Alicia's body laughs, bounces, throws its arms back and howls at the sky.

This is it. Everything just like Atlanta'd said it'd be. An infinite canvas at her fingertips.

She knows she's not dreaming. She has a lot of experience with dreaming. Every night for the past thousand nights, she's been getting ready for this day to dawn.

The levers of this place come to her even easier than do those behind a common dreamscape, yes. As easy as picking at fingernails. And Alicia? She has never had any particular talent for not picking at her fingernails.

Within her first second of empowered self-appraisal, acne becomes a distant memory. Then she gets taller--longer strides, better reach. Her body sways from side to side, adjusting to its new gait. She smiles, and her teeth whiten. Her flesh becomes leaner and her muscles better refined. Her cup size changes--just a little, slightly smaller, rewound back to before they started getting in the way during gym class. Hair lengthens. Long abused fingernails grow back in symmetrical and unblemished. 

Her face remains the same. She wants Atlanta to still recognize her when she wraps things up here.

How's the metaphorical cup doing? Still light in her palm?

Oh, yes. That's not enough, not nearly enough.

Some girls have trouble hitting the threshold, Alicia's been told. Too timid. Too indecisive. Too attached to what they used to be.

But she won't have that problem.

Alicia's body looks to her expectantly. She pans across the starscape, examining it with distant certainty. Her body is not what she is. It never has been. Her body is just a tool, a vessel, an interface between her selfhood and the world existing beyond it.

She throws a more drastic lever. Her body drops to its knees, arms wrapped tight around its chest, as bony protrusions erupt from its shoulderblades and unfold into a quartet of featherless wings.

That's plenty. Before the wings are even all grown in, she's there.

The mental image of herself from the outside changes, like a lens has dropped into place between it and her virtual eye; at the original layer she can still adjust her body, if not back whence she came, and on this new level she can decorate it with impermanent flourishes. Clothes, approximately telekinetic hairstyling, accessories, makeup, she'll never need to visit another apparel or cosmetics store except for inspiration.

That's all she can do right now, because she looks ridiculous, with wings while not wearing something designed for wings and not having shopped in the right sizes for her current height and so on. She looks kind of stupid. All you can do when you look kind of stupid is arrange to look less stupid.

Okay. This part will be a little trickier. Like most students at the highly selective School For The Gifted that she and Atlanta attend, she has a great many prodigal skills but does not count fashion sense among them.

She can get through this if she takes it one step at a time, though. First thing, she 'blinks' at the clothes her body's currently wearing and then makes a mental motion analogous to rolling her eyes. The ill-fitting attire gets torn loose and cast away into the void.

Yes. Better. The naked body sprouting naked wings looks decidedly nonstupid, if she can just manage to throw an outfit together on top of that without making things actively worse she figures she can call it a day.

Looking naked is indeed objectively-according-to-the-character-generation-viewer and her internal magic sense decidedly nonstupid. It's not a lot of magic, she is still stark naked and not elaborately styled, but she's got a skosh, now, enough to do something other than immediately clothe herself if that happens to be her priority. Something with... light maybe?

Power.

She doesn't know precisely where it is, or how to access it, but she knows it's there and it calls to her.

She spends a couple seconds grasping for it at random, but only manages to pull levers she already had access to--pans her viewport around, adjusts the illumination, makes her body's hair flutter in a nonexistent breeze and so on.

Inefficient. There's just one mote of magical power waiting out there, and probably not even a big one. Waste of time to search for it now.

She needs to stay focused on the aesthetic levers, pick enough of the low hanging fruit there that additional avenues of power become available, and then search for them all at once.

Though alas, she still has no fashion sense. She stares at the unblemished body before her for a short spell, feeling the same apprehension that always tremors through her when she's staring at a blank page eight hours before an essay's due. So many directions to go. So many ways things could go wrong.

What if she started out with a base layer that doesn't change the outline any?

