm is called Dampen, and it calms things down. You can use it to extinguish flames and calm storms. The curse is called Churn, and it fans flames and starts storms.]

[Enough to, like, power an energy grid off it, or...?]

[We used to use it in power generation, but we had some issues which we've only now managed to trace back to it. Has Eclipse had problems from burning too much petroleum?]

[It's polluting.]

[A little late to have confirmation on that, but hopefully you folks can send some scientists our way before any more coastline gets flooded. If you have things to burn that have less problems, we can use Quell to multiply their impact. It doesn't work on electricity itself, it's- not really related to physics as we know it, that's why we call it magic. I can make a list of things it affects in case anyone here can make heads or tails of it.]

[You were - using magic to burn petroleum? But the problem is related to the petroleum and not the magic?]

[-yeah, sorry. Shouldn't skimp on the details with people from another world. We burned things using- normal methods, I don't actually know enough about how it works to give you more there- and used Churn to ramp up the power generated from that. The problems were definitely about what we were using, but we didn't figure that out until after things had already gotten bad, so we're kind of waiting until we have better alternatives. Mostly, we've, uh. Austerity measures, things like that. No one's a fan, but most countries agreed to them after we watched the death tolls go up. It'll be nice to have hope.]

[...we have had some climate alteration but yours sounds maybe worse, did Churn also increase the pollution output or something? That or maybe some mage in Australia is good at carbon capture and I just haven't heard of them yet.]

[I'm not actually sure how to figure out the difference. We can put the climate scientists on it. That just leaves Divert, I think. Divert is an odd one, emotionally. Most charms exploit positive emotions, and most charms exploit negative emotions. Divert's charm, Bless, uses sadness or grief. Divert's curse, Bane, uses schadenfreude. Bless- it brings good luck, if I try to keep things short, but we can get you access to the literature on this. It seems probabilistic. Helps you avoid getting shot by arrows, in the traditional example, although now we use it to minimize car accidents. Bless lasts up to seven days.]

[And they aim it at car accidents once a week? Cool. We don't have enough precogs to prevent all car accidents, even all fatal ones, but we can usually catch ones that are going to kill several people or a kid or something.]

[We haven't solved them completely, but they're the most preventable and high-volume thing we've found good returns on using Bless. We might end up wanting to re-distribute our supply of professional chanters once we throw mages and psions into the mix.]

[-and that just leaves Bane. Bane is- it doesn't work the same way as Bless nearly at all. No one is really sure why the various charms and curses do or don't resemble each other- most theories about that kind of thing are hard to test. Bane- it misleads, it sends you off track, it makes it so you can't return where you came from or- if you've been using Freedom to change shape, so that you can't change back to your original form. It's- Bane and Arouse are the only chants which civilians can't use in public.]

[Does it have redeeming uses?]

[Professional musicians use Arouse if they're verified- if not, there's some clubs where people don't ask too many questions. Bane is useful if you Freedom yourself into something that can't chant. Mostly it's that people want to retain exile as a punishment for crimes. Speaking of, how does exile work in Eclipse?]

[It's no longer a particularly common sentence. Uh, how is Bane useful if you're turned into a bird or something? It sounded like you'd just get stuck that way.]

[It's a weird interaction between Freedom and Bane. I don't actually know how it works on the neurological level, but usually the reason you can't chant while shapeshifted into certain animals is that their brains can't do the work. Bane doesn't trap you in a form you're shapeshifted into, technically, it's just how that works out in practice. What it's actually doing is preventing you from getting back to where you want. So when you're in a form you can't- want things in, not the way a human would, Bane sort of short-circuits that. You need a Reverse ready too, for after that, so you can remove the Bane before it has time to cause any other issues. Only emergency services deals with these cases, I couldn't do this.]

[I don't think I follow but if you can't even do it I guess it's not urgent.]

[Probably not urgent, yeah. We'll have your people talk to my people.]

She takes way too much pleasure in saying that.

[Anything else we need to cover- oh, how soon is Eclipse likely to end?]

[The... world?]

[Yeah. What's the timeline for the end of the world? We're thinking about two months if everyone on preservation chanting stopped today and we left it up to volunteers.]

