"Ill try pointing and pushing later. Pretty sure destroying a tree or something would be... Bad." And at Queenie, "Thanks!"

"I mean," says Melissa, "that we do have target practice coming up." She takes off and goes through one of Clarine's smoky hoops and proceeds to slalom through the next section.

Heavy armor, even turned to aluminum, and large wings will probably make this hard, but she doesn't want to take it off and likes challenges anyway. Into the air she goes!

The obstacle course is designed for people who've been flying longer than she has; she's going to clip a few obstacles and make Clarine grumblingly replace them.

She only tries the course once, then throws herself into practicing fast turns and whatever else it demands that she's not good enough at yet, a short ways off.

This is fine with the other girls.

They fly for about an hour, then land to shoot at targets. Melissa has beams of white energy to shoot.

Okay so she looks pretty cool, here, right, she totally has magic. Time to use it. She sets herself up in front of a target, steps forward sharply, pointing, and yells, "HA!"

And a jolt of lightning zaps the target. They're heavy duty metal with paper taped to them for aiming; the paper goes up in flames.

"YES! Magic!"

She zaps the target again. And again, and again...

Clarine giggles at her.

"It's awesome! I am pretty sure this counts as combat magic. So I can fight swarms! Maybe I don't even need a stardarter."

"Yeah, that looks like don't-need-stardarters territory to me," agrees Clarine.

"I'm a little curious what you guys have - the solid smoke is pretty cool. And, like, how this all... Is it basically life like before, but more fun now?"

"Not sure what you mean," says Clarine. "I have the smoke, and I can do a shadow-stepping thing, and I can basically dust by magic but I think if I refine my outfit that might turn into something cooler, it's not cool enough to be a third spell."

"I mean... I'm having lots of fun, yeah, but it's not like an adventure novel, where nothing's the same now. I'm still, uh, in high school, still not great at math. I kind of thought it would all be different." She shrugs. "Silly, I guess..."

"I mean, you could have gotten powers that made you great at math, or something so weird and powerful the CIA or something snapped you up," says Clarine, "but yeah most of us just... stay in school, maybe ignore the advice about calling 911 about swarms once...."

"Hmm. I guess that's fine... School won't be so bad now. I'm probably gonna do that. Fight a swarm, I mean. Maybe call 911 and then fight a swarm. Maybe join the 911 teams."

"Once you're 16 there's a thing you can do to ride-along with swarm fighter squads so they can cover you and you can get experience," volunteers Vera. She's an excellent shot with a stardarter.

(But I've got zappy powers now. And if I'm good at killing swarms, with magic, that's pretty close to being a straight up superhero.)

"Yeah, maybe. You got three things, Clarine? Mine just feels like one."

"Some people get about three things - you have to do incredibly intense costume fine-tuning to get four," says Clarine. "And some people get one more flexible thing that averages out to about the same total power as the people with three things."

"So I should try and do something else with lightning."

...She looks around. "Proooobably a little further away from everyone, though."

She backs off to a more open area and - tries something - unless someone interrupts.

Can she get the lightning to go all over her body, acting like some kind of defensive field, like that hot celebrity in bikini armor and scarves she can't remember the name of?

She can kind of do that! Its defensive value is unclear.

Well, it'll zap things that try to hit her even if it doesn't actually stop them, hopefully.

She plays around with lightning some more - well away from everyone else so she doesn't zap anyone. Mostly trying to control how it moves and branches. She tries to see if she can sustain it or if it's limited to short bursts. She also tries coloring it - it's coming out white - but golden yellow, or red lightning? Those could possibly look cooler to whatever's judging coolness.

(She gives herself pointy electric yellow fingernails with little black lightning symbols on them!)

She can color the lightning; sustaining it is also possible. Its motion is harder to control but she's better than chance. The magic is currently negative on this fingernail adjustment.

Sweet. This is a pretty fun power. Control is going to need practice - maybe she can make it not zap things she doesn't want to hurt?

Can she make the fingernail adjustment a net positive with any combination of - color changes (red/white/brown/blue, those being all the other colors she currently has on her), adding color to the lightning symbols, fiddling with the shape, changing the lightning bolts to feathers, putting little rubies or maybe yellow diamonds or topaz or something in her fingernails?