That seems safe. (Alternately, she could just crib an aesthetic package off of one of the celebrity MGs she's seen on YouTube. That would also be safe. The magic has a plagiarism penalty, sure, but if you plagiarize something top-of-the-line it still works out to a net positive aesthetic balance doesn't it?)

But Alicia wants to see how she'll do on her own. She stretches a uniform pane of form-fitting material up from her body's toes, over its legs, all the way up to its neck and then down to its fingertips. She sets its base color to black. (Black goes with anything, right? Alicia thinks she heard a fashionable person say that once.) Then she adds contouring that matches the color of her wings.

There. Based on everything Alicia knows about aesthetics, there is literally no way that first move could have gone wrong.

It helps, a little. It's not very centrally magical girl but it's slightly improved over Stark Naked.

Okay. That's encouraging. She isn't completely lost here.

She adds boots and gloves next. Long ones, past the knees and elbows respectively (she's pretty sure bigger items are worth more points). She gives them fancy lacing up their full length, because why wouldn't you add fancy lacing to items you'll never have to take on or off by hand? She agonizes over the color, though. Her instinct is to match them to her outfit's existing two-color palate (metallic black or chalky white) but she knows MGs are supposed to be vibrant and so has concerns about committing such an important pair of accessories to grayscale. She cycles between black and white a couple times, then tries out blue then green then pink then red, and in the end elects to go with whichever one the dreamscape likes best.

Whether it's a matter of her own coloration, her exact chosen shade, or something else, the magic likes blue over pink over green over red.

Blue it is, then.

Conveniently, blue is a very reasonable color for pleated skirts to come in, and pleated skirts routinely outperform all other lower body clothing options in all the online MG polls that she and Atlanta read in preparation for this. (Such polls are notoriously unreliable of course, but to acquire reliable MG aesthetic intel you need the sort of connections or security clearances that are pretty difficult to get as a sixteen-year-old.)

But now she comes to the dicey part. A skirt has to coordinate seamlessly with adjacent clothing items or it can ruin the whole ensemble.

And Alicia, if the point need needs further belaboring, still has no earthly idea what she's doing.

She wants something billowy. Something dramatic and fun to move in.

She knows she would mess up billowy if she tried it though.

Would a classic, two-tone single-piece sailor-style short-hem work as the centerpiece to an outfit like this? (She'd better hope so, because it's on a very short list of classic MG attire that she has committed well enough to memory to recreate from scratch.)

Blue skirt, white top is the classic among classics. She starts there, borrowing the white from her wings and the blue from her shoes for the new item's palate. The result isn't exactly pleasing, her admittedly hazy color intuition tells her that the upper portion of her body is now way too white. White is boring. She adds more blue by enlarging the neckerchief, then adds some laces down the sides and around the openings on the back that accommodate the wings. (Still missing something?) Ribbons. MGs love ribbons. She adds a big black bow to the front, a couple smaller ones to her hips right above where the material changes from clinging blouse to bouncing pleats and then--in a reckless flourish--two fat floor-length ribbons that emerge from under the oversize neckerchief and cascade down her body's shoulders to (yes) billow out behind it.

Okay. So. What's the damage?

It's hard to compare with anyone else - she doesn't get feedback on how anybody else is doing, just on relative power with herself - but so far she hasn't added anything that outright detracts, and the magic seems to like the laces and the billowing ribbons in particular.

Oh. That's interesting.

(Of course it liked the ribbons. Alicia excels at everything she puts her heart into, that's how it's always been before and so of course that's how it'll be here too.)

A thousand invisible fingers dance over a thousand invisible levers.

Yeah, she's been too cautious if anything. While there's no precise feedback on how others are doing with their magecraft, she has no doubt that Atlanta's made it up to the second or third aesthetic benchmark already. Atlanta never wastes time with things.

Alicia won't either.

When she'd hit her first benchmark, the hint she'd gotten had been "light." 

Maybe it's time to stop polishing a safe base layer and reach for some elemental point multipliers.

What does she associate with light? (Fires, shadows, lasers, bulbs, the sun, stars in general, radiation, rainbows, photosynthesis, mirrors, flashlights, deep ocean bioluminescence...)

