Whenever she wants it, the same toolset that let her add the butterfly is there. She could remove the butterfly - she hasn't added enough that it's no longer permissible to take away - or she could do anything else - fiber optic hair or corner-to-corner gold eyes or protruding spikes down her spine or mermaid-bright scales up her shins or switchback digitagrade knees or coal-dark fur or glinting ruby claws? -

She's going to need clothes too but she has not yet earned the privilege of magically adjusting those.

The very first thing she does is adjust her weight. She's so thin; almost every kid she knows is too thin, but she doesn't like to cooperate, so they don't feed her more than they absolutely have to. But she doesn't have to make a choice between letting them change her body and letting them change her mind, any more, so she doesn't; she pads herself out until she looks like the kids on TV, the kids who've just come in from outside. It's a relief already, though not as much of one as she expected it to be.

She pauses, then, for just a moment, before tweaking her face - nothing drastic, compared to what she's already done, but she angles her eyes slightly differently, changes the shape of her ears, her nose, lengthens her hair and makes it darker; she's not sure how much it takes to make someone unrecognizable to most people, but it won't hurt, at least.

She pauses again, this time to think; she has some ideas for clothes, but nothing special in mind for how her body should look, yet.

The magic waits patiently. Well, probably patiently; the exact figure of how long you can keep it after making a few adjustments but not a magically adequate overhaul is not widely known. Maybe it is very impatient and if she doesn't have hooves and elephant ears in the next fifteen seconds it will leave her forever, obliged to explain being moderately different-looking.

Just sitting doesn't really help, anyway. She does know enough to make some guesses - she knows that more dramatic changes mean more magic; she knows that too dramatic of a change is bad, though not why. She's not really sure what makes a change too dramatic, or not dramatic enough. She knows that you can't hide being a magical girl.

Maybe it's that simple. Maybe she just needs something she can't hide.

She turns her eyes deep indigo-blue, the color of earliest night, clearly inhuman.

Closer. No cigar.

But closer.

She changes her hair to match and gives it a slight sparkly sheen. If that's still not enough, she'll try swirling indigo tattoos up her arms - actually, now that she's had the idea, she likes it; she'll do that anyway. It's not too dramatic.

Almost almost almost...

Almost!

What else what else what else... more tattoos, down her legs this time, she doesn't expect it to be enough but the imbalance bothers her. More colors, maybe, streaky horizontal stripes gesturing abstractly at sunset-tinted pink and orange clouds, just a few.

The tattoos, colorful though they are, don't quite get her there, and increased coverage doesn't add as much as putting the first ones on did, but she's really quite close...

Well, they're pretty, anyway. She likes them.

She really just needs one more good idea - maybe not even a good idea, if there's some rule like 'you can't just do all color changes'.

Claws. She'll take claws. Little shiny blue-silver ones, shaped like regular nails filed to points, but sharper and sturdier. She tweaks the color until she has something that looks good with the tattoos before checking what the magic thinks of this one; she has another idea, too, if it's still not enough.

Claws do it. She's got magic.

Just enough magic to do clothes; the institution has not clad her in haute couture.

She wouldn't know haute couture if she was buried in a pile of it, anyway. But she can do better clothes: jeans that aren't many-times-over hand-me-downs, in the same indigo as her tattoos with the metal parts in the same shade as her claws; a similarly new tee shirt, silver-blue and metal-sheened, with bright sunset clouds streaked across it front and back; gloves, biker-style, glimpsed in an ad a few months ago, indigo leather with shimmery pink-orange piping at the wrists and matching insets where the originals had breathable mesh; steel-toed boots, half-remembered from a magazine, indigo again as the base color, pink-orange toes and fittings; silver-blue socks.

She looks okay, now. Not amazing, there's definitely plenty of room for her to improve. But she doesn't look like someone whose very existence is at someone else's whim; she's her own, she's free, even if she hasn't figured out how to leave yet.

The magic surely has an opinion; she might find that she cares, later. For now, it's time to look for her magic, get started on figuring out how she's going to get out and how much more she needs to change to have enough oomph to.

She has a little magic now. Apparently this outfit is at least OK.

She gives it a nudge - is there any sense of what she can do with it?

She could - talk to people, sort of - just think at them -

That would be much more useful if there was anyone she could safely talk to that way. Well, she can let Janet know she's leaving, maybe.

Hopefully it won't all be like that; there's only one way to find out. She adds swirls of silvery-blue to herself; not just a color, this time, but slightly raised lines of the same metal as her claws, complementary swirls accenting the tattoos on her arms and legs. She extends the tattoos and metal swirls to her torso, while she's at it, not because she expects that to help with the magic but just because it looks better, and then adds filigree to her face, a symmetrical pattern that starts with a curl at her cheeks and runs below her ears to meet at the base of her head. She adds some to her forehead, too, a simple sunburst pattern, and then checks the magic again.

A little more, maybe enough for the spell to work better, but not enough for more spells.

She expected that to work better. Maybe the aesthetic is just wrong? She's a little tempted to start over, see if something else gets better results - she likes this, but it doesn't matter if she likes it if it doesn't have her out by morning.

She'll try something less drastic, first. She changes all the indigo to hot pink, all the orangey-pink sunset parts to bright yellow, and all the silvery metal to black.

Doesn't help. A little worse if anything.

Okay. Might be the aesthetic, but she's not on a blatantly wrong track. She puts the colors back to how they were, thinks about it for a few seconds, and then adds cat ears - light orange inside, indigo fur on the outside, and, importantly, properly mobile for expressing herself with - and a long fluffy cat tail to curl around her feet, and changes her eyes again to orange cat's eyes. She double-checks that she still has the option to remove things, and adds fur to the tattoos, too.

She can remove things, and the ears and tail don't help - the ears make things a little worse and then the tail brings it back up. The eye change makes it worse.

Okay, that's weird. There's something she's not getting, here.

What if she extends the indigo skin and accompanying fur over her entire body, losing the metal swirls and cloud streaks? And changes her shirt pattern from clouds to plain? And gives herself a little muzzle? And then changes the fur to a dark grey, like a real cat might have?

Turning into a catperson loses most of her progress and de-clouding her shirt loses the rest.

She changes everything back to how it was before she tried the ears. Saves the tail for last, checks if that's still an improvement on its own, it can stay if it is.

It is not an improvement on its own.

Off it goes, then.

Obviously adding bits can be an improvement, though. Let's see... wings just sound terrifying; she doesn't really want a tail if it's not a cat tail... antennae might be okay, and there's no obviously good way to add a pair of legs - being a centaur sounds very inconvenient - but she can add a pair of arms, how about that?

That's worse, apparently, especially if she doesn't fix her shirt to accommodate them.

She reverts the change. And of course she fixed her shirt; she puts it back, now.

