While the bus trundles down Main Street, her vision blanks out to be replaced with a look at herself: sitting (bus seat not included), wearing the clothes and hair that get her made fun of, against a backdrop of stars.

Would she like to change any of this?

It's the magic thing! She's heard of this - she thought it wasn't going to happen to her, because since when do lucky things happen to her.

...They said not to be too eager and think about if you want it, but it's kind of too exciting not to do anything.

Okay. Okay, first of all, her hair has got to behave. A bit longer, not frizzled or frayed, shiny and smooth and all going down the back of her head, darker brown. Second of all, she has a birthmark that has really got to go. Goodbye, ugly blob. Third of all - fix those teeth.

Fourth... Can she get taller?

She can! She can get taller!

Her hearing is unaffected; a girl says, "Holy shit, Laura got starscaped and she's going for it, look."

"We're all doomed," says a boy.

She's taller now. The feeling of suddenly having a couple inches of bare midriff past her T-shirt, and the suddenly too short old jeans, makes her pause. She doesn't wanna do this on a bus in front of everyone. Even though it might be fun to watch them gape as all the bad parts of her disappear.

...Okay one more thing. Permanent lipstick that won't smudge, in light red, is that a thing?

She can pigment her lips! Doing it in actual makeup is not currently unlocked because she basically still looks like a human.

She wouldn't mind having her lips look like that basically forever, so doing it in real skin is perfectly fine.

At any rate, she tries to get her vision to go back to normal. For now. And sort of smirks at everyone until the bus drops her off and she can run home.

She can exit the starscape with no problems. Running is a little different with extra inches.

Huh, it really is. She stretches her legs and swings her arms around, feeling the differences. There's a little bit more inertia to everything now.

...She kind of wants to play with her shape and exercise in lots of different conditions now.

She goes home. She tells her mom about the starscape, points out what she's done, and says that she's probably going to go all the way with it - her mom hesitates, then hugs her and says 'I hope it makes you happy'. Mom calls her dad, and he doesn't know how to react, eventually joking 'well, if I don't recognize you tomorrow at least I know why'.

She goes up to her room. She does a little internet research on the painfully slow, old laptop. What are the downsides to embracing magic, exactly? She knows you can't go back to plain-old-human even if you want to, anything else?

If you do too much, you turn into a cryptid! Also it makes you gay!

Yikes. And... Yikes maybe? ...It's not like she's ever had a successful date while straight. And magic! MAGIC!

She looks at a couple examples of 'too much', then strips naked, stands in the middle of her room, and brings the starscape back. There's all these really crazy changes right there, right under the surface, begging to be used, but she sticks to perfecting what she's got first. A more symmetrical face, slightly bigger eyes, less prominent collarbone, no scars or freckles, no hair in places other than her head...

Clear skin, bring in that waist a bit, bring up the bust and butt and hips a bit. Just a bit, she still wants to look like a teen at the end of this. The height plus this is already pushing that.

She has Opinions about the shape of her legs and arms and feet and hands and fingers and toes (and -nails on all four limbs). They're pretty subtle changes but it's so satisfying to be able to make them.

And after maybe fifteen minutes of carefully fiddling with what she's already got, stretching and posing between changes, she can take a deep breath and start to make bigger changes. Yellow-gold irises, like some creature of magic? Metal hair, in dark silver or bronze or gold, maybe? Hopefully that doesn't send her head crashing to the floor.

It's pretty heavy, but no, she can hold her head up with some difficulty.

She likes the look (and feel) of it, but the extra weight is really annoying, can she make that go away? Or get something that acts similar without being actually metal?

She likes the eyes. They make her look heroic.

She can get normal hair to be very very shiny and to behave stiffly like wire.

That's good enough for now. She's going to fiddle with it a lot, but later.

So, just these changes isn't enough, hmm...

The starscape waits patiently.

The Internet informs her that wings are always enough by themselves.

Okay then. Wings. Flying sounds fun. She's not nervous at all, no way.

Wings styled after an eagle. A single pair, long, wide, and feathered. The front half of the feathers brown, the rest sort of golden-blonde, but not shiny or metal, real feathers.

There she goes! Now she can change her clothes and stuff too so she doesn't have to wear ill-fitting junk!

Cool! Heeeee. She flaps them a couple of times, limited by the size of her room but positively grinning anyway.

Okay, maybe turn down the shininess of her hair some, it's clashing with the un-shiny wings. Make it layered brown/blonde like the feathers, make it less stiff, make it curve and curl a little.

As for clothes, she's probably not very good at this, but she wants to be a knight. A hero.

She gives herself a long-sleeve white undershirt coming up to her neck with patterns of red diamonds on the seams. Silver chainmail shirt, some of the links golden instead, a big ruby with circles of golden links around it in the center, over her chest. She adjusts it so it fits her figure, hugging it slightly without hurting her ability to stretch much. She has to try several times to make it not get in the way of the wings. She gives herself golden bracelets like a hexagon twisted over itself again and again in a spiral.

As for bottoms, apparently skirts are pretty much mandatory? But it can be an armored skirt, a Lady Knight's skirt, right? Pieces of chain-metal backed and sewn together with cloth, that clink pleasantly when she moves and flare out if she twirls. Leggings with the same white and red diamond patterns as her undershirt under them, the red diamonds peaking out of the armored skirt. She works more patterns of different colored metal into both items, flipping the colors of everything around until she gets something that looks cool.

Armored skirt seems to pass muster, and everything else she does is at least a little positive to the magic she can now slightly sense; she gets the biggest jumps from the ruby, the skirt, and the leggings.

Hmm.

More gemstones! Not, like, everywhere, not so many it becomes gaudy, but more. Mostly tiny little diamonds in various colors, and a lot of rubies. She likes the redness. A few more gems arranged around the large ruby on the armor shirt. Some at the corners of the skirt panels, little diamonds and rubies in gold fittings. Maybe a circlet, gold like two ropes weaving over each other, one large ruby in the middle and a line of smaller ones in slightly different shades of red.

Maybe the armor shirt needs to be more elaborate than one single layer - how about an open vest over the armor shirt, red trim and the fabric patterned white-and-yellow in a feather pattern?

Gloves? She's not sure about what kind of gloves fit the Knight thing without being cumbersome or ugly though...

How about some thin metal chains criss-crossing along the edge of the wings, or running through the feathers? How about she adds more red patterning, and maybe a little gold, to the undershirt and leggings?

The rubies do better than the diamonds, though the diamonds still help. The gold fittings are great, the circlet is greater. The vest isn't helping much, though it doesn't hurt. The wing adornments are weak additions. The red patterning is good!

Well, she likes the wing adornments, so nyeh.

White stockings with the same red patterning. Leather boots with gold fastenings and nubbins - one piece, no laces, she doesn't have to get them on - she tries a few different designs until the magic likes one. Interleaving lines of gold chain dotted with rubies hanging off each other down her armor vest, split along the center. A cape that fits just over where her wings join her body, dark blue with red, yellow, and white angular patterns on the back! Little golden feather-shaped earrings with a tiny ruby in each of them. She makes her eyelashes silvery, and her lips gain a slight sheen. Red seems to be working well - does adding red highlights to either her hair or the wings help? How about going totally Gold-and-red instead of gold-and-brown?

She wants to go try flying as soon as she gets something the magic likes enough to give her a spell, but she's having plenty of fun with this right now anyway. Though, she suddenly realizes that all this armor is pretty heavy. Well, she can go with just the undershirt and leggings or something later if she has to, to fly.

