Not so uninterrupted; there's a swarm.

It takes her a moment to remember her stardarters are at the small of her back, now; then she's firing and calling shots for Susan and Caroline.

They're a little out of practice listening to her but get back into it quick enough.

Charity teleports really aggressively, to line up basically every shot. She only carries one darter.

And eventually the swarm is paste!

"You're really fast! I bet you could make use of updates on the motions of individual little bugs, if we found a way for you to designate a target for me to update you on, or for me to designate a target and indicate it to you. How do you usually pick which one to shoot next?"

"I usually pick ones near but not at the leading edge of wherever we least want the swarm to go. Then sometimes the ones at the leading edge shrink back to fill in the gap."

"Hmm! We could use numbers for them, and I could tell you which ones would make the front move back if you shot those ones! Like, I say 'three' and that means 'shoot the third from the left in the second row', or something."

"...you've noticed they're usually not in rows, right?"

"Yeah, of course, but if you look at the ones that are near the front but have another one in front of them, that's usually a defined set. I don't know, maybe you'd designate different ones as 'near the front but not at it' from what I would."

"Can you tell if your instructions are going to be followed correctly?"

"I see people's trajectories change as soon as I decide to do something, so yes, but I usually give the instructions right after deciding to. I might be able to iterate on your projected response once or twice but the timing would be tricky."

"Worth focusing on in training?"

"Yeah, I think so. There are a couple things I could try to make it work."

"Like what?"

"Well, there's the version where I reivse what I'm going to say based on what I see you being about to do. And then if that's not fast enough, I can try deciding to say different things conditional on what I observe, and see if having the conditional set up in my head in advance makes the projections update. It should look the same from your perspective, just faster."

"Okay, we can plan to practice like so then next time we get a weekend training day."

"Sounds good!"

How does the rest of the shift go?

Uneventful!

Then she will get more work done on her science fair project!

"Whatcha working on?" Susan asks.

"So I don't know if you heard, but I left the county pinch squad in late June to do a sort of internship type thing at the CDC, using my prophecies to predict disease outbreaks and stuff. And it got me really into biology, so now I'm doing a science fair project, writing a computer simulation of how diseases spread. Going to submit it to the county-level fair in October and see how far I can get."

"They take that sort of thing in science fairs? I thought it was all, how does mold grow look at all this mold, or baking soda volcanoes."

"It is mostly that, but they have a category for mathematical modeling stuff. I'm going to validate it against historical data from real outbreaks, and if the school bio lab has the resources I might be able to replicate it in a petri dish--get some colonies of harmless bacteria and infect them with viruses."

"Why would the school bio lab have those?"

"I know they have Petri dishes and the equipment for growing bacteria in them; I might need to get the bacteria and viruses on mail-order. And I'm hoping for permission to store things in their fridges and stuff."

"Yeah, not something you wanna stash by the eggs."