She's already used some. The stars on her person wouldn't glow under the laws of physics; that's her. She can do things with light - create it, manipulate it, extinguish it.

Well.

She supposes that's an acceptable place to start.

(Light up jewelry isn't so exciting on its own but could snowball into so many clever tricks once she's gotten a finer handle on it.)

Time to go back to Atlanta and compare notes...

There's a trick to waking up from dreams at exactly the moment you'd like to, Alicia's found. A dreamscape has edges. Lots of them. Terrain it hasn't mapped out yet, actions it can't let you perform, sensations that it doesn't have valid reference points for on file. When you dream passively, you get nudged over and over again away from the edges so that you never even notice they're there. But when you're lucid? You can pay attention to which direction the nudges are coming from, and then fight your way upstream, and from there you can find the edge of dreamworld and jump off of it if it pleases you to.

Alicia wakes.

Well, it feels like waking at least. In a certain manner of speaking, she supposes, she wasn't exactly asleep. And if she wanted to get even more needlessly poetic about it--which, being sixteen and all, she definitely does--she might suppose that being a MG is sort of like having a dream you never exactly wake up from at all.

"Atlanta?"

She looks around her dorm room, doesn't spot her partner right away, and so staggers over to the mirror instead to look things over herself.

Apart from the conventional perspective limits of the mirror and the unflattering fluorescent light, she looks just as planned.

She fixes her hair, flexes her wings, and with a snap of her fingers makes the light above the mirror flicker.

Nice.

(The wings are a little inconvenient right now, admittedly, in such a cramped space. It takes a fair bit of focus to keep them from knocking anything over while she looks herself over. Still, though, she likes what she sees.)

But where's Atlanta?

Alicia considers the dormitory door. Does she really want to go wandering around campus like this?

Experienced MGs can toggle back and forth between forms in an eyeblink, but she isn't quite cocky enough to try that sort of thing on her first day.

She turns the doorknob and peeks out into the hallway.

"Hey... Atlanta..."

(Atlanta should have been waiting in the other bed when Alicia snapped back to reality--either still in the dreamscape herself or keeping an eye on Alicia while she was under. That was the plan.)

She steps out into the hall, her wings trailing behind her. Checks their friend Kirsten's room a couple doors down--finds it unlocked but empty. Checks the restroom--unoccupied. Heads for the end of the hall, intent on heading upstairs to check Atlanta's dorm room--stops when she hears a familiar laugh while passing the lounge...

"Poor thing. You worried about me?"

When Alicia turns around, she'll see Atlanta standing in the lounge doorway.

"You were supposed to be watching me until I finished. Just in case."

"I was."

Atlanta smirks and backpedals into the lounge, stepping deftly over a mess of tangled cords trailing from the beat up old TV behind her.

"That's my power, sweetheart. Perception."

As she says that last word, she leans in and waves her fingertips around as though casting a spell.

Alicia follows Atlanta into the room, folding up her wings slightly to get them through the doorframe. (The motion involved is already becoming intuitive to her.)

"I got illumination."

Two sides of a coin, as always. Since meeting, a few days after their respective arrivals at ISG (Iowa School for the Gifted), they've been steadily finding more and more implausibly specific points of commonality between themselves... that their MG manifestations should follow adjacent thematic threads is no surprise to Alicia at all.

"How long did it take you to Threshold, after you hit the Chargen screen?"

Alicia grins.

"About ten seconds. Maybe twelve on the outside. You?"

"One and a half."

No kidding.

Alicia tugs the lounge door closed behind her with one of her wingtips.

Oh... wait a second.

"You don't look any different."

"Mmhmmm." Atlanta brushes her perfectly normal-looking hands down the front of her perfectly normal-looking school uniform. "Your powers of observation continue to astound."

Alicia's bony wings tap listlessly at the glowing studs along the sides of her boots.

"How."

"Turn around."

Alicia turns...

The door swings open again.

A thing emerges from the hall, its finger-tendrils wrapped around the doorknob and its huge spotlight eyes sweeping over Alicia's spindly body.

Every inch of the thing glitters. It has scales like overlapping lenses, which reflect and intensify the glare of the overhead fluorescent lamps. It's clad in prisms, transparent on their own but swirling with rainbows when any patch catches the light just right.

Alicia hops back immediately from the door, her feet spreading and planting themselves in a fighting stance. Her arms come up in a defensive posture, protecting her face and core, just as she's drilled thousands of times in her kempo classes. Her wings flare out nearly of their own accord, filling the half of the room she stands in so that the thing can't reach Atlanta without going through her.

Then she watches.

Waits. Thinks. 

And the truth clicks together.

"...Atlanta?"

The thing smirks, though its mirrored skin makes it a little hard to trace the outline of its lips.

"Yeah. That's me."

"Not a bad chassis, huh? Definitely room to tune it up, get some better bonuses for aesthetic variance and so forth, but it was still enough to come out of chargen with multiple spells. The first one I unlocked was clairvoyance, naturally, but my strongest unlock is a false-sensory-projection effect."

"Illusions."