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terraform me a planet
Sadde and Isabella in Eclipse
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The rest of the day is rainy and damp, and Sadde reads and thinks about magic and eats deerthing meat and sleeps (unfortunately the night sky isn't clear enough for a good look at stars and moons or lack thereof). The next morning is sunny and warm—and damp but not wet—so they decide it's a good time to try to find their way back home. They eat, change, and pack their tent, then go, towards the river. It's the one landmark they know about.

They reach it and try to retrace their steps and fail, then try again and fail again, then it's time to eat. They set up their tent by the river, make another fire (they still have a bit of meat left which they eat but it's smart to do it anyway), eat, then try again. And fail. But that's alright, they can explore and try to find the place again.

A giant eight-eyed dinosaur thing tries to eat them once, and they destroy all of its internal organs.

It rains again but at night—the day is annoyingly shorter—the sky is clear enough to show constellations they've never seen before and two not terribly pretty moons.

It's warm during the day but there's rain and the rain sometimes is cold and in the evening it is cold without the fire but there's fire. They try looking for the place again the next day. And the next. And the next.

They run into other animals—comparatively small (i.e. about waist-high) brown fuzzy six-legged things that are reminiscent of a cross between a rabbit and an eggplant, various kinds of bugs (Sadde murders the huge not-mosquitoes with a vengeance after the first time they get stung), things that are kinda like fish and kinda like eels and kinda like neither and really huge, lizards without a discernible head about as tall as them, carnivorous lizards with discernible heads that don't actually bother them—and as time passes decide they can't really only survive on deerthings. Probably.

But berries and fruits and plants are still probably dangerous.

That's the next thing they'll try to learn—how to survive poisons. Their thing is making their body be that way instead of some other way, it's all biokinesis, really, healing is just another application of it. It does mean they learn it much slower than other mages would (on Earth, he's not on Earth right now, is he, how does that even work), but they do try to learn it.

They have a watch. They know they've turned seventeen, by keeping track of days according to their watch, but what sense does that even make when they're probably far enough away that relativity should matter?

They're confident they can deal with poisons after seven months, ten days, and thirteen hours. They've been eating plants for a while by then. Their clothes are in tatters, their knife long gone, their tent barely more than a fond memory. It's damp. And warm. It could've been damp and cold, that'd be worse—and sometimes it is, actually, but there isn't much seasonal variation there, or perhaps the year is just really really long.

And they can't find the goddamned cave.

They turn eighteen.

And two months, five days, and four hours after that—

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[Pet?]

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[Ma'am?]

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[Pet where are you are you okay -]

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[Is that really you how did you do this are you okay can I send things other than words through this -]

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[Of course it's me - expanded the thing that lets me talk to Alex - just words for now - where are you, are you okay, tell me.]

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[I'm—okay? Ish? Is this thing superluminal how does it work—you won't really believe me if I tell you I'm in another planet will you.]

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[...I have no idea if it's superluminal because you being on another planet did not cross my mind. Okay ish? What does that mean?]

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[It means I spent the last year and three months on another planet and was pretty sure you'd written me off as killed or kidnapped or kidnapped and killed and that'd have been justified and I've missed you so much and I couldn't find my way back and I'm probably sounding like a raving lunatic aren't I.]

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[I figured you ran away at first like your note said - but you didn't call or write or anything - and then your birthday went by and you didn't turn up -]

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[I—did, I was just gonna try to, to not have to rely on your family so much, and I'd probably have changed my mind after a while, I was in this spiral of thinking I was a burden on them and you because of something Tobias said, and I had a lot of time to think here and I'm pretty sure I was a stupid idiot but I did that anyway and then I found a cave and the cave was a tunnel and it was raining and I'm on another planet- I could tell you where the cave is, that'd be some evidence that I've not just gone insane or am not trapped by a psion somewhere—although I might be—but it's a cliff and I wasn't able to find it again after almost a year and a half looking.]

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[But you're all right? You've - been able to eat the extraterrestrial whatevers -]

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[Yeah, they're actually pretty tasty, and I learned how to not be poisoned so I could eat more stuff except I ate more stuff before I got that down but yeah I'm alright. Is this thing specific to me, or did you manage to do generalized telepathic communication?]

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[Not fully generalized, but people I know at least a little. Where was the cave?]

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She describes the location to the best of her memory.

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[That's all you remember?]

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[Yeah, I'm sorry, it's been a really long time. I'm close to the place, probably, I didn't move around too much, but I couldn't find it, it was raining and I had to run away from an animal—animals here are really big—and how're you? I want to know—everything, I want to see you, I'm-] She cuts herself off. It's been so long, does she even...?

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[Oh lovely, I missed you too - I'm all right, I have thirty seconds precog range now and I have an interim job while I work that up to emergency response times, I'm out of school -]

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[Wow, school, I'm of age now, aren't I—I'm rid of Tobias—when I suggested living in the wilderness as the worst-case scenario it wasn't meant to be a challenge.] She sighs. [What are you working with?]

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[I have a little office and I get funneled short term precognition questions, usually just yes-or-no, by text. Nothing very interesting but it pays the rent.]

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[And you get time to think about magic and become the uberpsion. How's your family doing? Did anything interesting happen on Earth while I was gone?]

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[My family's fine, there has been a usual amount of world news but nothing standout...]

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[And -] Pause. [One second I need to kill a dinosaur.]

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[.......okay.]

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[Animals here are really annoying,] she complains after about a minute. [There are these mosquitoes larger than my head and these bug-things almost as tall as I am and these annoying eight-eyed dinosaurs.]

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[Well. At least they're yummy?]

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[The deerthings and the rabbit-eggplants are, I refused to eat the bugs, and the dinosaurs are very stringy.]

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[Rabbit-eggplants sound delicious actually.]

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[The description precedes the taste, they're smaller than other things but only comparatively, still about as tall as my waist, and look like six-legged rabbits with a weird eggplant shape.]

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[So they actually taste like chicken?]

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Can she send a mental giggle? She tries to do that. [They don't taste quite like anything from Earth but if I were to try to approximate it's something between trout and ribs.]

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[Weird. I'm going to get some people to go looking for your cave.]

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[Okay good it'd be great to finally figure out whether this is real or I'm insane or in some twisted psionic experiment.]

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[I think a psion who could pull this off would probably notice us talking.]

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[In which case I might just be crazy, wouldn't that be grand.]

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[Not exactly a typical presentation of mental illness.]

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[Probably not, but finding a portal to another planet is so wildly unlikely I have only been entertaining it as a possibility because if it is true I'd rather not be eaten.]

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[I mean, it's the sort of thing a mage could do...]

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[Open a portal? I guess in theory, but it'd take so long and where is that mage if so? ...maybe eaten.]

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[Or they just abandoned the portal a few hundred years ago, hard to say.]

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[I suppose, although I can't really imagine why someone would do that. Then again, I can't really understand why generalized immortality isn't a solved problem yet.]

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[I read a book suggesting that a lot of early eclipsed didn't actually realize that 'mage' and 'psion' are the only specialties, and assumed they could only improve at whatever they did first or most easily.]

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[Huh. That would explain it, I suppose. I confess doing non-biological things—by which I mean setting things randomly on fire—feels weird.]

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[And this when you've known all your life that a mage can pick up any mage stuff.]

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[Yeah. Well, whichever the reason, I feel much better about making everyone immortal now that I'm no longer potentially stranded in another planet forever.]

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[It'll help, yes.]

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[You know, I'm considering taking one of these animals as a pet.]

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[Are they friendly as well as tasty?]

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[The deerthings are pretty harmless and curious and I feel terrible for eating them, the rabbit-eggplants aren't curious per se but don't do anything, and I would feel awesome if I could ride one of the dinosaurs.]

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[Awww.]

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[Have I mentioned the deerthings are ridiculously huge? They have six legs and are often more than twice my height. The trees are also gorgeous and the view from above's breathtaking.]

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[Well, once we've figured out if there's a way to establish safe two-way transit you can show me.]

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[Unless the tunnel thing closed—and I don't think it did, since we're talking in real time—I don't see why there wouldn't be.]

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[Do you have particular reason to believe we're talking by tunnel and not just across interstellar space?]

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[FTL communication breaks physics enough that I might scream for a few hours if it exists.]

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[Pet, we're magic.]

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[Yeah but there's, like, degrees of breaking physics, and the speed of light is kinda the last one.]

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[Doesn't your tunnel violate lightspeed all by itself?]

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[That... depends. Wormholes and stuff are theoretically possible, but I don't understand enough general relativity to know why.]

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[So why can't my psi-phone be doing its own tunneling?]

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[Well... I suppose if someone did in fact make this tunnel and there was any nonzero amount of targeting then I ought to be freaking out about it much more than I did over the past year.]

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[What do you mean?]

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[Like, I'd been sorta assuming this was a natural phenomenon, but if someone went ahead and actually made the tunnel and targeted it to, like, some habitable planet with life on it and it worked, then I need to freak out for a bit about it.]

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[Why?]

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['Cause of what I just said, about this breaking physics even harder than I was already used to. I'm very uncomfortable about living in a universe that's perfectly well-behaved according to simple mathematical laws that apply everywhere except when a creature of a certain specific species thinks really hard at it!]

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[I feel like it is a little late for you to be having this crisis.]

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[Yeah that's my point, I had this nice little exception around it in my brain, like surely we're not really breaking any laws, maybe we're drawing energy from somewhere else and it's not literally being created out of nowhere, or maybe the laws are a little bit different than we all thought, but this means everything's wrong! Augh!] 

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[Is there some reason those explanations can't apply to superluminality?]

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[Yes! Subluminality is a really really big part of physics! It breaks causality if you go faster than light! Kinda!]

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[Pet, I'm a precog. I break causality a dozen times before my lunch break.]

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[Not necessarily! Precognition could just be very good simulation!]

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[On the calories in an omelette I'm simulating thirty seconds of a world?]

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[The energy could come from somewhere else, I don't know, my house of cards is collapsing!]

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[You're adorable, lovely.]

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[Aaaugh!]

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[Awwwww. Did the physics not be uniform in the presence of magic at you.]

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[Yes! Yes it did! Can you make it stop?]

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[Pet, I'd be out of a job. And you might be suddenly much harder to bring home.]

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[Aaauuuuggghhh!]

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[I love you.]

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[I love you, too.]

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[Is there anything in particular you'd like me to have ready for you when you come home?]

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[Clothes. Dry ones, that I can slip into after a shower.]

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[I can do that.]

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[Should I do anything? Maybe light a fire or something while waiting—it's a rainforest here, either equatorial or the year's very long, there don't seem to be proper seasons, and everything's really big. Oh and the moons are boring.]

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[I'll let you know when we find the cave so you can start being obviously findable. Boring?]

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[Yeah, not really pretty, they're kinda just—there. Our moon's much prettier.]

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[Oh well.]

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[It's still something to see more than one, but I think the landscape's pretty enough without taking that into account, and that's only this one rainforest.]

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[I wonder if a case can be made that you own the planet.]

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[...ooooh, yes, this planet's mine, no one lived in it before and now I do and it's mine!]

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[Well, you'll have to defend it if anybody wants it, but I can go stealthier on getting the cave found.]

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[I can just plant dinosaurs on the entrance and charge for admittance!]

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[Pet, there are other mages.]

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[Five dinosaurs!]

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[Pet.]

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[I'm just being silly. I'm not sure what the consequences of having the planet be mine would be, and what kind of power I'd have over it. I'd make you queen, of course.]

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[Well, naturally. Although in the shorter term you'd just be able to charge expeditions and people who want to extract resources from it.]

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[Yeah, but then we could start a settlement—I had a year to do it, why didn't I think of that?]

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[Busy trying to survive?]

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[It wasn't actually that hard after the first few months, it turns out uncontrolled biomagery can kill a lot of things very fast, even if their size here means not as fast as back home, and I did look up survival stuff when I was twelve and returned to civilization.]

