"Here, I can write it down for you." Margaret grabs a post-it note and jots down "Sugardream Confections, 26 Magnolia St".

"Thanks!" Aaliyah pockets it.

There is enough cake here for everyone to have a good chunk.

"Turning sixteen is awesome."

Josephine starts singing Happy Birthday and everyone chimes in.

Eeeee!

The training session is held on grounds used by the whole-county swarm response system. Vanessa is already there, practicing throwing her lightball, but Caroline and Susan aren't there yet when Margaret flies in. The illusions girl is also there, making targets for Vanessa.

"Hi Vanessa!" She turns to the illusionist. "My names's Margaret. Mind if I shoot at those targets too?"

"Go for it. You want extras?" the illusionist asks. "Easier ones?"

"Can I get some that are a bit bigger, but move around?"

"Sure thing hon." There they are! Big blobby monstery illusions.

Margaret's tactical sense does work on illusions! She practices leading the target, aiming the right fraction of the way between its present and future to hit center mass.

Eventually Caroline and Susan appear!

Then she will stop finish up her target practice and get ready for group training.

"So," says Vanessa, "what is it you get when you get a warning?"

"So, the danger sense is a rough distance and direction, about the same range as my swarm sense, with the knowledge that something is there or about to be there that could hurt me. Maybe if I improved my look I could learn to tell the difference between a swarm about to spawn and a downed power line, but right now I can't.

Then the tactical sense tells me where anything involved in a fight--targets, allies, projectiles--is going to go and what they're going to do, a few seconds ahead. It feels like swarm-sense but for trajectories instead of locations, and not just on swarms."

"Okay. A few seconds is enough to yell a couple words, but we're often fighting in three dimensions. Thinking back to the monster fight, what could you have told us, let's work backward from that."

"Well, it sort of took turns charging at different people, I could have called those in advance. I saw when it was going to shrink and drop, and when it was going to go for altitude again; if I'd given warning on that last maybe Vanessa wouldn't've had to punch it. I think for directions in 3d, if you usually try to surround them like that, up/down and then which of us it's targeting would be a better bet than trying to do a three-axis system. Maybe up/down, grow/shrink, and names when it's it's going to retarget, assuming that was a relatively typical fight."

"That means you can't use our names for anything else," Susan points out.

"Well, of all the things I might want to say to a specific person in a fight, 'the monster is about to come at you' is probably the most common. But is there something else you think would work better?"

"We do have codenames. Don't use them much because they're not globally unique, but you could assign codenames to one use and regular names to ordinary outbursts of alarm or whatever," says Vanessa.

"Codenames makes sense, and then I could say 'Vanessa, get higher' if it's about to get over top of you or something. Do your attacks have names I can use if I see an opening for one, for later when I have a better grasp of how you use them?"

"Not good ones," says Caroline.

"I call mine 'hellfire'," Vanessa says.

"I just call mine shooting at things, whatever I do to the darts," says Susan.

"And you know how to use them better than I do . . . maybe I should focus more on saying what a monster is about to do, grow or shrink or take off or jump or dive or bank."

"Yeah. Do you have a good sense of cardinal direction, like north and so on?" asks Vanessa.

"Yes, I could get in the habit of keeping track of which way North is, and I already know some of our patrol area pretty well."