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Sadde and Whites in Eclipse
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Edie is thinking about magic, because what else do you do with your spare time when the good part of a book isn't calling you with its siren song?

Her thoughts are interrupted by a knocking on her door. She gets up to answer it.

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We-ell okay Sadde will just—it's purely unconscious and not voluntary at all, the way she lowers her eyes and doesn't actuallyquite bat her eyelashes. "Hello."

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"Oh, hello! You must be new, but you don't look young enough to be a 2001..."

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"Oh, no, I'm actually ninety-seven."

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"Huh, same. Well, most people who were going to come here showed up a bit sooner after their eclipse, so you might be a bit of a talking point for a little while. Any reason you care to share why you took so long, and if not d'you need help fending of nosy people?"

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She struggles for a bit to remember how to words, but then: "It's just that my father didn't want me to go to magic school but I managed to talk him around to it. My name's Sadde, by the way."

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"Edie! Lovely to meet you. Mage or psion?"

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"Mage! Working on biokinesis and have—"

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"—gendershifting down."

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"Nice! I'm a psion, I've got telepathy working--just with my sister, so far, but it's pretty tricked out."

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And back to girl. "Tricked out?"

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"It's, you know, actual thought-sharing instead of just a verbal channel, and she can initiate conversations, and we can set it for default emotion-sharing even if we're not actively talking."

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"Sounds really cool! And what are your long-term plans, if any?"

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"I'm going for precog for the utility and continuing to work on my telepathy because telepathy is really awesome. I spend most of my meditation time on the precog and just practice a lot with the telepathy. At some point when I've got a little bit of precog working I'll switch some of that to practice to and pick something else to spend a little time meditating on too. Luck of all luck, my twin eclipsed too--she's a mage--and she's going for metallokinesis--she's got a little bit of that yet--going for fine control over sheer scale so as to compete less with generalist teeks--and de-aging, because the more mages can do that the more people can not literally die."

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"Wait, what? Seriously? You both eclipsed?—wait I think I might've read a note about you in the papers."

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"Wouldn't surprise me."

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"I'm honored, to meet someone so statistically unlikely."

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"My arbitrary mathematical characteristics and I thank you."

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She beams. "My goal's along your sister's, too, I want to do de-aging—but I want to eventually figure out how to make that permanent."

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"That would be excellent, of course, although given that that's not known to be possible and de-aging is, it's probably higher-leverage in the immediate future to work on convincing more mages to work on de-aging and improve virtuality so more people want to be mages."

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"On the other hand virtuality and psionic tech in general were not known to be possible until only a few years ago and the boom in eclipsed will already help a lot. But in any case I expect de-aging will in fact come before permanent immortality if it's possible—for me, at least."

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"Yeah, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and all that."

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"Yeah."

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"I considered working on interfacing with psionic tech and working on improving virtuality but precog appeals to me more than that by a higher margin than that would be more useful than precog, considering that precogs are essential to preventing disasters on eclipses."

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"Oh yeah precognition is definitely incredibly useful. If it weren't for the gender thing I'd have preferred being a psion."

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"Aha. Makes sense."

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