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[What have you been doing, then? You must've been so bored.]

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[Thinking about magic and trying to find the cave. It's really well-hidden, or maybe it got closed off by magic or rubble or something. And even if surviving wasn't terribly complicated, living in these conditions was quite time-consuming by itself.]

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[I bet. My poor lovely, I'm so glad you're all right.]

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[I am, too, and I'm glad you found me, even if I don't quite understand why.]

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[What do you mean, why?]

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[Well... why you thought I was alive and such? It's been a really long time, and you must've derailed your plans for magic very completely to get to talk to me on this minuscule chance...]

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[Oh, not that much. I do my optimization work while I'm thinking about other things, I worked on this while I was talking to people in general. My dedicated now-it's-time-to-work-on-magic hours are all about precognition, I'm just more mindful about how I approach everything else.]

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[Oh. I guess that makes sense. ...and did you? Think I was alive, that is?]

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[I didn't know. But once I could talk to anybody I knew I wanted to talk to you.]

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[Well, I'm—glad. Really glad. I've missed you so much. And I'm still wearing your collar—it's a little bit worse for the wear, but.]

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[Well, it's chainmail. It's supposed to hold up.]

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[Yeah.—Did you, um, find someone else?]

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[No, lovely.]

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[Oh. It'd've been okay, if you had.]

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[Even if I hadn't thought you might be alive and hadn't had a way to find out it would have taken me longer than you've been gone.]

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[I guess. I love you. I love being yours. Even if technically we've been around each other for strictly less time than I spent here.]

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[I love you too.]

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[...this is all kinda ridiculous, isn't it. Getting stuck on another planet. Maybe getting to own it, by some legal trick or other.]

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[Little bit, yes.]

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[How long do you think it'd take you to—rescue me?]

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[Depends how hard it is to find the cave from your description.]

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[Should I try to start building a settlement somewhere?]

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[Doesn't seem urgent; for this to be viable at all we have to be able to go back and forth freely and you can always do it later.]

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[Yeah but on the other hand I've spent the past year doing nothing but magic and walking around and it will probably still take a while for me to be found.]

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[Days certainly, but probably not months. But if you want to build something go right ahead.]

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[Enh. I might just spend these days talking to you when you're free instead, that's also very interesting.]

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[Can you not talk to me while you build things?]

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[I'm not sure how much attention learning to do it as I do it would require, but yeah probably.]

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[Well, I'll usually be able to talk to you with occasional short distractions. You must've been so lonely.]

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[Desperately. I'd probably keep looking for the tunnel for a while and if I completely failed to find it for any longer I might have just focused on keeping myself immortal and then figuring out how to mage teleportation or even tunnelling or something.]

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[Teleportation would be so great.]

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[Yeah, but it'd probably take forever, I'd get back on Earth and find spaceships or something.]

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[...you realize the moon landing was before you were even born, right?]

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[I meant generalized ones, going to Mars and such, not a dying U.S. government program.]

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[And Pathfinder landed in ninety-seven.]

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[You know what I mean!]

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[Yes I do.]

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[Anyway! You found me, so none of that matters, I won't need to develop teleportation in two hundred years.]

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[I'm sure it wouldn't have taken you that long.]

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[I actually have no idea how long it could have, seeing as no one's ever done it, whereas people have in fact turned themselves and loved ones immortal before.]

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[We don't know no one's ever done it.]

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[I guess,] she sends dubiously. [But this does not raise my opinion of past mages.]

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[What would?]

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[It being really really hard.]

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[Wouldn't that just leave your opinion of mages where it is? You're assuming it's hard.]

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[I have an uncertainty distribution over possibilities, like it being hard, it being easy but no one having thought of it, someone having thought of it but not shared, et cetera. If I find out that it being hard was the correct hypothesis my opinion of them will raise from the current mix.]

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[Fair enough.]

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[Have you told anyone else about finding me yet? And by the way, what were you doing when you did, just now?]

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[Told Alex. When I did what?]

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[When you found me. Are you at work or at home or?]

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[I was on the bus, I'm home now.]

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[Mmhm. What do you think you should do, now, to find the cave and stuff?]

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[Take a week off, go visit Renée's, get a Jeep and a remote control car I can stick a camera on.]

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[...that image is kinda adorable.]

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[Oh?]

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[You controlling a little car with a camera zooming around in the wilderness.]

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[I wouldn't have it zoom too far, just go and get video and come back. Then I'd send it with like a rat or something to make sure it's safe both ways and you aren't a fluke.]

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[A fluke how?]

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[If the portal is usually fatal or something? Otherwise it's hard to say why there wouldn't be lots of crosspollination of stuff between the planets.]

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[...good point. Although the cave wasn't super shallow, and it's a rainforest over here, maybe the climates just don't align well enough for anything to stick.]

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[I'd still expect some microorganisms or something...]

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[Would those have noticeably changed anything in the past few hundred years or however long this has been around?]

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[Not necessarily, I guess. You haven't gotten sick or anything?]

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[No, actually, but that might be my magic doing stuff without telling me, wouldn't be the first time.]

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[Huh.]

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[It's a bit more complicated than the taste bud things of last time, but I did start steering it towards keeping me safe from poisons, it might've somehow generalized beyond that.]

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[Your magic is less tame than mine.]

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[It is. It kinda suits me, though, I like it.]

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[Good, you're stuck with it.]

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[I wonder if people's magic is influenced by their personality and style like that.]

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[Not sure I've ever seen a study on it.]

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[Well we could collect some anecdotal evidence—although now that we're not at school anymore that's a bit harder.]

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[I did networking, remember?]

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[...right. I'm not sure how my contacts will react after I disappeared for a year. "Hi, there, how've you been? Yeah, good, good, got stuck on another planet, had to gruesomely kill lots of dinosaurs, rabbit-eggplants are cute though. Say, do you like your magic?"]

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[Well, I have no idea how to put you in touch with Jackson, but I should be able to dig up emails for most people you knew from school.]

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[I had his phone number written down somewhere but who knows where it is now. He's probably still at school, though, he was younger. But I should probably email the others to explain this, yeah—after we deal with it.]

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[Yup. ...I'm sort of assuming that you've been appallingly lonely and I should just keep talking until you're back on Earth.]

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[Well, at some point we'll probably need to sleep, and you have to work or talk to your employers to get that week off or something, you shouldn't, uh, disrupt your life over me.]

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[Yeah, I meant except for when you're sleeping, but I can tell my manager I need a week without interrupting the conversation.]

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[Well, yeah, I have in fact been appallingly lonely and might not be very good at speaking with my mouth when we meet. Maybe I should practice that for the next few days.]

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[Well, one advantage of the telepathy is I'll be able to kiss you and hold a conversation at the same time, but it would be good to actually hear your voice, too.]

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[Ooh, multitasking, I approve. There's even more than kissing we can do while talking...]

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[Pet, if you can string together sentences during certain portions of the reunion I will be disappointed in myself.]

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[Okay, maybe not talking, but I'm sure I can find more ways to express my feelings with this new avenue available. Even absolute silence communicates something, after all.]

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[This is true.]

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[It'd be particularly nice if this could be used to express more than words. I'd love it if you had full access to what's going on in my head those times.]

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[That would be delicious. One day.]

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[I miss you,] she whines mentally.

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[Aww, pet. I love you. I'll find you soon.]

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[I love you, too,] she sighs. [And I know you will.]

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[What time of day is it there?]

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[Just shy of midday.]

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[All right, so it'll be night here first unless the days there are a lot shorter.]

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[Not that much shorter, no, and I'm more-or-less used to here, now.]

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[No trouble adjusting your sleep cycle? I've heard that's supposed to be difficult.]

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[I've been here over a year, it took me a while but eventually I got it. Adjusting it back is gonna be a right pain, though.]

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[It's okay, you can have as long as you need.]

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[The joys of being unemployed and out of school.]

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[I've been assuming you'll just move in with me. At least as an interim measure, you might want your own place for a while to see what that's like, but I've got the place, rent won't go up just because you're in it...]

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[There is... very little I'd want more in life than to live with you, to be frank.]

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[Good.]

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[I might even not grumble about mooching.]

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[Pet.]

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[I know, I know, I've had a while to meditate on it, but I'd want to be contributing at least a little bit anyway. If I'm not a burden, then if I generate income it'll be extra.]

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[It doesn't have to be directly monetary. I currently go out to eat a lot and have a cleaning service and stuff, you could help out around the apartment even if you didn't go out and land a job right away.]

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[True, eating out's expensive. And I could get that almost-not-predatory-at-all contract thing, now Tobias has less than no say in what I can or cannot sign.]

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[You could, if that seems like a good idea when you read it over again.]

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[It seemed pretty nice last time, although that could've been just in comparison to having to live with him.]

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[Exactly. You might prefer to focus full time on expanding what you've got without entangling yourself and then go into business yourself or get hired on a less contractual basis.]

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[Yeah. It was a pretty productive year in the jungle.]

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[Well, you'll need to be able to work on other people to get paid to do it, but good.]

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[I know, it proceeds more-or-less simultaneously. The delay between ways I can change myself and ways I can change other people has more to do with learning how to generalize stuff I can already do to me than learning something new. Although I can't do the genderstuff to other people yet, maybe I could focus on that and get hired at one of those very high-paying sex-change places to get lots of money early and then focus on everything else.]

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[I think that's quite high margin, yes.]

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[I have no idea how hard that would be to generalize, I got it for myself in the wilderness but I was terribly bored and very motivated and it's unusually specific to myself.]

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[Unusually specific how?]

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[It's... a lot of stuff at the same time, but it's all packaged into only one thing, which is turning boy-me into girl-me or vice-versa, and I don't have a good grasp of the constituent parts like I do for, say, healing a bruise or something. It's just this big instinctual black box.]

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[Well, you'll get it if you focus enough.]

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[Perforce I will, just don't know how long it'll take.]

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[Only one way to find out.]

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[Mmhm. ...by the way, it just occurred to me that the elections were last year, who won?]

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[Pike.]

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[Quelle surprise,] she sighs, butchering the pronunciation even in her head. [...hey, you know what'd be cool, telepathy that doesn't work off languages.]

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[It's in the work-while-I-do-the-thing category. While we have this conversation I'm thinking about how I'd add stuff like that.]

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[And you got the cheaty eidetic memory, too, bet you're loving it.]

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[It's nice that I can remember you like it was yesterday.]

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[...it's really nice that that's what you're thinking of.]

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[I missed you.]

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[I missed you, too. Like crazy. You're still the most important thing in my life.]

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[Why'd you run away?]

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[Oh, ma'am. I—it wasn't—I didn't mean to run away, I-] She pauses, groping for words.

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She continues: [When I talked to Tobias, he went on about how a real dom wouldn't go through all that hassle for their sub, that you were just playing at it and trying too hard, that I was being a drain and a burden, and of course he's full of poop. You... said something to me, then, that, I don't remember the exact words, but something like if I didn't think belonging to you meant you were supposed to take care of me then you didn't know what I thought it meant. And, and that makes sense, you're right, but Renée never agreed to that, Alex never agreed to that.] She pauses again.

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[They were helping me out because I couldn't look after you on my own.]

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[I know, but that wasn't... I wasn't being a burden to you, I was being a burden to them. It—didn't feel fair. I could, could accept help with the lawyer, there'd be no way I'd be able to cover all my expenses then, and I'd get rich later and pay them back, or you could do it, but I didn't want to be any heavier to carry than I strictly had to. So I'd planned on moving somewhere else, maybe getting a job like at McDonald's or something, so I'd at least not be relying on them for everything. It was—I wanted to feel like there was stuff in my life that I could say was mine, I was getting myself.]

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Sigh.

