The high school's robotics club has a supply budget, but it's not the biggest, and anyway she can't use that stuff for personal projects. Her dad is willing to donate scrapped car parts from his auto shop, but his customers have been having a run of good luck lately and he hasn't had to throw much out. All of this explains why Margaret is detouring through this junkyard on her way home from school, looking to score some free parts.
The internet contains a few spirit bearers' blogs, and if she digs an interview with other people with transforming powers. A lot of them seem to experience that the transformation slowly becomes more total, more powerful, or unlocks new features and options.
Transforming powers are great and scales are great! She practices transforming one arm and untransforming the other at the same time.
She can do that! The extent of the scales has moved up again, inched a tiny amount closer to her elbows. Each change/unchange takes a few seconds. If being transformed is like holding a weight above her head, repeatedly doing it and undoing it is a bit like reps with the weight - she'll get tired again soon.
She stops when the feeling moves from "pleasant exercise" to "worn out", even though she really wants to know what exactly is going to happen if the transformation gets all the way to her torso. She can't wait to show Teddy at school tomorrow!
One last thing before she goes to bed: if she puts a pot of water on the stove with a thermometer and her hand in it, how hot can she get it before she has to pull her (non-scaly, then scaly) hand out? Without magic resistance the limit is apparently about 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
It doesn't start to be painful until nearly 180, when she's all scaled up. A lot less than her actual fire resistance rated, but water counteracting that is approximately the kind of logic that a lot of magic seems to run on.
And water is a more efficient conductor of heat than air, so okay, fine. And now she really needs to go to bed so she can be alert at school tomorrow.
Nothing accosts her on the way to school! Or at school. You don't see a monster every day if you don't go looking for them, after all.
That is all to the good. She gets to econ a few minutes early and looks around for Teddy.
He's working on some homework assignment on his laptop, before class starts.
"Hey, Margaret. How'd the SA go?"
"It was good! I met a woman who runs a powers wiki and she helped me with powers testing, and I have more questions than I did yesterday but also more clue how to go about answering them. And I got a new spell!"
"There's a powers wiki? I feel like I should have known about this already! What's the URL? Also, cool!"
She writes down the address for him. "You should check it out, it's pretty great. I'll show you the new spell as soon as we're not in class, meet me at lunch at the back of the cafeteria, you're gonna love it."
"It does have its use in a fight, but there's no way I'm going to hurt you by accident with it, and that's all I'm saying."
"...Alright, then. Hopefully the lunch monitors don't care about using magic at school, but that might be a lost cause."
"Yup." And now the teacher is here and they should pay attention, but she'll be waiting in the designated out-of-the-way corner come lunchtime.
Teddy evades the lunch monitor and arrives at the out of the way corner.
"So, magic?"
"Yup. Watch this." She turns so her arms are mostly only visible to Teddy and en-scales, claws and all.
"Huh! A transformation spell. I assume you've done some testing already?"
"Yup! It comes with a strength boost and I think also fighting instincts, though not super strong ones. Just a general sense of how to use them in combat."
"Yup! All I've tested so far is the heat resistance; at some point I'll want to do a hardness test and also find out in controlled conditions how much harder they are to stab."
"Magic changes in strength over time, so doing the earlier tests again in a few days is probably a good idea, too. You can pick out a trend and try to figure out how much you're improving."
"Yes, for sure! I know this one improves in at least one way; the first time I did it it only went up to here." She points at the area on her arms where the scales stopped the first time. "We should meet after school and find somewhere to run tests. We might be able to do it in the Spirit Association gym; I have to talk to the leader there after school but then I should have building access."
"There's always the junkyard again. But at this point I really need to get my own car..."
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