While she's thinking about the shirt - the magic cared more than she expected it to about her taking the clouds off. Maybe it'll care more than she expects about other changes, too. Not that there's anything she wants to change - she likes the colors, and the matte texture against the skylike shimmer. How about... can she animate it, have the clouds drift like real clouds do?

Not quite. She can move it moment to moment manually - actually, the magic likes that quite a bit, there's just the edges of another spell coming in when she keeps the clouds in motion - but she doesn't seem able to automate it, at least not with only yea much magic.

Good to know.

She adds clouds to her pants, near the cuffs, and a gradient of sparkles from mid-thigh to waist to suggest stars becoming visible as night sets in. If that helps, she'll add a similar sparkle gradient to her hair, and make the tips sunset orange.

That does help! Now she has her second spell. She can make - things. They will not be quite real but they can have real effects.

Magic!

Can she try that out, here? Maybe it'll give her some ideas.

She can! It requires a lot of concentration - it might take less if she looked cooler; animating the clouds is about a tossup in terms of how much she can get out of her attentional capacity and this spell.

The stuff looks obviously fake; it casts shadows but they're oversimplified and blocky, and the creations have outlines, and move with something very much like a frame rate. They are, in a word, solid cartoons.

That's pretty cool. And it might be enough to get her out, if she can make, say, a key, and have it be the key to a door she wants to unlock.

She's going to try for another spell, first, since that will only maybe work. She likes this star gradient idea, and the magic seems to like it, too; she starts by shortening the sleeves of her shirt so they just barely cover her shoulders and then adding the gradient to her arm tattoos.

The magic does like that! Not a whole-nother-spell likes it, but it does like it.

Good that they're on the same page. And - it seems to like the sunset/evening motif - what happens if she, say, adds a couple moths, the little brown ones she sees at the window sometimes, to her gloves, in the same painted-on style as her shirt's clouds?

Neutral.

Might just be a little dull. What if she recolors them - sky blue, or maybe a bright teal?

Sky blue works better than brown or than the teal but still not well; it's barely possible even to tell the difference.

Well, they are small, and gloves are a pretty aesthetically dubious place for moths. Maybe around the knees of her pants will work better, between where the sunset fades out and the stars fade in.

- nah. She takes a glance at the magic but she'll be surprised if it's an improvement at all, and anyway she doesn't like it, too cluttery, night isn't like that.

What if... context does matter, she saw that with the cat tail and ears combo, together they were almost neutral but individually they were both worse; antenna might help if they're specifically moth antenna - yeah, that looks good, curling back from her temples like a fuzzy indigo tiara with orange tips - and... maybe moth wings? Moth wings don't sound so bad.

Moth wings and antennae give her a little boost together! She might be almost at another spell.

Cool.

Given how context does matter, she should check that none of the parts of her outfit are working against her now. The metal swirls seem most likely to have that problem; she removes them, then the gloves, then changes the boots to plain sneakers, checking the magic and reverting each change when she's done with it, and then checks the gloves and boots together, for good measure.

None of those elements seem to be hurting, but the gloves are helping least, followed by the swirls.

Good.

Fixing up the colors on the wings might even be enough to push her over; the sky blue is a bit much at this scale. The orange-to-indigo-to-starry theme seems to be working really well; no reason to not at least try it. And - she can open the wings, and there's a second pair of wings that peeks out when they're just slightly spread; that can be silvery-blue and metallic.

There she goes! Another spell! Would she like to be less real?

'Less real' seems to here mean 'can walk through walls'. She would very much like to be less real.

When she casts her spell, she shifts slightly kata, out of phase with the room; she can see it, but all of it looks farther away, at the same time. And yes. She can walk through walls.

This is the best thing.

She can probably get to Janet's room without being seen. And if she is... well, they're going to have a tough time catching her, huh. Off she goes, carefully.

The older girl is asleep when she gets there, quiet but restless with some nightmare; Denice settles herself on the floor by her bed, shielded from Janet's roommate's view, before phasing in. She knows better than to touch her without warning, but a gentle tap on her mattress is enough to wake her partially, anyway.

"Mmnh... no, go away..."

It's me, Denice, she sends. I got magic.

That doesn't seem to wake her any further. "Denice should have magic. Yeah. Go talk to Denice."

- huh?

She taps the mattress again, a little more urgently this time, and that seems to finally bring Janet properly awake; she sits up and looks confusedly at the moth girl sitting on her floor.

It's Denice, she sends again. I got magic. I came to say goodbye.

It still takes her a few seconds to respond. "-Denice?"

Yeah. Do you want a hug before I go?

"...yeah."

She slips to the floor for the hug.

"This is really real, wow."

Yeah. I'll come back for you, if I can.

"You're a good kid, Denice. Take care of yourself, all right?"

Of course. Thank you for taking care of me.

She gives her one more squeeze, and goes.

It's chilly outside, and dark. Her magic perks up slightly when she emerges into the night.

What good magic.

She'll have to experiment with having her stars and silvery bits glow, later when stealth isn't so important; she expects that'll look really cool. For now, she phases out again - no point risking tripping over something in the dark - and follows the institution's driveway out to the road; maybe she'll be able to see lights or something from there, and figure out where to go.

There are streetlights along the avenue, if not dense or all in good repair.

Less helpful than she was hoping, but that's not really surprising; she's been pretty wildly optimistic recently, and she can't expect that to pay off every time. She'll follow the road downhill; it's as good a reason as any to pick a direction. And - can she be translucent, or even invisible, to go with her phasing? If not, she'll walk in the woods where she'll have a bit of cover.

She does not have translucence or invisibility yet.

Woods it is, then. Convenient that she can just walk through the trees and underbrush. Walk walk walk, keeping an eye on the road so she won't miss it if it turns away from her path.

Nobody is out in the woods at this hour; she is undisturbed for a couple of hours, which isn't long enough to get anywhere more interesting than residential cross streets with a handful of dark houses on each.

Especially since she can't walk all that far without needing to rest. The first time she needs to, she heads deeper into the woods first; while she's out there she can play with her look a little more. Maybe having things glow will be enough to get another spell.

Glowing doesn't seem to be on the menu, not like she has in mind.

Well, it was worth checking.

Tromp tromp tromp. It's a little surprising how much she likes being in the woods at night.

A siren approaches from the distance.

She dives into a bush.

The police car zooms past without slowing down.

She's going to just lie here and shake for a while, actually.

Then she will also get to watch police car number two go by. It doesn't spot her either.

She should get moving. It's not safe but it's not less safe than staying here. It takes her a minute to gather enough willpower to stand, but she does it, and sets off again.

There's more of a real town, coming in stages: gas station there, apartment building there, denser houses, grocery store.

Better and worse both; more and better hiding places, but she doesn't know which ones are safe and which ones will have people in them.

That grocery store sure looks empty, though, maybe that's a good one. She gives it a try.