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[It's—silly, in hindsight, and was obviously just what Tobias wanted, or close enough—he never did manage to get a good enough read of me to make me react exactly how he wanted me to. He wanted you to lose and I—made that happen.]

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[Yep.

Well. I declare your punishment for running away to be more than a year on an uninhabited planet with dinosaurs. Don't let it happen again.]

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[It won't, I promise. I'm so, so, so sorry.]

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[Manager approved my time off.]

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[Oh great!] Pause. [You know, I'm a bit skeptical of my ability to let go of you for a while when I see you again.]

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[Should I also ask my manager about 'bring your pet to work day' or should I just expect to have to swat you for excess clinging?]

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[Yes.]

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[I can probably bring you to work once or twice but not indefinitely.]

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[I suppose I can live with that.]

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[Good girl.]

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[I wonder what your co-workers would think.]

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[Probably "oh that explains why she didn't talk about her love life".]

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[Because she had a pet stranded on another planet?]

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[Yup.]

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Mental giggle. [Did they bug you a lot about that kind of thing?]

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[Not a lot, just, people wonder and I didn't want to get into it.]

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[Makes sense. What should our policy be about telling people about this? And should we maybe see if a lawyer has something to say about who owns planets they accidentally land on?]

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[Way ahead of you, no answer yet though. Telling people about it - you were missing, you turned up, I guess. Details seem uncalled for.]

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[I guess. It must've been—kinda awful, not knowing.]

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[Yeah.]

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[What did you think had happened?]

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[I thought you'd got yourself killed somehow.]

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[When I got here it was raining a lot and a dinosaur was chasing me and it hadn't yet occurred to me that I can basically wreck anything biological if I believe in myself, and I almost decided to jump into a turbid river to escape.]

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[Oh pet.]

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[The 'raining a lot' part turned out to be a pretty consistent feature of the terrain.]

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[We can hang out in Arizona for a bit before I take you home if you like.]

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[Yes, please. If I never have to see rain again it'll—well, be kinda sad, but I definitely wan't to stay somewhere dry for a while.]

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[I'll have to do some remote work, but I can finagle that.]

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[You don't need to inconvenience yourself over me, ma'am. And where are you living?]

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[New York.]

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[Ooh, cool, I've always wanted to see New York.]

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[I like it. Very dense. They've got an elementalist doing air quality now, too.]

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[Does it rain a lot there? Wait, at this time of year it's probably just snowing, right, snow is definitely a huge improvement over this blasted rain.]

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[It's not Forks but there is precipitation sometimes.]

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[Enh, it's fine, honestly I'd actually love to throw myself at the snow and make an angel right about now.]

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[I'll take you to Central Park when there's good snow cover.]

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[Eeeee! ...you know, speaking of Forks, I've never actually met your father in person.]

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[We'll have to fix that. I'm planning to spend the first week of March there, I can bring you.]

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[Sounds like a plan. I'll probably have had time to get used to not-rain again by then.]

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[I didn't know you hated the rain particularly.]

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[I dislike the damp—cold and damp is depressing, hot and damp is uncomfortable—and I really hate having to wear wet clothes.]

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[Well, if the place is warm and uninhabited I suppose you could run around in the nude all the time.]

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[Which I did in fact start doing here except for shoes because having to heal my feet and slash or watch where I step all the time is really annoying, but my shoes are pretty banged up by now and anyway there's only marginal gain in the comfort front from wearing them in this weather.]

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[I'll bring you clothes.]

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[I still have non-destroyed ones here, I just never use them anymore, but yeah, I'd be going back to your place barely decent.]

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[I can bring you dry clothes.]

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[Thank you.]

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[Neither my stuff nor Alex's is overwhelmingly likely to fit you that well but they'll at least hold you until you can go shopping.]

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[Yeah. Alex's things are probably more likely to fit me better.]

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[Yeah. I'll have him set some stuff aside. Did you grow much?]

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[I d—oh, I'm actually a bit older in body than I ought to be?]

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[...on purpose, I assume?]

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[Yeah, when I got here I made myself a bit older—I couldn't do much, it was never something I specialized in—so I could get whatever marginal physical improvements that'd get me.]

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[Well, about how much taller are you?]

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[I have no idea! I sort of made myself older then and then didn't touch it again, I dunno how tall I'd be now or how tall I was back then. Couple of inches, maybe?]

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[Do you have any things with you that are known lengths?]

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[Known lengths, no. I'm bigger than my clothes but they're destroyed enough there's little information to be gotten there; I still fit my shoes but they were bigger than my feet then and now they're tight, and it's not impossible my magic decided to make my feet in particular smaller than they'd otherwise have been.]

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[Well, I'll get something that's big on Alex. What's the shoe size?]

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She gives a number.

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[...is that in men's or women's sizes?]

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[Men's.]

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[Okay, you'll fit in Alex's shoes then.]

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[Thank you, ma'am.]

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[You're welcome, pet.]

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[What time is it there, now?]

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[Seven. Leftovers from the ramen place for dinner.]

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[Tasty. I'm gonna have car-sized bird and giant fruit salad for lunch.]

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[Giant fruit salad? Have you come up with names for any of the species of things?]

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[Deerthing, rabbit-eggplant, car-sized bird, motorcycle-sized bird, bat-vulture, fluorescent apple-melon, spiky pomegranate, fuzz-fuzz...]

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[Fuzz-fuzz?]

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[There are these fuzzy eight-eyed things that like living in caves formed by tree roots.]

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[Are they cute?]

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[They're a weird mix of cute and creepy. Definitely creepy when all you can see are a bunch of sets of eight eyes shining in the darkness during a thunderstorm.]

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[Aw, pet.]

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[They don't actually do anything, they're herbivores, but the associations with spiders are very strong. Oh there are also snakes as wide as sofas. Those are fun.]

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[Literally, like, you can ride them, or not actually that fun?]

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[Not actually that fun, I'd love to ride them but I have not really been able to tame any animals here. They don't really bother me, though, unlike the dinosaurs, they mostly ignore me.]

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[Well, I'm glad that not that many of these things are trying to eat you.]

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[Well, there are these six-legged cheetah-wolf things that hunt in packs and they actually give me a run for my money when I see them, but I'm smaller than their usual prey and they have a hard time compensating for that and end up overshooting often and then I have enough time to kill them.]

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[And you have a way to keep things away while you sleep?]

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[Fire. Animals here are really not used to that.]

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[Good.]

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[You know, when your sustenance is megafauna you really start appreciating the usefulness of salt and refrigerators.]

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[You don't have salt? From anywhere? I think salt is supposed to be important.]

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[I'm probably getting salt from animals, but I mean, I don't really have salt to, like, preserve food and stuff.]

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[Well, hopefully at least some of the megafauna are scavengers?]

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[The bat-vultures and the motorcycle-sized birds are and also some lizards and I'm pretty sure the cheetah-wolves eat pretty much anything.]

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[Good. So you aren't just laying waste to the ecosystem.]

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[The forest is pretty large, I don't think I could singlehandedly do that even if I tried.]

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[The animals sound pretty large too!]

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[Everything here is pretty large, it's ridiculous, have I mentioned the bugs? I think I've mentioned the bugs. At least there aren't any spider-equivalents, that'd be terrifying.]

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[Are you especially scared of spiders?]

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[Not specifically, no, it's just, they're spiders. There's this strangely pretty almost-a-spider thing that's white and about as big as my head with lots of legs which I thought for the longest time was actually a plant spore or something, reminds me a bit of a cross between a dandelion and tumbleweed.]

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[That does sound pretty.]

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[Yeah, it doesn't really do anything, and when there's wind sometimes you see lots of it being blown around, it's why I thought it was a plant, but when there isn't wind for a while it actually starts walking.]

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[Maybe people will want to keep them as low-maintenance pets. Do you know what they eat?]

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[I think they're pollinators, actually, they sometimes land on flowers and stay there for a bit before flying on.]

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[Cool!]

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[And the flowers are also, of course, enormous. Not many at ground level, some near the river, but up there in the trees, yeah.]

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[Are they pretty?]

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[Yeah, but relative to the general prettiness of everything else here less so than ours are relative to the general prettiness of stuff on Earth. More or less.]

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[Well, are they prettier than typical Earth flowers?]

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[Yeah. Also typically wider around than people.]

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[Wow.]

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[Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if someday I found bacteria as large as my eye.]

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[Ew.]

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[I don't really have a disgust reaction around bacteria, to be honest.]

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[Which is funny, considering why we have disgust reactions...]

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[Well, those evolved when we didn't even know bacteria existed!]

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[I know, it's just funny.]

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[Frankly if I found huge bacteria I'd be tempted to poke them. I probably wouldn't, but the temptation'd be there.]

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[I wonder what they'd feel like.]

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[That'd be part of the temptation! I'd bet on something like an egg's yolk.]

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[Yeah, that's what I was thinking too.]

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[It's actually pretty weird that everything here is so big. Like, presumably at some point it was all microscopic, so where are the intermediate stages? Tiny species?]

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[Are you positive there aren't any? That you're not stepping on dust mite type stuff all the time?]

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[I might be, yeah, but like, the head-sized not-spiders are about the smallest things I've actually noticed here.]

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[Couldn't tell you, maybe there's some reason not to be within that size range which just isn't obvious...]

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[Or maybe it's just that smaller things don't happen to live in this particular rainforest.]

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[I'd find that weirder, actually...]

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[Really? Why?]

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[In Earth ecosystems there's generally a pretty smooth range of sizes of things. I'd expect something like 'everything is big' to have to do with... the atmosphere mix, not something local. There would otherwise be a niche for something from a neighboring biome to come be that size in.]

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[True, I guess. Maybe everything that size lives underground or something?]

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[Could be. Or inside the giant trees or something.]

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[Yeah. Once we start colonizing this world we might find out.]

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[Scientists will be so excited.]

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[Right? This place's a goldmine. ...speaking of which, I bet there's all sorts of mineral resources here, too.]

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[Probably!]

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[Even if it turns out I can't own the planet I bet the exploitation of resources alone...]

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[Well, it'll be a big deal for somebody, but you might not turn out to have any rights over it at all.]

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[Well, if I don't have any rights over it at all I can just not tell anyone where it is.]

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[Might have to to even find out if you have such rights.]

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[Rights to not tell people where I found this place?]

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[No, I mean it might depend on whether the government owns the land or something like that, and you might have to explain where the place is to find that out.]

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[Isn't information like that publicly available?]

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[You think you can find the place on a map? I guess maybe if you tried creatively enough...]

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[Well, can at least approximately estimate it.]

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[Most of the land in Arizona is actually federal, we could try to find out what the rules would be if you'd discovered a diamond mine or something...]

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[Mmhm. Wonder if we can buy land off the government or something.]

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[It might be that we have to tell them about the diamond mine, or something.]

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[Hmm, which would probably make it illegal to economically exploit the planet without telling the government.]

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[I don't know any of this for sure, it just might be really hard to navigate finding out without saying where you found it.]

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[Yeah, and this is kinda really unprecedented. It'd be so nice for us to be queens of another world, though.]

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[Oh yes.]

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[Probably a huge hassle too, though, getting subjects and whatnot.]

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[Especially if we have to put customs in a cave.]

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[Well, we'd probably make it into something other than a cave then, build something around it and stuff.]

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[We don't know how the portal works, it might be anchored to the cave.]

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[Then we could build something around the cave, or in front of it.]

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[Yeah, true enough.]

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[When are you coming to Arizona?]

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[Plane tomorrow.]

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[Wow you're efficient.]

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[And I can throw around some money now.]

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[That must be fun.]

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[It's nice!]

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[How does it work? Do you get paid for every question you answer, or?]

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[Salaried, with bonuses if I answer things off the clock.]

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[That sounds cozy. What kinds of questions do they even ask?]

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[Bunches of stuff but I'm actually not supposed to talk about most of it.]

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[Oh. ...that kinda makes me want to know even more but I won't ask.]

