Lunette had a few more people on her "not worth the thalers or time" list than I had put in from my quick sort, but that's not surprising. She'd worked with more of these folks and nothing beats personal experience. Some people can do great things in an interview but couldn't do the daily stuff that required consistent effort. I should know, I was one of those folks in my other youth. Once something got a bit boring, it was really hard to care about it. I wasn't the worst case of this that I knew. Later in life I ran into a programmer who literally was incapable of doing the same thing the same way twice. If there were four or five sort algorithms, he'd pick the one he hadn't implemented before. Even if it was the most inefficient or the hardest to maintain. The more obscure ones got bonus points. I'm not sure how that personality would translate to this world, but it would be the death of a research system in ANY world. The people participating in the research needed the same prompts, the same environment, basically as much identical-ness as you can get your hands on, or there are way too many variables to analyze. Throw in the whole "intent and visualization matter" parts of the psionics and we've already got unexaminable and uncontrolled variables. We have to minimize variances in all the rest of the areas we can control. It's got to be a mess trying to replicate magical results.

Here's a funny thing that keeps me up at night. Cultural differences might well play a part in magical results. Not only do I have a hypothesis that there is some kind of biological level magical affinity that limits what kinds of psionics you are best at, what if cultural concepts affect the performance. Some things are considered lucky in one culture, anathema in another, and unknown in yet another. Heck the concept of having a counting position for zero was like that. We're not even going to talk about negative numbers. But third time's the charm? Nope not here. Closest we have to that idea is this: "The fourth failure is final." So many minor differences, even some major ones. Organized religion never got big here, and yet many people believe in a higher power. But things like saints? None. Famous philosophers existed, and with different names filled the same niches of ethics, dignity, human existence, and the quest for meaning in our lives that Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Hobbes, Locke, or Spinoza filled. Some of the results of religions are not present here. For example, there is no golden rule here. There's a version like it or the buddhist karma where you return kindness for kindness, but the concept of "love your enemies and pray for those that persecute you?" Yeah, that concept doesn't even exist. Nor was there some divine right of kings. Kings ruled because they had power, either social, economic, physical, or magical. Some had multiple combinations of those. Autocracy has faded in my society, but there's still all the trappings of power, just aligned on those paths. Well, I'd hoped to avoid politics, but politics is part of culture, and the rules and power structures have an impact on everyone.

Enough woolgathering on that. Let me check on something more concrete. I've spent a week on daily practices and using the psionic cleaning techniques for the shuttered and semi-abandoned rooms. I've had some more growth, which is nice.

{Status:

Name: Grintel Coddlestahl

Age: 17

Mental:

Acuity:

Perception:

Memory:

11

8

11

Psyche:

Wisdom:

Insight:

Willpower:

9

9

14

Physical:

Strength:

Coordination:

Endurance:

8

8

12

Skills:

Energy Conversion

3.054

Energy Emission

2.683

Energy Control

2.322

Channeling

0.149

Instructor

0.090

Meditation

2.698

Walking

5.026

}

Anyway, we had hashed out the roster and were ready to start up in a few weeks. Lunette signed an intent document to join the research team and a standard confidentiality agreement on the research results in exchange for a byline on the released final report just before we headed out to the cafeteria. As we walked over there, I was looking forward to finishing up lunch and then hopefully spending the rest of the day hashing out the finer points of the self-healing technique. Odd. I'd been so excited about lunch time, but spending time chatting about the technique and practicing with psionics together seemed like it would be much better use of time, and honestly more fun.