It's locked but she can walk through walls. Behold, a grocery store, closed for the night, rows of freezers humming. There's a sound like maybe there's a guy with a mop humming in the produce section.

She almost turns and leaves immediately - she's looking for a hiding place, and this isn't a suitable one, with someone here - but food. She walks down an aisle at random, picks up a bottle of juice and a pack of applesauce cups, and - is she going to be able to carry them, actually, if she phases out again? She sets the juice down and tests it with the applesauce, holding the pack with the back of her hand on the shelf where it'll land if it doesn't phase with her when held.

Nope, she can't bring it along.

Well, at least it's a quiet thump.

She puts the applesauce and juice back. She has no way of carrying them; they might not be missed if she took them but she can't eat them here without leaving an obvious mess, and her best bet is still to not give anyone any clue of where she's gone.

She closes her eyes, then, aims away from the humming, and walks until she feels the night air again.

She's in the parking lot. The lights overhead glare down at her. Occasional cars separated by a minute or two each whoosh down the road.

She pauses just long enough to take a deep breath, figures out which way she was headed before she tried the grocery store, and sets off again, avoiding busier roads as best she can.

Avoiding busier roads will have her on quiet stopsign-studded residential streets. There's a closed convenience store which doesn't even seem to have a guy with a mop.

She checks the convenience store and takes a nice break, making a meal of a bag of tortilla chips and cheese from a vending machine. Before she goes, she checks an idea she had on the walk - if she gives herself a nice thematic bag, and puts things in it, and then phases, does that work?

Nope. The bag helps, but not that much.

Well, it was worth a shot. She cleans up and heads out again. (She'll keep the bag. Even if it isn't useful right now, it will be eventually, and she wants to know if any other ideas she has along the way work with it.)

Houses houses nail salon bank restaurant restaurant laundromat houses bar restaurant houses library swarm of monsters spawning on her six.

....what. She turns to look.

Coming into existence on the surface of a pine tree in a park, like slugs and pillbugs morphing into tiny tree octopi, cicadas, spiky radially symmetrical things that ooze through the branches. Moving around slowly, staying more or less together but with individuals going in a variety of directions. They descend the tree trunk.

They don't seem to be a threat but this also isn't something that just happens, as far as she knows, and the magic warned her about it; she doesn't want these things hanging around maybe being a clue about where she's been.

She makes a cartoon box with a funnel on top, and a scoop, and tries scooping them in.

They do not want to be in the box or the scoop. They start growing more wings and flying into the air.

That's kind of alarming.

How about... she drops a cloth on the swarm, followed by a pile of rocks.

This successfully geeshes some of them and inconveniences others! Many wriggle out around the edges of the cloth and help the survivors underneath chew through it.

More rocks, then, while she tries to come up with something else - a big flyswatter might work if there were only a few of them but she doesn't really like her odds even with a chunk of the swarm incapacitated. Sticky paper might gum them up enough to stop them from moving, and then she could squish them. Or just stickiness, no paper - does that work, dropping a layer of goo on them?

Gooing them inconveniences them! They can shapeshift out of it, and they get underway on that, but it seems to take a while.

Plenty of time for more rocks, then, after she clears out the existing rubble, nice flat ones for maximum squish.

Once the earlier rocks are out of the way flat rocks do a decent job on the remaining swarm. There are only four unsquished ones - there and there and there and there -

Flyswatter time, then. Squish squish miss squish squish. (Ew.)

Hooray! She has defeated a swarm!

Hopefully that doesn't happen too often. She cleans up again and continues on her way.

Houses houses bus stop church houses, signs for something called "the snake zone", apartments, swimming pool, gym associated with swimming pool, houses, elementary school with playground, park.

She peers curiously at the swimming pool, and rests for a little while in the gym, curled up in a changing stall. When she gets to the park, she decides that it's a good enough place to stop and sleep, behind a bush with a cartoon blanket over her for camouflage and a bit of protection.

Putting a cartoon blanket over herself diminishes her access to her unreality spell, though it doesn't nix it altogether.

That's fine. She doesn't need it for much while she's asleep anyway.

Nothing disturbs her sleep for the next few hours.

The sun rises in the morning.

She rolls over slightly and pulls the blanket up over her face, and sleeps on.

A soccer ball lands on her hip.

She jolts awake, silently, and lies there frozen in place for a moment before realizing where she is and that she should find out what's going on.

A soccer game is going on. A little boy is jogging in her direction.

Okay. Okay. She can do this. She dismisses the blanket and phases in to pick up the ball so she can hand it to him when he gets to her.

He's startled to see her. "Whoa! Magical girl!" he says, accepting the ball.

Yeah, she is. And she's a secret, okay? For important magical girl reasons.

"Okay, magical girl!" says the boy, and he runs off, kicking his ball in front of him back to his friends.

Okay, good, that probably won't be a disaster. She needs a better hiding place, though - anything she can plausibly get to without being seen?

In her immediate vicinity there are more shrubs, and some trees; the playground for the school; the school itself, buses pulling into its drive and disgorging children a bit older than the boy with the soccer ball; a bunch of houses, one of which has a shed she can see; a gas station; and beside the gas station an auto shop.

Even at a distance, the kids getting out of the busses are far enough over the amount of people she's used to to be a little overwhelming. She can't help staring, for a minute or so.

She's definitely not going that way, and she doesn't think she can get to the houses or anything without attracting attention. Up a tree is her best bet; time to find out if these wings are functional, as soon as it seems like nobody's watching.

Moth wings - nope. Doesn't work. She can flap them, but if she does it hard enough to get any lift they hurt.

That's fine, honestly, she's really not a flying type of person.

It takes another bit of thinking before it occurs to her to manifest a climbing net between the ground and the tree branch she wants to be on, like she's seen in playgrounds on TV. She tests it to make sure it'll hold before climbing up.

It holds fine. Now she's up a tree.

Not bad. Maybe she really can handle being out on her own.

She repeats the trick another few times, until she's satisfied with how hidden she is, and then puts a denser net between two branches and curls up on it to go back to sleep.

She and her hammock are undisturbed except by squirrels. The squirrels chitter at her and at one point throw a nut shell at her.

She's properly phased out, this time; the nut shell goes right through.

She's next woken by the sound of after-lunch recess at the school, but she feels reasonably rested, so that's fine. She sits for a bit, enjoying not having anywhere she needs to be or anything she needs to do, and then climbs down a few branches to check what's going on in the park.

Person sitting on park bench reading, mom with a baby in a stroller, picnic, Frisbee with a dog, that's all she can see from here.

If there's a search party lurking around looking for her, everyone's awfully calm about it; that's good enough for her. She returns to her nest and plays with cartoon constructs, trying to get a better feel for what she can do. Like: Can she make machines that work - something like a jack in the box? A helium balloon? A lamp? A TV? A tablet? Do things have to look like the things she wants them to work like in order to work? Can they make noise? (She's careful to check this very quietly.) How about cartoon physics bullshit, portable holes and invisibility paint and so on? Outright magic, an endless decanter of water or a wand that gives a squirrel a beak when she waves it at it? Can she put an electrical outlet on the tree and have it power cartoon things, if they don't work without being plugged in?