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[Sorry, pet.]

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[It's alright. It's also really cool, having classified stuff like that.]

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[It's classified mostly on principle, like medical information is, rather than because anything would actually happen if I told you.]

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[Ssshhhh I'm imagining all the secret stuff you must know.]

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[I love you.]

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[Governmental agencies consulting my dom the uberpsion to figure out what their next action must be! What should they decide? To start a war or not? To send the CIA in that super secret mission or not? Only the most powerful people on Earth can know about it!] Mental giggle. [I love you, too.]

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[Bear in mind my range is thirty seconds.]

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[Sure, that's what you must tell anyone who asks, wink wink nudge nudge.]

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[Honestly, pet.]

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[I have a year and a half's worth of bottled up silliness!]

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[Shouldn't you have bottled up everything in equal measure so it ought to come out in the normal ratio?]

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[Not really, the other things don't accumulate, or not as much. I don't need to, like, let out five hundred days of weather remarks.]

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[Oh, I thought that's what you were doing.]

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[I have five hundred days of loathing for this particular weather, and five hundred days of finding everything around me bizarrely pretty, that's different.]

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[The distinction is lost on me.]

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[Well, if I had ended up in a place with pleasanter weather or plainer surroundings I wouldn't be commenting on them at all.]

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[You don't think it'd be remarkable? "I'm on an alien planet. Meh."]

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[Not about the weather!]

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[I think most things about an alien planet are remarkable. You weren't impressed by the moons but you mentioned 'em.]

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[True, but only once, is what I mean. I don't have lots of bottled feelings about the moons like I have about the weather or the giant mosquitoes or the complete lack of silliness in my life.]

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[I'm sure the fuzz-fuzzes make a terrible audience.]

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[They don't even react! They just kinda stare at me like I'm invading their personal space or something.]

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[Are you invading the fuzzes' personal space, pet.]

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[Not anymore, but when I got here I kinda had to go somewhere to not be stormed on. Or chased by dinosaurs. Or nosed by deerthings. Or summarily ignored by giant snakes.]

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[Being ignored by giant snakes, the horror.]

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[You won't know what really being ignored feels like until you've been ignored by a giant snake. And you won't know what really being judged feels like until eight judgmental eyes have stared at you out of a patch of fuzz.]

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[Are they soft, or have you not checked?]

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[Not checked, they're very skittish.]

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[And they don't look tasty?]

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[Not really, and I'd feel judged by those eyes if I tried to eat one.]

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[You're pretty sure none of the things are people, right?]

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[They don't act like what I'd expect people to act, don't seem to have language, other than the shape and size they could be regular earthly animals.]

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[Okay.]

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[Nothing came to me to communicate, the deerthings nose me and then walk away, other animals either ignore me, run away, or try to eat me. I've even tried talking to them—not that I expect them to understand English but just to see if they recognized that it was an actual attempt at communication—to no avail.]

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[Might be worth having a psion who detects minds swing through just to double check before going nuts on planet ownership.]

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[Yeah, especially 'cause I didn't really explore much because I wanted to make sure I wouldn't get too far from the gate, so as far as I know there could be sprawling civilizations on the other side of the planet.]

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[Yup. ...Probably nobody there though.]

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[Yeah. I do wonder why whoever made this gate never told anyone.]

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[Maybe a dinosaur ate them.]

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[That's what I figured, too, and it'd be—a real shame. And makes me imagine what other things like this might be around and undiscovered because of silly accidents like that.]

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[I wonder if the cave is more like the holy grail of persistent magic or more like psionic tech. The latter would explain why there hasn't been cross-contamination, although not how you'd activate it by complete accident... might also mean non-mages can't go through...]

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[What do you mean?]

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[Persistent magic is generally considered impossible. Psionic tech is not actually persistently magic, it's just persistently responsive to magic.]

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[Oh, so the gate could be something like that, that mages can... mage at... and open or go through? Possible, I suppose.]

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[Yeah, and it might mean I can't send a little RC car through after all.]

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[Well that'd be terrible. But I wasn't actually maging at anything when I went through—well, I suppose there might have been some background level of constant magery going on, way my magic works.]

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[I might still be able to help; thirty seconds is more than enough time for you to report results of looking in a particular direction.]

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[Yeah, that's clever. I could try doing general background magery all the time, too, if that'll keep the gate open, maybe.]

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[You didn't need it before... which is also not how psionic tech works, but this is clearly unprecedented somehow whether my guess is right or not...]

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[It could be natural, somehow.]

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[Also unprecedented!]

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[Yeah. ...you told me, a while ago, that trying to backchain precognition doesn't work. What actually happens if you try? Do you just fail to precog at all?]

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[I precog, but I precog that I'm not going to get anything when I precog in the future.]

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[You see yourself failing to see the future? Do you ever fail to see the future otherwise?]

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[If I reach out of range, which is basically exactly what I'm doing if I try to backchain.]

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[How annoying.]

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[I also don't get anything if I try to precog when I'm going to fall asleep.]

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[How would that even work? Thirty seconds before I'm asleep I'm pretty much no longer conscious enough to think about anything.]

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[Sometimes if I'm really tired I can fall asleep that quickly from a state of being able to try magic.]

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[Fair, I guess. It'd still be really nice if you figured out backchaining, that's pretty much insta-win on everything.]

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[I know! Alas, no such luck.]

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[Yet.]

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[Yet.]

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[I wonder if I should add 'trying to create space tunnels' to my priority list somewhere.]

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[And then you can make sure you will own wherever they pop out.]

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[Yeah. It's so ridiculously far from my current area of expertise that I think I should probably just figure out generalized immortality first anyway, though.]

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[I approve this priority.]

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[I'm glad I pass muster with the most amazing person on Earth.]

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[I love you.]

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[I love you, too!]

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They eat together—or, at any rate, at the same time—and continue talking until Isabella cannot physically stay up any longer, and by the time she wakes up the next morning Sadde's already going to bed.

When he wakes up, he tries to be the one to start the conversation, not entirely sure on how to do it. [Ma'am?]

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[Morning, pet.]

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[Afternoon! Or is it not afternoon yet there? I lost track.]

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[It's eleven-thirty. I'm in line for lunch. How are you?]

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[Ridiculously happy yesterday was not a dream, you?]

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[Likewise; also starving, didn't have much time for a full breakfast after staying up that late and being groggy in the morning.]

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[Aww, you could've gone to bed earlier. Or slept in.]

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[Couldn't sleep in, had a plane to catch. I'm on my layover now and if I don't get my burger in five minutes I'm gonna collapse.]

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[Please don't collapse, ma'am, that'd be awful and disconcert people around you and make me feel very guilty.]

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[I will probably get my burger in five minutes. I shall resist the temptation to describe it to you because I can't feed you any of it at this time.]

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[...you could do it anyway.]

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[Would you like that?]

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[Yeah.]

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[- ooh here it is yum. I got one with everything on it, two burgers and three kinds of cheese and bacon and a fried egg and red onion and avocado and whatever this house sauce is and pickles and jalapenos and it's completely falling apart while I bite it but it's so so good. They bake their own buns, this was absolutely worth twelve dollars that is not just airport markup - came with shoestring fries - got a milkshake too, Oreo malt -]

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[Okay now I need to go get breakfast because that sounds delicious and I bet burgers made of megafauna are gonna be delicious too but I miss everything else. I haven't had a milkshake in over a year.]

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[I will feed you all the everything, lovely. It'll be just like when you learned to taste over again.]

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[Oh that was a lovely time yes please.]

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[Soon as I bring you home. I'll bring a snack to the cave with the dry clothes. Anything in particular you want?]

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[I don't really know, there's so much stuff! Um, french fries?]

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[They'd be cold by the time I brought them to the cave. Potato chips?]

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[That works, honestly even cold french fries would.]

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[Perhaps you have forgotten how disappointing cold french fries are.]

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[Maybe, it's been a while.]

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[We can get you hot ones. Just not in the cave.]

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[Fair enough, potato chips are fine.]

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[And some other things. I'll surprise you. Ow brainfreeze.]

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[You're so cute. I love you.]

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[I love you too.]

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[When's your next flight?]

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[Boards in ten. Fortunately, this is not a cell phone, so I can keep talking in the air.]

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He giggles mentally. [Honestly is there even a reason to ever speak out loud with this as an option, it's so handy.]

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[It can't quite do nonverbal noises as expressively as - actual noises - yet.]

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[Well, for nonverbal noises, especially certain ones, we can use voice, but for actual conversation?]

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[Also people's faces move differently when they're actually talking than when they're doing this.]

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[Yeah I remember you talking to Alex, it's kinda adorable.]

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[Yeah, but if he's in earshot and what I have to say isn't private I talk to him aloud instead. It's somehow friendlier?]

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[Well, if there are other people around that are part of the conversation sure, but otherwise, we could spend a lot of time doing other things—oh you could gag me -]

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[That's true, I could.]

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Closest approximation to a mental whine he can manage.

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[I missed you.]

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[I still do! I have not revised my estimate, I still think I'm gonna be clinging to you for a long time when we see each other again.]

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[You may do that.]

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[Thank you, ma'am. ...do you still have my leash?]

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[I lost it when I moved, I don't know where it wound up. We can get you a new one.]

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[Okay.

 

 

[Kinda really wish I could send more than words.]

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[Sorry, pet.]

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[You don't have to be. I'm—it had never registered on the radar as a possibility but now that it has I just really want to share everything with you. I know I'm not exactly shy about what I feel for you but it suddenly feels not enough. I want you to feel it, too. I love you very much, I can't wait to see you again, the idea that it'll be merely days until I do makes me paradoxically not want to sleep, I keep entertaining the most ridiculous scenarios of you deciding to just take me before we even reach your place -]

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[Who says it's ridiculous, we'll be in a Jeep in the middle of nowhere.]

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Squeak.

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[I wish I could see the look on your face right now.]

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[I think the look you probably have on your face right now might be etched forever in my brain, ma'am.]

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[I'm trying to keep my actual facial expressions restrained, don't want to bother my seatmate.]

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[Well, then the facial expression you'd be making if we were in fact alone with each other.]

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[Oh yeah.]

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[I maybe ought to practice at those, otherwise I might end up making some... very undignified faces in very inappropriate places.]

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[One of several things you will have to readjust to.]

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[I'm a fast learner, presumably even faster relearner.]

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[I will have high expectations of you.]

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[I will strive not to disappoint you.]

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[Good boy.]

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[In the meantime between now and my daring rescue I will entertain myself with the highly contrived scenarios of same I pictured.]

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[Oh will you.]

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[Yes. I could maybe describe some of them...?]

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[I have a window seat and will avert my face from my poor easily traumatized seatmate. Go on, pet.]

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So he starts describing the scenarios in vivid detail. They're all of them plausible even if some might require quite different mental states to sincerely occur.

And he has come up with several of them.

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[I love you.]

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[I love you, too.]

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[Best in-flight entertainment.]

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[And not being observed by anyone does have its perks.]

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[Lucky you. I will just have to remember all this for later on. Fortunately...]

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[Here's to hoping I might've inspired you to a thing or two...]

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[Wait and see.]

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Squirm. Oh she can't see him squirm. Ngh.

[What time will it be when you arrive?]

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[I land in Phoenix in four hours.]

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[And then Renée's and the Jeep tomorrow?]

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[I'm gonna check if the car rental places at the airport have a Jeep just in case but they probably won't, so yeah, tomorrow.]

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Mental sigh. [Well hopefully you'll be able to find the place tomorrow.]

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[Hopefully.]

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[Do you know where you'll find your test rat?]

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[I'll just buy the kind you're supposed to feed to snakes.]

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[Oh, makes sense. ...I wonder if the sofa-snakes here would even eat rats.]

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[Probably too small for them to bother with.]

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[Yeah, given that I am.]

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[You are indeed larger than a rat!]

