"Yup. Great to have you here, good luck with all your magical girling!"

"And good luck with whatever you do that's not this."

She grabs her phone and stuff, and wings off. The stylist gets five stars from her - helpful and she liked his attitude.

When she gets back to her house, she finds the ideal shades of darkened red and yellow, tries out a bunch of braids from his reference sheet and really likes this one waterfall braid where all the hair past the waterfall part is also braided into twists, and experiments with various ways to do pockets and pleats on the skirt.

Does this improved non-armored outfit feel like it matches up to how strong she was with the elaborate shiny armored version? Or maybe even beat it?

It's better than she managed with the unassisted armor version!

Sweet.

Okay, one last idea for today - adding two ruffles like on her sleeves to her leggings, just past where the skirt ends.

It doesn't like that.

Huh. Then they can go away.

She has another photoshoot to lock down good references for this new look. She waits a day to see if she'll decide to change her color scheme again, then orders a replacement stardarter (with feather emblem) with proceeds from her job with Yasmin. No rush shipping, this time. Selling a used stardarter that no longer matches your color scheme has to be a common thing, right, even if you'd only get some of your money back? She does that with the old one.

The next time she joins a swarm patrol shift, she mentions her improved outfit to Pansy, then asks, "Should I be practicing fighting swarms as a team somewhere? I haven't screwed up with the real swarms yet, and I do stardarter practice, and a little practice with the lightning, but, like, in soccer being good with the ball and being good on a team are two totally different things."

You can flip used stardarters, yes, though for considerably less than new costs.

"Soccer teams are all trying to get the same ball to do something," Pansy says. "It's a little different with swarms. It's not nothing, we look out for each other and we're all trying to get the same bugs dead, but you're doing fine at that for the level we're operating on."

"Makes sense... Do you think I could switch to a rural squad for a while? Maybe once I'm 16 or something. To see about fighting the bigger ones."

"You're allowed to switch to rural when you're 16 or with parents' permission, same as with joining us," Pansy says. "You're magically better suited for outdoor monsters than picking off swarms indoors, though you're compensating pretty good."

"I'll ask them. And, thanks, it's been tricky, glad you think I'm doing well! I'm sort of jealous of girls who get, like precognition, or super luck, but mine isn't bad at all either."

"The weird powers like that usually aren't all they're cracked up to be."

"Yeah. I wonder where magic comes from, you know? But wondering isn't helpful or useful. Gotta keep your head out of the clouds and do stuff with the magic."

Her parents don't want to let her join a rural swarm response team yet. She stays in school, almost manages to get up to 'average' in terms of academics, flies around and joins the swarm patrol a lot, produces matter for Yasmin a bit less often (most of the money gets put in savings by her parents). She occasionally takes a Saturday to wing over to some neighboring shopping mall or downtown and browse with her not inconsiderable allowance. Like today. She lands in this sort of riverside park in another town and then walks out and starts down a street full of relatively fancy stores, good restaurants, and the like.

Store with purses, store with jewelry, upscale Italian, upscale sushi, magical girl street preacher, store with clothes...

(Ooh, sushi.)

Wait, what? Magical girl street preacher? She's heard of the magical girl religion, but not really any more detail than the fact that it exists.

She turns around and stops, listening.

"- chosen by the hand of God, to give form to the vision of God! You ask yourself, 'why should I care?' You ask, 'why should I believe it's even a person, let alone God?' You ask and you're already asking the wrong questions! No force in the world cares whether humankind is beautiful - except us - and God! Physics can make the stars, oh yes, and biology can make the flowers, but neither one cares what kind of raiment she's wearing!" She points right at Laura. "Only God!"

"God cares about beauty, and gives us magic? Why only girls then? Why only, like, some girls?"

"We are given the chance to know a facet of the mind of God, not to comprehend the whole of Her mysteries. If you want to shed your human life to seek the fulness of the mind of God, you are given that chance as well!"

This girl sounds like she likes the sound of her own voice, more than like she's actually trying to convince her of anything.

"...Well, I don't wanna be a cryptid. I don't know what you're all about but what you've said so far doesn't make much sense."

"Do you believe in God, girl?"

"I don't not believe in God... I guess you have a point that magic doesn't make much sense compared to physics."

"There is a mind telling you this color not that one, these rings, that hairdo. A mind that can tell whether you stole them out of magazines! Girl, She reached out for you and plucked you from the crowd to hold you in the palm of Her hand and you still haven't listened!"

The plagiarism thing is pretty weird... It doesn't go by the her own impression of fashion, or the armor would've worked way better than it actually did... But still.

"Well, maybe. Maybe it's physics we don't understand yet. Apollo pulls the sun across the sky, yanno."

"You find me anything in all Nature that can do that. I'll wait." She taps her foot in its ballet slipper.

"Uh, bye, then..."

How about some sushi. Sushi makes more sense than this lady does.

...She does google 'magical girl church' later. Maybe she can get a more complete and less... Loud and insistent... Explanation of the idea. And what do they think about swarms?

Magical girl church is called Thaumatology. They think swarms are from the Devil, who was frustrated by human progress towards the vision of God.