hello skies of blue | Glowfic Constellation

Insurance is apparently a good thing to have, she is learning lately.

"...Well, that's good. I'd have tons more questions but you three probably have to get back to flying around, right?"

"We don't fly around all night," says dog girl, "that'd be exhausting. Well, for them, I don't use wings for it. We do keep moving so we can do the thing you did, but in a truck. Our driver'll catch up soon."

"Huh." She glances at the neighbors, wondering if she's being rude, or if they need anything.

"I guess it would be. I flew for like three hours straight my first day, but I exercised a lot before already. Oh, I got, like, lightning bolts for magic! Not sure if I can do other things with it. I think it'd be good for swarms but I ordered a stardarter anyway."

"Our shift is eight hours, ten if we have to cover part of somebody else's," says dog girl. "Lightning's good! Better for outdoor than in though."

"Yeaaah that would be a long time to fly. Magic is so great though! I'm having fun being, like, a part eagle knight or something. Oh, I'm Laura Rossi."

"Ginny Danvers. Here's the service card if your parents say they'll sign things for ya." She hands over a card.

"Will do. Good luck. I am gonna go back to sleep."

She gives a jaunty salute, and if nobody has anything else to say, gets a running start to take off.

Nobody stops her. Her house is where she left it.

She tries to land straight through the window back in her room, thinks better of it about three seconds from smacking into the side of the house, and flaps wildly, making a racket skidding over the roof instead.

Then she lands out front and knocks on her own door and has to explain herself to her parents again.

They're - trying to be understanding, Laura always had difficulty staying within the lines and found it draining and stressful. Being a magical girl has clearly made her a lot happier. But they're worried about the recklessness and danger now. They go back to sleep for a couple of hours, wake up early and have a Talk, then ground her for a day despite the act of heroism, for bolting out in the middle of the night without telling them anything and doing something so reckless.

("She's changing so much, doing so many new things so quickly. I'm just worried there's no control. The patrol thing might be good, actually.")

("You want to encourage the risk-hunting?")

("The swarm patrol is full of responsible adults. It'll channel her energy productively. I love our daughter, but Lord knows she needs her energy channeled productively...")

The end decision is that they won't ground her any longer than one day, but they expect her to text them where she's going and what she's doing. And her father is going to make her do a cryptid self-evaluation once every few days, just in case.

...And, fine, they'll try to sign her up for going along with a swarm patrol team.

She's absentminded in class the next day, morose about the lecture and grounding - (Calling Yasmin and putting off going back until tomorrow! Waiting another day to use her shiny new stardarter! Only half an hour of flying, and only because she claimed it's great exercise!) - but looking forward to the Swarm Patrol thing, whenever her parents can arrange it.

She has her pick of shifts but presumably wants the second dayshift, rather than the one that takes place from six in the morning to two p.m. every day of the week. She will be a little late for the start of the next shift but probably didn't actually want to pick up a full time job and won't be staying for the whole thing anyway.

She goes straight for the second day shift after the last class on Thursday, pausing to fly home to grab her stardarter and to put on the nicest (most powerful) version of her outfit she's managed yet before flying wherever she needs to go for the swarm patrol!

The swarm patrol is in a truck moving around constantly but has shared their location with her on Google Maps, so she can intercept them and land in the flatbed back of the truck while it prowls the streets.

"Hey there Laura!" says the squad leader, a batwinged, bat-eared girl wearing a lot of fur.

The technology is pretty easy to use, which is nice. She's holding her stardarter, and added a leather belt styled after her boots and gauntlets with a couple of pouches, for wallet and phone and stardarts.

"Hi!!!"

"Lemme give you the basic rundown. We hang out in this truck while it patrols the town. If we sense a swarm, we all hop out and book it for the swarm. We're allowed to break windows and doors to get into a building but if it feels very slow and somebody might be home we can also knock and see if that works. Our priority is to kill it. If it's an older swarm, the cutoff is six hours and we can guess how old ones we find are for you so you get a feel for it, and it's just in a normal house and not an art museum or anything, then our only priority is to kill it without killing any people - you can set shit on fire if you have to, you can kill somebody's dog if it's covered in older bugs, you don't wanna but you can because the older they get the worse it gets. If it's a newer swarm, or it's in an art museum or something, you gotta try to minimize collateral damage. We've got insurance but if you use this job to gratuitously commit arson or murder dogs you're in trouble. Once we're done, we call the aftermath squad in and they help anybody who's injured, refer 'em to cleanup services, take statistics, make sure they have someplace to stay if we blew a hole in their house. Questions?"

"Save lives and get the swarm quickly first, don't do any damage second but keep it in mind. I don't want to murder dogs or commit arson! I'll have to be super careful with the zapping but I'm already practicing that, I can mostly aim it. How common are swarms, anyway? Does everyone feel them at about the same range? And, you mean you don't try to fight swarms older than six hours?"

"Sense range gets better the dressier you are. I mean that a swarm newer than six hours counts as new, and if it's older some of the rules about damage go out the window."

"Aha. And there won't be any kaiju around here unless something goes really really really wrong, right. Okay, I think I get it... I've still probably got a lot of improving to do on my dressiness."

"Oh yeah, we're way out of kaiju zone. Sometimes you get like... two swarms' worth of monster that manifested in a cornfield and nobody noticed till it got that far, but it's not gonna be bigger than a bear."

Another girl, monkey-tailed but wingless, says, "Ride-alongs don't qualify but if you join up for real you qualify for once a month formal costume tuneups. They're short sessions though, like twenty minutes."

"Oh, thanks for having me along, by the way! I thought I would have basically zero fashion sense but the magic likes some of my ideas! And the school club does advice circles. I'll probably pay for a fashion adviser once I'm more settled in and not making progress on my own? Like, getting a belt that didn't hurt the look took a little while, but I do need a place for my phone."

"Oh, yeah, I had an awful time with carrying capacity," agrees batgirl. "Wound up hiding all my pockets on the inside of things."

"I do sort of wonder why it's 'looking good' that does it, but nobody knows, do they? ...Anyway, what's everyone's names?"

"Sandra," says batgirl.

"Pansy," says tail girl.

"Juanita," says the third who hasn't spoken; she's quiet and four-armed and angel-winged.

"Laura. Uh, you probably knew that... I guess nothing happening on a patrol is the best possible outcome even if it's boring, yeah?"

"Yup. But we usually get at least one. Might not be while you're along."