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Giggle.

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[If it turns out you have to be a mage to go through you will just have to find the place, though. I'll precog you along, but... thirty seconds. You could start now if you wanted.]

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[Start what?]

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[Start looking precog-assisted? In case I can't send you anything from my end to find. You just give me running status reports and I'll tell you where you run into dead ends.]

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[Oh! Right. I'm not sure it's relevantly useful since there aren't obvious ends to be dead, and I've been looking for over a year. My current best guess is that the rain got it buried somehow.]

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[So dig.]

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[It's what I started sorta-doing a while ago but there is a lot of ground to do that in that looks mostly the same everywhere. With the thirty-second thing though I could maybe just form intents to start digging places and see if anything's obvious.]

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[Yup. I mean, if it'll take more than thirty seconds of digging to find something I will not be helpful, but you can at least get cursory cover of the area.]

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[Mmhm. I should probably look for higher ground, first, it was down from wherever it was to get to the river.]

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[Lemme know when you're there.]

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[Will do.] He walks for a while, then eventually reaches a likely-looking place and says, [Might as well start now.]

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[Okay, so, you tell me where you're going to dig - just assign spots names or numbers or something - and then make up your mind that you'll let me know what you find, condense it for simplicity to "worth continuing" and "nothing".]

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[Okay. So I'll start with spot number one...]

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[Nothing.]

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[Number two?]

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[Nothing...]

And so on.

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It's a very large rainforest. It was raining a lot that day.

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A hundred and seventy-one is [Worth continuing.]

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Oh joy!

He continues.

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[- nope you give up on that one.]

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[That's kinda weird slash creepy slash something I don't quite have the words for. One seventy-two?]

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[Nothing. And yeah a bit.]

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[One-seventy-three and—four? I mean, do those people thirty seconds in the future... experience something? How does it work, what kinda thing is actually happening when a different future than the one seen is the actual one?]

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[I don't know, pet. Nothings.]

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[If it was a simulation like what I said—well, that'd be just terrifying.—Five,—six, and—seven?]

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[Don't batch them, if you could cover all those areas in the next thirty seconds you should just designate bigger areas.]

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[-Five, then.]

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[Nothing.]

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And so on.

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[Ballpark how many of these are there?]

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[Um, not sure, maybe one to two thousand?]

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[Okay.]

They can cover a lot of that in a four-hour flight.

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But unfortunately not all of it. And Sadde's guess turns out to be too optimistic.

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[And here I am in Phoenix.]

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[Welcome, I suppose?]

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[I feel very welcomed.]

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[I think I'm probably much farther away than I thought I was from wherever the tunnel is.]

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[How much farther?]

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[I have no idea, as far as I can tell I'm not really but there's only so many failures I can have before I start entertaining the possibility that my whole possibility-space is wrong.]

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[Well, we can check over the rest of what's there when I'm free to look ahead again.]

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[Yeah, and anyway you'll probably be able to inform me more meaningfully once you get the remote control car through.]

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[If it goes. It may not go.]

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[That would be really tragic.]

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[Yeah.]

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[Also what did you mean by 'free to look ahead again'? Aren't you right now?]

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[It's distracting; it's not something I'd like to do while trying to walk at the same time.]

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[Oh, fair enough. What's it like, subjectively?]

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[It's like... flipping ahead a few pages in a book. I can sort of keep an eye on both pages at once but I can only read one at a time.]

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[But I mean, is it a vision, or like imagination, or like actually being there...?]

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[Well, in this case I'm looking ahead for what you telepath me, but when it's visuals it's like a memory of something that hasn't happened.]

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[A particularly distracting memory?]

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[I have to concentrate to do the magic part.]

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[Ah, yeah, fair enough.]

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[It'll get easier, but my actual focus is on range, because I seldom need to precog while I'm walking or anything.]

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[Yeah, that's fair, and range's the part that pays.]

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[Ayep.]

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[What does this part of magic feel like? When you described the eidetic memory thing to me you mentioned it was like reorganizing your brain, but...]

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[Mm, you ever watch a movie and know exactly what the next line is because it was set up so nothing else would fit?]

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[Yeah?]

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[It's like tapping into so much knowledge of what sets up what that I know that for whatever I'm looking for.]

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[That sounds really cool to have.]

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[It's great!]

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[It also sounds like not the kind of magic I'd have, for some reason, if that hypothesis of magic flavor fitting personality or something is true.]

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[Oh, how would it work for you if you were a psion?]

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[Mmm I'm not sure, but I think it'd be more like... some combination of intuition and description? Like I had an ineffable feeling and then when I managed to put it into magic-equivalent-of-words that'd be when I'd get it down, or something.]

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[Not sure I get it.]

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[Okay, so, remember when we met, and you asked me what ten adjectives I'd use to describe myself?]

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[Yeah?]

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[So, I hadn't ever tried to do that, didn't have that cached, but I had a, a feeling, or an intuition, about what such a list would be like if I ever were to try to write it down. And when it came up, I squinted at this intuition for a while and eventually did produce a list that came out right, and which I'd say was the verbal representation of that intuition. I expect if I were a psion my magic would be something like that, there would be lots of intuitions about what I could do, and the process of learning how to do it would be the magic equivalent of putting those intuitions into words.]

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[Huh. But what would actually performing the look-ahead be like?]

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[I think it'd be like fishing for the intuition related to the future and then—sorta—putting it into words as well but more literally? More like imagination than recall.]

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[Huh. It's possible more things are like recall to me now that I'm eidetic.]

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[Yeah. And I may be completely off-base, here, it's unlikely any non-biological magery I do will feel the same so I don't think I ought to expect all different kinds of psionic stuff to.]

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[You never know, it might wind up all filtering through the same sense. Somehow.]

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[That'd be—weird. I suppose I can set random non-targeted stuff on fire, but that feels like pushing- well, I suppose it's not too dissimilar from stretching -]

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[Oh?]

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[You know, how the usual metaphor I go to with bio stuff is like stretching or doing the splits? Setting stuff on fire I'd metaphorize as just randomly pushing stuff, like actually physically pushing it, except with my, uh, 'magical arms' or whatever instead. And it's, like I said, not very targeted pushing.]

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[How not-targeted are we talking here?]

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[I haven't actually tried setting anything on fire with it since I was twelve, I don't remember a lot about it, but it was more-or-less causing a random volume within a certain sphere around me to superheat. Most of the time I wouldn't even hit anything, just air, and there'd be a flash and that's it.]

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[Okay, good on you being careful with that.]

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[Yeah I'd definitely not want to see what damage I'd cause here, I saw some trees being set on fire by thunder during storms and if it weren't for the rain itself it'd have been—bad.]

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[You were able to manually make fires okay?]

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[Yeah, when I was little I researched a lot about survival in the wilderness, after I came back, and I refreshed my knowledge before I—left—this last time, just in case.]

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[Good.]

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[I had kinda promised myself I wouldn't be caught unprepared, at least by this, anymore.]

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[I bet you were real prepared for being stranded on another planet.]

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[Surprisingly so, actually, given how breathable the atmosphere is and how woody the wood is and how foody the animals are. It's just a difference of scale.]

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[How foody the animals are.]

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[They're very foody! If someone actually targeted that tunnel I wouldn't be surprised if that was the criterion they used, the wildlife here is just that tasty.]

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[Sell deerthingburgers. Make a fortune.]

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[Deerthingburgers! Blue strawberry cake! Dinosaur meatballs!]

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[Course you'd have to make sure it's all safe for people who don't biokinese.]

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[Yeah. I didn't biokinese anything in particular when I started eating stuff, though, I only really finished getting reasonably good at toxins and poisons and whatever later, so at least deerthingburgers and dinosaus meatballs should be okay. I was warier of plants.]

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[But the way you work you could have been doing it unconsciously.]

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[Yup.]

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[So FDA testing of some kind.]

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[Yeah. I wonder if they even have protocols for this kind of thing, completely new species. Presumably yes for plants, I guess, for drugs and stuff, but for burgers?]

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[They can probably adapt something, at least.]

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[Probably.]

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[You can get USDA grading on your deerthings.]

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[Grading?]

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[USDA grade whatever?]

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[Like—prime steaks or whatever?]

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[Yeah, like that.]

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[Oh. They'll probably have to invent a new category, these are really good—although I suppose it could just be the case that food this good on Earth is sold in other restaurants than the ones I've been to.]

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[I've been some nice places in New York, manager takes us out every month to ridiculously fancy restaurants. Dunno how it stacks up against deerthing.]

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[Want me to get you some?]

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[I can't biokinese, pet, it might not be okay for me.]

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[Oh, right, that part, eugh.]

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[Alas.]

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[I definitely can't detox other people yet.]

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[We'll get the FDA on it, they'll have somebody who knows what needs doing to check it out.]

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[Mmhm.]

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[And then you can bring me a delicious roasted deerthing filet.]

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[Ooh yes, and there'll be all these new delicious foods you'll be able to handfeed me.]

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[Yep!]

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[I wonder what giant fish sushi tastes like...]

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[Haven't tried it?]

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[I don't think I'd trust even my biokinesis as far as just eating raw stuff from an alien planet!]

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[Naively you'd be at less risk from pathogens and more from the proteins being the wrong way round or something!]

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[You know, I don't think I actually ever gave my magic a good definition of what toxic stuff was, it might as well include prion diseases for all I know.]

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[I think that's a different thing?]

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[It is, but like, it's a thing I consume that makes me sick? I could totally see my magic deciding to say it's the same. Of course, I could also totally see it not, I should meditate on this for a bit to find out.]

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[And then it'll tell you?]

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[I do generally manage to know what I can or can't do, it just turns out to sometimes do things I didn't ask for that are nonetheless in some sense good for me.]

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[I wonder if that's slowing you down or if you're doing it sort of in the background the way I do my optimizations.]

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[I'd bet it's the latter, I never actually spent time thinking about, say, taste buds and stuff, and for all I anthropomorphize my magic I think the most likely way it's doing that is by reacting to my subconscious or something whenever I gendershift.]

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[Ooh, that would be interesting!]

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[Yeah. I mean, whenever I do magic I—get feedback, I don't have any persistent magical effects going on, my transition magic leaves me a wholly nonmagical body after it's done, so unless I'm doing feedbackless magic that's probably when whatever happens, happens.] 

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[Makes sense. And you do it often enough that you could accumulate a lot of tweaks that way.]

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[Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. I mean, it's certainly doing some work behind the curtains, when I pseudo-aged myself up I didn't have to do it separately for both genders, and while I was growing up it developed everything in parallel sort of on its own.]

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[Ooh, that never even occurred to me to wonder, wow.]

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[I actually started going through puberty slightly later as a boy than as a girl.]

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[Oh? How much later?]

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[About six months or so.]

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[What're you using as your identifying-the-start-of-puberty features?]

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[First period as a girl and first time something more interesting than just me feeling good happened when I masturbated as a boy.]

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[Huh. I wonder why the discrepancy.]

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[I think boys tend to go through puberty later than girls in general? But why that'd hold for the same individual at all is a mystery to me. And most people aren't eclipsed, of those only half are mages, of those very few are genderfluid, and of those I might be the only one to have had my eclipse and my two years in the wilderness entirely before puberty.]

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[Possible! If you ever meet another one you should ask.]

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[I do have forever, after all.]

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[Yes you have.]

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[You know, with forever, and especially with forever and with being on another planet, the question of how eclipses not-on-Earth would work becomes much more relevant.]

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[Yeah, that's true, it'll be a huge factor in colonization.]

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[Especially with this place having two moons.]

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[Have either of them eclipsed since you've been there?]

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[Yeah, one of them eclipsed once and the other twice.]

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[I'm so curious what that does, but you'd need such a huge sample of people to be sure you had any information...]

