"Lightning's a good Paladin prospect!" says Sandra. "Good luck with that."

"Thanks! It's freeform and I'm kind of scared to experiment with it, because uh lightning, and I'm a little jealous of some of the other girls' spells at school for every day use, but it's not bad at all!"

"Well, try not to set anything on fire. Hang back if you're not sure, we're pros and we can handle it."

"Yeah, I'll be careful."

The truck trundles slowly around. Pansy has a packed sandwich and pulls it out to eat.

Since the conversation appears to be over for now, she plays with her outfit a bit while sitting.

Changing the patterns, colors (anodized metal? Slightly different shades of red on everything? More yellow here, less white there?), lengths of things, and arrangement of jewelry around slightly.

She also tries new styles for her hair like changing the dutch braid for a crown braid, adding feather decorations to other parts of her clothes, say, the cape and the bottom of the leggings, experimenting with a few inches of actual neckline (trying to use the negative space thing), to see if there are any little improvements to be had.

"Hey," says Juanita when she notices, "not a good idea to play with that on duty."

"Uh."

Several arguments go through her head, but she is definitely not the expert here.

"...Sure. If you say so."

"If you make something worse, and you forget how it was before, and then there's an emergency, you'll be caught without your magic performing as well as you're used to," explains Sandra.

"Yeah. I don't really have a 'used to' power level yet, though? I'm gonna be really cautious and I'm super aware that I'm definitely just starting out? That happened the other day actually, I woke up in the middle of the night to a swarm and threw something on and could only zap one at a time and thought about going into the basement to fight them but wasn't that stupid... Er, I don't know if you've heard about that from whoever it was that responded."

"It's a bad habit," Sandra says. "It's actually illegal for Paladins to change to a non-approved mod or outfit set while deployed. Mess with your outfit during downtime."

"Right. Got it."

And now she's going to just. Fidget and feel guilty for the next while.

The others are on their phones, reading and playing games and browsing.

...Eventually she does that too.

They stop at a drive through for dinner; Pansy doesn't get anything.

She just gets fries and continues to feel vaguely guilty about the outfit thing.

She receives fries. They trundle around.

Well. Nothing happening is better than finding a swarm. Even if it's boring.

She attempts to do homework on the truck, after a while, with mixed success. Not too long after dinner she asks if it's alright to quit out early.

"Sure thing, you're not on contract," says Sandra. "See you later."

"See you later..."

Okay, now, back at home and having felt stupid and sulked for a while, she can try some of the adjustment ideas she had earlier. Crown braid? Feathers hanging off the cape and leggings? A little neckline?

Good, slightly bad, neutral.

Yaaaay for crown braids. She keeps the little bit of neckline too, and works up enough motivation to take a couple pictures of each of the changes.

Her dad asks how the ride-along went, gets a noncommittal answer, and then has her pull up the cryptid-risk-tracking website and look at cryptid risk scores.

How many points is the threshold where you're at risk? Big wings, eagle eyes, a short feather tail, moderate tuning-up - about how many points does that total?

Wings are 120 points, tuneup is 18 points given her starting position, the tail is 95 points. Eagle's eyes are probably closest to "Eye modification [vertebrate source]" and are worth 37 points.

You want to stay under 325.

...Doing wings again would potentially be enough to cryptid-ize her.

Yikes.

She doesn't like the tail that much and resolves to drop it when going back to Yasmin, and also resolves to check this site before trying any body mods more significant than a fingernail from now on.

She's about done for Thursday aside from exercising and doing homework. She practices with the stardarter a lot and does some more work for Yasmin (temporarily de-tailed) on Friday. For part of Saturday and Sunday she rides along with the swarm patrol again. On Monday, she takes a little bit of a break from magical girl stuff. And then finally it's Tuesday, and she can look forward to the fun of Magical Girl Club all day!

At Magical Girl Club it's more of the same pretty much, with a different smoke obstacle course and a screening of the first twenty minutes of the documentary Paladins.