She can make a jack in the box and a cartoon balloon. Her lamp doesn't light; her TV and tablet don't work. They can make noise; whether they have to look like what they are depends on what she tries. She cannot currently do portable holes or invisibility paint or real water or a magic wand. The outlet in the tree will make her lamp work but doesn't help with the TV or tablet.

Could be better but still not bad.

She hangs a light from an overhead branch - her spot is basically a tent, now, not just a hammock, she put up sheets of fabric before she tried the lamp at all - and gets back to that idea she had last night for making the stars on her outfit glow. The magic won't do it, but she's seen Christmas lights before, maybe she can rig something up indirectly. She doesn't want to be tethered to the tree, that obviously doesn't work, but maybe she can get outlets and wires that are small enough to put on herself or her clothes.

If she hides an outlet on her costume she can cartoon-light herself. The effect is... cartoony; the magic doesn't think it's pretty.

Fair enough. She goes to change her gloves to have places for cartoon bulbs, anyway, so she can use them as flashlights without tying up her hands; while she's figuring out how to make that work, it occurs to her to check whether she can add a real Christmas light bulb, there, and a real wire and outlet, and have that work.

Her clothing powers do not extend to adding trailing wires, let alone real outlets.

- real bulb, though? Do a cartoon wire and outlet work with it?

No.

Eh, it was worth a shot.

That's killed a couple hours, but that only makes it afternoon, and she's not coming down from this tree until night... can she make a book?

She can make a cartoon book full of gibberish. Its pages don't turn right; she can make it look like she's turning pages but can't get away from the apparent middle.

Again, it was worth a shot.

She cleans up, and naps, and then fiddles with the editor a bit until the sun starts to set, trying different variants of things in her outfit to see if she can come up with anything the magic likes better.

There are lots of small tweaks with small positive effects. If she tries a skirt that's a solid boost. She could also stand to put stuff in her hair.

She wants to keep the pants but she can put a short translucent ruffly skirt over them and move the star gradient to it, that looks nice. She does eventually think to put a wide cloth headband in her hair, and then tries a ponytail briefly before going back to loose hair and adding alternating indigo and orange ribbons to the headband to move with it.

The headband doesn't help. Maybe the magic thinks it clashes with antennae. It prefers her hair down to a ponytail. The ribbons don't help.

She's not married to the antennae; does it prefer headband-no-antennae to antennae-no-headband?

Antennae are preferred.

She'll stick with what she has, then, it's not obvious that she could add anything without cluttering things up too much - blue-silver streaks, maybe, if she's careful about where she puts them; framing her face?

That's good!

Cool.

How's the park looking, is it empty enough for it to be safe for her to come down yet?

Somebody's emptying the trash cans.

After that the park is empty.

Time to go, then. She avoids the school; the gas station is presumably still open, but if it happens to be closed she'll stop in for something to eat, and otherwise she just heads out, in roughly the same direction as yesterday, avoiding people as well as she can and keeping an eye open for meal opportunities.

The gas station is indeed still open.

There's a poster with a picture of her on a telephone pole.

That's not great. What does it say?

It gives her name, and says she's missing as of yesterday's date, and has a number to call.

She tears it down and takes it with her. Tears down the next few, too, until she realizes that she'll leave a trail that way. Sets off perpendicular to her path until she's found and removed a few more, then turns back the way she was going.

She's not very recognizable as the girl in the poster, anyway.

Synagogue daycare bakery bodega pet shop bike store massage parlor.

...bikes exist, right. She's never ridden one, but maybe it's not too hard to pick up, and maybe a cartoon bike will be easier than a real one. Next time she sees a park she gives it a try. (She gives herself a helmet before she gets on, modeled after the ones on the bike shop's signs, with sparkly indigo foam and an outer shell that matches her shirt, clouds and all; she adjusts the shape of her antennae to sit right at the base of the shell.)

The bike helmet does only minor damage to the Aesthetic. Her cartoon bike works fine.

And now she's making much better time. It doesn't improve her mood all that much, though. (Food would help. Maybe she'll find someplace properly empty, soon; the bodega was open and the bakery had a light on in the back.)

This liquor store has a rack of munchies and candies.

That helps, yeah. She's still hungry, but it's back to being ignorable at least. She continues on.

A party of three magical girls bearing a searchlight flies slowly overhead in goose-skein formation.

UM.

She loses the bike and ducks into the nearest empty-looking building.

The nearest empty looking building is a bank.

It transpires that the girls are calling her name: "DENICE? DENICE?"

She will just huddle all shivery on the floor, then.

One of them lands, not outside the bank but cattycorner to it. "DENICE? PEOPLE ARE WORRIED, DENICE."

She goes face-down onto the floor, pressing herself against it, not resisting not resisting not resisting don't hurt me don't hurt me don't hurt me. Can't stop shaking.

The girl has a flashlight. She crosses the street. Aims the beam in through the bank windows.

Spots Denice on the floor, goes and knocks on the window. "Hey! Denice? Is that you?"

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

(She doesn't move. Barely breathes. Not resisting not resisting not resisting don't hurt me don't hurt me don't hurt me. Still can't stop shaking, hard enough that it's probably visible. Hurts. That's fine. It'd be weird if this didn't hurt.)

"Hey - we're not gonna hurt you -" The glass muffles her. She signals the still-airborne other girls; they land, and one teleports into the bank.

She couldn't move if she wanted to, right now. Couldn't want to, for that matter.

"Denice? Are you hurt?" asks the teleporter girl. She's in a steampunk outfit covered in gears with a fake corset and everything, carefully organized around the wings. "Your wings look pretty fragile, do you have enough else changed to get rid of them to put them back right? - That's a bike helmet. Do you have a bike somewhere?"

She twitches hard when the teleporter starts talking near her, something like an attempt to curl into a fetal position. Doesn't make it. Doesn't otherwise respond.

"- do I need to call you an ambulance?"

She manages to curl up, this time. She doesn't seem injured, but she's shaking like a leaf.

"You look like you might be cold or - or hungry or something? Janie has some raisins, do you want Janie's raisins -"

She's far too far gone to make out the words, but the tone is off-script enough that she notices. It takes only the barest edge off the panic, but that's enough for Denice to be present in her head at all, for her world to contain anything besides the certainty that it's ending.

There's not much she can do; moving is an option in only the most technical sense, and talking is right out. She could make a cartoon thing, but she's too terrified to think about what to make. She has this telepathy, though. There's only one thing to send with it. It might not be a good idea, but it's not like she's in a position to think about that, right now.