[Eclipse is... not... slated to end. What are you preserving Chant against?]

[For a while it was impending nuclear war, although we're not sure how much of a concern that still is. And for all we know, several countries (including the U.S) could be sabotaging those efforts, anyway.  Everyone seems on board with chanting against widespread flooding, though, which is our big worry right now.]

[Your petroleum issue sounds WAY worse than ours. Probably we should not import any energy solutions till we know exactly why for sure. Uh, many people still have nukes but most of the nuclear powers also have antinuke mages on retainer and no nuclear war threatens right this minute.]

[...that sounds fair, yeah. How good are your precogs? Think they could give us an estimate for two months out?]

[I don't have that range but some people do. They're rare and expensive though.]

[So probably something our governments need to work out. Uh, speaking of governments and other- first contact concerns- is it going to be as disconcerting for the average person in Eclipse that we don't have roles as it will be that you don't have genders? Sorry, don't have our genders. That seems like something we need to find out.]

Dottie doesn't particularly want to kick anything up the chain of command. She's not even part of it, so she'd presumably be removed from this situation pretty quickly. Maybe if makes herself too valuable, she won't be arrested.

[Probably not as disconcerting, since children don't have roles yet, but it'll be a little weird if you're all illegible, yeah.]

[Great. Uh, world ending, energy crisis, general authoritarianism, no roles...the list of issues we have is getting long. Anything in Eclipse that really needs doing?]

[I mean, there's global poverty and unrest in the Middle East and very few people are immortal and all that jazz.]

[Right. You're ambitious. Is that why I haven't been mobbed by your government or the press? I would have expected most people to send this up the chain.]

[I mean, I will probably eventually have to explain you to some people, but I snagged the report and said I'd check it out because I'm ambitious, yes.]

[Happy to help. So, can you think of any other discussion topics you want to get to urgently? I think I've hit everything I'm going to think of until I notice some glaring difference between our earths.]

[We should go over how you're going to get here in case there are important airplane-related differences.] She explains how he will be driven by Brian to the airport and then collect a "114" ticket with her sponsorship attached.

Airplanes are mostly familiar! Some of these security procedures sound...frustrating.

[The security measures are this strict without them knowing I'm from another earth?]

[Yeah, they're just like that, it's annoying.]

She submits herself to the rigamarole. At least this world isn't ending soon, that'll be a nice change. Maybe Chant can import expensive psions in exchange for chanters. Remaining patient throughout the rigamarole would be frustrating-

-but instead she can manage compliant. Dottie puts up with strangers prodding her with a boredom that would make the whole thing seem more ridiculous if she were capable of thinking things were ridiculous. Instead, she floats patiently through to her flight.

The flight is uneventful and Isabella is there to meet her at the airport in LaGuardia.

By which time she has had to trigger false heat twice to avoid a pressurization-triggered panic attack. It's worn off by the time she sees Isabella.

"Hey. So you're Isabella. Apologies for- all the culture shock we're going to be dealing with over the next couple years. Hopefully everyone can focus on what really matters: saving two worlds."

Instead of gender, which is of course still hounding her here. No one can tell she's an omega, which would be much less upsetting if it meant they thought she was an alpha or beta. Saving two worlds sounds incredibly exciting, exactly the kind of thing Dottie never thought she would get to do- especially after the past few months.

"I agree completely! Is there any particular culture shock I can help you with right now?" Isabella asks, leading the way with her cane.

"If I say- 'I had to trigger false heat on the way over here' and 'wow someone got hit over the head with the alpha stick pretty hard as a kid', I'm guessing those mean absolutely nothing to you."

"...I think my guesses are slightly more educated than 'absolutely nothing' but yeah I don't know what you mean."

"Right. So in Chant, we have three genders: alpha, beta, and omega. I'll spare the details, which you can get later from a biology textbook if you want them, but basically, alphas experience ruts, during which they're fertile and, uh, horny. This triggers heats in omegas, during which we become fertile. Betas are fertile year-round. How similar is this to how Eclipse humans work so far?"

"...well, betas are similar, I guess?"