Most of these things are good! The earrings are very good. The eyelashes are bad. The highlights on the wings help, but losing the brown entirely hurts.

She's definitely got magic at this point! It just doesn't seem to come in discrete blobs.

Well, she'll undo the eyelashes then. And keep most of the brown, just doing highlights.

There's probably something she can do to improve the vest. Ribbons, perhaps? She could probably add more stuff directly to her body... Silvery tattoos, maybe? Hmm.

Either way, it's about time for her to go try to fly. She's not gonna wait for that any longer!

Flying works! She's not great at it but she can successfully take off and not crash into anything! The armor is really heavy, though, she's having to work pretty hard.

Wheeeee, flying!

Yeah fine the armored shirt can go away for now, and the cape it's flapping around annoyingly, but the skirt is staying. Doing cardio has never been so fun so she'll do this for a while and try to figure out her top speed. Maybe practice rolls and dives or something.

Ditching the shirt and cape harm her magic capacity a little, though not all that much.

She can go about thirty-five miles an hour; maybe if her wings were bigger or she were better at this in some way she'd be faster. It's still an improvement over a car anywhere but a low traffic highway, though. Rolls are hard and dives are scary!

Dives are exhilarating, you mean. Also a lot of work to set up, like biking uphill. And scary, yes, so she doesn't do more than a couple.

This is probably a really good workout, and it's awesome, so she'll be at it until she's totally exhausted unless something stops her.

There's another magical girl in the air over there! She's got a hummingbird aesthetic going on.

Laura flies near-ish and waves!

"Hey!" says Hummingbird Girl. She looks like the kind that's mostly green with a white throat, though on closer inspection the only feathers actually growing out of her body are on her wings; everything else is on her clothes, and the white throat is a scarf. "Are you new? I don't recognize you."

"Today! It's so great!"

"You look good for day one!" she smiles.

"Thanks! I went straight for, like, Lady Knight. I've got an armored shirt and a cape, but they're not great for right now! Armor's heavy! Had to fly, though!"

It's a little scary trying to fly slowly. She wobbles a bit.

"Flying's super good! I don't know why not everybody does it!"

"I had to think about getting wings! For like thirty seconds, but yeah. And being up high's a little scary. But it's really great cardio!"

"If that's your thing, welcome to being a flier," laughs the hummingbird girl.

She tries to shrug self-consciously but it really doesn't work while flying. 

"I mean, exercise is the one thing I was actually good at before today."

"It'll come in handy! What's your magic?"

"Dunno! Feels like a thing is there, but I'm not sure how to actually do it."

"Maybe it'll pop up if you find a swarm? Some people's powers are only good for swarms."

"Much as I want to go find one right now, they always say to just call 911 so that'd be pretty stupid, huh? I'm thinking about getting a sword, a sword would be so cool. But it's probably illegal or something."

"I mean, if you call 911, a magical girl squad's gonna show up, and that could be you if you have good powers. Sword's no good for swarms, you need range."

"Not today it's not gonna be me. That sounds like a good job though... Spear? Or am I supposed to just throw rocks or something?"

"No, you get these dart gun kind of things, heavy duty enough to squish a swarmling if it's not too old. If you want to go after older swarms you really need combat magic though."

"Well... I hope I have combat magic. Also I'm already starting to run out of easy ideas for looking cooler."

"Once you're out of low hanging fruit you need a consultant," says hummingbird girl.

That sounds useless and annoying, but she is at least tactful enough not to say this out loud.

"Hmm. I'm going to look at tons of stuff on birds and wing design later. Flying's cool, but I want to be faster."

"Bigger wings?" says hummingbird girl.

"Yeah. And, like, birds have different kinds of wings. Eagle wings are wide like these, for better control. Falcon wings are narrow at the tip, for speed... I probably shouldn't really be able to fly at all like this if we worked like birds though! ...Uh, sorry, I like birds."

"Believe me, I did my research," says hummingbird girl.

Suddenly, there's anxiety. She has no idea what she's doing, really.

"...Maybe I should go do that then. The scarf is a nice touch, by the way."

"Thanks," says hummingbird girl.

Aaah. Why is she feeling useless and intimidated again... Hummingbird girl didn't even say anything.

"Er... Bye, then."

She goes home. Puts the armor vest back on. Makes little adjustments to patterns and colors of things idly, probably not making much of a difference. She tries to do her homework but as usual can't seem to focus on it.

Perhaps searching the internet for other girls who used gemstones and armor well will be inspirational?

Public figures in armor:

"Knight", who does silver and purple gems, no wings, instead she's a centaur in full armor and barding with a heraldry theme.

Monica Chapman, under fire for using samurai styles despite not being Japanese, armor covered in red and black enamel and decorated with clouds made of inlaid opal.

Becky White, who rocks gold bikini armor plus a lot of silk scarves (her magic does a personal force field).

Coast Paladin Squad 29, who all rock studded leather with different colored diamonds as studs (white and blue, pink and black, and yellow and brown).

Olivia Nguyen, who obviously started with Wonder Woman and iterated from there till plagiarism stopped costing her. She's also got wings.

Cindy Li and her teammates, who all adhere to a dress code of approximately "video game armor", but according to their press the armor is not functional and it's super lightweight so they can fly.

The centaur thing is certainly... A thing. Maybe she should invent a heraldic symbol. Or something about as Knightly as that, at least. The feathers are already sort of a theme with her. Oooooh, force field. That would be sweet. Using Japanese styles doesn't seem unreasonable to her, but people are jerks on the internet too. Apparently. The opal is pretty. Maybe something like liquid pearl, swirling off-white - maybe she should go for pauldrons? Those don't seem very on-theme, looking at what's here, though.

She tries adding bands of opalescent inlay - on the underpanels of the skirt that only show if it flares, bands of it around her upper arm, inlay surrounding all the gems in the center of her mail shirt wherever there's not already a gold pattern. (She vaguely wonders if this counts as plagiarism, but doesn't really have a way to check.)

She also studies wings for a while and eventually makes hers bigger, and does some feather adjustments that supposedly will help with control. She also tries out having the different colors of feathers sort of fade gently at the borders, instead of being solid blocks of color, and keeps that if the magic likes it.

Does the vest improve any if she turns the trim the same blue as her cape, instead of red, and adds little dots of red on the feather pattern to make them match her earrings?

(Also, wow they all look so very strong, especially Becky White and the Paladin Squad, and - this is what she used to think about some guys. Well. The internet did warn her.)

If it counts as plagiarism, it doesn't count enough to stop it from helping - but it doesn't help much. The magic is neutral on her wing adjustments, and likes the color fade, and still doesn't seem to like the vest.

Apparently the vest has to go. She gets rid of it. She's not sure what should replace it, but probably something...

...She idly wonders if, since she has functional wings, she could do other weird biology. Gills? Poison stinger in her fingertip? Extra eyes on the back of her head? Those are probably all really ugly... And cryptid-y. She doesn't try any.

Rubies have worked well so far. She adds more - to the cape, to the wing accessories. She acquires gloves, leather and ruby-studded. She changes the big one on the center of her armor to a trilliant cut after some quick googling.

Rubies keep helping for a while, but she'll run into diminishing returns by the time the gloves turn up.

Yeah, the rubies are getting a little excessive. She switches a few out for the colors of diamonds that worked the best.

...Wow, she's made herself very shiny.

She realizes she can change the metal on all her armor pieces and chains out for something less heavy. Aluminum, or thin titanium if that makes it look too pale.