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[Maybe it only works with our moon, which would be ridiculous but honestly everything about our magic system is, or maybe there are other types of magic here, and maybe it won't work here specifically because all moons of a planet need to be eclipsed at the same time and I dunno if that's possible here...]

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[Maybe the way to do it would be to advertise that eclipses here will be under particularly close precognitive supervision, so people who want to make sure that if their kids eclipse it'll be safe can find that a selling point? But then we have to scrape together particularly close precognitive supervision, and if it turns out that the moons are weird in a way that makes more people eclipse I can't cover the population we'd need alone even if we assume I have great range... but if we time it right we could get off-season eclipse precogs...]

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[On the other hand if it is only our moon it could be the case that through whatever bizarre time-syncing method this tunnel is causing people here will just eclipse according to Earth eclipses somehow.]

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[Yeah, that's possible too. Need a lotta precogs.]

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[I wonder how much preparation and study and equipment would be necessary to figure out the calendar of eclipses here. I bet there'll be lots of people interested in figuring this stuff but I dunno if there'll be enough.]

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[I have a higher estimate of the number of people interested in the place! What we don't know is if non-mages can go at all, and how to make sure the filter is 'us' and not, like, 'some rando in the federal government'.]

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[For the sake of science, does it matter?]

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[Might. I mean, they might let NASA figure out the eclipses but I'm not sure they'll be efficient about figuring out what the eclipses do, say.]

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[If they're that interested I'm not sure there's anything we could do about it anyway, though.]

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[Well, if they eminent domain it or something they at least have to pay you off? If it's yours before they do that?]

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[Pretty big ifs there, especially with it being something so unprecedented, they might just claim it as theirs or something, and in any case what I mean is that we'd regardless have no say on the amount or rigor of science done.]

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[Yeah, that's true. There just seems like there ought to be something owed you for finding the place and I don't know how to find it.]

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[I expect the lawyer you contacted still hasn't gotten back to you?] 

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[Lawyer wanted me to be more specific.]

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[Ah. What did you tell them?]

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[I wanted to know under what circumstances you could buy and keep property which does in fact currently belong to the feds given that you want it because you found something on it.]

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[And I suppose it depends on the thing you found? Like, whether it was a fossil or diamonds or oil or a different planet?]

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[I guess, since he wanted me to be more specific?]

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[Assuming that's the case, if I were to guess, I'd bet whatever law was most relevant to oil would be the operative one here, or something similar to it.]

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[Possibly, or maybe something about cave systems? Since those could extend underground across property lines but still have only one entrance?]

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[Oh, yeah, if there's something like that that sounds more similar.]

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[Maybe I'll tell him that I want answers for what if it was the ruins of a crashed UFO and what if it was a cave system and what if it was an oil well.]

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[...ruins of a crashed UFO.]

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[Hey, it's not the reality but it gets at the significance okay!]

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[Oh I know I'm just imagining that if there are actually laws about that specifically I'm gonna spend a lot of time laughing.]

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[There probably aren't but he could tell me what principles he'd draw on to argue the case!]

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[Fair enough. For that I'd guess there'd be laws involving, say, dubiously active mines or other kinds of weapons and maybe stuff about foreign governments.]

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[Yeah, but you don't actually know for sure your planet's uninhabited, either...]

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[Yeah, that's true. If it's inhabited by people with reasonably advanced technology radio or something should find them but otherwise there might have to be expeditions and stuff... It actually sounds more unlikely that the government would let this go the more I think about it.]

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[Maybe we should hope only mages can go through, then on a combination of experience with the place and actually being able to travel there you could get in on the project...]

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[Yeah, being in such a research expedition would... not be what I'd've normally chosen to do with my life but would not actually be that bad?]

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["Not that bad"?]

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[Meaning I'm still thinking through its consequences but it actually sounds pretty fun, while I'm working on healing and deaging and immortalizing during my dedicated think-about-magic time.]

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[Okay, good.]

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[The biggest drawback would be being away from you for extended periods, I think.]

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[Yeah. But we can talk, and I'm assuming a schedule that'd have you back here sometimes...]

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[We can, but I'm not sure what to assume about the schedule—vehicles would have to be built here so people would probably build the infrastructure around the tunnel to at least assemble pre-made pieces of whatever, and that might not be feasible for a while, and there might be lots of walking around, which would limit the frequency with which I'd be able to come back...]

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[Learn to fly,] she suggests. [Maybe anybody can go through, anyway, we don't know.]

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[Yeah, and if it's only mages it'll probably be disproportionally healers and fliers anyway, maybe the fliers will carry everyone else back and forth.]

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[Lot of maybes. We'll figure out the tunnel first.]

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[Yeah, I guess.]

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[Home from the airport now. I can check more spots for you.]

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[Oh, cool, so next one...]

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[Nothing -]

And so on.

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Once again Isabella has to go to bed earlier than Sadde. He asks her to not let him wake up later than a couple of hours after her.

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[I'll try, but the only person I've tried waking up with telepathy is Alex and he's a light sleeper and still doesn't always come around when I call him.]

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[Well, I'll try to wake up earlier on my own anyway, if that doesn't work.]

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[Okay.]

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So after she goes to bed he continues looking for the cave for a short while before returning to his camp for the night, and tries waking up earlier.

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[Pet,] she nudges him after she's been up for a few hours.

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[Mrrrn?]

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[You wanted me to wake you.]

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[Mrrrn, 'm wkn up.]

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[I'd offer you coffee but obviously this is impractical.]

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[V'ry.]

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[It's weird that you're slurring even while you're not speaking aloud, what, is it too hard to move your imaginary mouth?]

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[My thoughts are just that slow in the morning,] he explains fluently.

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[Well, up you get, you need to get back on a twenty-four-hour clock. It's ten-thirty in the morning, I've got my Jeep and a camp shower because I doubt you had any soap out there and you'll be gross and some clothes and some snacks.]

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[I won't be that gross, the river isn't turbid when it's not raining a lot and I scrub! ...but yes, thank you, I love you.]

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[Love you too, pet.]

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[Also my toothpaste and floss are long gone but I still have my toothbrush.]

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[Then I guess I brought this new one for nothing.]

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[No you brought it because this toothbrush is a year and a half old it needs to be retired desperately.]

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[Aha. I also got you shampoo and stuff.]

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[I think I might cry.]

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[It'll have to be a quick shower, though, the camp ones don't have huge volume.]

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[I know, but it's still much better than nothing.]

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[And then you will be all cleaned up for me.]

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[Yes, to do with as you please.]

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[Mm-hm.]

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[Are you in the Jeep?]

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[Yup, I probably look like a comedy version of an offroading commercial or something. Haven't plowed into any cacti yet though.]

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Mental giggle. [Why a comedy version?]

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[I'm not a very good driver! I picked up my license after I graduated before I started work but I haven't practiced much. At least there's nobody to hit out here.]

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[Except for poor cacti.]

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[Cacti aren't anybody!]

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[You could end up hitting a cousin of your tiny cacti!]

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[I don't think I'd lose any sleep over it.]

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Giggle.

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[How long did it take you to run across the cave on foot?]

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[I think maybe three or four hours?]

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[I should be able to find it today unless you misdirected me, then...]

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[My memory isn't eidetic, but yeah.]

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[Did you specifically try to commit it to memory at the time?]

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[Yeah, I did want to be able to come back to civilization, my reasoning was just that this was cheaper than finding a place to live and I had relevant knowledge that'd make it not too uncomfortable compared with the alternatives.]

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[Okay, good.]

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[Where are you right now?]

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[Jeeping about in the desert.]

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[Right, but I mean—describe your surroundings? If I recognize any landmarks or anything that could stir any memories I might've failed to remember yesterday.]

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[Oh, okay -] And she describes the sparse features of the featureless desert.

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And as she goes along he tells her what he remembers of the trek.

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Eventually:

[I think I might've found it.]

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[Oh, awesome. When you go in it should be bizarrely bright in a different way than where you came from...]

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[...It's not,] she says. [Might just be because it's caved in on your end. I'll try sending the little car through.]

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[Alright. Eeeeee I'm going to seeeee yooooou.]

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[...dead end. Did the tunnel branch at all?]

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[Uh, no, actually, it was just a straight line. You sure it's not just very buried?]

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[It looks like a legit dead end but I'm not a geologist.

Go plan on digging places again.]

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[...okay. Maybe it could be another cave, though, maybe you took a wrong left...]

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[Could be, but this one matches your description except for not being - to me - visibly a tunnel.]

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[Right, could actually be the mage thing, that'd make sense I suppose.]

He does not say that "it closed down forever" would also make sense.

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[C'mon pet, numbers.]

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[Right, yes, numbers.]

Numbers!

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Nothing nothing nothing nothing -

[Try that one.]

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He does!

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It's promising within the first thirty seconds!

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Ooohkay so he continues digging, then!

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Tunnel!

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"Really?! Fuck's sake," he says, as he goes through.

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"Oh my god you just walked through the wall come here right now -"

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...well what's he gonna do, disobey? He goes.

(He is also quite nude, shoes excepted.)

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And she holds him tight, comments about showers notwithstanding. "Oh my lovely."

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"Y—yeah," he says, his voice cracking as the realization hits him, and his eyes start welling with tears.

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Hug hug hug hug hug hug hug. "I love you, I love you -"

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"I love you too, oh Isabella, you're here, you're real, it actually worked-"

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Squeeze. "I'm real. I'm real and you're home and you're mine it's okay."

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So much squeeze.

...he looks over his shoulder. "So you can't see that?"

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"Looks like a wall. You just walked right through it like a ghost."

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"Well. I'm pretty sure I'm not a ghost."

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"You don't feel like a ghost." Hug, hug, hug.

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So much hug. He buries his face on her shoulders and makes no attempt to stop the crying. "Definitely not a ghost," he mumbles.

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She will hold him for a solid ten minutes and then: "...you do smell kinda weird."

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He starts giggling teary giggles. "I'm sorry. Camp shower...?"

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"In the back of the Jeep, there's nobody around for miles or anything, go set it up and get clean and get into the clothes I brought you."

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He looks through the tunnel one more time then disentangles and goes shower.

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The shower is present. She brought a couple big tanks of water and some smaller bottles of same and one of everything from Renée's bathroom and it'll take some finagling but he can totally get showered. (She sits just inside the shade of the cave. Supervising.)

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Well then maybe he'll show off whatever non-shapeshifting-derived muscles he got in very plausibly deniable ways while he showers.

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She does not look like she would find denials plausible, but she doesn't look like she minds, either.

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Then:

"Must I wear clothes? I got used to going without..." As the even tan attests.

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"Oh, not immediately. You should wait until you're all dried off, for one thing.

"There's a picnic blanket in there, lay it out and weigh down the corners for me and don't let any sand get on top."

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Isabella is telling him to do things again.

He does as he's told, the stupidest grin on his face.

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And now they have this surface all nice and clean and not sandy. Isabella steps over to it, cane a little less useful in the sand but she manages, and steps out of her shoes onto the blanket in the shade cast by the the Jeep. "C'mere, pet, I think I've waited long enough."

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"Yes ma'am."

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And Isabella demonstrates how much she missed him. (It was a lot.)

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Yeah, a lot is right.

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...And then she opens up the back of the Jeep and she gets out a picnic basket.

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"Oh lord almighty processed food."

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"Earth calories!" Smooch. Potato chips. Hand-fed to her beloved pet.

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Smoooch!

"This is ridiculously good, all those people who talk about how we would all live only on 'natural food' have no idea what they're talking about."

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"Well, I think those people still get grocery store selections on their produce instead of whatever grows in a specific area of jungle. Out of season apples and such abominations as that."

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"They have no idea what they're talking about, deerthing meat is good but variety is better and seasoning and dressing are best."

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"I am so looking forward to feeding you everything there is and watching you squirm about it, you're so cute." Chips are gone. Peanut butter and jelly?

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Gods yes.