Okay which of those things are prettiest? (Bonfires and glowing jellyfish.) But which ones are prettiest in an MG sort of way? (Stars and rainbows.)

Great. And rainbows definitely require Level 99 color coordination skills to work into an outfit.

Stars it is.

She gives her body dangly star earrings. She cinches the bows on its hips and chest with big star-shaped clasps. She adds black detail work to her gloves, particularly along the back of the hands, and then into that void adds glittering studs--a big star on the reverse of the palm, five little ones across the knuckles.

She does similar to the boots: colors its details black and then embeds lines of star-studs into the material.

(She doesn't bother conferring with dreamscape between additions. She knows she's on the right track now. It's like those moments in her Calculus class when a new concept finally clicks into place.)

Her foundation is strong. Her intuition is good. She will not trip.

Her intuition tells her the aesthetic's unbalanced. That the head need more adornment. She gives it a star-encrusted headband, pushing its hair back into a tidier bundle, and then fills her body's dark hair with sparkles.

Yes. That's a good effect. Sort of evokes a twinkling expanse of night sky when her body swings its head back and forth.

Which draws her attention to the as-yet-unadorned shoulder ribbons. She'd been planning to cinch them with star clasps like she had the bows, but as she regards them now a new notion strikes her. The dreamscape likes billowing, seems to have given the ribbons a point multiplier for that. So it stands to reason...

She pulls the lever before even finishing the thought. Constellations erupt down the flowing lengths of void. Hundreds of individual star-studs, sketching out Orions and Big Dippers and Canis Majors and so on.

The magic likes the stars a lot! It seems to like that she's matchy; she gets a bigger jump than anything she's done before for adding stars at all, and more for every additional star element, especially the sparkle hair.

And how does the magic like it if she makes the stars glow?

She grips the luminosity lever and gradually eases it up through its full available range, testing how things look at different levels of radiance.

The optimal level of glow is right about.... there. Shiny but not a Lite Brite. In her current real-life lighting conditions; her magic doesn't care about the lighting conditions in her mind's eye, that's just there for her aesthetic sense.

Alicia lets her focus shift, releasing the various aesthetic levers and instead feeling out the eddies of untapped magical energy.

There's more now. A lot more. Not her full potential, nothing close to that, but a fair place to start. A target rich environment.

(Her body smiles, raises a gloved fist and hungrily scans the starscape surrounding it.)

She extends her mind. Twines her awareness out across the vast metaphysical scaffolding that now suspends her. Searches for her first supernatural boon like a vine searching for the sun.

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."

"Yup!"

The Atlanta-shaped projection that Alicia's been speaking to up until this point vanishes in a puff of illusory smoke.

Atlanta--the real Atlanta--walks over to the couch across from the TV and flops down onto it.

"So. What spells did you get?"

"Well. Just one type of magic so far. Not sure if it's even a 'spell' exactly."

The forums said that while all MGs get magic, only about half of them get proper spells.

"Ahem. Let there be light."

Alicia makes an unnecessarily dramatic gesture and puts on a lightshow. 

Illusion Atlanta reappears, now wearing a reproduction of Alicia's current MG getup rather than a school uniform.

"Ooh. That's a neat trick."

The illusion waves her hands, and a near-perfect replica of Alicia's lightshow appears between her outstretched palms.

Alicia pokes a finger at the Atlanta Illusion's chest. Her hand sinks right through. It's more than a little disconcerting.

"It's a start. I've still got a lot of room to work with, making aesthetic upgrades. No telling what sort've magic'll crop up in the next few days."

The illusion goes up in smoke again.

"So. What now? It's um..." Alicia glances at her watch, and realizes she no longer has a watch.

Atlanta's spotlight eyes swivel off to the side for a moment as she glances at a clock in another building.

"Seven thirty three AM. Cafeteria's supposed to be closed but they're still letting in stragglers, if you're hungry."