She thinks about direct body-mods again. She can always get rid of them if they're awful, she just can't get rid of everything, from what she's read. She tries changing her eyes further, eagle-eyes. Even better if it improves how she sees. She grins and sharpens her teeth slightly. She removes the gloves and tries out sharp talons for hands - inconvenient, probably not as stylish as the gloves, but it feels powerful. She tries tattoos with gemstones inset in a variety of colors and shiny metals and picks a small one to be placed on the top of her right forearm, a little stylized eagle head and wings.

She makes the opalescence slightly more golden, maybe slightly red for some of them, and keeps it if it helps.

Eagle-eyes help some with the vision. The magic doesn't like sharper teeth or talons but it does like the tattoo. Changing the opal color helps; it suddenly jumps by quite a bit once it's playing into her color scheme.

Fine, fine, she'll put the teeth back. For now. She's keeping the eyes, they're very different, but they're pretty and useful.

She's about done with this for the day, probably, though. Run down her initial enthusiasm and inspiration. It's still pretty great, she looks awesome, and she's got magic that probably has something to do with fighting monsters. She flies around a little more, feeling the differences of the new wing design, then spends some time with her mom (who is a bit disconcerted but happy Laura is so much more cheerful) and her dad (who is much more disconcerted, but also happy).

She looks up stardarters. If she can't have a cool sword, she at least needs the standard magical girl weapon... Money: Is a thing.

She asks her parents about it, maybe as an early birthday present? They say they'll think about it, so clearly she's going to have to get some money. Somehow. Well, she can worry about that tomorrow. For now, she takes the internet's advice again and has her mom take lots and lots of pictures of her whole ensemble so she doesn't lose all this cool design work, then gives herself comfy PJs and figures out how sleeping with wings works.

She practically radiates self-satisfaction while standing on the corner waiting for the bus the next day. No armor, that seems likely to get objected to by the school. But the undershirt, yes, and a ruby necklace, and her shiny wings, and the leggings and a simpler, un-armored skirt.

...You know what, forget the bus. She'll fly to school. Buses are slow and ugly and crowded. The sky is none of those things.

The sky is indeed uncrowded! She makes it to school without encountering any other fliers.

...She looks for the guy who said 'we're all doomed' to her yesterday. If she finds him, she grins at him with sharp teeth that she puts back to shiny perfection a moment later.

And she'll go to class and - not pretend nothing is changed, everything is changed, she is awesome now, but she's on time for once and she doesn't go boasting or anything.

At lunch another magical girl who's never talked to her before tells her there's a club and she's entitled to be in it.

"Oh hey. That sounds maybe interesting! When, where? What d'you guys do at it? Just chat, or what?"

"It's Tuesday afternoons," that means this afternoon, "in the soccer field in nice weather, in the gym in bad weather. We do style critique and target practice and calisthenics and power testing."

"I will totally be there. All dressed up in everything. This isn't everything, everything's a bit much for school."

And she is there, armor and cape and all, after scrutinizing her somewhat old phone for a bit to get everything mostly the way she had it yesterday.

There are eight girls in this club. They introduce themselves:

- Amelia, in nice but very plain civvies, her only visible mod a lizard tail;
- Jodie, with bat wings and a goth look;
- Gwendolyn, who has twi'lek-style hair-replacement tentacle things and a weird science-fiction-runway getup that is probably not compliant with the school dress code;
- Melissa, angel wings and extra arms and white hair, lots of white and hardanger embroidery, tiara, centerpiece belt entirely made of emerald the only non-white thing on her person;
- Vera, deer-inspired mods including ears, tail, and antlers, wearing green velvet;
- Aileen, duck-inspired angel wings, heavy on the purple and the pleats;
- Clarine, blue skin with light applications of scales in some places across her 6'6" frame, yellow-green dress that may actually be attached to her in places;
- Queenie, red-fox-tailed and pterodactyl-winged complete with functional extra fingers at the bend, fox-colored tunic over very form-fitting leggings and eye-catching boots.

Aileen and Vera are particularly appealing somehow? And Melissa, but in a different way.

She waves at Melissa and Aileen, flaring her unusually large eagle-inspired wings. Her armored shirt and all the rubies clink a bit. (She waves at Jodie and Queenie too as an afterthought.)

"Wing buddies!"

Queenie snorts. Melissa and Aileen smile and Jodie waves back.

"All right, I think that's everybody we're expecting today," says Melissa, ticking off attendance. "What's your name, Laur-something? Laurel?"

"Laura. Rossi." She's practically bouncing on her feet, wingtips twitching. A magic club is pretty exciting!

Melissa writes that down. "Welcome, Laura. All right, agenda this week - Clarine's agreed to do an aerial obstacle course -"

"Woo!" says Jodie.

"- based on the 2012 Olympics, and for our terrestrial members there's the usual parkour on the bleachers, assuming Vera's been keeping up with her lessons to relay them to us -"

"Yep," says Vera.

"- followed by everyone's choice of target practice and style consultation, which today may as well focus on Laura since she's new."

"Aerial obstacle course sounds like loads of fun. Target practice too. I, uh, might not be able to get a stardarter any time soon though. And, hey, how long does it take to figure out what your magic actually does? I met someone who said maybe it only works on swarms..."

Clarine sets up the aerial obstacle course; her power appears to involve stationary smoky images.

"You can borrow my off-hand one," says Queenie.

"Mine took forever to figure out," says Vera. "It's very subtle. You'll find it eventually, faster the better it gets."

"It's always worth pointing unarmed at a target and seeing if that opens anything up," says Melissa.

"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?

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.

"Oh, good idea!"

Feathers, brown and blonde with touches of red at the tips, stuck into the braid aligning with the smaller bands of hair. And maybe a few coming out of the crown of her head, mostly flat and pointing back, if they help?

The ones in the braid help, the ones on top don't.

Then the crown-feathers can go away. "Hmm... Okay I think I might be about done for today, gonna try one more thing..."

Do gauntlets going a few inches up her wrists in the same red-white-yellow-tooling style as her boots help better than hiding the fingernails, tattoo, and chucking her braclets hurt?

Gauntlets help!

"Cooool. That's good. Okay. I'm happy with this for now, thanks everyone! Someone else's turn now, or what?"

"Yeah, I want troubleshooting on my new casuals," says Jodie, replacing her outfit with something that could just barely pass on the street if somebody who looked like a normal human was wearing it. "I need it pretty enough to keep my second spell, I don't need the third..."

People start critiquing Jodie's costume.

Laura gamely tries to think of something to help, to emphasize the goth look without looking Not Casual - maybe a little deep, dark red on the jeans? - but if nothing seems obvious she's probably too timid in the social arena to actually suggest anything.

There's nothing obvious; Jodie got everything obvious already! People are making very subtle recommendations - adjustments to the knit of her skirt and the flare of her blazer hem.

She has no idea how to help here and will halfheartedly suggest a touch more dark red and then kinda just. Back off.

Jodie adds a little dark red, in her earrings, and keeps it!

...So she did help. At least a bit. Yay!

No other ideas come to her, but she chimes in with support to some of what other people come up with sometimes.

And eventually magic club disperses.

"That was a lot of fun! Looking forward to it next week!"

And then she takes into the air, bearing the strain of doing it in her armor long enough to go home and spend a little time with her family and get another impromptu photoshoot. Then, of course, she flies around some more in her undershirt and a de-armored version of the skirt.

She jogs on the ground a bit and does some push-ups and sit-ups and a few other exercises, because it doesn't do to just do cardio, but after getting the exercise out of her system she showers, has a bit of trouble drying her wings off, and then thinks about stardarters again and googles 'how to make money as a magical girl'.

