"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."

"I think I prefer eidetic memory to flying. Not that I have the choice."

"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.

"No big," shrugs Peony.

"What level of divination do you want to achieve before you start working on other stuff?" Isabella asks.

"I'm not sure but I expect it to be a while? When I get divination down I expect to be spending a lot of my time using it, and will probably iterate from there for a while based on what improvements seem useful."

"Can you get a job in divination, like, a regular one, or do you have to freelance?" asks Myeisha.

"Most regular divination jobs are ones where you have to work exclusive for a single place doing a much smaller amount of divination than I actually think there is use for, I'm hoping to freelance if I can manage to convince more people that divination would be useful for them."

"Probably you can't actually make money off being invited to highly secure locations to check that no one is invisible or shapeshifted in there, since then they'd have to want you in the highly secure location," muses Isabella. "And they'd need separate handling of anti-remote-viewing and so on anyway."

"I think some prisons use divination for security, which seems like a waste of it to me."

"Wow, they can afford that? I guess at the really high security end - but you'd think you could just have diviners pinch-hitting on eclipses and otherwise hire precogs."

"Diviners aren't for breakouts in prisons, more for tracking rates of routine infractions, gang violence, where people are slacking off on their jobs, that sort of thing. Only the very largest prisons with tens of thousands of inmates use them since diviners can be effective for huge populations and ameliorated across that many prisoners it's often cheaper to hire a small staff and a diviner to figure out what sort of thing needs more attention. So you can do things like have one group of guards that is sent to whichever cell block has the most need, instead of having guards assigned to each cell block all the time."

"The whole thing means a lot of people end up thinking of diviners as sophisticated mass surveillance systems, I think."

"Huh, yeah, I could see that being an issue. I hope your stats thing works out, it sounds much cooler."

"I hope so to! Researchers could iterate so much faster if they didn't have to wait to get results."

Lucien wants to say many more things about this subject but prefers to let Isabella direct the conversation.

"I mean they don't have to wait for results if they hire a precog? I don't understand the difference," says Myeisha.

"Most researchers want studies done over the course of several years, which makes precogs way less viable as a quick solution. It's also much harder to iterate on precog results since you have to wait between measurements."

"What does that mean?" Myeisha asks.

"When you find out the results of a test you might want to perform another test based on the results, and doing that a bunch of times in a row takes precogs longer than it takes diviners by a substantial amount."

"Oh, that makes sense," nods Myeisha.

"Plus," says Isabella, "with precogs you need everything ready to go, you need it to be that you'll actually go through with it - which is fine for some kinds of research but you might want to bypass it entirely with riskier or more logistically complicated things. You could divine the results of all those unethical experiments you'd have to be a mad scientist to actually do, and you couldn't precog them. Without being a mad scientist."

"Does that mean there's an incentive for precogs to become mad scientists?"

"Or become diviners!"

"Which one do you plan on?"

"Oh, in the long run I assume I'll get around to divination, I'm hoping to be immortal."

"Oh, cool! I'd like to be immortal but don't have any specific plans for it, aside from hoping that it will be a byproduct if I  succeed at changing how statistical research and logistical planning works that I end up wealthy enough to afford it."