"Thinking we might want to catch AP Chem."

The chemistry teacher's one of her favorites, it's a very fun subject, and Alicia has to admit she's kind of looking forward to showing off her apotheosis to her classmates.

"Try to catch it?"

An Atlanta Illusion appears in the lounge again.

Then a second one does. A third. A fourth.

"Who's to say I'm not already in class."

To her credit, it only takes Alicia a second or so to pick up on Atlanta's meaning.

"Well. I'll see you there then, I guess?"

Atlanta brings a couple of her finger-tendrils up to her mirrored lips and blows Alicia a kiss.

"Better hurry. He's already started calling roll."

Alright.

Time to see how fast this new body can go.

Alicia ducks back into the hallway, double-times it to the stairwell and descends four steps at a time.

She feels fantastic.

She was not slouch athletically before, but the way she covers ground now is simply superhuman.

The RA on duty downstairs does a double-take as Alicia scrambles by. Alicia laughs, waves, and makes for the door without bothering to explain.

(Doesn't she need her backpack? Pens? Paper?)

Eh. She can probably figure out a way to make her lightshow magic cover for that if she puts her mind to it.

(Or just bum some off a classmate. Right. Yes. That's probably the smarter play.)

No time to dwell on what's smart. She's pushed the doors open already, vaulted down the dormitory's front steps, and is breathing in the crisp morning air with abject delight.

This is living. She spreads her wings. It's all uphill from here.

On her way to class, she can detect a swarm, spawning some hundred yards off to her left. She can tell where all the individual bugs are; the swarm as a whole is drifting north, then apparently impeded by a wall it starts crawling up.

She skids to a stop, her wingtips plunging into the ground to serve as anchors. She turns in the direction her swarmsense indicates.

(The school hasn't had a swarm attack in months. And now suddenly, one pops up within minutes of her hitting the MG threshold? Kind of a big coincidence. Enough to make Alicia wonder if she and Atlanta might've somehow... caused this, with the way they went about things?)

No matter. She can mull that over later, when the monsters are all mopped up.

"Atlanta? On the off chance you've got eyes on me right now, I could certainly use some backup. Just scented a swarm near the gymnasium."

No illusions appear. No voices project from thin air. All signs point to Alicia currently being alone.

"Eh. It's freshly spawned. I can handle it."

Alicia's wings hurtle her body into motion again, now headed for the gymnasium. AP Chem can wait.

The swarm is still in its nascent exploratory phase when she reaches it. They're crawling up toward the window, now insectile, now myriapodal, now abuzz with wings, never the same shape moment to moment.

She could hit them with her eyes closed if she had anything to hit them with but she's still wearing pretty boring clothes.

She has her fists.

In the back of her mind, she understands that there is probably a reason why most newly minted MGs don't go hand-to-hand with monsters. But Alicia is very much the type of person to reflexively dismissive such understandings with 'it may not work for most folks, but it'll probably work for me because I am Just That Good.'

She races up to the edge of the swarm and punches the nearest swarmling. 

It squishes disgustingly on her fist. Her spell deteriorates noticeably. Its neighbor leaps onto her hand and sinks a circular mouth of teeth into the meat of her thumb.

Oh. Does the magic not think that 'covered in gore' is a great look?

Well. Alicia thinks it's a great look.

She skips back to create distance, lifts her thumb over her shoulder so that she can squish the swarmling stuck to it between two of her wing bones, and then jabs with her offhand to smack aside a third swarmling that's leaping for her.

She successfully deals with three swarmlings.

There are seven hundred of them and they're excited now, and moving faster.

She knows from sparring drills that (unless her apotheosis boosted her endurance somehow) she can fight all out for about a minute before she winds herself.

(That means about a dozen kills a second. She has to step up her game. Fists aren't good enough, not nearly.)

What about her wings? They're pretty pointy, and she's got a pretty good hang of how to maneuver them by now...

(Five seconds, then she'll back off and reassess her process. One Mis-sis-sip-pi...)

