He nods. "Thérèse says you are attached to your mods but willing to adjust them, what are those?"

"I have full-body metal scales, dragon-type wings, and horns, are the major ones, plus some minor skeleton and eye tweaks--slit pupils, better night vision, longer skull and fingers."

"Mm-hm. All right." He pulls his blindfold off.

"Blue," he says. "Blue metal scales. Are you attached to the color?"

"I like it, and I wouldn't want to be bright orange or yellow, but some other color would be fine."

"It draws attention away from the really rather respectable neutrals you've done everything else in. It takes away from the subtlety of opal, it distracts from all this white lace. Silver scales. What are they made of?"

Now her scales are shiny silver! "Aluminum, for a balance between lightness and armor."

"Aluminum is not a bad choice but towards the end, when we've tweaked other things, it might be worth checking to see if titanium or an alloy accords better with the colors. Oh, speaking of which, please don't volunteer the magic's opinion on something until I ask for it - are you familiar with the concept of a local optimum?"

"Yes, I am--some change you make might seem to make things worse because it moved off a local optimum, then you make more changes that go with it and it works better overall. I won't report the magic's opinion until you ask."

"Good. I assume if you were at all sympathetic to the idea of having hair, you'd have it, yes?"

"Yeah, I would really rather not have hair." Hair gets dirty and tangled and doesn't come out of scales right and is generally the second worst thing after skin. 

"That does leave you with this blank space on the back of your head and down between your wings. I'd recommend spines but you may be flirting with your threshold already, do you happen to know your point value?"

"Spines sound really cool, but I'm at 315 not counting my eyes. Think I could do a cape or a headdress or something that wouldn't get in the way of flying?"

"I think you can use the space without needing a cape. You can drape some ornaments between your horns, and have a halter top to your shirt and dangle some more from that or just extend the necklace behind you, you already have a chain motif in use." He peers at her ears, her nails. "Ditch the dragons. We can revisit them when your basic contours are handled."

Drapey horn ornaments sound exciting! She grins as the earrings and nail art come off.

"Take off the boots too, I can't see all this lace... did you do all this yourself? Much better than average eye."

She de-boots. No socks to take off underneath, just scaly feet. "No, I saw an amateur consultant a few months ago and got some advice from classmates. Thank you though."

"I do want to change the lace, though," he says. "I'll come back to that later... get rid of those rings for now... and the belt and the bandolier and the tiara. I like the bracelets and the necklace, those we can iterate from. I suppose you don't want to add fangs from 315 points..."

She unholsters her stardarters and sets them and her ammo down nearby, then removes the specified accessories. "I have actually had fangs on briefly alongside the rest of this . . . No, wait, that was before I stretched my skull out, better not. Also they made me lisp and I need to be really easy to understand during fights, I do tactical coordination."

"Right. No fangs. As far as I know adjusting exact wing shape never hurt anyone, though I'm not the expert on making them perform better in the air and that sounds like it should rightly be your priority there.

He walks around her, inspecting her. "Your scales are in what looks like a nearly random pattern, like you decided to have scales and didn't decide anything else about them, is that right?"

"Yeah, they were literally the first thing I did before I had any clue what I was doing, I should really revisit that."

"Mm-hm." He pulls out a Sharpie. "De-scale a hand and I'll mark centerpoints, and then we can do the rest of you."

. . . This will make her prettier and more magic and it's only for a few minutes. Sure. One of her hands acquires skin with no pores or hair follicles or sweat glands or fingerprints.

"I would prefer overlapping scales to adjacent ones, for armor purposes."

"We can try and adjust scale shapes later, right now I'm just laying them out."

His Sharpie has a very fine tip and he makes quick precise marks all down her fingers and in between them and up her hand. They get farther apart away from the knuckles, a little, spreading out into a sunflower-seed set of arcs and whorls.

When he's done, she will sprout scales centered on each dot, overlapping each other similarly to before but tiling rather more nicely.

He goes up her arm, does her head, does her feet. "It matters much less for anything that will always be covered with clothes, but I can suggest scale placement on the rest of you too."