We-ell okay Sadde will just—it's purely unconscious and not voluntary at all, the way she lowers her eyes and doesn't actually, quite bat her eyelashes. "Hello."

"Oh, hello! You must be new, but you don't look young enough to be a 2001..."

"Oh, no, I'm actually ninety-seven."

"Huh, same. Well, most people who were going to come here showed up a bit sooner after their eclipse, so you might be a bit of a talking point for a little while. Any reason you care to share why you took so long, and if not d'you need help fending of nosy people?"

She struggles for a bit to remember how to words, but then: "It's just that my father didn't want me to go to magic school but I managed to talk him around to it. My name's Sadde, by the way."

"Edie! Lovely to meet you. Mage or psion?"

"Mage! Working on biokinesis and have—"

"—gendershifting down."

"Nice! I'm a psion, I've got telepathy working--just with my sister, so far, but it's pretty tricked out."

And back to girl. "Tricked out?"

"It's, you know, actual thought-sharing instead of just a verbal channel, and she can initiate conversations, and we can set it for default emotion-sharing even if we're not actively talking."

"Sounds really cool! And what are your long-term plans, if any?"

"I'm going for precog for the utility and continuing to work on my telepathy because telepathy is really awesome. I spend most of my meditation time on the precog and just practice a lot with the telepathy. At some point when I've got a little bit of precog working I'll switch some of that to practice to and pick something else to spend a little time meditating on too. Luck of all luck, my twin eclipsed too--she's a mage--and she's going for metallokinesis--she's got a little bit of that yet--going for fine control over sheer scale so as to compete less with generalist teeks--and de-aging, because the more mages can do that the more people can not literally die."

"Wait, what? Seriously? You both eclipsed?—wait I think I might've read a note about you in the papers."

"Wouldn't surprise me."

"I'm honored, to meet someone so statistically unlikely."

"My arbitrary mathematical characteristics and I thank you."

She beams. "My goal's along your sister's, too, I want to do de-aging—but I want to eventually figure out how to make that permanent."

"That would be excellent, of course, although given that that's not known to be possible and de-aging is, it's probably higher-leverage in the immediate future to work on convincing more mages to work on de-aging and improve virtuality so more people want to be mages."

"On the other hand virtuality and psionic tech in general were not known to be possible until only a few years ago and the boom in eclipsed will already help a lot. But in any case I expect de-aging will in fact come before permanent immortality if it's possible—for me, at least."

"Yeah, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and all that."

"Yeah."

"I considered working on interfacing with psionic tech and working on improving virtuality but precog appeals to me more than that by a higher margin than that would be more useful than precog, considering that precogs are essential to preventing disasters on eclipses."

"Oh yeah precognition is definitely incredibly useful. If it weren't for the gender thing I'd have preferred being a psion."

"Aha. Makes sense."