She laughs. "Lots of things are weird. Starscape's weird. Anyway, I wanna do landings again, same lane-sharing deal as before?"

"If you want. I'll be out of your way in fifteen."

"Yeah, that works, thanks."

She hangs out at the park exercising for a couple of hours until her parents text her that it's time to come home, and wings home a bit tired and sore but very satisfied.

The next day, she searches the internet for stylists for hire. Preferably local and cheap - her work with Yasmin is very nice but it feels deeply weird to drop more than about a hundred bucks at a time, and the more amateur stylists are still going to be way better than she is.

There are people who do this in their spare time for supplemental income; these are cheapest. Pros start at a hundred dollars an hour.

She'll try one of the amateurs first. One that has a profile somewhere that allows reviews, and has more good ones than bad.

Elements of Style has consultant reviews. Here's one not far from her.

She emails them about an appointment! And then shows up at it with cash in hand.

It's out of this guy's house. He takes her cash and counts it and says, "All right. Hi, I'm Jeff. Do you want to start from scratch, or iterate?"

"I don't know if what I've got is a dead end, it's just an iteration of my very first try. I don't wanna change my mods, not any drastic new shapes anyway, color would be fine. I'll still need pockets and I'd like to keep some kinda armor. All that said, d'you think iterating is better, or from scratch?"

"It's not that it's a dead end, exactly, but if you're attached to it there are things you might not think to change - that I might not either, having seen you. I hear the best stylists do from-scratch on any girl who hasn't seen a pro before, but I'm not the best, I'm inexpensive, and presumably you had reasons to go in this direction."

"Yeah, uh, I don't want to go to a pro until I'm pretty sure I'm not making much progress without one. Hmm. Iterate, I think. Oh, and my power is lightning, and I can control the color of it."

"Do you have little demo versions I could look at?"

"Yeah, I can make it small. Still, better safe than sorry."

She takes a few steps back and cups her hand, running crackling lines of sparks over her fingertips. She pushes it out, up and away from her (and Jeff) about a foot. She cycles it through red, white, yellow, blue, green.

"I can aim it alright, bend it and fork it a bit, and it'll go nice and far when I'm all dressed up. So, this is my flight wear-"

As to how she's dressed up, her mods are yellow eagle's eyes, big wings in yellow and brown with red highlights, and a short feathered bird tail - "I drop the tail sometimes, though."

She has similarly colored hair in a crown braid, and feathers decorating the braid. A gold circlet with a line of large and small rubies. Then, an undershirt and leggings with fairly elaborate patterns of red shapes (mostly diamonds) along the hems and seams, and a large abstract red-white-yellow-white-brown design in concentric shapes on the center of the shirt. A pleated skirt in white-and-red, with rubies in gold settings on the corners of the pleats, and a necklace with the same combo. Gold feather earrings with a single tiny ruby each. Tall leather boots in red, white, and yellow, with feather-pattern tooling, and matching gauntlets and a belt with pouches.

"I've got a more elaborate version with an armored shirt and lots of gold and gemstones, plus armor on the skirt, and a red cape, but it's really hard to fly in. I have pictures, but I sort of want to forget the armor and just make my flight wear better and make it my everything-wear."

"Good plan. A good outfit only helps your magic, and if your magic doesn't help you move you have to aim for something that you can move yourself in. Hmmm. Do you need those pouches, are you keeping stuff in them? You should put down everything that you can't recreate, your phone and stuff."

"Yeah, I need pockets, phone and wallet and stardarter ammo and other little things. Didn't bring the stardarter but it's colored like the boots. I might not actually end up using it much, lightning's pretty swarm-killy on its own."

"Is a replacement stardarter in your budget? I don't expect to need to change your color scheme - most any color scheme can work and you aren't trying to do green and orange here - but if you try different shades and another is better."

"I could get a replacement if I had to, but I don't wanna do that, like, every week."

"Yeah, all right, we can use your time to focus on non-color changes. Pouches empty?"

"Yep, ready to glam up, rock and roll!"

"Okay, ditch the pouches. I've got a good website reference on how to hide pockets. Is ditching the pouches better or worse?"

"I think I got them about neutral before, matching the boots..." She gets rid of them and double checks.

Just about neutral, yep. "If they match something, and getting rid of them is neutral, that means they're bad but you don't have enough of the style they match for it to be a good motif," he says. "Here's my pocket hiding site." He turns his computer her way; it has diagrams on how to hide pockets and compartments in a skirt, under layers, in boots, in thick boot soles.

"Hmm... Okay, so I'll try that with the skirt. Boot compartments don't look very big."

She scrutinizes the diagram a bit and then starscapes and applies it to the skirt.

"I think I could get at least wallet and phone like that. Or under a jacket if a jacket works for me. Can you email me that or something later?"

"Sure thing, Laura." He makes a note of it. "So that means you can either add more boot-like elements, or you can retool your boots to match something else. Preference?"

"Thanks. More like the boot, I think. Leather's nice."