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And she has more things in the basket too. Orange slices. Oatmeal cookies. Box of assorted chocolates.

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Isabella is so good. Why is she so good. Not that he is complaining he is just gazing adoringly.

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Oh good, she likes being gazed at adoringly. Pet gets scritches.

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Eeeee.

"My gorgeous dom. Dry land. A shower. Food. I won't do the cliché'd thing and say that if this is a dream I don't want to wake up but I very much understand that sentiment now."

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"So, cliché only by apophasis."

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"More or less, yes. I mean, I prefer reality to dreaming as a general rule, but since this is in fact real I don't have to choose and that's great because I'd be seriously tempted."

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"Yup. Here you are." Snuggle. "Food's all gone, go get dressed and we'll head back to civilization."

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"Yes, ma'am." So he does, once again maybe being a little bit slower and showier than he strictly needs to.

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No complaints.

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Then he's dressed and ready.

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And they pack up the objects and Isabella makes sure the GPS knows where they are and tells him to buckle up and back to Phoenix they go.

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"So I guess it really does turn out to be mages only."

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"Well, it's possible I could have gone through without being able to see it but we can investigate that more later."

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"Yeah I was thinking the same thing, maybe if I'm with you or something, my clothes did go with me after all."

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"Yeah, we need to figure out what counts as being like your clothes and what doesn't."

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"I'd guess 'inanimate objects,' on the fence about nonhuman animals, but I'd be somewhat surprised if it actually worked for nonmages."

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"I did bring a rat, but we can have you try the rat tomorrow."

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"Yeah. The worst part is not being able to bring you, though, it's so beautiful, and you'd make an amazing queen."

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"Maybe you'll work out how to teleport, or make the gate friendlier."

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"At the very least bring non-mages with me, yeah. But that'd still lose as far as prioritization goes to the current goal, I think. Although maybe we should actually try to come up with an actual plan on how to turn everyone immortal rather than just vague-ing it up, so we can properly compare it with teleportation and whatnot to make a more informed decision."

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"You mean logistics-wise, not magically?"

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"Yeah, like, making everyone immortal is a nice goal but as far as I know the best we can actually do is deaging, not turning aging off altogether, which would be like step zero, and depending on how long that'd take it might actually be better to focus on the other planet first."

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"Well, how long it'd take is not logistics, it's projection about magic progress."

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"I guess I mean both, then. There's progress, there's distribution, which depends on progress and on what it'd look like, and there's whatever intangible benefits we'll get from the other planet... And it's all so annoyingly vague."

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"Intangible?"

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"Maybe not the best word, um, what I mean is that in the best possible world the other planet will house at least one new country sort of designed from scratch to be sensible, and all the benefits that'd give people that aren't as obvious and directly or quickly measurable as 'this person will no longer age and is much more resistant to diseases and trauma.'"

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"Ah, makes sense."

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"Of course, that's not likely at all, but a sub can dream. And my point about it stands, I think."

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"Yeah, we have some plans to plan, but we need to know more about how much control we even have over the planet before we can put weight on any of them."

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"Yeah, I'm not gonna stop working on immortality anytime soon, even if I do later decide it's not what I should be doing it's not lost effort."

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"Oh yeah, the worst thing to do would be to put off working on magic in case you wind up deciding to work on something else."

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"Mmhm. Now given that the tunnel's apparently mages-only, maybe we could actually tell the lawyer the truth."

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"Yeah, the lawyer himself can't take immediate advantage and probably doesn't have a disclosure obligation... I'll quiz him and find out but yeah."

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"Although he might not believe you, come to think of it."

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"Well, he said he'd charge me extra to promise to answer questions within thirty seconds of being asked them over the course of a conversation, but at this point it's probably worth it to pay him. Then I can find out how I get him to believe me."

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"Ooh I hadn't thought about that application, that's so exploitable."

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"I know, right? Does require a cooperative conversationalist but."

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"And you can actually use that to figure out how to secure their cooperation, or at least have a better shot at doing it."

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"Yup. Although doing that feels mean. Especially if they don't know I'm a precog first."

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"Yeah, and if they do all they need to do is commit to take at least thirty seconds to answer anything you ask. I wonder if there are politicians or lawyers that use that—what's the record so far on longest precog range?"

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"Year and a half, but it perturbs like crazy over that time from even very subtle reactions to the vision."

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"You wouldn't really need a year and a half, even a month would be enough to give politicians a very big edge, and lawyers wouldn't often need even that."

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"Yup. But it does perturb a lot."

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"Yeah I'd imagine so. And besides I'd bet it probably reaches an equilibrium at some point, lawyers who don't hire precogs or aren't precogs themselves must charge less or be outcompeted, similarly for politicians—I've never really looked into this, does it actually happen or is there some counter incentive I'm not thinking of?"

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"Precogs are really expensive even off-season, and a significant number of people don't like being finessed that way so they make it prohibitively difficult."

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"Is there a way for it to be prohibitively difficult if you're, like, part of a jury and don't really know who the lawyers in question are?"

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"...You know that precogs are not the same thing as remote viewers, right? Without way more specialization we can only look ahead to things we get to see. All they have to do is keep jury proceedings private."

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"Oh, yeah, that part, I'd forgotten."

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"There's a few remote precogs, but you can't just casually hire them for things."

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"No, you're right, they'd probably be ridiculously expensive. D'you know what they do?"

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"Nope! I think they all have secret classified jobs! They might help during eclipse season, I guess."

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"Secret classified jobs were probably invented by a precog who hated me in particular."

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"Aw, pet."

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"It's like dangling a deerthing burger right in front of me after I spent a week without eating! It's a secret job with classified things and I want to know them!"

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"Well, I suppose you could abandon immortality and work on stuff that gets you a really high security clearance..."

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"No thanks, I have better impulse control than that. Maybe empirically not much better, but I like to think I learn fast."

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"Good boy."

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Grin. "With everyone immortal there'll probably be some pretty awesome eclipse specializations cropping up, too, remote precogs will get way more common."

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"It'll lead to kind of an interesting arms race."

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"Which is already coming anyway, with VR and more people not getting locked down."

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"Oh yeah. What a time to be alive."

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"Yeah, we're at just the right time to be the amazing couple who invented immortality, resurrections, and founded a country with sensible economic policy and laws on another planet."

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"I love you."

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"I love you too, ma'am."

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She pulls onto the actual highway out of the desert. It's not long from there until they are at Renée's house.

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An actual house! With a door and a roof and a kitchen where food can be prepared!

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"Hey Alex look what I got!"

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"Is it your long lost love oh gosh look at that it is hi."

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"Hi, Alex," he says sheepishly.

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"Yo. How was being stranded in space."

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"Good for my physical health," he says, flexing his slightly-physically-older-than-his-chronological-age biceps, "not so much for my mental health."

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"Well, don't do any crazy shit in the house, thanks."

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"Isabella fixed me."

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"Didn't think she was that kinda psion."

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"I'm just that good."

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"She is the uberpsion, after all."

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"Curing mental strain with both hands tied behind my back."

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"I thought I was the one who got tied up."

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"It's an expression. Do not scar my brother."

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"I apologize. Anyway how've you been?" he asks Alex.

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"Been okay, still in school, thinking about college."

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"D'you know what and where?"

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"Maybe something in New York or thereabouts to be closer to Bella? Not sure."

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"...you call her Bella, I'd forgotten about this."

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"Mom and Dad do it too. Dad calls her Bells."

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"Yeah, I'd just—it's still completely adorable."

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Isabella snorts and pats Sadde on the head.

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"Anyway, d'you know what you'll major in?"

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"No idea, like, I want to say art but then they just give you an art degree."

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"Ye-es, people typically give you degrees for the things you major in."

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"...so I might wanna do something more practical."

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"Sounds reasonable. Although, I mean, you could get an art degree and then go teach art?"

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"Maybe, dunno if I wanna teach though. Plus you have to get a teaching cert, that's separate."

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"Yeah. Hmm, is there some job you can get just with an art degree?"

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"Probably, but you have to compete with everybody else who got an art degree."

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"Point. Well, joking aside, if Isabella and I get rich off our planet I don't actually object to you mooching off us."

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"Swell."

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Isabella laughs.

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"You could be our first royal subject."

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"Oh, come on, I think I get to be a prince or something by virtue of being related."

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"Are princes not usually royal subjects of the royal couple?"

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"There might be a formal distinction, probably depends on the monarchy."

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"Well. Citizen of our country, then."

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"Thank you."

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"You're welcome!"

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"Anyway, dinner's chili and cornbread, be excited, pet."

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"Oooh! Seasonings!"

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She beams and kisses him.

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Kiiiisss!

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And Renée comes home and Isabella relinquishes her pet so Renée can hug him.

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He hugs her back! "Hello."

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"I'm so glad you're all right," Renée says.

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"Thank you. I'm really sorry about—all of it."

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"We're just happy that you're safe."

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"I'm really happy, too. I missed this, and all of you."

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"Isabella, you should take him clothes shopping before the stores close," advises Renée.

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"Yeah, good point. And I should return the Jeep - when's good, Alex -"

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"Eh, as long as we're home in time for dinner. Go shopping in the Jeep and I'll meet you at the rental place."

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"Okay, thanks."

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He goes after her.

"Funnily enough this will only be the third time in my life I go clothes shopping."

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"What kinda stuff do you want to get today?"

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"Well, I'll probably need warm clothes for New York, but other than that and 'dry' don't have lots of opinions."

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"Target it is."

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"Yaay clothes that fit me."

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"Dry ones!"

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Off they go, then.

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And Isabella buys her sub various things to wear - "Don't go overboard, you're gonna have to fit it all into a suitcase to come home with me."

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"I think I only need enough for a few days and we can get more stuff in New York, right?"

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"Yeah, three days of clothes per gender and a pair of shoes and the heaviest jacket available in Arizona so you don't freeze when you step off the plane should do the trick."

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He gets that, and when he finds shoes he hmms and focuses and finds that his magic had, in fact, made his feet smaller than they ought to be. There, fixed.

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"Do your feet stay the same regardless of what gender you are?"

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"Nope, but they don't change a lot. I am shorter as a girl than as a boy, though, and have correspondingly smaller feet."

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"You may get two pairs of shoes if you like."

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"Thank you, ma'am."

He does that.

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And Isabella buys all the things and goes to where she got the Jeep and Alex meets them there and drives them home.

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Home! Well, Renée's.

And presumably food?

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Food! Chili. Cornbread. He will have to feed himself the chili but he may kneel by her to do it and she will give him nibbles of cornbread.

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Eeeeee kneeling by Isabella and being fed by her!

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"You're so cute."

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"I missed this!"

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"Me too." Scritch scritch. "My lovely pet."

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"You're gonna spoil me."

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"I can't see any reason you should not become accustomed to being fed!"

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"Well 'being fed' is a strict subset of what I mean."

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"And what exactly are you going to be expecting later that I will not be perfectly delighted to give you, pet?"

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"That's the point, you're gonna be perfectly delighted about it and I'm gonna have a gorgeous, adorable, amazing dom taking care of me and it'll be great."

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"Good."

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"Nothing like getting stranded on another planet for a year to gain perspective and appreciation for what I have."

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She leans down and kisses him. "You were not unappreciative before."

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Kiiiissss. "Then I suppose at worst I will be exactly as appreciative as I used to be."

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"Good boy."

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"But hopefully more appreciative now!"

[What with the new medium through which to be appreciative.]

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[True, true. And this way we don't have to scandalize Alex or send him out of the room!]

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[When I learn to control my facial expressions he won't even know there's anything to be scandalized about!]

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[Good boy.]

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[I try.]

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And that night Sadde is put on the couch and in the morning there is sausage and muffins and:

"Experiments!"

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"Experiments! What kinds?"

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"D'you feel safe enough going back and forth carrying the rat and stuff?"

