"Yup, that'd be it. Good to know. The line for where to worry about it is if I start having nightmares?"

"No, the nightmares can still kick in if you get roughed up some but not enough to be in real danger. You ever had a migraine? About that much pain from unwinding is when you ought to be getting really worried."

"Got it." She's getting kind of tired again; she puts the spear away. "I want to do a bunch of tests on my capabilities with this spell, now, or more with my fire resistance, but I don't want to wear myself out and end up sorry tomorrow. How much more stuff do you think we can get in?"

Marxie gets rid of her spear too. The scaled transformation of her hands and forearms is starting to ache, like holding a strenuous pose.

"You know your magic better than me. If you think it's about time to take it easy you're probably right."

"Yeah, my arms are getting sore." She reverts them. "Actually, my arms being scaly was getting sore, magical qualia are weird."

"They sure are. You get used to it eventually. Now, if you don't mind, I think I wanna fetch my laptop and type all this up and then maybe make you a wiki page - unless you don't want a wiki page, that is."

"I would actually love a wiki page! And I think I'm going to get some water and sit and do my homework for a bit while you do that."

"Cool. I'll make you a wiki page. Well, you gotta follow me back to the lobby so I can grab it from my car, but I'll hang out with you a while more, sure."

"Sounds good." She will follow her back to the lobby.

Marxie's wiki is one Margaret managed to never have heard of. It has strict content guidelines. She is the number one contributor by a large margin.

"I've been working on this thing since the internet first started being a thing. Been into computers ever since the eighties. Much easier to keep and restore backups than the books I used to use."

"Ooh, nice. And yeah, much better than paper. I'm definitely going to get sucked into reading that as soon as my homework is done."

And she sits and does homework for a bit until she's not feeling quite so worn out and won't mind the rest of the trip home.

"It's all about the powers, not so much the people. You can find famous people on there but I won't stand more than a paragraph or two about their lives and accomplishments. There's always Wikipedia for that."

"Powers are definitely more interesting. I'm going to head home, but I hope to see you around again--and I'll have more experimental results to report when I do!"

"Have a nice day!"

She goes home, does her homework, eats her dinner, and then checks out the wiki. What are some cool powers people have?

Chromadyne is a bit of a media starling and has a lot of high-powered laser attacks. Armoury can animate metal, especially steel, and uses empty suits of armor to fight. Underdog can create tunnels that stay open if some work is done while he's there and is in very high demand, being much faster than a tunnel boring machine. There's at least one lie detector and a few other clairvoyants. There's someone who can control plants, who can talk to animals, who can bend space, who can teleport, who can conjure ice.

Oh wow, that's a lot of cool powers!

Wait, there's one that can talk to animals? What do animals have to say? Are they people?

His stance on it is that animals are not people but still deserve ethical consideration, and even pigs, crows, and great apes rarely have opinions more complicated than "I love you!" or "I'm hungry" or "playtime is fun" or "This is MINE!". He runs a vet office in New York.

Dude has a point. She should start avoiding pork and chicken.

Is she feeling rested enough to do some more magic after dinner? Her parents want to see her claws and she wants to see how deep she can scratch into a piece of scrap wood.

She can call up the claws again without trouble. The scales go about an inch further up her forearms than last time, even.

Sweet. She rakes a clawed hand across a bit of particleboard left over from making the climbing wall.

Particleboard is no match whatsoever for magic claws.

Magic is so much fun. She grabs her dad's freeweights next. What's the biggest weight she can lift with scaly arms, and the same for non-scaly arms? How many reps does it take to wear out her left arm when it's scaly but not clawed, and how many does it take to wear out her right arm when it's not scaly? She suspects Marxie was right about her getting a strength boost but she wants to put at least rough numbers to it.

She can just barely lift fifty, un-scaled. Transformed, she can manage eighty, and the point of failure is pretty clearly her shoulders and legs, not hands and forearm and elbow.

The transformation helps out with curls much more than any other sort of lift, and gives her about triple endurance given the same weight.

This is pretty neat! She likes her strong scaly arms. She likes running her claws over her scales and hearing the clicking noises. She really likes the feeling that she could totally shred something, and the fact that slightly more of her arms are scales than was the case the first time she transformed. Maybe with enough exercise she could get her whole body like this and not worry about the interface between the stronger and weaker parts.