[Yes.  Sorry.]

[Earth is weird.  It would be impossible to write fiction for dath ilani using Earth as a setting, because you'd have to interrupt every other paragraph with three pages of backstory about how any specific feature of Earth could possibly end up the way it did.  You get here and you see the people and they look human, and you think you know how a high-tech human civilization is supposed to work, and you're wrong.  It's hitting inside the lower-than-maximum-entropy parts of your probability distribution, doing things you specifically thought couldn't happen.]

[The least expected, most impossible fact about Earth - which has fewer consequences and seems to be overtly responsible for less of the overall weirdness than I first thought on arriving, because this isn't a literary story with a single added impossible premise - is that every person, during the total lunar eclipse falling nearest to their twelfth birthday on either side, has a roughly 1 in 100,000 chance of gaining apparent extraordinary powers.  Some are 'psions' with powers over minds and computers; 'mages' have powers over more material objects.  My native cofounder Isabella is a psion, and practiced up her skills at mental communication until she could sustain this connection to my mother, who I identified to her as best I could.]

[The powers of 'psions' and 'mages' on first manifestation are extremely uncontrolled to start with, lethal to others and often to themselves.  Unless they have consumed nothing containing calories for 48 hours prior, in which case their powers have nothing to fuel them, and can be safely contained.  Their metabolisms otherwise seem to work the same way ours do, including triglyceride stores and glycogen reserves and some people having longer-lasting intestinal digestive processes.  So it's not a matter of energy availability in the bloodstream; the phenomenon literally tracks what they've eaten.]

[Earth's civilization has the eclipses barely under control, using precognitive psions to foresee twelve-year-olds accidentally eating, and so preventing them from smashing cities.  They then use recently-developed virtuality technology to give psions and mages a safe way to get their powers under control.  Mages and psions are now growing more common; but that part is extremely recent, and powers take time and practice to develop and specialize.]

[Yes.  Sorry.]

[Earth is weird.  It would be impossible to write fiction for dath ilani using Earth as a setting, because you'd have to interrupt every other paragraph with three pages of backstory about how any specific feature of Earth could possibly end up the way it did.  You get here and you see the people and they look human, and you think you know how a high-tech human civilization is supposed to work, and you're wrong.  It's hitting inside the lower-than-maximum-entropy parts of your probability distribution, doing things you specifically thought couldn't happen.]

[The least expected, most impossible fact about Earth - which has fewer consequences and seems to be overtly responsible for less of the overall weirdness than I first thought on arriving, because this isn't a literary story with a single added impossible premise - is that every person, during the total lunar eclipse falling nearest to their twelfth birthday on either side, has a roughly 1 in 1,000 chance of gaining apparent extraordinary powers.  Some are 'psions' with powers over minds and computers; 'mages' have powers over more material objects.  My native cofounder Isabella is a psion, and practiced up her skills at mental communication until she could sustain this connection to my mother, who I identified to her as best I could.]

[The powers of 'psions' and 'mages' on first manifestation are extremely uncontrolled to start with, lethal to others and often to themselves.  Unless they have consumed nothing containing calories for 48 hours prior, in which case their powers have nothing to fuel them, and can be safely contained.  Their metabolisms otherwise seem to work the same way ours do, including triglyceride stores and glycogen reserves and some people having longer-lasting intestinal digestive processes.  So it's not a matter of energy availability in the bloodstream; the phenomenon literally tracks what they've eaten.]

[Earth's civilization has the eclipses barely under control, using precognitive psions to foresee twelve-year-olds accidentally eating, and so preventing them from smashing cities.  They then use recently-developed virtuality technology to give psions and mages a safe way to get their powers under control.  Mages and psions are now growing more common; but that part is extremely recent, and powers take time and practice to develop and specialize.]

[Yes.  Sorry.]

[Earth is weird.  It would be impossible to write fiction for dath ilani using Earth as a setting, because you'd have to interrupt every other paragraph with three pages of backstory about how any specific feature of Earth could possibly end up the way it did.  You get here and you see the people and they look human, and you think you know how a high-tech human civilization is supposed to work, and you're wrong.  It's hitting inside the lower-than-maximum-entropy parts of your probability distribution, doing things you specifically thought couldn't happen.]

[The least expected, most impossible fact about Earth - which has fewer consequences and seems to be overtly responsible for less of the overall weirdness than I first thought on arriving, because this isn't a literary story with a single added impossible premise - is that every person, during the total lunar eclipse falling nearest to their twelfth birthday on either side, has a roughly 1 in 1,000 chance of gaining apparent extraordinary powers.  Some are 'psions' with powers over minds and computers; 'mages' have more material powers.  My native cofounder Isabella is a psion, and practiced up her skills at mental communication until she could sustain this connection to my mother, who I identified to her as best I could.]

[The powers of 'psions' and 'mages' on first manifestation are extremely uncontrolled to start with, lethal to others and often to themselves.  Unless they have consumed nothing containing calories for 48 hours prior, in which case their powers have nothing to fuel them, and can be safely contained.  Their metabolisms otherwise seem to work the same way ours do, including triglyceride stores and glycogen reserves and some people having longer-lasting intestinal digestive processes.  So it's not a matter of energy availability in the bloodstream; the phenomenon literally tracks what they've eaten.]

[Earth's civilization has the eclipses barely under control, using precognitive psions to foresee twelve-year-olds accidentally eating, and so preventing them from smashing cities.  They then use recently-developed virtuality technology to give psions and mages a safe way to get their powers under control.  Mages and psions are now growing more common; but that part is extremely recent, and powers take time and practice to develop and specialize.]