Here's TOP SEVEN WAYS FOR MAGICAL GIRLS TO MAKE MONEY!, a featured page on newgirlsontheblock.com:

1. Swarm patrol! If you're old enough, you can come along with more experienced squads of swarm hunters to get experience, or bike or fly around your town to be the first to sense a new swarm and call in a squad before it gets too hairy. (Don't try to take on a swarm alone till you know what you're doing!)

2. Healing! It's legal in most states for even young magical girls with healing spells to use their powers in a medical setting.

3. Modeling and acting! They save on costume and makeup budget and pass it on to YOU!

4. Generating biomatter - the most popular options are ivory/horn and coral, but there are also markets for exotic flowers, wood, special feathers and scales, wools, and (if you get the hang of growing it so it'll come off painlessly) fur!

5. Birthday parties! A lot of little kids like having a real dressed-up magical girl at their party. This is best if you have safely demonstrable magic and don't mind all your mods being poked and prodded.

6. Research! Scientists are often looking for magical girl subjects to ask questions and try things with to find out more about magic.

7. Special powers applications - healing's mentioned specifically up above, but lots of powers have applications in the private sector!

She is pretty sure zapping things won't heal them. And that trying to power the house would lead to, at best, a bunch of blown lightbulbs. So, 2 and 7 are out. She's too young for 1. Modeling sounds awful on a visceral level, but it might not be too bad. And it'd be ironic, or something, if she ends up a model.

Making and breaking off horn-and-things might work? If it doesn't hurt her long-term, and it pays... Are people just selling bits of themselves on eBay, or what?

Birthday parties might work, she'd like to show off, but the style she has now is more badass than cute, so maybe not. Doing science sounds almost fun. She tries to find out if anyone wanting to do science is looking for freshly activated 14 year olds right now.

Some people sell bits of themselves on Ebay, especially if they have chosen to sculpt them before detaching them, but there are also middleman services if they look.

The National Institute for Magical Studies will pay her $50 to take a survey if she proves she's a magical girl by presenting state ID that indicates that.

She wants a stardarter and wants it soon and straightforwardly. She looks into the middleman services for the one that's easiest to get started with or contact.

She probably doesn't have a state ID, unless her school ID card counts.

Her school ID does not count and doesn't currently indicate she's a magical girl anyway.

The middleman for magically generated biomaterials that is most accessible to her is called Parker's Ivory (which also deals in things other than, strictly, ivory).

Eh, forget the science.

So is she supposed to call them or email or fly somewhere and go in or what.

They take drop-ins, though they do encourage calling ahead.

She calls them!

"Parker's Ivory this is Yasmin how can I help you?"

"Hi! This is Laura, and I got magic the other day and I want to earn some money and I'm okay with cutting bits off so here I am calling you."

"Cool! When's a good time for you?"

"Right now! Or, basically any time after school?"

"If now works for you, now works for me! How long do you have and do you happen to know your modifications' point score?"

"As long as I can fly back before, like, nine... Points?"

"There's a point system - it's used for gauging risk of turning cryptid. It's kind of cheesy but there's some real research behind it and while we do carry cryptid insurance it's better not to have to pay out, yanno? I can do a point tally when you're here though."

"Okay... I just did wings and fancy eyes. I thought about a tail but the idea of cryptids are creepy, so... Anyway, should I fly over now then?"

"Yup, come on down!"

She flies on down! Back in the fancy boots and gauntlets, and the leggings/undershirt/skirt that's quickly becoming her casual-slash-flight wear. (She adds the pattern that's normally on her cape to the front of the undershirt, hoping it helps a bit).

Just a bit, but every bit counts once you've managed "not looking schlubby" and "wearing a skirt"!

The business is among some warehouses. Yasmin is apparently the only employee in at the moment. "Hey there!" she chirps. "Welcome to Parker's Ivory! You're Laura?"

Flying is so great, even when you're doing it in a sort of industrial park. "Yeah. Hi! Yas... Min?"

"Yasmin! That's me! So you don't look like you're more than two hundred points all told there unless you used to be a Filipina midget or something, didja?"

"Nah. I mean, I did, uh, figure up a little bit," (vague gesture and slight blush), "but nothing very big on that level?"

"Anything a human could look like and you wouldn't go 'wait a second' is under fifty points easy," says Yasmin, consulting a chart on her phone, "unless you started out kinda 'wait a second' all by yourself. Okay, I think you've got more than enough safety margin. Today is narwhal horns! Assorted sizes, big ones to hang on walls and little ones to sell to kids at Renfaires, that kind of thing. If you fill all the boxes I have prepped for narwhal horns in assorted sizes and you wanna stick around, I have another box you can fill with coral beads. You ever take anything off before?"

"Huh, narwhals... No, but it can't be that bad, right? Also I want to know how much you're gonna pay me before I do anything."

"It depends on your speed how many I can sell - I don't pay by the hour - and also on the quality for pieces that get sold individually like narwhal horns. I've never had a problem with quality, understand, but if they turn out messy or uneven or something they're not gonna fetch as much. But if you get the boxes full of horns, you can walk away with two thou minimum, then a cut of whatever they go for. Now, the way you wanna get them off is you get them real thin at the base and then snap them. I can still take broken horns but it's gonna cut into the profits so you don't want to break them anywhere but the base. It's okay if the end is messy, I have a grinder. You don't wanna be near me without safety gear while I'm smoothing out the ends of the horns, very dangerous. More questions?"

Her eyes widen at 'two thou'.

"Right, right, nah, no questions. Thin base, power tools not toys, uh huh. Okay-"

She looks at the boxes to get an idea of the size Yasmin is going for and - acquires a twisted narwhal horn (from her forehead, because that's obviously where horns go).

...Weird. Kind of heavy and uncomfortable. But not as strange-feeling as she expected it to be. Maybe something like this permanently could look cool, but she'll think about that later.

"-So, sized about like so for that box?"

"Yeah, do one box like that and this smaller box here do 'em between yea big and yea big," she says, gesturing between six and twelve inches, "minis for kids who like unicorns, you know?"

"Makes sense."

She makes the base perilously thin, grabs the protrusion, hesitates, then screws her eyes shut and - snap. It stings where the force of it pulled on her skull. She goggles at the snapped-off horn - horn! - a bit, stuck between fascination and discomfort.

She sets it in the box. "...Okay. Kind of weird, but I think I got the hang of it. Want me to do some in different colors or speckles or whatever, and vary the length a bit, or nah?"

"I've actually got a color grade chart," she says, producing one. "Do mostly white, for the big ones, and some of these variations, mostly for price discrimination. For the little ones you can do some in kinda pale gold or silver or sparkly pink, since, little kids who like unicorns."

"You've got this all figured out, huh? Okay, here goes nothing."

She'll do this for a couple hours or until she fills the boxes, following the color chart and doing her best to make them pretty (without slowing down too much). It's still kind of weird, she definitely wouldn't do this for fun, but it's not bad as a job.

The boxes aren't exactly bigger than they look, but narwhal horns are thin, and when Yasmin is done grinding the snapped end off each one she packs them very efficiently, wrapped in a layer of bubble wrap but laid pointing in alternating directions for maximum tiling. It's gonna take a lot of horns to fill up.

It's still not bad as a job.

About how many seconds does it take to starscape, grow a horn, un-starscape, and snap it off once she gets into a flow for it? How full is the box after a bit more than three hours of this?

Once she has the hang of it it's less than ten seconds per. Yasmin is not that fast at grinding, but she knows how many horns will fill the box; in about an hour and a half the box for long horns is all filled up.

