She can net-positive it by recoloring it according to her current color scheme, or by the switch to feathers.

Or both! Both is perfectly fine by her.

She looks around for Queenie (She's warming up to Queenie's look too, especially the leggings and tail... Which is a little weird to think about but not unpleasant...) and asks if the offer to borrow a stardarter is still on.

"Lightning is fun but I should practice the other thing too probably."

"Here ya go," says Queenie, handing her a stardarter. It matches Queenie's color scheme, not Laura's, and the magic doesn't like that she's holding it.

"Color penalty, ouch... Eh, I'll find the cash for my own somehow..."

She looks it over and investigates how you're supposed to load and charge it a bit before trying to aim and fire.

It's pretty straightforward, like a Nerf gun.

She practices with the stardarter for a while. This is neat too.

And eventually people are bored of target practice and drift over to Laura to kibitz on her outfit.

Besides the extra inches and the practically mandatory general body tuneup, she has full-on eagle's eyes, a deep golden yellow. Large eagle-styled wings, the top half brown and the lower half a deep golden-blonde, with red bands of highlights, that all fade into each other. Her hair is a slick column arching out a bit behind her, following the same color pattern. There's a circlet sitting on top of her hair, gold ovals linked together and a line of rubies centered on a larger one at the front. She also has golden feather-shaped earrings with a tiny ruby near the base of the feather dangling from her ears.

She has a long-sleeve undershirt that goes up to her neck with patterns of red diamonds and other repeating shapes along the hems and seams, and leggings and stockings of the same design that each go most of the way to her knees but don't cover them. There's a two-inch stylized eagle tattoo, black, on the back of her right hand. (She's abandoned the gloves, and it was getting covered by her bracelets.) She also has two golden bracelets, shaped like ropes spiraling over each other, but no gems.

Over the undershirt, there's a shiny aluminum chainmail shirt that hugs her figure some. In the center of that shirt is a large trillion cut ruby, with patterns of gold links and smaller rubies, plus some white and yellow diamonds, surrounding it. Chains of gold with tiny ruby insets criss-cross down the armored shirt, hanging slightly loose. She also has an armored skirt, made with panels of chain backed with fabric, pleated so she can twirl and have it expand some. There are rubies in gold fittings on the corner of each of the armor panels. Some pearlescent insets in simple shapes, slightly gold and red, are here and there on both the armor pieces, but aren't the focus.

She has laceless leather boots, which are fitted snugly and have a slight heel, with gold-and-ruby bangles and fastenings. She also has a blue cape with an abstract design in white, red, brown, and yellow on the back. There are some wing adornments, thin chains running along the joints and through the feathers, with rubies here and there. She's dropped the gloves, but her fingernails are the same red as her lips, copying the rubies, and have little black feather outlines on them. More rubies in gold fittings dot any part of the outfit that felt a bit bare, but not the undershirt or leggings and stockings.

"I don't like the leggings and the stockings together," tuts Jodie. "Pick one."

"Probably pick leggings unless you want to flash people," says Queenie.

"Doesn't the chain make it hard to fly?" asks Melissa. "And all the junk on your wings?"

"Boots could be fancier," muses Gwendolyn.

"Blue on your cape is really out of nowhere," says Aileen. "You're otherwise all warm."

"Lemme get a look at your nails - yeah, those are cool, but maybe do the feathers in the color of your actual feathers," says Amelia.

"Oh," says Melissa, "and remember to change one thing at a time so you can assess how it does, unless you want to just go wild and change a ton of stuff."

This is... Uncomfortably reminiscent of just two days ago. But it's okay, it's fine, she can change everything.

"Yeah, I'll probably take off the chain shirt and - maybe the skirt, maybe I can make a different one that's not chain - to fly. I made it aluminum, so it's not that bad. I like the wing chains, though. They make a cool sound. Hmm..." 

One at a time:

The fingernail feather color is an obvious change, so she tries that.

She makes the cape base red and changes the red parts of the pattern to other colors... Does adding her black eagle design to the center of the cape help or hurt?

She kind of likes the stockings, but they can shrink down into socks that peek over the boots, and then ones that don't, and if either of these help the magic much fine she'll keep it.

The color change improves things. The cape color change helps, the eagle does not help. No-show socks are better.

"That's better," says Gwendolyn.

"Is it?" Amelia asks Laura.

"Yeah." She scrubs the eagle from the cape and puts back the center of her abstract pattern. "That didn't, though. Maybe... Bells? I like making noise when I move my wings, but if the chains are weird-looking..."

The boots, taller, with fancy colored leather panels, red and yellow and white? And bells?

"Wait, what didn't," says Clarine, trotting around to look at the other side of Laura.

Taller and fancier is good, bells make it worse.

"I put my eagle tattoo on the cape, that didn't help. And bells suck, apparently." Goodbye, bells.

She messes with the panels and colors on her boots, trying to find a local maximum.

There's one! It prefers red:white:yellow in that order and lots of leather tooling in feather patterns.

Leather tooling is really quite pretty, actually. "I sorta wonder if I should be having a tail, or something, but that might be a bit much. And it'd get covered by the cape. Or maybe showing more skin? Or a scarf? I saw a lot of those when I was, um, researching."

"Tails are great," says Amelia.

"Seconded," says Queenie.

"Mine's just for the look, I'm not really attached to it," says Vera.

Clarine says, "How much skin you show doesn't make a difference by itself, you can make any level of modesty work short of a burqa - well, maybe you need to let your hair show to go fight kaiju? - but it's important artistically to keep in mind negative space as an option. Magic likes a certain amount of clutter but there's such a thing as too much."

"I don't mind showing skin. It's just, then there's no armor there. I dunno about a tail that'd fit the whole knight thing I'm doing now, though."

Negative space, huh... She tries shortening the undershirt and armored shirt, both on her arms and torso. And the wing adornments can go if disappearing them actually improves anything, but she's keeping them for now if they're neutral.

"Speaking of hair, yours looks kinda stiff," says Amelia. "Did that improve it from where it started?"

Wing adornments are neutral. Shortening the shirts has a weak positive effect on net, though it seems to prefer the undershirt be longer.

Undershirt stays long, then. Does shortening her skirt a bit help or hurt?

"I thought it looked cool like that and then stopped playing around with it much."

Shorter skirt helps a little.

"It makes you look like a cartoon character," says Amelia.

...Okay, so first she tries just letting it mostly loose, still pushing backwards a bit but not nearly as stiff. Her circlet stops feeling like it's going to fall off.

"I should probably do... Some kind of braid. But I always just did ponytails before. Never anything fancier than, just, three bands over each other."

"You don't have to braid it," says Melissa. She shakes her hair and closes her eyes and she has a pullthrough braid, just like that. "You just have to decide it should be braided."

"But I still don't know the options really..."

She settles for just sort of - metaphorically yanking randomly on the 'braid' lever, seeing if anything pops out - probably slightly different braids for the brown and blonde halves of her hair, the red highlights worked through them. Looking for something that makes her think 'noble' or 'knight'. Or at least that the magic likes.

This is too unsophisticated a selection mechanism to get anything fancier than a Dutch braid (also the magic's favorite).

"Stick some feather ornaments in there," recommends Gwendolyn.