"Maybe you could. You've got time to think about it, anyway."
"Good thing you're living in the only place where you can safely say that, huh?"
"Just about everything. Except Chelsa. It's possible I could keep people safe from Chelsa too, but I can't experiment with that, because when I make a change to what my Gift covers it's the same change for everyone I'm covering. And most of those right now are Chelsa's very special friends."
"I can tell who I'm covering; that part wasn't hard. As for getting to... I tried for a while once when I was pretty young, and it didn't work at all, and then years and years later I tried again and it worked fine. Maybe I was doing something different, or maybe it was all the practice the first time around, or maybe my Gift just grew an extra trick as I got older."
"Sometimes. Not that often, but it happens. More often if you use it a lot, and more often than that if you keep trying new things with it."
"Anyway, if it shrivelled up too fast, we'd have the same problem as if she just up and died one day. People wouldn't take the transition well."