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"Yeah. Some rope might be called for, too, if that works, à la Ariadne."

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"Okay, we can stop at the Home Depot and get some rope."

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"I wonder if we should also leave a sign there or something, so other people don't end up stuck, too."

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"Maybe. Something generic. 'Danger'."

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"Yeah. I can't think of anything else we'd need. Oh, hmm, maybe a non-eclipsed person?"

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"Well, Alex is in school... hm."

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"Well, we can always come back later, I suppose."

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"Yeah, it doesn't seem like it's going anywhere. ...Maybe I shouldn't have returned the Jeep, it's not too far to walk but I'm not very good at sand..."

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"...good point. Well, I'll catch you if you fall."

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"Good, you do that."

And sunscreen! It's important.

And out they go.

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Out they go indeed!

...to Home Depot, yes?

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Yep, Home Depot first. Then they can pull onto the shoulder of the highway and go for their hike.

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Hike hike hike there's the cave. Well, tunnel.

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"Still looks like a dead end to me." She ropes each of them to the car, and goes and rests her hand on what looks to Sadde like empty slightly glowy air.

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He reports this appearance.

...does Isabella cast a shadow, from magic light?

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No, actually!

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Does he?

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Nope!

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"So apparently this magic light I can see is just—I'd guess something like an illusion or something? Instead of real light, or real light that only mages can see or—what I mean is neither of us casts shadows."

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"Illusions are a psion thing..."

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"Yeah, I mean maybe not exactly illusion but the light I'm perceiving as being there is in some weird way not."

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"Maybe it was a joint psion-mage project, except I can't go through..."

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"What if I, like, touch you, or hold your hand or something...?" He tries.

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"...still a wall." She knocks on it.

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"So if I'm holding your hand and step through..."

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- can't pull her through.

"Try carrying the rat." She gives him a caged rat.

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He tries carrying the rat, slowly, gently, so as not to squeeze it against an invisible wall accidentally.

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The rat does indeed encounter the wall.

"Well, that explains why we don't have megafauna colonizing the desert or vice-versa..."

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"So it's literally only human mages? Well, and their stuff, I guess, does it look like the rat's cage is just going through the wall? For that matter, can you hear me when I'm on the other side?" He says the last sentence while on the other side, and sends it via telepathy at the same time.

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[Nope, can't hear you.]

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[Try saying something?]

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"Testing."

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"I can hear you fine," he says, going through. "So, okay, let's see, rope, if you try to push it against the wall it just doesn't go, right?"

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"Yup." Demonstration.

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And if he tries just touching the rope while she's pushing it?

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Doesn't go when she's the one pushing.

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But if he's the one actually exerting force...?

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He can push it through!

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And what happens if he then lets go of the rope?

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Falls, with all lateral motion being Earthward.

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"This is weird," he declares.

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"No kidding."

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"Like, you can't get the rope through it, but if I do and then let go it acts almost-but-not-quite as if the wall weren't there..."

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"There's sure to be an explanation but damned if I know what..."

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"I mean, 'magic' is probably the explanation."

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"Sure, but magic by whom, aimed at what?"

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"Yeah, good question. Tentative hypothesis is that whoever created this was acting alone and went through without realizing other people wouldn't be able to and then got eaten."

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"Yeah, that could be it. I wonder if all mages will auto-activate it..."

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"I think I'm unlikely to be special in any way, so probably. I also have an intuition that a more generalized tunnel that would let anyone and anything through is possible with enough magic."

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"It's possible that it's relying on your biokinesis to identify you as a mage, or something."

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"Well, that'd mean my biokinesis is active all the time, which if it is it's not telling me, but possible, I suppose. We'd need differently specialized mages to figure that one out, probably."

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"Yeah. We may not be equipped to unlock all the secrets of this cave on our own."

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"Well, we can unlock at least some of them."

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"Yes we can. Hmmm, I don't know how to check if you're bringing bacteria and stuff back and forth..."

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"I'm certainly bringing some, pretty sure my gut microbiome wasn't disrupted or anything when I went through."

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"Yeah, and I think normal operation of, like, skin, will also tend to involve bacteria, so it may be that you also bring external ones, but maybe not..."

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"Hmm, maybe we could get, like, one of those solutions meant to grow mold or something people sometimes use in science class, put it in a jar, and go through, and see if anything grows? ...if anything we expected to grow does, that is."

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"Maybe. Oh, we should dig up a plant and see if you can bring plants."

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"I'd naively expect 'no' for the same reason I'd expect a no on animals but am less sure, and that one's easier to test. Or at least live plants, I guess, maybe dead ones can go through fine?"

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"We can dig up a sedge, and pick some of it off, and see if it's different."

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"Alright."

Is there an easy to dig up sedge anywhere nearby?

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Yup! Over there. "Fetch, lovely."

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He fetches! And tries going through with the dead bit and then (if that works) the live sedge.

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Dead goes, live doesn't.

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"I expect this means the rat could go through if it was dead, but I'm not sure what it says about, say, spores or seeds."

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"Yeah... none obvious on the sedge..."

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"Hmm, I could go fetch fruit from the other side?"

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"Sure, if you have enough slack in the rope to reach some."

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"I don't necessarily need the rope, I did manage to return here without it..."

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"I don't wanna take the chance. We're not in such a hurry."

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"Okay. I'll see if I can find fruit while holding onto the rope, then. I love you."

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"Love you." Kiss.

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Kiss!

He grabs one end of the rope and goes looking for giant fruit.

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There's a fair amount of rope but not quite that much.

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Oh bummer. He returns and reports this.

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"Oh well. If I'd brought snacks you could try bringing through a strawberry or something... oh well."

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"Yeah. I'd try bringing a cute spider-thing here but it probably wouldn't come while alive. Should I kill the rat to test whether it'll go?"

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"Yeah, probably."

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Rat: be dead.

Now when he tries to bring it with...?

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It'll go, that way.

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"Okay, so apparently the only alive things that can be pushed through are mages and, at least, enough microorganisms that I didn't notice their lack. I wonder where it draws the boundary..."

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"If only we had a tapeworm?"

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"Ew," he grimaces. "You know, I'm not so sure these restrictions are accidental anymore."

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"I wouldn't naively expect the collision between Earth and extraterrestrial life to be harmless. Maybe you're being biofiltered whenever you go through."

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"Not extraterrestrial life in general but all in all other than their size the life over there is pretty similar to life here."

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"What of it you could see."

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"Well, yeah, but what I mean is, someone probably chose this place somehow, the odds of getting such a similar place by accident are less than risible. So, conditional on it having been picked somehow, it doesn't sound at all unlikely that it'd have been picked with an eye for biological compatibility or something."

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"Yeah, possible. That'd be divination, though... or the place isn't natural."

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"What do you mean?"

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"Sufficiently advanced mage could've just made all the species on it."

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"Whoa. Yeah, that'd be... quite something, yeah. But they'd still have to have found a planet that'd sustain life, and the odds of that are still too low. I mean, the vast majority of the universe is pure nothing, and what's not nothing is deadly to pretty much anything and definitely to the things I did end up finding, so there must've been some steering, even if it wasn't, like, conscious steering or anything."

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"Might have been able to pull off a match on gravity and ambient temperature without divination per se?"

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"Yeah, I guess that could do it, gravity could get if not a planet at least a suitable moon, temperature... There's still the matter of atmosphere, though, and Earthly atmosphere is the way it is because of life turning various noxious gases into oxygen and stuff, over millions of years, so this mage would probably also need to somehow do that in less time. Or they found a non-divinatory way to add those constraints in, but in that case I think it's still more likely that life just evolved there anyway."

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"We're already postulating a ridiculously powerful mage, we may as well assume they have the elementalist chops to atmosphere a planet."

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"I think between ridiculously powerful mage who somehow completely failed to become known and less powerful mage that specialized in making portals and managed to figure out a targeting system that'd find a planet with Earth-compatible life... Well when I put it like that I'm not actually sure which I find more probable."

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"Not everybody wants to be famous."

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"Yeah I suppose but it sounds so... wasteful... to become this powerful and then not do anything with it. They probably figured out how to make themself immortal, too, there's no way a single lifetime could contain this much magic."

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"Yeah, I'm assuming they had to be really old, but not necessarily invulnerable..."

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"Honestly at that point it sounds like they would almost be? My hypothesis of being eaten by a dinosaur goes out the window when you're postulating that level of biokinesis and elementalism and portalmaking and who knows what else."

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"If they didn't have psion help they'd need to sleep."

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"Yeah but... I mean, build a cave, hide in it to sleep, or go back to Earth to do it—I guess it's possible they underestimated the danger or overestimated their own skills..."

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"Or they got into a fight with another mage, on Earth. Or with a psion."

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"Such a waste."

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"Yep."

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"Another possibility, of course, is that they're still alive and just living as a hermit on their nice cozy planet."

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"Maybe! In which case it is totally their planet, not yours..."

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"Yyep, but then I'd like to convince them to maybe see if they can figure out a way to widen the cave or make another planet or something for, you know, other not-them people. Altruism and such."

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"Yeah."

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"But in case they're dead it is my planet. I declare you counterfactual queen."

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"Good boy."

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Grin.

"If they're dead, I don't think it matters much whether they made the planet or found it, though. My biokinesis may be decent for my age but it's definitely not good enough to have made me survive on significantly different atmosphere or eat significantly different food, it's probably at least mostly compatible."

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"Probably. I still don't want to try it without some semblance of actual testing, even if testing is 'wait until I have a few days' range and see if it makes me sick'."

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"Yeah, of course, but maybe we'll have actual experimental results by actual biologists by then."

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"Yup. I'll talk to the lawyer some more."

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"Yeah. Anyway, we've determined at least when it comes to animals and not-seed-nor-spores plants, dead can go, live-and-also-a-mage can go, live-and-not-a-mage cannot go. Or, at least, live-and-also-me, but yeah probably mages. Inanimate objects can go if I'm the one doing the work but not otherwise, if an object is halfway through apparently its lateral motion is Earthward... Or, wait, maybe that's only if the object is coming from the Earth?"

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"Go get a rock?"

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"From there?"

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"Yeah, a longish rock, put it halfway through, drop it."

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He goes looking for one such rock.

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There's one!

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He grabs it and tries to perform that experiment.

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It's sort of hard to tell with something like a rock but to the extent it doesn't fall straight down it falls megafauna-side.

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[Hmm, I wonder if it's something about the origin of the object, the place where most of it currently is, or where it's coming from. We could test with the rope.]

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[What protocol do you have in mind?]

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[First I wanna pull most of the rope to this side—we should come up with a name for this planet—so that only a bit is Earthside, and then drop it and see which way it goes. If it still goes Earthward, I wanna pull all of the rope through and then repeat that experiment.]

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[I'll untie my rope; I don't want you untethered over there.]

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[I love you.]

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[I love you too. C'mere and get the rope.]

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He does, and performs the first test.

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The rope behaves just like the rock when it's sent from megafauna-side.

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[Huh, so apparently it's about where most of the mass is?]

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[Looks like!]

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[I kinda wanna try to see if anything interesting happens when it's half-and-half but I expect this thing's precise enough there'll be no such thing.]

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[Yeah, no good way to calibrate that.]

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[Yeah.] He returns to Earth. "Got any more tests?"

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"Nothing I can think of without the ability on hand to culture your skin bacteria or anything..."

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"Yeah. There's just the barest possibility that non-psions can go through, if this restriction was enforced and the mage had a thing against psions, but I think that's pretty unlikely."

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"We can bring Alex tomorrow."

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"Yeah."

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Smooch.

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Smoooch!

[Any reason for this smooch in particular? P.S. telepathy's great.]

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[You discovered a planet! You can go back and forth! And you're mine and I wanted to kiss you.]

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[And you can of course do whatever you like with me.]

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[Yes I can. Mine mine mine.]

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[Aaaaaaaalllllll yours.]