"Hello," the girl says, raising an eyebrow.

Lewis is going to take that as a "I am completely okay with what is going on here".

"How's the food?" he asks.  "I'm Lewis, by the way.  I'm new."

"Food's good, and yeah, I figured. Welcome to Selene! When did you arrive?"

"Last night," he says.  "How long've you been here?"

"Coupl'a months! Was there an eclipse two years ago?"

"Nah, couldn't go last year because my aunt had breast cancer, so I stayed home to take care of stuff."  Then, quickly, he adds, "She didn't make me stay home or anything like that.  Actually, when I told her I was staying, she was all," he imitates a woman's voice, "'Lewis, if I die before I see you go to magic school my ghost will haunt you for the rest of your natural life', but I'm stubborn."

"Oh. Is she okay, then?"

"Uh, yeah, she's in remission.  Thanks for asking."

"Good, I'm glad. So, mage or psion?"

"Mage," he says, snapping his fingers and creating a spark for demonstration.  "You?"

"Mage!"

"Whoa!  Nice!"

"Yeah, I left boot camp being able to gendershift. I haven't been able to generalize much more than that, though. I mean to become a healer and figure out how to leverage magic and turn everyone immortal."

He raises is eyebrows, impressed.

"Whoa.  That's...everyone?  That's. A lot.  Wow."

"Well, I suppose there are some nuts who would prefer not being immortal..."

"Hey, they might have good reasons!" he says, and shrugs.  "I don't know if I'd want to be immortal.  Like, I don't want to die, or anything, but I've never really thought about what it'd be like to be alive forever."

"Sure, but currently you don't—well, most people don't have the choice. They'll just keel over some day, involuntarily, after having spent who-knows how many years suffering through their body's degradation. That's completely different than deciding there's nothing else interesting in this spatially infinite universe with a myriad possible configurations of matter including uncountably many people and books and songs and languages and planets and stars and galaxies and stuff so you might as well stop being in it."

"I don't--oh, yeah, I'm a mage.  Still haven't adjusted all the way.  But...yeah, I mean, it's sad when people die, and it'd be nice if people didn't have to, but wouldn't it get, uh, kind of crowded?  If everyone lived forever?"

"Not really, we don't occupy nearly as much of available surface area as we could, not to mention places such as the moon or Mars."

"Huh.  All right.  But...hmm.  I feel like there's gotta be some reason why more people aren't working on this but I don't know what it is.  I mean I guess you could say 'death is a part of life' but, like, so is cancer and we're trying to cure cancer."

"I don't know, don't ask me, I made up my mind to do this when I was ten."

Again with the impressed-eyebrow-raising.

"Wow.  When I was ten I wanted to be a professional wrestler.  Well, sometimes I wanted to be Robin Hood, but mostly the wrestler thing.  Definitely nothing as, you know, huge as that.  You must've been a pretty weird kid."  (It's clear from his expression and tone of voice that he doesn't think that's a negative thing).

"Thanks!" She looks like she'd have taken being called weird as a compliment regardless of intent. "To be fair when I said 'when I was ten' I meant 'when I eclipsed.' My birthday was almost right between the September '99 and the January 2000 eclipses, but was closer to the former, so I eclipsed early."

"Huh, mine was around then, too.  I was in 2000."

"Yeah, I figured. So then I eclipsed, and was like, well now I have magic, so everyone's gonna live forever, ain't that grand."