She stabs and slashes, keeping her arms back to protect her vitals while her new prehensile limbs do the heavy lifting.

She can kill a lot of them, but even newly augmented she only has eight limbs and there are still hundreds of them and they all have sharp parts when they want to. Right now they want to. She's festooned with swarm, bleeding freely from scores of wounds, and too gross-looking to put out one lumen.

(Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa--)

Oh. Her wings can feel pain. That's neat to know.

(--aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa--)

Alicia dives back into the parking lot, clawing at herself and rolling from side to side to dislodge the monsters still clinging to her.

Rolling helps! They're not very durable. She kills the ones that are on her, and the swarm is still slow enough that the remaining several hundred lag behind her slightly as they chase her out of the gym in a carpet of black.

She scrambles back, half-dragging her body using the three wings that're still responding reliably to her mental commands.

It is possible, Alicia admits to herself, that I might have made some bad decisions today.

She eyes the approaching swarm. She knows she could probably outrun it, still--get back to Atlanta, lick her wounds, come up with a better plan than engaging otherwordly monsters in fisticuffs--but if she did that the remaining swarmlings would have several more minutes to rampage and they've be getting faster and stronger all the while.

Yeah. How would she feel if just one of her classmates got hurt out here while she was backtracking to look for help.

Can't risk that.

Have to focus. Have to win.

She scrabbles her way up on top of a reasonably defensible-looking motor vehicle, takes one last look at the approaching swarm, closes her eyes and reenters the dreamscape.

There it is, right where she left it. Wow, she looks awful. (She can hear them, skittering up to the car, buzzing into the air on little black wings...)

(Yeah. This would be a kind of absurd time to start from scratch, wouldn't it?)

Alicia starts from scratch. Grabs hold of everything her body's wearing and tears it away in a single mental motion.

(Her body is now standing naked in a parking lot.)

Alicia is so many steps removed from caring about that right now.

(What she needs is change. To reforge her vessel into something more suitable for channeling the magic she's tapped into.)

No time for careful deliberation. She acts or she dies.

The swarm crawls up the tires. It wafts through the air. Some land on her shoulders. Some creep onto her toes.

Think. Fast, fast, fast before they erode her aesthetic again.

She remembers a wardrobe option that intrigued her back when she entered this mental space the first time around.

She grabs the Armor lever with both metaphysical hands and pulls. Silvery chains unspool across her, knitting themselves together over a buffering layer of supple leather. Elegantly sloped plates click together over it all: her arms, her legs, her body, her wings. An ornamented half-helm replace her previous outfit's hairband.

When the armor's done growing into place, she throws a generous helping of glowing star-studs across its crests and edges.

Then she seeks the edge of the dream again, ready to face whatever awaits her beyond.

The armor helps, except insofar as she's accidentally trapped a few bugs between it and her; those itch and squirm and start trying to burrow into her legs and back where they're trapped. The bugs that are trapped outside are not immediately able to get through leather and plate and mail.

A good defense. But defenses don't win fights, O Sensei taught her that much.

She dives from atop the car, down into the swarm churning below. Tucks her head in, takes the impact with the ground on the shoulder (the one that's currently got a swarmling burrowing into it) and rolls with the impact.

After a full rotation, she slaps her palms down on the pavement to either side of her to check her remaining momentum (the whole sequence hurts a bit more than diving, rolling on and then slapping a training mat but the movement still works.)

Her wings are splayed out to either side of her--covered as much ground as possible when she came down. One of them still hangs limp. The other three are already grasping around, looking to cause more damage.

(Twelve a second. She just has to kill twelve a second. Piece of cake.)

She kills the one on her shoulder. The ones on her legs are still alive. They're getting faster, and faster... she can still hit them, but the gore isn't doing anything for her armor any more than it did for her last outfit.

She tries to rise to her feet. Doesn't quite manage it. Splits the difference and lifts her body skyward with her wings then sort of just flops it over: dropping it belly down on top of the next nearest big concentration of swarmlings.

