They are both full of glossy pictures.

The Visual Dictionary has closeup details of real magical girl outfits, like a pageful of subtly different sweetheart necklines on otherwise radically different costumes and a short paragraph of things each element works well or poorly with. It has sections on sleeves, shoes, under-skirt shorts and leggings, gloves, belts, hems, pleats, pants, fasteners, hats, and more, and recommends its sister volumes A Visual Dictionary of Adornment (for more on jewelry, accessories, makeup, and hairstyles) and A Visual Dictionary of the Magical Body (for more on tattoos, wings, tails, skin changes, eye changes, hair alterations, and more).

The motifs book has several rows per page of different variants on various little symbols that you could festoon your costume with - six kinds of paisleys, seven variants on "triangles", three pages of assorted Celtic knotwork, a row of various stylized birds, clouds, stars, leaves, feathers, lightning bolts, fruits, flowers, butterflies, spirals, stripes, spots, mottling, stippling, crosshatching, cabling, coils, shells, spheres, 2-D projections of cubes, musical notes, planets, moons, and weirder things that look like logos or Japanese prefectural symbols.

She'll touch up her outfit, then - she's basically got the low-hanging fruit by now, but there's plenty of things in the Dictionary she hasn't thought to try, surely a few of them will be improvements. She even finds a pair of leggings that she likes enough to be willing to try in place of her jeans.

The motifs book is less useful, but still interesting to look through, and she does find a couple ideas that she might want to try at some point - a flower design, a particularly interesting pattern of dots, a kind of half-elongated diamond that can be tiled or scattered to interesting effect. She tries drawing these on cartoon paper with a cartoon pencil, one to a page.

The magic has no opinion about her drawings, but it likes the leggings and some of the little touchups.

Cool.

She goes back to look for the other dictionaries; if they don't have them she'll get something on powers, instead, preferably something that talks about what kinds of powers exist and how common they are.

The one about mods is in, the one about accessories is checked out.

That's less interesting but not uninteresting. What does it have to say about mods?

It's like the other visual dictionary; if she looks up wings like hers it says they work better in muted colors visible while folded and any bright ones on the underside.

Well, that's pretty close to what she's got; she doesn't really have any properly muted colors.

Does it have anything interesting to say about tattoos? She hasn't messed with those much, it's pretty likely that she can do better than what she's got.

Tattoos have to work with the lines of your body and it's hard to make medium-density tattoos work as opposed to very dense or very sparse. Detail matters up to pretty high resolution and you might want to shift a tattoo to make sure it's in a good position relative to your pores and follicles if you still have those. Tattoo colors done in ink as opposed to inherent skin pigmentation fade over time just like conventional ink, so you have to touch them up every year or so.

Hm. Hers are on the dense side of medium but not very dense, but just adding more will mess with the thing she's doing with negative space and the lines of her metal swirls. She thinks about it for a bit, then removes the metal on her arms - that feels weird, she'd gotten used to it - and replaces the existing arm tattoos with sleeves that dissolve into swirling spirals like the ones in Starry Night, that then fade out to plain skin halfway down her forearms. She adds metal spirals on top of it, fading similarly from her shoulders to elbows, replaces the metal sunburst on her forehead with a symmetrical pattern of spirals, and changes the hems of her skirt and shirtsleeves to dangling curls of fabric in an attempt to match, paying attention to the magic's opinion at each stage.

The magic is in favor of the dissolving tattoo spirals. It's neutral on the hem change.

She's not really sold on it either; back it goes.

Anything relevant to the metal insets themselves, actually?

Yup, skin inlays are mentioned; it's near the stuff about piercings. They can get infected so they don't recommend having them very deep, especially on head or torso. Usually work best if you're using the same material as wearables; otherwise seldom to never an improvement over shiny tattoos.

She didn't realize shiny tattoos were even an option; does the magic care, in her case?

It's fine with either!

Hmmm. She does like a little bit of actual metal, scattered around - does it ding her for doing a mix, if it's all on theme?

Nope, that's fine.

Cool.

Hmm. She likes her antennae, now, and probably won't change them much even if the book has suggestions, but the claws have turned out to be less useful than she thought they might, and they don't really fit her theme. Any fingernail-related ideas? - actually hands in general, she never did check to see if different kinds would work better for her.

There is a section on nail art! There's all kinds of styles of polish or recoloring depending on whether you want to patch chips or deal with mental changes/cryptid risk ticking up, not limited to what could be conventionally applied (though a surprising variety can be conventionally applied, apparently); insets work here better than in skin, if they're shallow, and little stuck-on ornaments, and cutouts (high maintenance) or other shapes.

Hand mods in this book include extra fingers (often thumbs, sometimes just another generic finger squeezed into the middle, in one case a couple pointing backwards from the wrist like a bird foot), longer fingers, extra joints, modifying the ring and middle fingers to work independently, reversible finger joints so they can curve backwards, sticky finger pads, claws of various styles, and going nail-less. These all carry point values.

Eh, she's not super big on nail art, they can stay how they are for the moment. What are the point values about?

This book assumes its readers know that.

Well, it wouldn't say it if it wasn't important; she'll wait to mess around with that until she figures that out.

Any other sections that look interesting?

It has a short section on antennae and their variety; some people get theirs to do things, mostly smell.

Enh.

She sets the book aside to check out when she's done and goes back to look for something on powers, ideally one that goes into what kinds of powers exist and how common they are.

There are lots of powers.

Some of the most common are various trivially different "energy bolts" and "energy blasts". Next commonest is the class of "elemental" magic - controlling fire or ice or water or air or earth. Some girls get plant control or animal spells, some get kinetic manipulation powers, some get illusions or things that power up ammo or shields or boosts to their strength or durability. Some have enhanced senses, some have less concrete powers like luck or precognition or something.