"-huh, maybe you're just all betas. Do Eclipse humans menstruate? Some betas do, some don't. If that's a really sensitive topic, you don't have to answer, it's probably not that important."

"Women menstruate."

"Weird that we developed the same word- weird that a lot of things are the same, probably, I'm just not noticing how weird they are. We call omegas 'women', usually. 'Omega' is an old-fashioned word from back when English-speakers in the West were really into showing how up on the classics they were- we call 'alphas' wemen¹, and 'betas' men. I'm mostly using the Greek terms because I'm pretentious enough to know them- back home people don't usually bring them out everyday.

Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked- if I ignore the way you divide up by gender, it seems like the social role of alphas corresponds with that of doms, and that of omegas with that of subs. It seems like your genders might match what betas have going on- sexes, I guess. I'm not up on gender studies, never really figured it would be a priority."

1: 'wemen' is pronounced as 'way' + 'men'

"Huh. People sometimes use 'men' or 'man' in a slightly archaic sense referring to the whole human race?"

"Yeah, I guess we probably derived our words from the same source but we needed an extra one. Anyway, my biggest worry is that we're going to have a lot of people- on all sides- who are upset that whatever they're doing with gender or role isn't coming across. Some people take that stuff really seriously. I'm not sure what the best solution to this is- maybe just don't let those people at the helm of interworld contact. I thought it was worth talking about before we call in the big guns, in case it might impact- how well we're received."

"I'm not sure people expect aliens to do gender and role just the way we do, though I suppose in a fashion it's actually weirder that you're still English-speaking humans with Google and everything."

"As long as we're getting out of ahead of it, I'm not worried," she says, giggling slightly.

"Is there something you're - currently trying to communicate, that I should be aware of - you didn't sound sure if you wanted to keep using 'she' -"

"It's- uh, it's complicated. I'm not a fan of my gender role but I'm kind of attached to my gender, so. It's a personal issue, I'll figure it out eventually. The thing I'm talking around isn't because it's hard for me personally, so I should just get to the point- what are your rape laws like?"

"...rape is illegal? Uh, and defined to include any cases where consent is coerced or dubious due to drugs or threats or being fourteen or whatever, not just a stranger jumping out of the bushes."

"Right. Doms don't have the problem where once a year they suddenly become fertile and horny and expect subs everywhere to cater to their whims?"

"No!"

"We're not- it doesn't happen anymore, but it's very much in recent memory that you could expect every alpha in America to apologize for the ones that did it, and the ones that did- even if you expected them to be good, they weren't always- my boyfriend's great."

Mostly. Dottie's not going to mention what it took to manage that.

"Some alphas understand that there's no such thing as a 'biological imperative' when it comes to justifying rape, but there's a reason most of our government are betas. You can rely on them not to get- caught up in anything."

"We have a rape rate, we're not perfect, and some people are shitty about, like, drunk subs going out in revealing clothing and stuff, but there is not a time of year in which lots of ordinary people start committing sexual assault."

Nod.

"That's everything I was worried about. Everything else can wait. What do you recommend for someone new to Eclipse? Any good tourist destinations that- rely on eclipsed, somehow?"

"We're mostly too expensive to use as a primary vehicle of consumer-grade entertainment. There's some folks who work in movie effects."

"Works out for you. For us, chanters are kind of like- medical professionals. You guys have doctors, nurses, and- what else, orderlies? Some are more trained, some get more respect, they all are basically doing something similar in a really broad sense but some need less skill than others- and the only really expensive ones are the ones that have to train for years for it."

"That makes sense. Only one in ten thousand people gets eclipsed and a lot of those don't want to suffer through control training and get locked down."

"It's hard to know the exact statistics- how have I not mentioned the chorus of preservers yet? We even talked about it earlier. So the Chorus of Preservers is the organization- cult?- that collects new preservers. They've been around thousands of years in some form of another and they have recruitment drives every year. They work with the U.S. government but they don't really respect it. We ran into some issues a couple years ago when the president tried to cut them off. They ended up inventing a new battery and offering it to all of our political enemies if we wouldn't supply them with more chanters. They're trying to save the world, they claim, so maybe it's just the cost of doing business- but with two earths we might be able to do better."