The short horns are not much faster per and take a lot longer to fill a box with.

Well, after about three hours even as the other box is not yet full, she smooths out the last nub of bone after the latest snap-off and says, "I should probably quit for now, but I can definitely come back tomorrow."

"Happy to have you!" says Yasmin. She weighs the second box and writes Laura a check for one thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars.

Yeah, not bad at all as a job.

She salutes Yasmin jauntily and tears off into the air. She hands the check to her dad and laughs at his spluttering reaction, and has to spend half an hour reassuring him that Yasmin wasn't acting creepy at her or anything, and that it didn't hurt that much, and that she can zap people if someone tries to kidnap her.

And then he promises to cash it for her and lets her borrow a credit card and she can try to buy a stardarter and some ammo! In red-white-yellow, if possible! Rush shipping!

She can get overnighted stardarters in her preferred colors!

So exciting! She'll get to practice with them tomorrow! She's in such a great mood she doesn't even resent having to do homework and chores that much!

She does play with lightning in the backyard a little more, and then experiments with tasseled red-yellow striped scarves wrapped around her neck and shoulders in various ways for a while. Maybe one of those improves her flight wear, or even full armored ensemble, though she thinks scarves will work better with a less gemstone-covered rest-of-her-outfit.

The scarves are pretty meh, though they don't hurt as long as they're pretty enough.

She's not a big fan of scarves if they're not helping out the magic.

Horns will probably clash with the wings, but she tries various small ones for a while. Unicorn, antlers, tiny bone nub in red? ...She's not a huge fan of any of these, probably the magic isn't either. She gets rid of them before trying something else.

What about a tail... A short bird tail, a fan of feathers matching her wing pattern, coming out just over the back of the skirt? A longer bird tail, that comes down to about her knees? Scaled lizard-y tail, in red, with a few patches of scales on her midriff or cheeks or forearms to match? ...Tails and scales are only a bit more strange than the wings, but she doesn't feel a burning need to have one unless it improves the aesthetic.

None of these antler types are good, though antlers are least bad.

Bird tail is good but shorter is better. Lizard tail is bad, though less bad with scale patches.

A cute little bird tail can stay, she likes how it sways just ahead of the skirt when she walks or kicks her hips, being attached a bit more closely to the rest of her. She plays with the length and width and colors a bit before settling on something, getting new pictures, then removing most everything to go to bed for the night.

At about 3 am, a swarm materializes a block away.

...Something's wrong. She doesn't remember what she was dreaming about, but in the groggy half-sleep state, she knows something is wrong over there.

--Bugs! Magical girls can sense bugs! She doesn't have her stardarter yet but she has zappy powers - if she dresses up first - swarms get worse if they're left alone so she does it fast, from memory, shirt, leggings, skirt, boots, armor, rubies and gold. Hair! Her hair is messy and frazzled from sleep, she has to fix that. The outfit comes out a bit messier than if she were more awake and less panicked. She forgets the gauntlets, earrings, and cape entirely and climbs out the window, flying into the night to try and figure out where the swarm is.

Over there. Looks like it's in somebody's house.

She looks for a place to charge in but - Oh. 

She shouldn't actually break into someone else's house, even to fight a swarm, should she?

She lands hard and starts pounding on the front door and hitting the doorbell and shouting instead.

Eventually somebody answers the door, groggy and pissed off.

"There's a swarm in your house! You should call 911!"

(She left her own phone in her room, in her slightly panicked exit.)

"- where in the house -"

She feels, points, "Basement I think, far corner maybe."

"- okay. Can I have you stand at the stairs while I get the kids out -"

"Of course. I-" Don't say you've never done this before, that'd scare the wits out of them, "-Where? And call 911! I don't have my phone!"

"I will but the kids have to be out first!" he says, grabbing her arm and pulling her toward the basement door. "Just stand there while I get them past -" He runs up to the second floor.

Okay. She fishes for a light switch for the stairwell, and then glares down into the basement. There's a swarm right down there, her magic is telling her. You should go down and get it. But that's stupid and reckless. She sticks to the top of the stairwell, 'listening' for movement.

The swarm is still very new. It's moving, but not fast. It's a big one, though, hundreds of bugs.

She can hear the man of the house shouting for his kids to get up NOW.

She stays there, glaring down the stairwell. The way it's moving she's got, what, maybe thirty seconds before they come up? That's long enough to shake nervously a bit, notice that she forgot - a bunch of things - and starscape very briefly to add a quick and easy version of the gauntlets and fail to remember what else worked and extend the chainmail's coverage a bit instead.

The man gets his kids up and down the stairs and out the door. It's questionable whether he remembered to grab his phone.

"Phone! PHONE! 911!"

She doesn't abandon her spot at the stairwell though, they're going to start up it any second, and she's going to zap them when they do.

"It's on my nightstand!" he hollers over his shoulder, ushering the kids to a neighbor's house.

'While they're coming up the stairs' seems like such a good spot to start a swarm fight from, though!

But fine, she takes fifteen seconds, runs and gets his phone - uses the emergency call button and dials 911. She dashes back out to the living room, facing the open stairwell.

There's a couple bugs coming up ahead of their swarm-mates.

She holds the phone in one hand and points and zap!

...A pretty weak zap. She's not glamorous enough right now. Zap again, aiming for the other one.

Even a weak zap can kill a single young swarmling!

"Nine one one, what is your emergency?"

"Uh I felt bugs in someone's house and woke him up and now I'm fighting them - uh - house number - uh-" Zap! "-Shit I don't know, sixth and Washington!"

"I'm sending a squad to the intersection now. Do you have a clear escape route?"

"Yeah they're in the basement I can back out the front door but they're coming up right now."

"If you shut the door, that will slow them down. If you have time to shut any open windows that will also help, but prioritize your safety."

Zap. She looks around briefly for open windows, but the swarm is coming out onto the first floor now. It's - intimidating. No time to safely go close a window even if one's open. She backs up to the front door, knocking over a lamp with her wings by accident. (Zap, zap.)

She is able to outrun the swarm to the door.

"Can you get me the address of the house?"

She slams the door. "One sec - I think everyone's out - " House number house number - there it is, she practically shouts it at the operator, then turns and runs to the end of the driveway before watching the house from there.

And the squad appears about a minute later, before the swarm has figured out how to get out of the house. They don't stop to say hi; they try the door, find it unlocked, and barge right in, shutting the door after them.

The guy who owns the house comes up to Laura and asks for his phone back. The kids are sitting on the curb, shivering.

Some part of her wants to follow them in. To clean up the swarm with magical might. But seeing the surging, disgusting mass of bug-things - and her zaps were so weak - that's a terrible, frightening idea. At least her neighbors are fine. That's really the important part. 

"Ah- 'Course, here. Uh, it's still on the 911 call. You all alright?"

"Yeah, I'm fine." He asks the 911 operator if he can hang up, answers a few yes-or-no questions, and then hangs up.

She... Stays there, standing a little apart from them, not quite sure why.

"Thank you," he tells her.

"Yeah. No problem. I-" She shakes her head and shrugs, feeling very awkward. "Uh... Sure glad the swarm squad's here, though. I... Probably couldn't have gotten them all myself."

"You warned us. We were asleep and everybody knows the swarm alarms don't work that great. You might've saved our lives."

"Yeah, but, you know, common decency? And - nobody getting hurt is obviously better than not that."

"Thank you," he says again.

"Thank you!" pipes up the older kid, who looks about twelve.

Her wings flutter happily a bit, at that. (It's surprisingly fun to offload body language to them!)