Steampunk girl is suddenly very aware that this entire situation is terrifying.

Steampunk girl rocks back on her heels. "Whoa, whoa, not gonna hurt you - did somebody hurt you -"

Terrifying.

The effect fades out after a second or so; it's still long enough to be pretty uncomfortable.

"Okay, you're clearly - really scared - but we're not here to hurt you."

Institutional hallways. Hunger. Being held down by someone much larger; pain in overstressed joints. Trapped trapped trapped; the horror of never, ever, ever being safe. The vague sense of a battle of wills that creeps along over days, weeks, years, never ending, no hope of ever ending, where even if she wins she loses.

"Do you want Janie's raisins -"

"- since you're hungry, I mean -

- I need to think about the other stuff but I can get you raisins now."

She's too scared to move, and shouldn't try to eat soon even after she comes out of it, it'll just make her sick. She is probably coming out of it but it's going to be a little while.

"Okay."

Steampunk girl teleports out of the bank, talks inaudibly to the other two.

She lays there, trying to remember how to move her legs. It's slow going.

Steampunk girl comes back inside before she has that figured out. Sits by her, takes out her phone, plays a puzzle game with soft bleeping noises and waits.

That's unhelpful; the only people she's ever seen play phone games are staff and it's hard to stop the reminder from sending her spiraling back into panic. Not that she's going to say so.

It takes more than five minutes but less than ten for her to sit up; she scoots over to the window and leans heavily against it.

"You feeling better?" asks steampunk girl, lowering her phone.

Better but not great, yeah.

"Can... I help?"

Denice pulls her knees up to her chest and wraps her arms around them.

She doesn't want to go back. She just wants to be left alone.

"- I don't think you need to go back where you came from but you might need some kind of help. You're in a bank and hungry."

She's not that hungry.

"You've been missing more than a day, what've you been doing, shoplifting?"

"You can't just go around shoplifting to eat. That'll get the cops after you, not just a search-n-rescue squad of girls."

The steampunk girl sits with her for a bit in silence. Eventually says, "I'm Megan."

Denice.

"Yeah. Your telepathy spell's pretty cool. They were like, oh, she doesn't know how to talk, but you're doing fine."

That gets a tiny grin: yeah, she really likes it.

"There's stuff geared at magical girls. Charities and transitional housing kinds of deals. Whatever other kind of magic you've got there's people out there who'd help you figure out how to make money off it."

She doesn't understand, like... any... of what she just said.

"Like... I dunno, does the Institute have actual custody of you -"

Doesn't understand that question, either.

"How old are you?"

Thirteen.

"That's really young to be on your own, like, even if you were a regular person."

She curls up a little tighter, tense.

She's not dumb. They think she's dumb, because they hurt her less when she made them think that, so she did. (And there's a sense in the background that she's been doing that kind of strategic masterminding for most of her life; that it's one of the primary tools she's used to survive.) But she's not dumb. She can figure this out.

"I didn't say you were dumb, just, like, not regular. And thirteen. So you need somebody helping you but maybe not those same people. I can get the others to say we never found you but you gotta have some plan that isn't stealing food and hiding in banks."

Oh.

She's still figuring it out. She only hid in the bank because they were about to find her. She doesn't know how else to get food but she can work on it.

"I could suggest some places to go? Some of 'em won't try too hard to find out where you came from if you just show up and say you ran away from home and you had a good reason."

But what if they're worse - she doesn't send that. If they're bad she can leave. If they don't know about the phasing they won't know to stop her from being able to. Maybe even if they do know they won't have a way.

Okay, she sends.

"So there's - are you a religion at all -"

She tenses up a little at that, for some reason.

No.

"...well, there's people who like, kind of worship whatever thing is judging how pretty we are all the time? And they have some charities but you have to listen to their spiel. My next idea is Magicals International."

That might be okay if it's, like, once. She is not a fan of church.

"I don't know how many times it would be. Uh, the Church of Thaumatology would probably try to get you adopted by some nice magical couple and they'd probably try to bring you up in the Church, so probably more than once. Magicals International would probably put you in a dorm and powers-test you and have you kinda working for your dinner but like you'd still have time for school so they wouldn't work you too hard."

She curls up tight as the girl finishes speaking. The mention of being worked too hard, maybe, or of going to school.

"Do they not have school at the Institute?"

Bad. Dreadful. The most insidious danger.

"...they have it but it's bad school?"

She doesn't have a concept of school that's not a horrible painful degrading tactical nightmare. If that's bad, yes, it was bad.

"I think they'd send you to like... normal... school? Where you would learn... math and science and English and stuff."

She doesn't trust this girl - this adult - enough for her calm about it to be reassuring. She doesn't send that; she just sits.

"I think anywhere responsible I could send you would send you to school but maybe if you got adopted by Church of Thaumatology people you could get ones who'd homeschool you?"

Okay.

(She'll play along, and as soon as she has a chance, she'll leave. She can do that. It's fine.)

"There's not a Church in this town but if you want to go that way a few miles," she points, "you can get into the next town, and there's one at Main and... thirty-third, thirty-fourth, around there."

Thank you.

"I could show you the way and let Bailey report in."

She's a little distant for a moment, but then there's a sense of appreciative agreement, and she stands and manifests a cartoon door on the glass wall to step through. (It's not much of a misdirection, but better than them knowing she can phase without any prep or limitations at all.)

Megan makes to follow her, but when she vanishes the door she shrugs and teleports out.

She manifests the bike again, manages to smile about it. She hates this so much and she's so glad she's good at it.

"Nice," says Megan, "that's a really cool utility power. Follow me." She takes off, texting her teammates once she's cruising.

She follows compliantly.

Megan leads her to a Church of Thaumatology a town over. It's a really pretty building.

She gawks, a little, but follows her in.

There's a magical girl who apparently lives in the church and is easily woken by Megan ringing a bell. She comes out in pajamas but switches smoothly into full vogue; she does a watercolor painting theme including elaborate lipstick and eyeshadow and abstract floral ornaments in her hair. "Hello, girls, what brings you here?"

New people are scary and there's no reason to hide that right now. She shrinks back just a little; hopefully Megan will take the cue to do the talking.

"- she ran away. I think she came from someplace real scary but she does telepathy magic instead of talking so I don't know all the details."

Yes, that's right.

"I see," says the watercolor girl. "What's your name, dear?"

"I'm Megan," says Megan.

(Shy shy shy shy shy)

Her name is Janet.

"Hello, Janet, I'm Thaumaturge Flora. Would you like to spend the night in the spare room here?"

Yes please.

"This way. Thank you, Megan."

Megan bows a little and lets herself out. Flora shows "Janet" to a guest room.

She follows, and sits nervously on the offered bed.

Thank you.

"You're welcome, Janet. I assume you can sort out your own pajamas. The bathroom's just across the hall. I'm usually up at six but if you rise even earlier than I do there are toaster waffles and cereal and fruit in the kitchen down that way."