Her forearms come up to protect her face, holding it a couple inches of the pavement at the moment of impact. Her legs come down limp. She sees a swarmling on the ground between her forearms, right in front of her eyes. She tries to headbutt it before it has a chance to get toothy.

Squish. She's killed about half of the swarm... which means there are only three hundred and fifty tiny monsters still trying to kill her.

Ha! She's got them on the run now!

(They're all over her. The flying ones especially are hard to deal with. She can hear metal rattling as they dig their teeth into chain links.)

She props herself up against the car, gripping it with one wing for support while her other two wings swing wildly through the swarm trying to score lucky hits. She gets quite a few. It's a real fish in a barrel situation, when she thinks about it. Hardly fair at all.

(One of them breaks through the chain and bites into her hip. She slaps at it quickly, but not before it's had a chance to sink its teeth into her skin.)

She keeps one foot planted beside the tire. With her other, she stomps intermittently at the few swarmlings still trying to make an approach along the pavement.

(While her hands're occupied prying the swarmling loose from her hips, another alights upon the side of her face and burrows into her cheek. She bites it.)

With a noise like a kalimba, a rainbow beam of light shoots past Alicia's cheek to obliterate a monster. Then there's another beam, and another, faster and faster, and the sound of wings overhead.

Atlanta?

Alicia spits out a mangled wad of blood and chitin, stomps another crawler, wraps her wings around herself like a cage of metal and risks a glance skyward.

Not Atlanta; different magical girl, all stained-glass rainbows, hovering above her and taking out swarm with careful pings of rainbow beam.

Alicia's tired. But she's still got another fifteen odd seconds of hard fighting left in her, doesn't she?

She focuses on the swarm again. Its numbers are really dwindling now.  She swipes at the stragglers, doing her best to keep the monsters occupied and packed tightly together while this interloper calls down the artillery.

One of her legs completely gives out as she works, but she still has the truck to lean on so she's fine.

The artillery eventually gets every swarmling that isn't actually on Alicia. "This is gonna sting!" she calls down. "Here goes nothing - Rainbow Fire!"

Alicia goes up in a wash of stinging many-colored flame. It does sting, especially in her open wounds, though it doesn't actually injure her.

(Okay. It's done.)

Alicia crumples. Her body is tired and her armor is heavy and her everything hurts.

She leans her back against the tire. Her wings slump out to either side.

"Thank you." She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. "I think you might've just saved my life."

"No shit!" says the rainbow girl, coming in for a landing well away from the swarm splatter. "What were you thinking? Bug goo ain't pretty!"

"I've only been an MG for about ten minutes." Alicia laughs, which makes her left cheek feel breezy in an astoundingly unpleasant way. "...might still have a few things I need to figure out?"

"Don't wade into swarms! - Christ, girl, fix your shit, you can't get all your blood back where it belongs but you don't gotta keep the holes!"

"Oh." She touches the hole in question. "That's good to know."

She slips back into her dreamscape, tosses her gore splattered armor into the same void her past two outfits went into, and then sets about applying new flesh to the wounds her body's incurred.

"WEAR CLOTHES," roars rainbow girl.

"Oh, I'm sorry. Where are my manners."

Her body giggles. She directs it to stand and walk over to a less gory patch of pavement. Then she conjures it an outfit made of stained-glass rainbows, a near identical recreation of her rescuer's attire.

"That's not gonna get you far, copying," says rainbow girl, "but least it's not your birthday suit, s'pose."

Alicia smiles, staggers a little and finds another vehicle to lean against.

"So... you go to school here around here, or what?"

"No, somebody saw you dying out here and called 911, stupid."

"Not a bad response time, then. Sixty seconds to here from wherever you got called in from. You a teleporter, or was it just a matter of augmented flight speed?"

"Flight speed. You're lucky I'm fast. Get a weapon before you try fighting these things if you can't go pew-pew and for fuck's sake keep your costume clean."

"Well. This has been a very informative first ten minutes. Suppose I am lucky.

"Again. Thank you."