"I'm just glad you're all okay."

The last swarmling in the house ceases to exist.

Out troops the squad. It's three girls; two have wings, one has digitigrade feet and doglike paws, plus a plumed dog tail. Other details are a little hard to make out in the dark, though one girl has a lot of glow-in-the-dark lines tracing out her contours. "Hey," says the one with the tail. "Thanks for calling us in, you did good. The swarm would've had fifteen minutes to grow before a regular patrol came in range of this house."

"Oh, I think they're done-" 

Ooh, they look so heroic, walking out like that after deleting a swarm. And glowy lines are a cool idea!

"Hi! Uh, yeah. It woke me up. And I had to do something."

"You did the right thing, not just something," grins dog girl. "Do you have a squad you accompany? You should start if you're into this kinda thing."

"I thought you have to be sixteen? -And, uh, I don't usually look like this, I threw it on real fast."

"Middle of the night, it happens," says dog girl. "You'll get better at doing it from memory. You do usually have to be sixteen but sometimes you can fudge that if your parents are cool with it."

"That sounds good! I'll look into it! After going back to sleep. Uh, do they need to do anything in particular, cleaning up?" She indicates the neighbors.

"The goop isn't harmful to people or dogs though it can hurt cats if they eat it," says one of the winged girls. "Assuming they have renter's or homeowner's insurance it'll cover a cleanup service and repairs and some property replacement."

"We have insurance," he says. "I think."

Insurance is apparently a good thing to have, she is learning lately.

"...Well, that's good. I'd have tons more questions but you three probably have to get back to flying around, right?"

"We don't fly around all night," says dog girl, "that'd be exhausting. Well, for them, I don't use wings for it. We do keep moving so we can do the thing you did, but in a truck. Our driver'll catch up soon."

"Huh." She glances at the neighbors, wondering if she's being rude, or if they need anything.

"I guess it would be. I flew for like three hours straight my first day, but I exercised a lot before already. Oh, I got, like, lightning bolts for magic! Not sure if I can do other things with it. I think it'd be good for swarms but I ordered a stardarter anyway."

"Our shift is eight hours, ten if we have to cover part of somebody else's," says dog girl. "Lightning's good! Better for outdoor than in though."

"Yeaaah that would be a long time to fly. Magic is so great though! I'm having fun being, like, a part eagle knight or something. Oh, I'm Laura Rossi."

"Ginny Danvers. Here's the service card if your parents say they'll sign things for ya." She hands over a card.

"Will do. Good luck. I am gonna go back to sleep."

She gives a jaunty salute, and if nobody has anything else to say, gets a running start to take off.

Nobody stops her. Her house is where she left it.

She tries to land straight through the window back in her room, thinks better of it about three seconds from smacking into the side of the house, and flaps wildly, making a racket skidding over the roof instead.

Then she lands out front and knocks on her own door and has to explain herself to her parents again. 

They're - trying to be understanding, Laura always had difficulty staying within the lines and found it draining and stressful. Being a magical girl has clearly made her a lot happier. But they're worried about the recklessness and danger now. They go back to sleep for a couple of hours, wake up early and have a Talk, then ground her for a day despite the act of heroism, for bolting out in the middle of the night without telling them anything and doing something so reckless.

("She's changing so much, doing so many new things so quickly. I'm just worried there's no control. The patrol thing might be good, actually.")

("You want to encourage the risk-hunting?")

("The swarm patrol is full of responsible adults. It'll channel her energy productively. I love our daughter, but Lord knows she needs her energy channeled productively...")

The end decision is that they won't ground her any longer than one day, but they expect her to text them where she's going and what she's doing. And her father is going to make her do a cryptid self-evaluation once every few days, just in case.

...And, fine, they'll try to sign her up for going along with a swarm patrol team.

She's absentminded in class the next day, morose about the lecture and grounding - (Calling Yasmin and putting off going back until tomorrow! Waiting another day to use her shiny new stardarter! Only half an hour of flying, and only because she claimed it's great exercise!) - but looking forward to the Swarm Patrol thing, whenever her parents can arrange it.

She has her pick of shifts but presumably wants the second dayshift, rather than the one that takes place from six in the morning to two p.m. every day of the week. She will be a little late for the start of the next shift but probably didn't actually want to pick up a full time job and won't be staying for the whole thing anyway.

She goes straight for the second day shift after the last class on Thursday, pausing to fly home to grab her stardarter and to put on the nicest (most powerful) version of her outfit she's managed yet before flying wherever she needs to go for the swarm patrol!

The swarm patrol is in a truck moving around constantly but has shared their location with her on Google Maps, so she can intercept them and land in the flatbed back of the truck while it prowls the streets.

"Hey there Laura!" says the squad leader, a batwinged, bat-eared girl wearing a lot of fur.

The technology is pretty easy to use, which is nice. She's holding her stardarter, and added a leather belt styled after her boots and gauntlets with a couple of pouches, for wallet and phone and stardarts.

"Hi!!!"

"Lemme give you the basic rundown. We hang out in this truck while it patrols the town. If we sense a swarm, we all hop out and book it for the swarm. We're allowed to break windows and doors to get into a building but if it feels very slow and somebody might be home we can also knock and see if that works. Our priority is to kill it. If it's an older swarm, the cutoff is six hours and we can guess how old ones we find are for you so you get a feel for it, and it's just in a normal house and not an art museum or anything, then our only priority is to kill it without killing any people - you can set shit on fire if you have to, you can kill somebody's dog if it's covered in older bugs, you don't wanna but you can because the older they get the worse it gets. If it's a newer swarm, or it's in an art museum or something, you gotta try to minimize collateral damage. We've got insurance but if you use this job to gratuitously commit arson or murder dogs you're in trouble. Once we're done, we call the aftermath squad in and they help anybody who's injured, refer 'em to cleanup services, take statistics, make sure they have someplace to stay if we blew a hole in their house. Questions?"

"Save lives and get the swarm quickly first, don't do any damage second but keep it in mind. I don't want to murder dogs or commit arson! I'll have to be super careful with the zapping but I'm already practicing that, I can mostly aim it. How common are swarms, anyway? Does everyone feel them at about the same range? And, you mean you don't try to fight swarms older than six hours?"

"Sense range gets better the dressier you are. I mean that a swarm newer than six hours counts as new, and if it's older some of the rules about damage go out the window."

"Aha. And there won't be any kaiju around here unless something goes really really really wrong, right. Okay, I think I get it... I've still probably got a lot of improving to do on my dressiness."

"Oh yeah, we're way out of kaiju zone. Sometimes you get like... two swarms' worth of monster that manifested in a cornfield and nobody noticed till it got that far, but it's not gonna be bigger than a bear."

Another girl, monkey-tailed but wingless, says, "Ride-alongs don't qualify but if you join up for real you qualify for once a month formal costume tuneups. They're short sessions though, like twenty minutes."

"Oh, thanks for having me along, by the way! I thought I would have basically zero fashion sense but the magic likes some of my ideas! And the school club does advice circles. I'll probably pay for a fashion adviser once I'm more settled in and not making progress on my own? Like, getting a belt that didn't hurt the look took a little while, but I do need a place for my phone."

"Oh, yeah, I had an awful time with carrying capacity," agrees batgirl. "Wound up hiding all my pockets on the inside of things."

"I do sort of wonder why it's 'looking good' that does it, but nobody knows, do they? ...Anyway, what's everyone's names?"

"Sandra," says batgirl.

"Pansy," says tail girl.