Okay. Thank you.

"You're welcome, Janet," Flora says again, and she changes back into her pajamas with a gestured flourish and goes back to bed.

She gives Flora a minute to get back to her bed, phases out for silence, and goes looking for the kitchen.

There is the kitchen. It's big; it's a combination kitchen and dining room, with three long tables that can probably seat thirty together. In addition to the promised breakfast foods it also has a tray of cookies (storebought, still sealed), leftover chicken soup and pasta in the fridge, sandwich and salad fixings including a really wide variety of pickles, and little jars of panna cotta and cups of fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt lining the inside of the fridge door. The freezer contains six flavors of ice cream, bacon, and lemonade concentrate.

The theme of the room seems to be something along the lines of "rustic"; the fruit is in wicker baskets, the tables are heavy wooden things with half-log-topped benches. The cookware's all copper and it's dangling from the rafters; also dangling are various herbs in planters, bunches of dried wildflowers, and strings of garlic. The refrigerator has been paneled in wood somehow; it might be wood sheets with magnets glued to it. There are placemats on the tables, braided flat rope coils. A poster on the wall reads God wills that we see the beauty in one another. The windows are stained glass, though the colors are hard to make out in the dark; each depicts a magical girl, though.

Wow.

She doesn't examine the food very closely, but she takes an apple and, feeling ambitious, carefully puts together a turkey sandwich, and then a ham one. She feels much better when she's done eating, and decides to explore a little further.

The kitchen is where the Thaumaturge's apartment bleeds into public church space. The dining end of the kitchen leads into the main sanctuary, which is divided into four quadrants with their own decorating schemes - one quarter is greyscale and has feathers in all shades of white and black and grey attached along the tops of the pews, one's all warm colors with the pews draped in brocade, one's greens and browns and festooned with tiny succulents and Spanish moss wherever people won't need to sit, and one's in blue and purple and encrusted with seashells. There's a bulletin board on the far side near the main entrance (Megan brought Denice in through the rear side door that lets directly into Flora's apartment); on it are children's art projects. Between each pair of windows along the walls of the church there is a statue of a different cryptid; there's a winged deer with a rack of antlers that looks like it ought to be too much for her head to support, and a six-armed naga, and a spider-taur, and a girl's smiling face peering out of what is otherwise an apple tree. Tree-cryptid is closest to planty pew section but otherwise they don't look matchy.

....oh. Oh.

She sees it, imagining the space filled with magical girls. How it's made to work for them, not the other way around. She fits in the green and brown section; Megan would fit in the greyscale; Flora would fit in the red. It might not work for everyone, but it tries, it tries to fit itself to people rather than demanding that people fit themselves to it.

She's never seen anything like it before.

She still... can't, with school; the threat of it still sits as a knot of tension in her belly. But maybe she can stay a little while anyway. A day or two. She'll give herself that, a little treasure of a memory to think back on later; that's the only thing you can really keep, anyway.

She goes to sit in a pew, in the nature section, of course.

There are books; in this section they are in leather pockets that hang from the pews in front of them. One is called Thaumaturgical Wisdom and one is called Songbook of the Church of Thaumatology.

Thaumaturgical Wisdom sounds more like the kind of book you read; she looks through it.

What are the principles of beauty?
Balance; harmony; tension; delicacy.
Why then can we make balanced, delicate things, tense and harmonious, which are not beautiful?

Why does God choose only some?
Ask instead: why do only some choose God?

Perhaps at any time those who lose themselves in the beauty of God's design could choose to return
yet are too ecstatic to leave it for even a moment,
but perhaps they have lost themselves in something less lovely,
and God's design is in restraint, and elegance without abandon.

...well, that's religion.

The third one is a little concerning - lose themselves? - and she makes note of where it is in the book, in case an opportunity comes up to ask about it.

She pages through it a little more and then goes out to check out the area around the building, keeping a particular eye out for hiding places.

The church is freestanding, but not by very much; there's a path, a row of forsythia bushes, and a fence between it and the grounds of an apartment building on one side, and it's comparably adjacent (though with gingko trees and rosebushes on that side) to a garden store on the other side. Behind the church there's a koi pond with a bench and a Japanese maple. She could fit under the Japanese maple but it's not really opaque.

Inside the church there are a couple of closets, which are not diligently kept beautiful like the rest of the church; she could theoretically climb to the rafters of the sanctuary if she wanted to make some climbing-oriented body-mods or swap her wings for ones that can fly; there is a cellar, reachable by trap door in the entryway, which contains more religious literature, some bottles of wine, seasonal decorations in cardboard boxes, some dusty cat-related equipment also in cardboard boxes, an antique globe, and a broken chair.

She'll have to check sometime whether that trick from cartoons about breathing through a reed works. Not here, though, not enough privacy.

She looks through the religious literature to see if there's anything more interesting to read.

She will have to turn on the cellar light (a bulb with a ribbon to pull) to read down here; even with adjusted eyes the streetlights don't spill sufficiently into this space.There are tracts with pretty illustrations in them, and there are earlier drafts of the songbook and the Wisdom, and there are a lot of copies of something titled On the Church of Thaumatology, which appears to be a very dry history in small print.

She looks through some tracts, and then starts on the history - she doesn't get far into it before she gives up, but she might learn something anyway.

Apparently the Church of Thaumatology was founded in 1797 by Abigail Lydia Claremont who later died a martyr, and has since split into five major denominations, mostly amicably, principally over differences in their approach to non-magical worshipers, adoption practices, theology of cryptids, and church spending ratios. The tracts indicate that the particular church she is in subscribes to the First Reform sect.

It's a little amazing how this book manages to make an interesting topic hard to read about.

She puts it away and heads back to her room - she can probably get a nap in now, and it's a good idea to if they're going to wake her up in the morning.

Her room is just how she last saw it, deep rug and cozy plaid bedding and a suncatcher in the window waiting for morning.

Flora is indeed up and audibly about at six but doesn't attempt to wake "Janet" at that time.

She's asleep by then; not deeply, but she's used to sleeping through some noise. She won't wake until Flora wakes her.

Flora knocks softly at around ten a.m.

She's disoriented for a moment, but appears at the door - back, or still, in the same outfit from last night - fairly promptly, to give a sleepy greeting.

"Good morning, Janet. If you need more sleep don't let me stop you, you've certainly had a time of it to wind up here in the middle of the night, but I'd like to know if I'm making lunch for an extra person. It's just rice and beans and cheese, nothing exciting."

Yes please.

Maybe not those - she's clumsy with her hands, and a little messy with utensils sometimes. But she doesn't mind trying.

"I could thin out the beans into a soup you could drink with a little rice and cheese in there to round it out? You might want to play with rearranging your hands, see if something else comes more naturally," comments Flora. "But don't go overboard, of course, not while you've already got wings and antennae."