"What is wrong with them apart from not particularly respecting the US government?"

"-the part where they extorted us in exchange for chanters. What they're doing is important but I'm sure humanity can put together something better than that if we have the most intelligent people working on the problem instead of the oldest."

"...are the chanters being, like, enslaved, or just... not banned from working for them?"

"...somewhere between the two, I think, but maybe I'm the victim of a propaganda campaign, we might want to table this until I can give you- hey, can eclipsed do anything for memory?"

"Yes, I have an eidetic memory - I can't share it right now but I'm passively working on that and might be able to in a while."

"Cool. It might help with making sure I'm giving you everything you need. I'd rather not involve my government until I've researched what yours is like. I think Eclipse might have a...kinder...recent history. There's so much to figure out and I don't want to give up any advantage we have against bad actors."

Sightseeing?

Sightseeing! If their sea level is way up in Chant maybe New York existing at all is a sight.

It kind of is! Dottie hasn't even heard of New York, actually. There was some flooding back in the 1970s that took out the most coastal areas, and they didn't isolate the problem until later. Maybe it was one of the cities overtaken before the turn of the millennium. Lots of people died but Dottie recounts this info surprisingly casually; as a near-miss, where things turned out better than expected.

She's generally intrigued by the skyscrapers! She's never seen any buildings quite like those, really. She'd love to see the most New York parts of New York.

"You don't have skyscrapers?" Isabella asks, plotting a route among the most quintessential landmarks.

"Not- some cities do, but not anything this tall in the U.S. I've never been this close. Mostly stayed in the same town my whole life. They're in a lot of old movies, when they show Gotham. They might still have some in Canada or the surviving parts of Japan."

"Jesus, maybe the cautionary tale will get opposition to carbon mitigation under control."

"I wonder if Eclipse is just dealing with a smaller version of the same problem and our magic sped up the effects. Does your earth at least have climate scientists, or is it not lucrative enough to attract interest?"

"We have those. Quite possibly fewer."

This is interesting but Dottie is not actually a scientist or even mildly scientist-adjacent. If it had been up to her, she probably would have just majored in literature and been a kept woman.

Once they have done some more sightseeing, Dottie can ask Isabella:

"So, do you have any thoughts about what you're looking to get out of all this? You, specifically, not your whole planet."

"Steering power! And I guess I might play the stock market a bit about it."

"Sure. What do you think your planet wants? Who do we need to appease? I have no idea what the balance of powers here must look like- we have one or two powers but nothing like the complexity that must happen when multiple modernizing countries get the internet at the same time. Is the Soviet Union a factor? I don't even know who would be relevant."

"The Soviet Union fell. Russia is still a thing, though. United States is a superpower, China's a big deal, the European Union might or might not have staying power but some individual European countries are still fairly important either way. I think India's probably on its way up, it has a young and booming population and enough of a tech scene to do their own virtuality these days."

"-huh. Chanting is pretty bad at some kinds of things which my guess is that psions would be better at- do you guys have any way of looking at historical events? It's probably not urgent but I'm sure we could get some benefit out of seeing why the worlds diverge- a lot of it seems recent. Were eclipsed less common, earlier in human history? Professional chanters as a substantial chunk of the economy is new, even if there were people who got to fairly high levels of skill before that."

"There are postcogs, but range is an issue with them just like with precogs. Eclipsed have been around for all of human history, we think, but the ability to get to a point where you're controlled and useful instead of uncontrolled and intolerably dangerous is much more recent."

"We should test whether chanters can boost range. What can mages do, if you had to list the things you think are most useful? Maybe focusing on climate-related flooding, specifically."

"There are some mages who study specifically how to control classical elements, including water. And there are telekinetics and teleporters and some people in weather."

"Alright. And are there any areas psions or mages work on that you think could use a range boost, if it's something we can do? Are there other things- what would it take to improve on virtuality?"

