Nod. "Yeah, no, even with a species that can't get people sick it could still ruin food."

"What if they evolve to make people sick, don't they do that sometimes?"

"That's mostly wild strains of stuff. The kinds you can get by mail order are especially unlikely to do that, and also they're made to be dependent on a special kind of food that isn't available on random surfaces. So to get someone sick they'd have to evolve to be harmful *and* to be able to eat different kinds of food, and I won't be keeping them around long enough for that kind of drastic changes. Not that I won't be careful with containing them, of course."

"And you'd probably get a warning anyway," says Caroline.

"Magically? Yeah, that's very much the sort of thing my power would tell me about."

The shift ends; they hand off the truck.

Margaret goes home and helps with dinner; she got in the habit of cooking a few different things while she was living in Atlanta. Then she checks in with the designated weird-hours grad student and talks epidemiology for a while. She has one more day of swarm patrol, then school starts on Monday.

The composition of the magical girl club is slightly different this year! Larissa, Aaliyah, and Sumiko are still there; Josephine and Hattie and Mariposa are gone. (Mariposa's still in school, just doesn't sign up for the club on the signup sheet on the bulletin board.) Two new names appear on the list, Madelyn and Danielle.

How exciting! The newbies are probably younger than her; if she doesn't share any morning classes with either if them she'll try to spot them in the cafeteria.

There are new magical girls there! Two of them, not sitting together. One has orange bird wings and an orange outfit, one has four arms and wears blue and gold.

She flips a mental coin and goes to sit with blue-and-gold. "Hello! My name's Margaret. Anybody sitting here?"

"Yeah but nobody's sitting there," blue-and-gold says, pointing at a different chair at her table.

She plunks down her tray and takes a seat. "So, new magical girl! Are you a freshman, or did you activate over the summer?"

"Freshman," she says. "I activated when I was ten. What do you do? I make stuff shake."

"Welcome to high school, then! I do precognition. What's making stuff shake like?"

"What do you mean what's it like?"

"How much stuff can you shake, how hard and how fast, does it come with sensory feedback, could you cause earthquakes, could you stop earthquakes. . . I'm being a huge magic nerd, feel free to tell me to mind my own business."

"I can shake a bug to death," she says. "Or make milkshakes. I can kind of feel it, I guess. I don't think I can stop earthquakes or start big ones."

"Mmm, milkshakes. Is having four arms as extremely useful as it looks?"

"It's so useful. I can see how wings are handy, I guess, but they must get in the way a lot when you sit down, arms don't."

"I really like being able to get places fast without a car, but I would totally go for extra arms if it was safe."

"Isn't it? I guess scales are a big deal, but what do you need those for?"

"The scales are decent armor, but mostly I just really really like them. They stay a lot cleaner than skin, and they don't get itchy, and at the risk of sounding like a cliche they just feel so much more me than skin would."

"I think wings and arms are about the same point value, arms maybe less, you could switch out."

"Taking the wings off feels super weird now that I'm used to them, but I'll definitely be tempted at the next robotics club meeting. Oh, speaking of clubs, there's a magical girls club that meets on Fridays after school on the football field."