hello skies of blue | Glowfic Constellation

Laura helps collect stardarts for her.

After they get moving again, she tells Pansy, "I think I might have said this before, but I want to try for Paladin somewhere, once I graduate. Eventually, I mean. I know it'll be hard work and take a while probably. Do you know what I should do as, like, a step in that direction?"

"So there's a few standard career paths for paladins," says Pansy. "One is working your way up through swarm patrol - you sign on with a squad like ours or maybe a rural squad if you're better at monsters than young swarms, you get experience, you get costume consultation, you figure out how you like the lifestyle, and if you're good enough a Paladin recruiter comes knocking. The other is you join the military. Paladins aren't military but they use some of the same hardware, they'll hire an ex-military girl if she's up for it."

"Hmm... I haven't thought about the military. I've seen, like, recruitment ads... I wonder if ROTC takes magical girls? Maybe I should try it."

"ROTC won't take you. You've got different needs and like half of ROTC is uniform code shit and there's not enough magical girls anywhere to support a high school level division for it. You want to go military you just graduate high school and walk into a MAGUS office and sign what they give you."

"I guess I have lots of time to think about it then. And do some costume refining and swarm patrol and whatever other stuff in the meantime."

"Yup. Though don't get too attached to your costume. Paladin stylists usually start you from scratch, I hear they think being attached to whatever you started with holds you back."

"I like my eagle knight thing but Paladins look really badass so I'd live if they did!"

"That's the spirit!"

"The music helps, right, I think attitude helps some, and I bet matching uniforms to powers helps too, and 'knight' doesn't exactly scream 'lightning', so they probably would."

"Matching uniform to powers helps if you can see your powers, which you can yours," says Pansy.

"Neat. I can do colors, I might be able to do patterns, haven't actually tried - I'm getting better but I'm not sure if that's practice or little improvements to the look."

"Well, by the time you have enough of a resume to join the Paladins you'll know the ins and outs. And have more practice."

"Yep! Being magic is so great! If only everyone could."

Later that night, she searches the internet for advice regarding wing shape.

There is lots of advice! Apparently there are some things you can do to get better wing performance in general (larger relative to your body size, lighter) but then there's other things you can aim at that trade off against each other to varying degrees: diving airspeed, travel airspeed, short-burst airspeed, maneuverability, handling over water, handling in rough weather, long sustained flight not too costly in calories or exhaustion, low weight, swimmability, heat exchange, and, of course, The Aesthetic. The resulting many-dimensional vector space is rendered as a series of instructional sites about how to construct wings of certain local maxima, and as many, many Internet Arguments.

So it's like the arguments over sports, or politics, or which character is the best in a TV show, or basically anything else that gets discussed on the internet. She'll just have to try it and see if it's true, for some of the more fringe and polarized advice.

She's lost in the ether for a while and eventually adjusts her wings for travel airspeed and sustained flight and maybe also rough weather and maneuverability for -

- She sees the thing about specializing body mods for particular scenarios, now. Okay. She tries to figure out one pair of wings for speed and sustained flight and a slightly different pair that gets some dive speed, a lot of maneuverability, and maybe rough weather ability. Of course, she has to actually fly, test them out, and see how they affect her look -

The magic is actually pretty neutral on most functionality-intended changes to wing shape. It doesn't like pointier wings as much, but it's a mild preference.

That's a relief! There's probably some really minor optimizations she could do but it's very hard to tell on the little things, even if they add up.

She does try out about a dozen subtly different wings, seeing how they perform. Say, google, can you lighten your own bones like a bird does, does it make them terribly fragile, and also how many points is it? She could probably lose weight from other things than bones first - or just shrink her whole frame a bit, but that's not as appealing as straight weight savings.

It's a lot of points to screw with your bones. It'd put her over if she did her whole skeleton. And it's risky, it means you can't do high impact exercise.

That's a solid 'no' then. Ah well.

...How fast can she get up to in level flight if she goes all in on speed-optimized wings, goes with the light and streamlined version of her usual outfit, and un-does the, er, bulking up she did when she first got starscaped?

She can do a hundred ten mph that way for short bursts but her wings tire quickly.

That's a lot of speed, though.

You could spend a whole evening doing this. And she does. She eventually puts back most of her extra height and features and works out a pair with a blend of speed and sustained flight, and a pair for wicked maneuverability, she likes.

There's probably flying clubs, races, obstacle courses... Surely the internet knows about something like that near her?

Yup! There's the state chapter of Flock Girls, and an Aerial Aces Park.

What exactly do the Flock Girls do? Is the Aerial Aces Park, just, like a skatepark for people with wings, or what?

Flock Girls is an amateur sports league for a variety of aerial games, including sky soccer, various racing formats, and Quidditch. Aerial Aces Park is pretty much exactly a skatepark for people with wings, but also attracts Olympic flight hopefuls and their coaches as a practice venue.