Aaliyah and Larissa have already drawn their stardarters and start shooting. Larissa's the better shot.

Margaret gamely draws and starts in. She's a worse shot than either of the others, but she can pick ones that aren't about to make any sudden moves and take a little longer to aim at them, and she does pulp a few.

They have to back up a few times as the swarm moves sluggishly in their direction, and Aaliyah has to run to her bike to get more ammo out of her panniers, but they have the whole swarm killed before it accelerates past a brisk scuttle.

"That was a lot better than Sunday! Also, apparently I get advance warning on swarms, that's neat." Margaret starts sweeping her ammo, starting with the large majority of misses since they don't have any ick on them.

"Did you get warning for the Sunday one?" asks Larissa. "Or do you have a shorter range?"

"I think the swarm-sense goes further than the threat sense; I found the ones on Sunday with swarm-sense first. It had already started when I got into range, though."

"Huh. Maybe you can make it better if you get your outfit more finely figured out," says Aaliyah, materializing gloves so she can pick up ammo and bag it without getting her fur gooky.

"Yeah, that would be good," Margaret answers, shamelessly copying the gloves trick to get the rest of her darts bagged up. "Do outfit improvements always help with existing spells in addition to getting you closer to the next one?"

"Usually. If you have a spell that's already basically perfect at what it does, it won't change."

"Nice. I'm not sure how the prediction thing would improve--maybe working on more different things, or going farther ahead--but more range on the danger sense is a good prediction. And of course whatever my third thing is is still hiding."

"The third is truth when the time is right." she adds, in a voice that comes with its own echo.

"Okay, apparently it's prophecies. Delivered via my mouth. That's awesome and kind of creepy."

"Wow," says Larissa. "Spooky."

"Very spooky! Fits the theme, though. Except it's less combat-focused."

"Yeah. It's a neat powerset, that's worth pushing real hard, you should get a style consultant," says Aaliyah. Larissa nods.

"I really should! I could get information about all kinds of things, wow. Maybe the people at Ricci's will know somebody good but affordable, I'm doing a thing with them tomorrow."

"They might, but I'm not sure, they'll usually be going for things other than 'God's own artwork', you know?" says Larissa.

"Yeah. I'll look around a bunch of places, read reviews, all that. And keep working on it on my own, of course."

"There's a pro who goes to my church but he only works on other believers," says Larissa, "or I'd try to hook you up."

That seems like a weird restriction to have, but Margaret isn't going to judge. She just nods. "Something to look into tonight. Speaking of tonight, do we want to do more patrolling before we turn around? We've got some more time before it starts getting dark, even with sunset being so early."

"I think one swarm's enough for the day but we can figure out a route to all our houses and bike it together," says Aaliyah, "so there's more of us together for most of the trip in case there is another manifestation?"

"That works!" She gives directions to her house, which isn't in this neighborhood but isn't that far off either.

Aaliyah's house is farthest away and Larissa's only slightly out of the way between Margaret's and Aaliyah's, so Margaret gets home first.

Where she does her homework and shoots at the trees some more and studies for the bio exam and goes to bed.

Friday morning, she gives her lab partner his bike back. "Here you go! You will be tested on the power of your cells. Uh, sorry, magical girl thing, apparently I prophecize now."

Her lab partner is somewhat disconcerted by this! "What's that supposed to mean though?"

"It means I say true things out of nowhere. I think this one is about the bio exam? I'm still getting the hang of this."

The bio exam focuses heavily on mitochondria.

At magical girl club, everyone's there except Josephine, who Sumiko reports said she had a headache.

Margaret nods at the other girls as they arrive. Hattie shows up last, having had to get here from the other school.

"Hi Hattie! Looks like that's everybody who's going to be coming." Then she turns to Larissa to ask if she has the targets and instead says "Her heart burns as bright as her magic, for you."