"Yyyeah, probably not." Pause. "I would've, though."

"Good for you."

She beams.

"For me it'd probably depend on if it actually worked like the lottery in that less people means a greater chance."

"What would be the cutoff point?"

"Hard to be sure. My ability to model what tradeoffs I'd make for a chance at magic are imperfect since I never bothered making them before I had magic already."

"Fair enough."

"I would have done it."

"To be completely honest, though, I whined for the whole forty-eight hours before my eclipse, I'm not sure ten-year-old me would've actually gone for it."

"Not being a mage was so boring, though."

"Yeah but I was a very whiny and dramatic child."

"Well, fortunately that's not how Eclipsing works."

"I'm not sure I'd call anything related to eclipsing 'fortunate.'"

"In two hundred years not one person at this table is guaranteed to be dead. I'd call that pretty fortunate."

"Well, I'm not sure I'd call that a fact about eclipsing as opposed to a fact about eclipsed, but granted."

"Well, it is a fact about Eclipsing that it causes people to become Eclipsed."

"Fair point, I concede."

"Good."

Grin.

"At least we have virtuality, now."

"Yeah. The wilderness sucks."

"Sometimes I think it's a miracle humanity never got wiped out by new Eclipsed."

"Hmm, likely the Anthropic Principle."

"What's that?"

"Well, if you imagine that there's an enormous number of inhabited planets in the universe, then at least one will contain life that survived their eclipses, and since population tends to grow, the majority of sapients who will ever exist in the universe will be from those planets, so it's not that surprising we find ourselves on one."