"I've heard of him," says Susan. "He's a little bit of a hike though."

"Well, it's never steered me wrong yet. Is this a  'long bus ride' kind of hike or a 'get a hotel room' kind of hike?"

"You could fly there, you'd just need to skip a patrol."

"I'll make sure I've got enough to buy a nice long session, then. Speaking of hikes, do you still think it's a good idea for me to switch to a more rural squad over the summer, for the experience with older swarms?"

"Yeah, I think so. You want references? We can do references."

"References would be great, yeah, and a recommendation for which county to go with if you know a particular reason not to just go with the one west of here."

"I'd go with Berkshire County. They get some bigger monsters in the woods. The hills don't help, there's airbone patrol but the elevation's all over the place so it's harder to be sure you're sense-distance away from wherever a swarm might be. Trees don't help them get a visual, either. You'd help 'em sniff 'em out."

"Yeah, that sounds like a good environment. The more I glam up the longer the range on my danger sense gets, and maybe we could set up a thing where people *plan* to check an area and then only go if I see them flush something out."

"That might work, but bears testing before they put any weight on it."

"Yeah, I definitely wouldn't want to assume we can rule *out* a swarm that way until we've ruled a few *in*."

"Maybe they'll have you direct a county pinch squad for a bit."

"That could be a good way to do it, get some testing in while the pinch squad isn't doing anything else."

"Exactly. They're usually bored, they'd probably like to have an excuse to fly around."

"Flying around definitely beats sitting around, yeah. If you'd write me a letter of recommendation for Berkshire County, I'll see how they feel about having me around for a summer."

"There is one other thing I'm wondering about, though. I know the Paladins want to do your style from scratch--do they make you do your body mods from scratch too?"

"They don't make you do them from scratch. I mean, they can't, you can't drop below baseline. They might want to do tweaks, get your wings optimized for performance, that sort of thing."

"Optimized wings would be good, I just wouldn't want a total redo. I'm a lot more attached to having scales than I am to anything about this outfit."

"They might want to do something with your scale pattern, since it affects so much surface area."

She can't quite make herself say "as long as I don't ever have to go back to having skin".

Instead she says, "Makes sense. I've occasionally thought about having different scales in slightly different shades of blue instead of being monochrome, but it always comes out looking like a mess when I try it myself."

"I bet a stylist can help with that. But I was thinking more about their shapes and sizes, not the color."

"Yeah, that too. I'm looking forward to seeing Valenti, finding out what he comes up with."

"How long are you thinking you'll book? Remember you have to budget time to try the changes."

"Given the amount of time I'll be spending in transit, it seems most efficient to book a pretty long block, at least a couple of hours. I'll have to see what I can afford and what size of blocks he offers, though."

"I guess your prophecy'll probably have taken that into account, huh?"

"I hope so, but there are so many variables with something like this. Location, scheduling, how good the ideas they're going to come up with are . . . for all I know I'm going to run into someone it'll be really good to know on the way there, or Valenti is the second-best choice but the best choice spends too much time with a girl with a powers-blocking power, or something. But yeah, probably, based on what I've seen so far." She fishes her prophecy notebook out of her boot and starts writing down the latest piece of data, leaving "actions taken" and "result" blank for now.

"Well, I hope he does a good job for you."