"You're welcome. You need an ambulance or anything?"

On the one hand, she feels pretty lightheaded. She has definitely never lost this much blood before. If there are circumstances where it's be ideal for an MG to get medical attention, this is probably one of those circumstances?

On the other hand, she feels fantastic. Euphoric, even. And after a first ten minutes like this, it seems a shame to spend the next in an ambulance and then the hour after that in a hospital.

"No, it's alright, I'm fine."

She pushes herself back fully upright, sets her heading in the general direction of the main school building, and starts off in that direction.

She makes it about a dozen steps before she collapses again.

"- you sure you don't want an ambulance? I don't wanna bankrupt you but you look in a bad way."

"Ambulance please."

Rainbow girl pulls a cell phone out of a rainbow pocket and calls it in.

An ambulance - which takes eight whole minutes to show up - appears and collects Alicia. Rainbow girl stays with her till the EMTs know what happened, then flies away.

So. This is what an ambulance is like. She's actually never ridden in one before. Hasn't had any emergency room visits she can remember, in fact.

Today's just full of new experiences, huh?

She has a bit of a wait at the hospital, and they want to talk a lot about her insurance status, and then she gets a couple units of blood.

She spends the interim messing around with glowing accessories in an attempt to further fine tune their aesthetic efficacy. This process is, due to Alicia’s almost terminal lack of fashion sense, little better than trial and error. She does not actually make much progress.

“Wow. I think you might have set a world record there?”

An Atlanta appears in Alicia’s hospital room.

“You know me. Always pushing it.”

The Atlanta hops up onto the side of the bed, her illusory outline phasing through the sheets a little bit.

”But seriously. You could’ve been killed. What the hell were you thinking?

“The last time a swarm spawned near our campus, three people died before an MG showed up. I wasn’t going to let that happen again...”

“You don’t get it. We’re different from them. We’ve always been destined for something greater and we’ve got that destiny in our grasp now and you do not trade that away for just a couple of bystanders.”

Alicia looks at the IV still hooked up to her arm.

”...you’re right. That was stupid. If I take fewer risks I’ll last longer, save more people in the long run.”

“Sure. We’ll go with that.”

Alicia pushes her body back against her pillows, propping up to look the Atlanta in the eyes.

(She realizes, after she does this, that this is a sort of silly gesture given Atlanta isn't seeing through those eyes at all.)

"I'll get the hang of this. I'll get stronger."

"I know you will."

"Please stay safe. You're the only one I can't stand losing."

After a while, the injuries Alicia can't just get rid of by removing an offending extremity (after removing an added one for safety) and putting it back are healed enough that the hospital discharges her and bills her.

This could actually be a little tricky, because Alicia does not have her wallet or her phone on her—if she’s lucky she forgot about them as she was leaving the dorm this morning and they’re still on the counter beside her bed, if she’s not lucky she forgot about during the swarm fight and they’re in the same mystical void she threw her clothes into—and she definitely doesn’t have her insurance information (or any useful phone numbers) memorized...

“Hey Atlanta... if you’re by any chance watching me right now..?”

Atlanta’s not there.

Well okay then.

This is awkward.

"Do you need somebody to call you a cab?" the receptionist asks.

“Yes please.”

"Dunno why there are any magical girls with wings that don't work," she mutters, picking up the hospital landline.

She should work on that.

Alicia’s wings wave themselves skeptically at her body. They don’t like flying, they prefer skittering and stabbing.

”That’s not very pretty though, is it?” Atlanta makes conversation with her wings as they wait for the cab.

Her wings shake their tips back and forth sullenly, then slink away.

"...are your wings, like... their own thing?" asks the receptionist, pausing before dialing the last number.

"No, I just have an active imagination."

"...okay." She finishes calling the cab. It arrives eight minutes later.

Alicia slips inside, her wings folded up behind her with their ends poking out through the window.

"I need a ride back to ISG," she tells the cab driver. "I'll have to duck into the dorm to grab money, I don't have any on me. Is that okay?"

