Then she will reload out of the spares and park on a bench.

"I think that went pretty well, all things considered."

"Yup. Somebody really needs to invent better alarms, though. The museum's festooned with them and still couldn't catch it."

"Absolutely. I never realized how useless alarms were until I started cleaning up after their failures."

"They're better than nothing. Sometimes they catch something. But the overwhelming majority of calls is human eyes-on."

"Yeah. My family's actually a lot safer at night than we were before I got this job, but it doesn't always feel that way."

"If there's a swarm in your house it'll wake you up, most likely," says Vanessa.

"Yes, probably before they start, even. My danger sense is pretty intrusive, I wouldn't be surprised if it was enough to wake me up."

"Regular swarm sense does that too. Happened to me on vacation once," says Vanessa.

"Good to know. That sounds like an unpleasant start to a day of vacation!"

"Oh, I got back to sleep okay after I killed it. And then I didn't have to help clean it up either."

"That's nice. Here's to hotel staff everywhere and to not having to clean swarm goo."

"Amen."

They sit in silence for a while. The only other thing that happens this shift is a false alarm that turns out to be an overactive cat confusing the detector.

The cat's owner apologizes! The squad eventually hands off the truck to the next shift.

Margaret will consider herself fairly compensated if she gets a chance to pet the cat. 

The next day at school, she sits at what approximates the magical girl table, as usual.

"Hi," says Sumiko, "how was your weekend?"

"It was good! Got some rest, did some patrolling. We fought a swarm in an art museum, that was new. Indoor fights are the weirdest."

"Weirdest?" asks Larissa.

"Well, there's all this stuff around, like outside you just get the same streets, trees, cars, sometimes a pond or a bench or whatever. Indoors could be in a garage, in somebody's basement, in a hair salon full of chairs, in an art gallery, whatever. It's different every time."

"I guess," says Larissa.

"On the other hand swarms indoors tend to be caught sooner, so they're usually smaller enough that it balances out. Anyway, what did you do with your weekends?"

"I saw the Spiderman movie," says Sumiko.

"English paper," says Larissa, "mostly."

"Ooh, the Spiderman movie was fun, I liked how they animated all the weirdness from the universes colliding."

"It was pretty," agrees Sumiko. "And you'd think you'd lose track of the action but I never did."

"Neither did I, I think it really helped how different all the characters looked."