"Juanita," says the third who hasn't spoken; she's quiet and four-armed and angel-winged.

"Laura. Uh, you probably knew that... I guess nothing happening on a patrol is the best possible outcome even if it's boring, yeah?"

"Yup. But we usually get at least one. Might not be while you're along."

"Right. I'm - I really like the idea of swarm patrol. It's pretty much the best thing you can do with magic, protecting people like that. I might wanna join a Paladin squad when I know what I'm doing more."

"Lightning's a good Paladin prospect!" says Sandra. "Good luck with that."

"Thanks! It's freeform and I'm kind of scared to experiment with it, because uh lightning, and I'm a little jealous of some of the other girls' spells at school for every day use, but it's not bad at all!"

"Well, try not to set anything on fire. Hang back if you're not sure, we're pros and we can handle it."

"Yeah, I'll be careful."

The truck trundles slowly around. Pansy has a packed sandwich and pulls it out to eat.

Since the conversation appears to be over for now, she plays with her outfit a bit while sitting.

Changing the patterns, colors (anodized metal? Slightly different shades of red on everything? More yellow here, less white there?), lengths of things, and arrangement of jewelry around slightly.

She also tries new styles for her hair like changing the dutch braid for a crown braid, adding feather decorations to other parts of her clothes, say, the cape and the bottom of the leggings, experimenting with a few inches of actual neckline (trying to use the negative space thing), to see if there are any little improvements to be had.

"Hey," says Juanita when she notices, "not a good idea to play with that on duty."

"Uh."

Several arguments go through her head, but she is definitely not the expert here.

"...Sure. If you say so."

"If you make something worse, and you forget how it was before, and then there's an emergency, you'll be caught without your magic performing as well as you're used to," explains Sandra.

"Yeah. I don't really have a 'used to' power level yet, though? I'm gonna be really cautious and I'm super aware that I'm definitely just starting out? That happened the other day actually, I woke up in the middle of the night to a swarm and threw something on and could only zap one at a time and thought about going into the basement to fight them but wasn't that stupid... Er, I don't know if you've heard about that from whoever it was that responded."

"It's a bad habit," Sandra says. "It's actually illegal for Paladins to change to a non-approved mod or outfit set while deployed. Mess with your outfit during downtime."

"Right. Got it."

And now she's going to just. Fidget and feel guilty for the next while.

The others are on their phones, reading and playing games and browsing.

...Eventually she does that too.

They stop at a drive through for dinner; Pansy doesn't get anything.

She just gets fries and continues to feel vaguely guilty about the outfit thing.

She receives fries. They trundle around.

Well. Nothing happening is better than finding a swarm. Even if it's boring.

She attempts to do homework on the truck, after a while, with mixed success. Not too long after dinner she asks if it's alright to quit out early.

"Sure thing, you're not on contract," says Sandra. "See you later."

"See you later..."

Okay, now, back at home and having felt stupid and sulked for a while, she can try some of the adjustment ideas she had earlier. Crown braid? Feathers hanging off the cape and leggings? A little neckline?

Good, slightly bad, neutral.

Yaaaay for crown braids. She keeps the little bit of neckline too, and works up enough motivation to take a couple pictures of each of the changes.

Her dad asks how the ride-along went, gets a noncommittal answer, and then has her pull up the cryptid-risk-tracking website and look at cryptid risk scores.

How many points is the threshold where you're at risk? Big wings, eagle eyes, a short feather tail, moderate tuning-up - about how many points does that total?

Wings are 120 points, tuneup is 18 points given her starting position, the tail is 95 points. Eagle's eyes are probably closest to "Eye modification [vertebrate source]" and are worth 37 points.

You want to stay under 325.

...Doing wings again would potentially be enough to cryptid-ize her.

Yikes.

She doesn't like the tail that much and resolves to drop it when going back to Yasmin, and also resolves to check this site before trying any body mods more significant than a fingernail from now on.

She's about done for Thursday aside from exercising and doing homework. She practices with the stardarter a lot and does some more work for Yasmin (temporarily de-tailed) on Friday. For part of Saturday and Sunday she rides along with the swarm patrol again. On Monday, she takes a little bit of a break from magical girl stuff. And then finally it's Tuesday, and she can look forward to the fun of Magical Girl Club all day!

At Magical Girl Club it's more of the same pretty much, with a different smoke obstacle course and a screening of the first twenty minutes of the documentary Paladins.

She attempts to match Jodie in the aerial obstacle course, this time! And not hit any of the rings. The large and broad soaring wings will hurt her maneuverability, probably, but she tries her best anyway.

Jodie's still better but by noticeably less, and compliments Laura on her quick improvement.

"Ooh, thanks! I've probably flown at least fifteen, twenty hours this week! It's better than jogging in almost every way! I think my wings aren't great for maneuvering though."

"Different kinds do different things well. You gotta specialize if you don't want to remake them all the time."

"There's probably a website for that now that I think of it! I think I like, uh, speed and cruising? And eagles are fast level and way cooler than, oh, a pelican or albatross or something."

"Most people can't tell that much about which kinda bird you got your wings off."

"Huh. Makes sense. I have no clue what kind of bat you got yours from, if it's even a specific kind of bat."

"It's not even a specific kind, nope."

The documentary profiles a bunch of paladins - a couple Coast Paladins and an Island Paladin and a Rockies Paladin and an Alaska Paladin. It has snippets about their home lives, closeups of their combat wear, and gripping kaiju fight footage with glorious music pouring from their helicopter speakers.

Cooooooool.

Wow. There's a lot of ground to cover before she looks even half as hot and awesome as Paladin teams. She's pretty much transfixed by the documentary.

They only watch the first twenty minutes of it. "We're going to watch bits of this for the next few sessions," announces Melissa, "but not enough to crowd out getting our heartrates up."

"But I am so totally going to aim for a Paladin team after I graduate. Calling it now."

"Me too," says Aileen.

"Who doesn't want to be a Paladin?" asks Queenie.

"I don't," says Vera.

"Not everybody's powersets are good for it," says Clarine.

"Powerset, and attitude, yeah. I'm not saying it's for everyone. But it's for me. I bet it'll be really tough, but it wouldn't be worth it, if it weren't hard work."

"Why wouldn't it be worth it if it weren't hard work?" asks Amelia.

"...Because then..." She thinks for a moment. "Some things are nice on their own, but a trophy, or being a Paladin? If it's not real, earned, doesn't count. It'd just feel weird instead of awesome."

"I dunno, I think it'd be better if kaiju were huge pushovers," says Amelia.

"...Good point. It's not like I like kaiju. I wouldn't make kaiju strong so I could be a Paladin, that'd be just. Evil. But if kaiju were huge pushovers, I guess being a Paladin wouldn't be such a big deal to me. And as long as they aren't, Paladins have to be the best and protect everyone else, right?"

"Right on," says Queenie.

"Which means I'm looking forward to target practice!"

"Kaiju are big targets," says Clarine.

"Which you fight with like half a dozen other people," says Queenie, "so you still have to be able to aim."

"And lightning is pretty hard to aim, so I'd better get it right down."

"That might react better to outfit tuneups than practice, depending," says Gwendolyn.

"Or both. Might as well try both. I'll probably find one of those fashion advisers sooner or later, I found a job that can pay for it."

"Yeah, what are you doing?" asks Queenie.

"There's this place that will take, like, horns and bits of coral and things that I grow. I found it on the internet, there's probably lots of them. I get rid of my feather tail and fancy eyes during it, so I'm nowhere near cryptid-ing. It's a little weird, but it's good money."