"Yeah, yeah, is fine if you have money where we are going," he says in slightly accented English. "Do not hurt car seat with wings."

"Thanks! Yeah, I'll keep the pointy bits off the seat."

He drives her to campus.

She directs the cab to the girls' dorm, clambers out, scurries inside and then upstairs.

Fortunately, her room is unlocked...

...unfortunately, her wallet/phone/keys are not on the bedside counter where she'd hoped to find them.

(She closes her eye, visualizes her wallet as best she,can and tries to conjure it back from the void?)

She can get a wallet. She can't get any of the stuff in it.

She's not sure what else she expected.

Okay, cab's still idling outside, gotta get some quick cash.

She checks the lounge again first, but finds it deserted. She then heads down the hall and knocks on her friend Kirsten's door?

Krirsten opens up!

“So hey. There’s a long story here and I will definitely explain everything but first I need to borrow twenty bucks?”

"...you good for it?"

Alicia waves a hand and conjures sparkly lights.

"Right now, I reckon I'm good for just about anything."

"I'm not going to wait for you to land a contract doing special effects, Alicia, are you good for it right now in your bank account that exists."

“Assets in excess of twenty American dollars currently exist in my bank account, yes.”

One of Alicia’s wingtips taps the floor behind her restively.

The cab is still idling downstairs. Alicia doesn’t particularly know what to expect if she doesn’t pay her fare—in fact this plausibly seems like one of those things where there wouldn’t be any consequences at all—but Alicia does not think of herself as the Sort Of Person Who Stiffs Cab Drivers and so all else equal she’d prefer to get back to the parking lot promptly.

Kirsten hands over twenty bucks. "Paypal me or I take it out of you some other way."

"Don't tempt me."

Alicia takes the money, dashes down the hall, drops downstairs four-steps-at-a-time again, and returns to the parking lot.

The driver accepts her money and zooms away.

"A cab. Really?"

An Atlanta appears beside Alicia, perched on the narrow curb between lawn and asphalt.

"How long have you been watching..?"

"Since you got back to your dorm room. I've had an eye on it for the past half hour. It's getting easier and easier for me to multitask. Pretty soon, I think I might be able to watch the whole campus at once."

"So... know where I can get twenty bucks?"

"Yeah. While you were out, I set up a little scavenger hunt."

"...what?"

"Check around back."

The Atlanta vanishes.

Alicia circles the dorms.

Their building's built along the edge of a hill, with a moderate slope spilling out behind it. There's a wooden staircase leading up onto a porch behind the dormatory's back doors. A few picnic tables are set up on the porch, intended as an outdoor study area but in practice they don't see much use.

"So." An Atlanta sits on the railing at the wooden platform's edge, just beside the staircase. "Find me something with teeth but no mouth. Something that wears a ring with no fingers."

Alicia climbs the stairs and surveys the porch, seeing nothing dental or jewelry related anywhere on the landing.

"...ooooor you could just swing by the dorms and slip a couple bills under Kirsten's door?"

"Humor me."

Alicia searches the slope next. Finds a whole lot of grass and several pieces of junk that do not in any way resemble her cryptic counterpart's riddle.

Then she glances back at the underside of the porch. And at the dark recesses where that underside joints the slope at the base of the dormitories.

She raises a hand in the direction of the darkness, chuckles to herself, and says: "Lumos!"

The space lights up.

She spots something glinting near the center of the illuminated expanse and skitters up to retrieve it.

Overhead, the Atlanta is clapping.

"There you go, finally thinking like a MG!"

"Oh. A key ring. Har har."

Alicia emerges from under the porch with her prize and climbs the steps again.

"It'll get you into my dorm room. You can help yourself to any of my old things from there."

Okay then.

Alicia heads upstairs, rifles through Atlanta's dorm room, and then returns to her own hall with a wad of money in hand.

"Hey." She knocks on Kirsten's door with a wing-knuckle. "You still around?"

Kirsten opens the door. "Yeah? You got my money?"