"Uh, we can be interrupted any time, including lunch, so eat breakfast before you show up and eat lunch before you're ravenous - you won't get called up if we're up in the middle of the night but you do drop your burrito and follow us if it's chow time when somebody calls in. No messing with your costume on duty besides to fix it if it gets dirty or torn or something. I'm in charge, if I tell you to do something and there's a monster anywhere in swarmsense range it's an order and you're in deep trouble if you don't hop to," says Marchessa.

She nods. "All of that's the same as I'm used to except for the food."

"We can have legitimately completely off days where we're not even on-call from home, if we get the next county's pinch squad to cover us, but we usually don't. People aren't wandering the woods calling 911 on monsters in the middle of the night." Marchessa claps elegantly gloved hands together. "All right, any questions or shall we get to it?"

No questions from Margaret!

They don't have an illusionist here; instead they mostly shoot skeet.

Working tactical coordination practice into skeet shooting sounds hard; for now she'll just shoot on her own and ask Marchessa later about finding a way to practice coordinating. She's a notably better shot than her level of experience would suggest, since she's never surprised by a disc's trajectory or the exact moment it's launched.

Nora suggests that they attempt to hunt insects with Margaret guiding them, which aren't as intimidating as monsters but are fast and hard to catch.

"Ooh, yes, that's really clever!"

Margaret proves excellent at hunting insects, and less good but still quite good at talking the others through it, up to the limits of their eyesight and reflexes.

The object isn't to really catch or kill flies, anyway, it's to practice reacting to Margaret.

They don't get any calls that day.

Margaret goes home and looks into swarmspotting websites.

There are some! Entire fora full of people whose hobby is to turn swarm responder public records into maps and trendlines and speculation about which cryptids sometimes swarmhunt.

There's a lot more signal in this data than she was expecting! She starts talking to herself at her computer, reading people's posts aloud and adding her own speculation (and occasionally posting it when she thinks it's interesting enough). She doesn't produce any prophecies that first time, but one night isn't enough data to conclude anything.

The next time she shows up to work, they're about to get a monster call!

Then she'll grab her rifle and follow everyone else to wherever the monster is!

"Didn't see it coming?" Nora asks as they go through their checklist and prep to fast-fly to the site.

"Not this one. Believe me, if I see one coming, I'll tell you."

"All right."

They fly there. It's only one swarm's worth - a monster the size of a dog, racing through a street scattering people and causing car accidents until a bolt of energy interests it in turning to stand and fight. It rises into the air on membranous wings.

She calls out a warning of its takeoff, and of its impending juke to the east, and of its lunge for Nora, all the while putting ammo into it.

The police are evacuating the area nearby; monster sirens are going off, though they're intermittent enough that she can time her warnings between them. Stray shots hit cars abandoned in the panicky traffic snarl, not people. Eventually the monster is a lot of goo-spatters.

Her danger sense is still going off, what--she points at a fire hydrant that was hit by a car earlier. "That's gonna burst." Everyone gets out of the way before it blasts water into the street.

"Wish I were a hydrokinetic," groans Marchessa. "Right, calling in cleanup." She does that. They fastfly back to their station.

The rest of that shift is quiet, but an hour into the next shift she's reading the swarm-tracking forum when she prophesies an intersection.

"- okay, let's go but bring the pager," says Marchessa, and they're off.

They arrive to find a new swarm just spawning, and take it out with ease.

"The squad that would've handled this is on another call," says Marchessa, checking her phone. "So they wouldn't have been able to come right away."