"Yeah, hopefully one of the parties will convince the other and then we can settle in to read about one or the other."

After a bit Lucien is done with his food.

"I'd like to go back for seconds again I think." he says, nervously making eye contact with Isabella.

"Yeah, you'd think they'd have larger plates. Grab me a couple scoops of pistachio ice cream while you're up."

Eee his secret plan worked. "Yes!"

Lucien comes back with ice cream. He even remembers to get his own food as well this time.

Om nom nom pistachio ice cream. "Being able to eat real food is so good."

"I think I'd still appreciate the option of the virtuality feeding to be honest. Eating actual food is really nice but it takes so much time out of my day."

"Huh. I mean, you can still eat while doing a lot of things, especially if you like stuff that you can drink through a straw."

"I have to be careful about that, if I get too distracted I end up failing to eat. Especially if I've been sleeping less than normal."

"...huh, I'd expect using magic to make your appetite reassert itself, when you started working on the power were you imagining you'd expand it in some way having to do with hunger?"

"The appetite is still there, it's the ability to steer my attention or multitask that's decreased I think. So I feel hungry but end up too absorbed in something more interesting to actually eat."

"Inconvenient. No immediate brilliant ideas are coming to me besides 'sleep a normal amount'."

"I try."

Mostly.

"One day you will have some spare time and you can fix it so it works correctly."

"Most of my schedule-branches have it waiting at least 50 years."

"You're planned out that far? And making your sleep skipping sustainable isn't on there for that long?"

"My plans that far ahead are very tentative, more like hypothetical paths I've thought about than anything definite. My sleep skipping doesn't work that badly, and there are a bunch of other abilities which would incidinetly decrease the side effects - like having multiple threads of attention."

"Maybe your sleep skipping is fine when all the magic you're doing is sleep skipping, but it could stop being so very fast if you wind up doing more magic and needing more calories. But attention threading does admittedly sound lovely."

"Working on sleep skipping also has the downside that I already know it's usually difficult for me, so a bunch of other things seem more promising."

"It's difficult, but you also started it already - it couldn't possibly take you more time to finish it than it would take the average psion to get it starting from scratch, could it?"

"I'm not sure, I can't see an obvious direction around the current issues at the moment, they seem fairly fundamental to how it works for me."

"Huh! Hard to imagine but I'll take your word for it." Om nom ice cream.

Lucien has not been skipping sleep so he is able to eat food and think about how cool Isabella is at the same time.

"I hope I have a better time with it when I get around to sleep skipping. But eidetic memory first. It'll free up time in its own way."

"Yeah, that's on my schedule for after I make more progress with divination."

"Oh, how much more?"