"Virtuality is actually improving at a decent clip - you need software engineering and what's basically game design, on the one end, and then tech psions boosting it, and both of those get better every year. The most advanced tech psions can work round the clock, in their sleep, on vacation on another continent, and those ones are mostly working on being able to cover more people if they're not picking up other skills entirely, but the bottleneck is more on willingness to attend at all - for that it would help if we could keep the kids in better health, they're not conscious of their bodies and that means they're not eating solid food for two years, or exercising except when they have stopped feeding them liquid food for two days and insist they go for a fasting walk so they don't atrophy worse than necessary. They have mages patch you up when you pop out but it's not perfect. It would also help if virtuality were cheap enough and popular enough - so, that'll happen in a few years - that people could visit eclipsed friends and family there en masse, instead of just making do with written correspondence."

"Aid might be able to do something about the comfort factor if people in virtuality can chant- we should test that before we doing anything else with virtuality. Healing, which we might be able to replace for any mages who could specialize in something else. Electricity, but only after we've looked into the causes of our climate crisis. Range-boosting postcogs, precogs, and whatever other psions have range issues- the most useful interaction might be with- hydromancers? My guess, based just on what we know so far, is that Quell might be able to boost whatever they do, somehow. Water isn't the best test case, but fire seems- riskier. Maybe we'd want to start with weather, since if it works we're making progress on Chant's climate problem, too. Am I missing anything obvious? Healing, weather, boosting psions who have defined ranges, boosting mages who work with natural phenomena..."

"We were able to chant over telepathy so I guess it's possible people in virtuality can but they cannot use their mouths. Replacing the healing demand would be good, though I think there's enough demand that it would take a lot before the healer wages go down, and some people of course go into the field because it appeals to them for other reasons. Gift for letting people borrow powers temporarily, even if they kind of suck, would be really big, because most people are not eclipsed."

"Yeah, I haven't really thought about what Gift could do here, but copying your magic is promising. One thing we should test is whether I can use it on some of these powers that I've heard of and know exist to come up with something better- at home, no one has gotten chanting to work on fictional superpowers, so I don't think it would, but if knowing they're real changes things- it's a cheap test."

Pause.

"Hope you're making a list of these in your eidetic memory."

"Automatically all the time. Do people use Gift to get better at chanting?"

"Not much. A lot of people find it frustrating to lose mental gifts, and emotional regulation is really the biggest skill improvement there. Singing ability helps a little, so people do use it for that."

"Huh. I'm surprised it helps at all but not a lot."

"We don't really know why it works, but I'd bet on everything reducing to emotional connection, myself. It's kind of hard to isolate factors there, anyway, since no one's invented anything that can measure intensity itself- we're judging by the outcomes. If you have better singers in a chant, it helps a little. I'm sure someone has a list of factors on their base."

"Maybe the better singing helps the other chanters with the emotional part and doesn't do anything directly."

"It's an area of research that I'm sure someone will work on if our world isn't ending. It's kind of hard to overstate how much everyone just takes that as given, that if we didn't have our dubious ancient cult sometimes conscripting people, the world would end. Like I said, I should probably be verifying any of what I know somehow. Is it easier to find somebody who could do remote viewing than post-cog? It's another world, though, that sounds harder. It seems like for every potentially useful way our different magic systems could work together, there's twice as many problems Chant is bringing to the table."

"Remote viewers exist, I don't think they're substantially more or less common than postcogs, but they'd have to expand their power to make it reach to another world."

"I'm putting a lot of my eggs in the 'Quell can boost psionic range' basket. We should test that one sooner rather than later. You said you have some precognitive ability, right? Could you predict whether it would work if we started chanting right now, or is the process more complicated than that?"

"That won't work specifically for precognition because I can't precog about precogging - mine or someone else's. Postcogs don't have this problem but I don't know any, they tend to work mostly with, like, detectives."

"Huh. Fascinating limitation- I shouldn't worry about them, but- there must be all kinds of implications- right. Why don't we practice rapport while we're sightseeing so that we have more leeway when it comes time to experiment, later? Have you ever had reasons to build rapport with someone you don't know very well?"

"Net...working? I don't know if that's the kind of thing you mean."

-Dottie laughs.