She can drink soup. She's not sure what Flora means exactly but she can try changing her hands around; she appreciates the advice.

"Oh, I just mean if you wound up with squid arms that might be enough to push you over into the mysteries," says Flora.

Mysteries?

"You'll probably have heard of it in terms of 'cryptids'?"

Where she was was really not a good place for learning things.

"- oh no, that's terribly dangerous information to omit. You have to change some things about your shape for God to grant you magic, you've already done enough with your wings and antennae - they're beautiful. But if you keep going, past what you need, till you're no longer quite a human under all the changes, then your mind isn't human any more either. People don't come back from that. There are times when people might choose it but it's not something you want to happen by accident or at all at your age."

Okay.

Is there anything else like that, that she needs to know and might not?

"Do you know about swarms?"

These?

"Yes, those. If you sense them stay back from them, it's best to fight them at range if you get involved at all, and you can call 911 to get emergency services for a swarm just like you can if someone's injured or committing crimes or if there's a fire."

Okay. Thank you.

"If I think of anything else I'll let you know but those are the important things a novice magical girl needs to know. I'll go fix your soup."

The soup is ready at a quarter of eleven and presented in a bowl with melty cheese on top, thin enough to slurp.

She thanks Flora again and, absent indication otherwise, retreats to her room.

She goes back to sleep again when she's done - she's not turning down food but she'd rather not be awake until noon, really - and then pokes around the room a little to see if there's anything interesting, when she wakes up.

The room has nothing all that interesting in it. Spare sheets, extra blankets, sewing kit, teddy bear in decent but not new condition, Josef Albers prints on the walls, nightstand, lamps with shades made of leaves pasted together, potted larkspurs.

Well, she can entertain herself messing with the editor again. She doesn't have any idea what to do with her hands - the 'squid arms' suggestion seemed like just another thing she's never heard of, though that's not quite true - but she fiddles with them some anyway, enough to be pretty sure that just changing the proportions of human hands doesn't help. And then - she thinks mote-shaped stars are best, but the magic might prefer star-shaped ones, or a mix? She'll check that out.

Motes are better, though polygon stars with many points are better than ones with fewer.

Motes it is, then. And maybe some mote clusters in her hair, similar to Flora's floral clusters? It'll take her a while to figure out something that works, probably, she's not sure how to get good-looking motes in 3d, but she's got time to spare.

If she takes a closer look at Flora she will notice that the flowers are in fact growing out of her scalp, but Denice can do star-spangled hairpins that the magic likes quite a lot if she plays hot and cold.

She's not leaving her room until she's disturbed, or until she starts worrying about dinnertime if Flora hasn't returned by then; it'll help her keep up her appearance of being very shy and not wanting to talk about things. She figures out the hairpins and switches her sleeves over to transparent ruffles that match her skirt and adds stars to the soles of her boots and fiddles with the exact shade of her sunset-colored parts and spends a while trying to come up with a way to make her aesthetic work with the cartoon look of the things she makes that doesn't look too bad and generally tries not to let herself get too bored.

Flora asks about dinner at five o'clock. "I was thinking omelettes, and I could wrap yours in a tortilla so you could grab it and bite it if the fork would present too much of a problem," she says.

That should work. She appreciates it.

"What do you like in omelettes? I have ham, deli turkey, smoked salmon, pickled peppers and tomatoes and carrots and green beans, spinach that isn't pickled, and Swiss and pepper jack and American cheese."

She freezes, and fails to answer the question.

"Janet?"

She flinches back a little, curling in on herself. Sorry, she sends, after a moment.

"- Are you allergic to anything? If you're not I can just make yours with what I'm putting on mine, but most people don't like pickles as much as I do."

She's not allergic to anything. What Flora is having will be fine.

"All right, Janet," says Flora with a worried furrow in her brow, and she goes and makes omelettes.

Well that wasn't great. Hopefully she's gone hard enough on shy-shy-shy that she can get away with not wanting to talk about it; she doesn't know enough about how things are out here to come up with an explanation for that reaction that makes sense and isn't the true one.

She can leave if she needs to. She doesn't want to but that doesn't matter. She can leave; she's safe; it's fine.

She's calmed down enough to only be moderately warry by the time Flora gets back.

Knock knock. "Your omelette's ready. Would you mind eating in the dining room, Janet? I worry about pests."

Not enough that she's going to object, anyway. She follows quietly.

There is her omelette, ham and cheese and assorted pickles, wrapped messily in a tortilla and some foil over the bottom half to hold it closed.

She eats. She's a little robotic about it. She can't make herself look appreciative and doesn't bother lying about it when it'd be so obvious that she was.

Flora glances at her occasionally but doesn't say anything. She plates her own omelette sans tortilla and sits across from Denice and eats it, fork and knife and glass of water. "Some parishoners are planning to come over a little later this evening and meet you," she mentions.

Okay.

"You don't need to decide today, but if you found that you got along with some of them, there are people who'd be happy to open their home to you."

New people are scary. But she'll try.

"Just one couple's coming tonight, and another one tomorrow. I'm not going to flood you with them," smiles Flora.

She relaxes a little: That's good, she appreciates it.

"And there's no rush. I have a spare room just for this sort of situation."

That gets a little smile.

Flora smiles back. She finishes her omelette and puts her plate in the dishwasher. "There's going to be a church social here in about an hour, you're completely welcome to stay in your room if you'd rather. Afterwards the Glories will stay to say hello to you."

Yeah she will probably stay in her room. The Glories are the couple she's supposed to meet?

"That's right. They're magical too, and they've been married ever since it's been legal. Well, and then some, in God's eyes."

All right. (She's not actually sure what that means, but presumably she'll find out; she doesn't ask.)

"They're very sweet and they've been looking to adopt for a while now."

She makes herself relax, and doesn't hide that she's making herself: She'll see what they're like when she meets them. She hopes she likes them.

"I hope so too." And Flora smiles at her and busies herself with setting things up for the social; apparently the cookies are for that, and a lot of the fruit, and the ice cream, though that she leaves in the freezer and merely fetches suggestive ice cream scooping implements.

She helps with fetching and carrying, using cartoon trays for some of it.

"What a useful spell!"

Yeah.

"Mine aren't as practical. But we all have what God wants for us."

She has always been a very practical sort of person, yeah. But she bets Flora's are nice, too.

"I have some magic for enhancing music, and one for illusions - nothing you'd believe to look at it, or even a Powerpoint presentation, just for pretty - and if I get more dressed up I can dance, but I usually don't. I use it during services."

Sounds lovely.

"You're more than welcome to come to services, there's one Sunday mornings and an evening one on Saturday."

She'll look forward to it.

"Don't feel obliged, of course, I don't know anything about your religious beliefs," she says.

She doesn't want to talk about that.