"That's a lot weird," says Amelia, "ew, people are buying bits of you."

"I hear it's a huge ripoff," says Vera.

"They're not bits of me anymore. You lose, like, skin and hair and sweat all the time. Same thing, just bigger, in my opinion... Ripoff? Like, they don't pay you enough for it?"

"If people paid for your sweat and fingernails that would be gross too," says Amelia.

"Yeah like they mark everything up a ton," says Vera.

"I mean, I made almost two grand in like three hours... Maybe I'm just weird for not really minding, I guess."

"Maybe," says Amelia.

"Wait, that is a lot," says Clarine. "I don't wanna shrink and I'm already pushing it being this tall but that's a lot of money."

"It's not as much as they sell the stuff for, not nearly," says Vera.

"Probably. But I can just walk in and do it. Owning a warehouse, owning tools to process stuff, boxing stuff, making a website, customer dispute stuff, shipping stuff, thinking of things that sell well, are all work too."

"I bet that's what they tell you if you ask about why you don't get a better cut," snorts Amelia. "Capitalists."

"You could always start your own site for it, or like eBay, and pay yourself 100%. I'd suck at it, so I probably won't, but you could."

"I don't wanna be a capitalist."

...Shrug.

Laura heads over to one of the targets and starts practicing with her stardarter.

Eventually the club disperses.

She thinks about challenging Jodie to a race, or something, or just asking if she wants to fly together, and feels... Strange. In the end, she doesn't say anything and isn't sure why not.

Laura continues to ride along with the second day shift swarm patrol. She does homework and reads on the patrols. She does not mess with her outfit on the move again. They'll find swarms to fight sooner or later, right?

Sooner or later, yep! They get a call and show up in a park, deserted.

"This one's pretty new," says Sandra to Laura, "and it's outside, you want to try hitting it a little before we get going?"

Here we go. Here we go. She (sort of) fought a swarm last week, and this one's the next step for that. Don't mess it up.

"Okay. Yeah. Carefully. And, you'll tell me where to go and when to back off, right?"

"Yup! Don't get closer to it than about the distance it is from that tree now - go as far as the tree and if it advances, back up, and we'll be coming around it from the other sides, okay?"

"Okay. I'm ready. One more question, stardarter only, or is my lightning okay?"

"Lightning away! We're outside!"

"Okay. Here we go!" She jogs up to the specified tree and watches the swarm, not too fast, so she won't far get ahead of everyone else.

She takes a deep breath, and lances out with gold-tinted lightning, guiding it straight at the ugly roiling mass and not at the ground or foliage.

It forks usefully, getting several in one blast.

Again, then. And repeat until it starts moving.

It does approach, but if she always gets the leading bugs preferentially, she can avoid having to move back more than a few steps.

She does move back those few steps, though, maintaining the distance they told her from the bulk of the swarm. Zap, zap, zap, zap. It's almost meditative.

Juanita helps - she has one stardarter per hand and can shoot them all in parallel, dropping them to let them dangle from ribbons on her costume so she has hands free to reload as necessary - and Sandra and Pansy wait and watch until the swarm's all dead.

"Nice!" says Pansy, clapping.

"Huzzah! Wow, that's a neat trick, Juanita!"

"Thanks," says Juanita, collecting stardarts into a bag she collects from the truck.

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.

That sounds fun.

Her parents tell her she can go to a Flock Girls meeting and visit the park as long as she finishes her homework and doesn't miss any classes. School isn't as much of a problem as it used to be. Nobody makes fun of her in school anymore - well, they still make comments, but she's much more comfortable simply flat-out ignoring them. Who cares? She's happy, now. She's only been late once since starscaping, and though her general level of effort in class hasn't gone up that much, she's doing better and hasn't missed any assignments since then.

She visits the Aerial Aces Park after school the next day.

Aerial Aces Park has sky obstacle courses, a person-catapult, a big clock, starting blocks very high off the ground, heat lamps pointing up for updrafts, and other such fun things.

Really cool. She pays admission quite happily, if they charge it.

It probably has a lot of magical people flying around, of all sorts of different aesthetics, right?

They do! And it does! There's a bunch of girls talking with their coach, in what passes for a uniform among magical girls (all the same three colors, same hemline and neckline); there's girls threading through the obstacles on all kinds of wings; there's girls flying laps, practicing landing softly and turning quickly with the starting blocks. There is a short line for the catapult.

This is really her kind of place. Practicing landings seems very practical, but the quick turning is probably some kind of sport?

She watches for a little while and then goes to the starting blocks to try it, cheerfully saying 'hi' if there's anyone it makes sense to say hi to.

"Yo," says a girl with falcon wings and a lot of tulle who's pausing to chug a bottle of water between batches of laps. "Do we need to laneshare?"

"Yo. Maybe? It's my first time here, I'm seeing what there is. I, uh, had a bad landing a few days ago so I thought practicing landings on these would be good."

"They're good for that. Shouldn't get in my way, I can just take breaks on this end and you can land on that end, and I'm using the sides for turns."

"Sounds like a plan. Thanks!"

She takes off towards the far block and climbs, circles, and starts doing landings, practicing sudden stops and gently touching down via wing flare. She's careful to stay above the blocks and not get in the way.

She looks around and observes how people use the other parts of the air park while lining up for each attempt.

The ones with the coach are doing relays. The obstacle course has a bunch of parts, color coded, and people are doing different colors or combinations thereof.

And the catapult is pretty self explanatory.

Do the colors seem to correspond to difficulty? Or maybe types of obstacle?

The fliers who look the best at flying seem to be doing black, or black and purple, and an eight year old is doing the pink one.

Aww, a winged eight year old. That's surprisingly cute.

Take off, circle, land.

She looks around some more. There are so many incredibly pretty and athletic people here.

...At some point, while staring slightly, she remembers that getting magic makes you gay, and recognizes those feelings about Jodie from the school club.

...Take off, circle, land.

She's not gonna say anything. Every time she tried to approach a boy, it was a bit of a disaster one way or another. So. Friends only.

After a while she stops trying landings, takes a break and gets a drink from a water fountain, then gets in the line for the catapult. It's a catapult, she has to try it at least once.

The catapult flings people into the air; sometimes they do flips, sometimes they just level out and glide to a land.

The catapult operator tells her this is At Her Own Risk.

Of course, of course.

Catapult!

And then she tries out the obstacle course, thinking better than to go straight for the black section, taking on a part that's somewhere in the middle in terms of difficulty instead.

The yellow might be next easiest after pink. It has widely spaced slalom poles and big hoops and places with a floor and a ceiling to fly through.

Yellow section it is, then. She runs it a few times with her speed-optimized wings, not the maneuvering-optimized ones, because 'next easiest after pink' feels a little too easy by itself.

Is there a sky soccer or Quidditch field, or any of the races she read that the Flock Girls do, around?

They do have Quidditch hoops, and ground markings for races (the relayers are using those), but you have to bring your own balls.

And find a team and an opponent. Maybe next time.

She bounces between the various stations some more and maybe chats with other girls if anyone seems friendly and up for chatting.

The one who was doing turns nods when she sees her again.

She waves!

Next time the other girl takes a break she asks, "Is this place always this busy?"

"No, it calms way down in the rain and it's closed during holidays."

"Eugh. Flying in the rain... No wonder."

"Yup. Some people dig it but not me."

"I can see wanting to be used to it, and know how to fly well in bad weather - for swarm patrol and stuff, I'm gonna go in that direction - but it's really hard to see it being fun. I guess someone likes everything."

"They do. It's weird."

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?"