"If you're really expressive, maybe. Most of it is about figuring out what emotional common ground you have. Where do you get happy about the same things, sad, angry, things like that. Some partnerships just don't work for certain chants, which is why the pros need emotional regulation and the ability to get on the same page as other people. Are there any emotions that we've covered which you think you'd be really good at? Don't think about how I would influence this, right now we're talking about you."

"I think I acquitted myself well at envy! I don't think I want to try Aid or Arouse but in general I'm pretty good at managing my emotional state. Contentment might be hard, I'm a malcontent by nature, but I could probably finesse it if called for."

"Right. So we've got- Gift, maybe Dampen- I might not be much help there, we might want to experiment with Churn in case you can get the right kind of anger...think you've got any wonder in you about the whole 'other earth' thing?"

Maybe Chant is just too disappointing to muster up wonder about; Dottie thinks she could muster some up about Eclipse.

"I think I could pull it off! Uh, Churn is maybe the one that melted your ice caps, right?"

"Maybe, yeah. It seems likely we can avoid that if we don't use it for energy production, which caps its usefulness but we can discuss what that does leave available. If you can do wonder well enough, we might want to invest time in co-chanting Escape. I've always been really good at both sides of it, no matter who I'm chanting with. It's- narrower than Churn in its scale but there are so many different things you can use it for. It's one of the most versatile."

"...isn't that the one that sent you here?"

"Yeah. Theoretically unprecedented. We don't have precogs. People have tried to use it for teleportation, but even professionals can't casually use it to cross more than 100 miles. The furthest any group of chanters has gone is somewhere around 300 miles. Right now, I'm treating this as a fluke, because- it really shouldn't be possible. Unless crossing worlds is easier than crossing ordinary spatial distance."

"I mean... sure, it might be a fluke, but I don't really want to try to reproduce the conditions when I do not care to be catapulted into another universe."

"Interesting threat model. Fair enough, though, we have no reason to think they're all this safe. I think that makes Gift the most exploitable one here. We should test whether there's a limit to what it can copy- what are some things eclipsed need to spend, I don't know, decades on?"

"There's hypercog stuff that takes that long, and really advanced healing, and long-range precognition, and turning into animals..."

"If we can figure out what went wrong when I chanted Freedom, we have turning into animals covered for anyone who wants that. Advanced healing- someone from my world might be capable of impressive stuff with Bless, if paired with someone who's been working on it that long, they might just have the right emotional resonance. Hypercog and long-range precog seem like the kind of things that Gift is made for. Tell me more about the possibilities there?"

"Hypercognition is just a loose collection of powers that make people better at thinking. You have to be careful with it because psionics is by no means opposed to making people worse at thinking as a technical matter so you can do that by mistake if you're wrong about what good thinking looks like."

"-promising, since Gift doesn't work for things you don't want. Precog seems a little harder but not impossible in principle- I'm worried that Churn is the best way to improve on it, but I could just be constraining myself creatively. More things in Heaven and Earth. Okay. My instinct here is to use Gift to get us both benefits from hypercog that we both want, without putting in the work- are you the type to feel especially triumphant if you get something without having to work as hard as someone else, or do you like the feeling of accomplishment of doing it yourself?"

Which is to say, are you the type of person who can't use triumph as well as you can use envy- it doesn't make a huge difference, just changes Dottie's overall strategy. If she's right, here, she could make herself so useful to Isabella that if it comes down to it, she'll protect her.

"I like both, but when there happens to be a way to cheat cleverly at something - something important, I mean, not like Monopoly - that's more satisfying than not cheating."

"Then let's cheat."

First, though, maybe they should get something quintessentially New York to eat. Dottie- has U.S. dollars on her person, actually, but she's not sure if they'll somehow be counterfeit. Does Eclipse have good anti-counterfeiting measures?

"I don't know the Secret Service to have anybody on staff for counterfeit but it's not the sort of thing I'd definitely know. I can cover it, I make a lot of money. Pizza?"

"Pizza's familiar. What's the point of being in a new world if you don't try something new? Unless New York City pizza is unique."

"It's the best kind but if it's old hat we can do something else. Manhattan clam chowder? Pastrami?"

"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."

"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.

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.]