It doesn't matter anyway, she'll like this or she won't.

"All right. Do you need anything? I'm afraid there isn't very much to do around here."

If there are books she'd like a book? But she'll be fine either way.

"I have some things - I don't know what you like, I'll drop off a selection before people start arriving for the social."

Thank you.

She heads back to her room when the prep seems done.

Flora's by a few minutes later with a selection of books - the Wisdom again, and a couple of novels of the sort high schoolers read in English class, and a book of poetry.

She thanks her again, looks through all of them, and starts on the poetry.

Gosh, poetry.

Flora bustles off to receive social-ers.

Denice is going to be thoroughly distracted for the next while; she has this poetry book, you see.

Three hours later, Flora and a couple of magical girls (they don't look any older than thirty, but that means nothing) arrive at her door. One of the Glories wears mourning dove wings and soft-looking neutral fabrics draped over herself to match, the other has fuzzy bat wings in dark blue and wears a chiton-style outfit, also blue, decorated with spirals of beads.

"Janet, these are Julie and Winona Glory."

The poetry has worked wonders on her mood, apparently, though she's still a little shy, not quite making eye contact.

Hi, she sends.

"Oh, what a charming spell," says Julie.

Yeah, it's great. Do they want to see her other one?

"We'd love to," Julie says.

The cartoons don't really match her style, but she can do indigo glittery ones - a ball, a balloon, a flyswatter, a lamp to show off the trick with plugging it in.

I made a bike before, she sends. I can't do everything but I can do a lot.

"That's so versatile," says Julie. "I have a mostly combat oriented power set and Winona has water powers."

That's cool. (She will think about combat oriented powers being a thing later, when panicking over it won't be a disaster.)

"Does that outfit cover anything else?" wonders Julie.

Just the two - she thinks she hasn't figured out everything the cartoons can do, yet.

"I like your wings," says Winona softly. "They don't fly, though, do they?"

They don't. That's okay, she doesn't really want to. They're pretty, though, it's okay for things to just be pretty sometimes.

"They're lovely," Julie assures her. "Lots of girls don't go for functional wings. It would just mean one of us might need to learn to drive."

...She could maybe do functional wings?

(The way she's shrinking back suggests she really doesn't want to, though.)

"Nobody's going to make you attach anything to your body you don't want there," says Julie. "Learning to drive isn't a big deal, millions of people do it every day, we've just both happened to skip it up till now."

Okay.

"Thaumaturge Flora said that a girl from a search and rescue squad dropped you off here last night and that it seemed like you'd run away from some bad people. Do you know if they'd be looking for you?" murmurs Winona.

Probably. She's not sure. They might not think it's worth it.

"There are a couple of things we might need to know to make sure they can't find you," says Winona. "Did you use to look like this especially in the face, did they know you were magic, are you far away from where you came from, is Janet the name they know you by -"

Deep breaths. (Oh no oh no she made a mistake... it might not be unrecoverable, though... deep breaths don't panic, Denice, that helps nothing... assume it is recoverable, how does she do that...)

They don't know she's magic. She changed her face but only a little, maybe she should change it more. And her name. She's not sure how far is far enough but this might be, she biked like a week to get here.

"That might not be far enough depending on how hard they're looking. Out of state would be better," Winona says. "We live here, but we often stay at my sister's place in Colorado. If we get you there and pretend we met you there, and stay there a couple of months, then we could probably move back. - I'm already talking like we're going to adopt you, of course Thaumaturge Flora was talking to several families -"

She should - she should meet the others, yeah - she really doesn't want them to find her -

"The Thaumatologists aren't going to turn you in," says Julie firmly. "We used to help escaping slaves, like Quakers - Abigail Lydia Claremont was raised Quaker."

She doesn't know what that is.

"Quakers are a kind of Christian. Anyway, you're safe with Thaumatologists as long as the police don't actually break into the church," says Julie. Flora, lurking behind her, nods.

She doesn't find that as reassuring as they'd like, maybe, but she makes an effort to calm down.

"Am I right that you don't really want to talk about where you came from?" Julie asks.

Yeah.

"All right then. What do you like to do? What are you looking forward to?"

She takes a second to think about that one, relaxing a bit as she does.

She likes reading. She really likes poetry. She thinks she likes cats but she's never gotten to interact with one. She likes being around other kids but she thinks she'll be okay on her own, too. She liked riding the bike she made. She likes being outside at night, it's pretty and quiet. She hasn't really thought about what she wants to do next; she was too busy getting away. She doesn't really know what her choices are, anyway.

"We don't have any other kids. Or a cat, but I had a cat as a kid, I could see getting a cat again," muses Julie.

That would be nice.

"Do you like school?" asks Julie.

Her body language reverts immediately to withdrawn-scared-cautious, but she doesn't panic, she's had enough time to think about how to handle this one.

She doesn't know what school is like out here. It was really bad where she was before.

"Do you know what kind of school it was? There are a lot of kinds - and public schools are only all the same kind in name," says Julie.

She shakes her head: No, she doesn't know.

"Well, we've got enough money for the private schools, we can shop around if you turn out to hate public," says Julie. "- and if you come with us, I mean."

Okay.

Did Flora tell them about her hands? She can only sort of hold a pencil, that might be a problem.

"Can you type, have you tried that?" asks Winona.

She hasn't tried it.

"Does it help if you make the pencil with your spell?" Julie asks.

That does work. She's not sure if it'll make marks or how long they'll last if it does, though.

"Well, it's worth experimentation. Maybe you could use a cartoon pen around a real ink part," says Julie. "And maybe you can type. It's fine, some girls don't even like to have hands."

Okay.

Winona smiles at her. "Is there anything you want to ask us?"

She has to think about it.

What do you do?

"I'm a Coast Paladin. There aren't enough magical girls to patrol the whole ocean and get swarms as they happen, so swarms that appear there have a lot of time to get faster and join up with themselves and other swarms till they're huge monsters," says Julie. "When that happens I'm one of the people who goes to fight them. Sometimes I'm away for a few days if they have to fly me somewhere in the middle of the sea."

"I work for the American Thaum Union," says Winona. "We work on getting rights and recognition and resources for magical girls - we were on the coalition of people fighting for the right to same-sex marriage, for instance."

Fighting monsters sounds cool. She doesn't understand Winona's thing.

"Like, if you decided you didn't want to have hands, the ATU would help convince whatever school you were going to that they had to figure out how to help you get an education anyway," says Winona. "Sometimes people get young magical girls on employment contracts that aren't good for them, and we get into legal fights about that. Sometimes we work with the Church on things to do with religious persecution."

She's still not sure she really understands it but that sounds very cool.

Winona smiles. Her teeth are very shiny. "It's kind of complicated and sometimes even tedious, but I think it's worthwhile."

"Is there anything else you want to know about us?" asks Julie. "Or think we should know?"