Lucien's class schedule was optimized, organized, color coded, and annotated. He'd gone over it and tweaked it and polished it for days, until his mother had asked him if he'd like have it notarized as well. It had taken him an hour of searching for the nearest notary public to realize she was joking.
And so, eventually, he put down his schedule and tried to relax and enjoy being out of VR as he waited for his first semester at the Selene School to start.
(And when his parents dropped him off, his mom surprised him with a notarized copy of his schedule. Just in case.)
Lucien is taking advantage of the free ride himself - though the lack of filtering does make it harder for him to find people he'll fit in with. Any interesting discussions he could listen in on?
That is definitely an interesting discussion!
"I wonder if you could extrapolate from eclipse patterns when the moon is at different distances from the people - there's some natural variation already I think."
"Well, of course there is, eclipse happens to everyone all over the globe at the same time or the precogs would be less harried. As far as I've heard it doesn't affect anything but maybe more detailed stats would pick something up. - I'm Isabella, are you new?"
"I'm um. Lucien."
"Yeah I'm new, just arrived earlier today."
Wow she is really pretty.
"Well, welcome to Selene, this's Myeisha and that's Peony." She doesn't introduce the boy on the floor.
"Whatever you want, it's not like they can teach magic," says Peony.
"I mean, there are classes about magic, they're just like, history of magery, famous psions," shrugs Isabella. "I'm in a sequence of econ classes, those are fun, and I like loading up on literature."
"I'm trying to get my math requirement out of the way with statistics but it's not the easy A I was looking for," says Myeisha.
"Oh, I'm also taking statistics, and the econ sequence too. And also History of Public Infrastructure."
"They have a history of public infrastructure? I don't remember seeing that in the catalog, maybe it's new," says Isabella. "Who's teaching it?"
"Huh, I liked his intro American history, maybe I'll take the infrastructure one."
"Wow, I had a class with him on World War II and I couldn't stand him," says Myeisha.
"I'm taking it now because I'm learning Divination, though I'd probably want to take it eventually for fun even if I wasn't."
"I'm going precog," says Isabella.
"Elementalism," says Myeisha.
"Healing," says Peony.
"What led you to pick divination?" Isabella asks.
"I think it's really understudied compared to it's usefulness - there's a huge amount of data which is really costly to gather by normal methods, not to mention things which no one thinks to look for until it's too late. Things like being able to get hundreds of years of data on what environmental factors are important for health without having to worry about noise are incredibly useful, just in a much more ... diffuse way than people normally think of psions being helpful, because it isn't incredibly useful on its own. It's only when you combine it with the ability to implement interventions once you know they're useful that it becomes important."
Lucien is very clearly excited about this topic!
"Oh, neat, I haven't actually heard anyone bring that up before and it's a great point," says Isabella, brightening noticeably. "Have you got any of it working yet or still laying foundation?"
"I can divine how many people are in a room with me. ... it's not exactly the most useful skill."
"So I was tempted to heavily frontload all the internal optimizations I want to do - I'm still working on eidetic memory but there's tons of hypercog stuff that appeals which I'm waiting on - but I really don't want to sign one of those predatory contracts where I get a stipend for three years and then they own my soul for fifteen, or whatever, so I want something that I can graduate high school with usable amounts of, and you can do that as a precog even if you only have a few seconds of range. Very monetizable, save the world from diabetic children every year or two, lots of daily life conveniences. And dovetails nicely with the communicative telepathy, which currently I have working only with my twin but it'll be better by the time I'm older."
"Ah, that makes a lot of sense. I think I can manage a living with small amounts of divination but it will be difficult for a while - a lot of the issue is just in proving to people that it's worthwhile to change how they normally do things to incorporate divination based data gathering. I'm working on eidetic memory too."
"I am so excited to have eidetic memory."
"I want to fly," sighs Peony. "But you can't make a living just flying, best it'll do is save you car expenses, Mom says."
"Well, neither do I," says Peony tartly.
"I'd do healing and want to fly if I were a mage, too, Peony," says Isabella.
"Oh um. Sorry."
He would want something construction oriented he thinks but doesn't say.