"Aren't you guys supposed to be the responsible adults keeping the teenage ride-along out of trouble?" she laughs. "I could try an iffy part of downtown, and also downhill skiiing, and I should probably go to a shooting range at some point just to learn about real guns. Do they use guns on the Berkshire County team, or are the monsters out there not big enough to be worth it?"

"They have rifles," says Susan.

"Then I should definitely go to a shooting range, learn which end of a rifle is which before I get out there. I've got an idea, how about sometime later this shift one of you sucker-punches me, we'll see if I can see it coming and what flavor it is."

"You got it," says Vanessa.

Ultimately it is not Vanessa who takes the bait; Caroline goes for it apropos of nothing two hours later.

Margaret did her best to get really absorbed in her homework, and since her homework is to read Pride and Prejudice she succeeded easily. She's startled out of the book about two seconds before Caroline slugs her and is too distracted by the sensation to actually dodge.

"Touché. And a different flavor from swarms!"

"Oh good, I wouldn't want to taste like a swarm," says Caroline.

"Do you like tasting like sucker-punch?"

"Well, it'd be pretty irresponsible to taste like throwing rectangle."

"Yeah, yikes, thank you for not throwing rectangle."

"You're welcome."

The rest of the shift proceeds with nothing more threatening than the prophecied rain. 

The next weekend, Margaret gets up early and goes to a shooting range before afternoon patrol. Is sixteen old enough to learn to use a rifle, if she brings a note from her mother?

Nope, note doesn't cut it, she needs a guardian present.

Drat, and both her parents are workaholics. Would the guardian need to accompany her the whole time? Maybe she can do it after robotics club on Monday when she's already missed most of a shift . . .

For now, though, she will check out the aerial skate-park thing instead.

Yes, she'd need full time guardian accompaniment.

The aerial skate park thing exists. It has equipment suitable for various flight sports and practices.

It is high time Margaret optimized her wings. She knows what she wants in her patrolling wings--maneuverability first, speed in level flight second, endurance third.  She knows what she wants in her commuting-places wings--speed first, endurance second, maneuverability third. She's read what various websites have to say about performance of different shapes of dragon wing. What she doesn't have is empirical data. What sort of obstacle-course-like things are available, and are any of them currently free?

It has slaloms, narrow passages and hoops, and a minigolf-like windmill deal (though it looks like the windmill won't hurt too bad if it gets you; the arms look disposable).

That's close enough to trying to maneuver around monsters and/or fly indoors for her purposes. She'll time herself going through the course a few times with her current wings to get a baseline time and a feel for the obstacles, then switch to a wing shape advertised as more agile and try again.

At first the newness of the wing shape hurts more than the optimizations help but the second time through, when she's more accustomed, they're an improvement.

The learning curve isn't too surprising. She goes through a few rounds of iterations, trying each variant two or three times to gauge its performance, then switches to her old wings and back one more time to make sure the magic doesn't think the new design is uglier.

The magic doesn't care.

Good! She will repeat the same process with a speed-focussed design, doing laps in one of the racing areas and making sure it doesn't tire her easily or mess with her magic. How many kilometers per hour can she get out of this version?

About 220!

Commuting all the way to Berkshire County seems a lot more reasonable now!

One last thing to try before she has to leave for patrol. She gets lots of altitude and practices switching between the two designs in flight without missing a (wing)beat.

That's really hard. She can't see while she's switching, and the sudden shapechange tends to send her tumbling.