"Super yikes," says Sumiko.

"I'm sure people do it but mostly you just let it come up incidentally, you know?" says Hattie.

"Oh good, that is not something I wanted to add to that list and if everybody else was doing it I would sort of feel obligated."

"I mean, it could be an obligatory army training course for magical girls for all we know," comments Josephine. "But I know emergency responders don't have to just to get certs."

"Good to know." Margaret casts around for a less gross topic. "Oh hey, can somebody take some pics of me with my phone while the lighting's still nice? You mentioned I should document my look and It'll be easier than trying to get everything into bathroom-mirror selfies tonight."

"Oh, yeah, sure," says Aaliyah, and all the other girls take photos.

And now she has a thorough collection of pictures of herself! She probably isn't going to make any radical changes except for modeling, or if her powers stop being hidey and turn out to be come with cool visuals. But if and when she does, she'll be able to get back to "jewel-encrusted dragoness" with no trouble.

"Thanks so much guys!"

Does anybody else want to do costume workshop? It might be fun to be one of the people brainstorming suggestions for another girl's theme.

Aaliyah has four different costumes and can't decide which one to focus on! She's got an all-black ensemble and a black change of fur to match, lots of obsidian and ebony and black titanium and black gemstones in Art Deco patterns, excessively buckley boots. She's got an outfit to go with Siamese coloring, navy blue and white and beige, smart and professional-looking and with a three-diamond symbol. She's got a calico coat and a loud white and orange ruffly costume to go over that, with bows and ribbons and a pawprint motif - "this was my first tack, but I was eight," she says. And she's got a green and silver outfit to go with grey fur, long dress, silver claw caps, elaborate ear jewelry, malachite buttons and emerald beads. "I've got them all refined so I get the same spells out of any of them but I should really pick a primary for good or at least for a few years and start getting more subtle stuff out of it," she says, when she's modeled each.

"The black and the green-and-grey are both really great! If you've been refining since you were eight I doubt I'll think of anything you haven't tried already, but what do you think of gold detailing on the black one? Say, gold eyes and boot buckles and maybe also the claws?"

"I haven't tried gold claws, maybe that'd pull it together..." She changes into her black variant and makes the suggested change. "- it's a little better, maybe if I go a little harder on the gold it'd come together. I could make some of the embroidery gold, some of the jewelry metal..." She closes her eyes and tweaks things. "Yeah, that's not a big boost but it's a little bit."

Eeee, she helped! 

"Try making your ears more like a lynx's ears, you know, with the tufts? Maybe make the tufts gold too."

Aaliyah looks up what a lynx looks like, and tries it. "Nah, it doesn't like that as much. Maybe I can make my nose gold." She does that. "That doesn't help either."

"Gold tail-tip, then? And I don't know if ear studs would be uncomfortable but it could be worth a try."

"I've got earrings, they're just hard to see 'cause they're all black..." She tries the tail tip, reverts it, tries gold whiskers, keeps those, tries adjusting jewelry till she finds a local maximum.

"You have such good taste in jewelry! Try gold mascara or eyeliner to match the gold whiskers, and a belt that echoes your boots?"

"Mascara's worse," Aaliyah reports, "belt is better..."

"If the mascara didn't work, I'm not sure where to go from there. Roughly how much more did you get out of all of that, can you tell?"

"It's all really small at the high end," says Aaliyah. "At a certain point it gets hard to even tell if something's better or worse."

"At least the experimentation is fun!"

"Yeah! I feel sorry for people who just literally don't care how they look and get magic, it must be pretty tedious for them... I guess they outsource."

"I bet! Magic makes looking good so much easier, though. I used to pick clothes based on what was cheap and wouldn't wear out quickly. Now I can wear whatever I want and I'll never have to spend hours doing my hair and makeup by hand!"

"I think I make up for it taking forever to dry off after I take a shower," says Aaliyah, "but you're probably saving loads of time!"

"So much time! I'm never shampooing my nonexistent hair again!" That giggle was definitely about her hair and not about the mental image of Aaliyah's face shortly after a blow-dry.

"I don't dry my wings," says Sumiko, "I just remove one and then put it back dry, then the other."

"I don't want to get rid of half my fur! I'd look stupid!" says Aaliyah.

"I wouldn't want to either if I was you! I wonder if taking the layer of color off my scales and putting it back would dry them off."

"Might, I don't know much about scales," says Sumiko.