Katarzyna imitates her, fumbles slightly due to different wing designs, but recovers and lands safely. 

Isabella trips when she lands, but arrests the movement and rights herself and proceeds to where everyone's convening.

"Zyna," says Mercedes, when Katarzyna has arrived, "in some magical girl clubs people take turns being surrounded for amateur style nitpicks, but here we do things differently; we all take turns giving presentations on facts about style for magical girls that will be useful to everyone. There's a club rule that even if you're a Thaumatologist you have to give the presentation in secular terms. Sometimes people stay late to do conventional circle critiques, too. While you're listening, if you have stardarters or a ranged magic weapon you may fire at the targets; I'll muffle the sound so you can still hear the presenter. This week it's Isabella!"

Isabella gets up and produces a notebook with her presentation outlined in it. "We don't have a projector yet, do we."

"No."

"Right, I guess I'll just demo on myself. I did some research on effective hairstyles. Of girls who participated in the Baseline Comparison Survey or equivalent Canadian research more than half found that as long as their hair was not tangled, split, messy, or otherwise obviously flawed in some way, and it was longer than shoulder length, it was competitive with the best-performing updos and braids in lab conditions while worn down. The reason more elaborate styles seem to perform better appears to have to do with the accessibility of ornamentation and the risk that wind and activity will tangle or damage loose hair; Coast Paladins and other Paladin squads generally have tight updos with stuff in them." While she talks she's occasionally blinking and swapping out her hair to demonstrate examples.

--Oh that's fascinating. Katarzyna takes out a notepad and earnestly starts taking notes. 

"Wait, what's the Baseless Comparison Survey," says Natalie.

"Baseline," says Isabella. "The Baseline Comparison Survey was a huge project they did in the sixties to figure out general principles of magical girling less obvious than 'wear skirts'. They designed a basic boring outfit that worked with wings and surface or extremity mods except tails, made all the participants wear it exactly so they'd all be taking the same plagiarism penalty, and then tried iterations from there, also all the same across participants, so they could shake out some of the statistical noise from girls going 'well, that helps a little but not very much' and 'ooh the magic really likes that' in lieu of producing numbers. And most of my presentation is about what they found out about hair."

"Go on," says Mercedes.

"Bad hair tanks a look fast," she continues. "Clothes can handle some distressing and still look all right - a few people use something along those lines as their motif - but hair basically can't. You can get away with some sloppiness in styling like messy braids and floppy buns if it suits what you're doing otherwise, short hair is not as hard to pull off as pants, but nobody makes a birds' nest work. Now, the Baseline Comparison Survey did include girls of all races, but since this was the sixties, they dropped girls from the study if they weren't willing to wear their hair in an approximately white-person texture. We have way less systematized data about how natural black hair works, especially since on hair that hangs down by default, length past the shoulders matters - is there an equivalent for natural black hair, we don't know!"

"So racist," opines Gabrielle, who is black.

Isabella doesn't directly respond to that. "The anecdotal evidence suggests that natural hair in assorted styles can perform at top levels; for example, Coast Paladin Keisha Vaughn has dreadlocks. But there's less to go on from a data-driven perspective."

Natural black hair is of little interest to eastern-European-stock Katarzyna, of itself, but research certainly is, and gaps in research even more so. She is taking notes furiously in her personal shorthand. 

"The rules for hair ornaments seem to be about the same as the rules for other ornaments. The rules for hair color are not - you don't take as much of a penalty for having hair of an out-of-scheme color in the natural human hair color range, your original or not, as you do for having an out-of-scheme accessory or clothing item. Basically, magic seems to consider hair to be an automatic candidate for a statement piece - a thing that's allowed to stand on its own without forming a motif. Both curly and straight hair were found to work, as well as all stages of intermediate waviness; worn down, straight hair works better if you go to knee-length or longer, wavy hair works better between there and mid-back, and curly hair works better between there and shoulder-length. Shorter hair performed worse with a few individual outliers - face shape affects this a lot. Also, all the length-and-curliness rules go out the window if you wear it up. Then it doesn't seem to matter at all. From baseline, statistically speaking, bangs are worse -"

Faith raises her hand.

"- but like everything else to do with how your hair is arranged close to your face that varies with face shape, and 'baseline' here means 'worn down', not your braid crown there."

It is tempting to start fiddling with her look based on this data right here and now but she will refrain. 

"Hair that does not behave like any nonmagical human hair - via the application of the magical equivalent of hairspray, or changing its material, or replacing it with a garden of daisies," says Isabella, "is tentatively hypothesized to revert to the standards for elements elsewhere on your person - so it loses the thing about being in human-range colors, its length and curliness are no longer interacting, etcetera - but the Baseline Comparison Survey didn't get very into a lot of alternative hair options and no similarly sized survey has been conducted since. This can still work if whatever weird hair thing you do plays into a motif; Rockies Paladin Miranda Cooper has feather hair that matches her wings.

"A cautionary note," she goes on, "replacing your hair with twenty-seven snakes is known to carry enough points to turn you into a cryptid if applied on top of wings and basic human-range cosmetic cleanup. We don't know if fewer than twenty-seven snakes would have been fine, since this has only been recorded happening the once, but twenty-seven snakes plus wings and cosmetic cleanup definitely cryptidizes you, so don't do it.

"That's what I've got, thank you all."

Light applause.

Somewhat less light applause! 

And Isabella collects her stardarters and joins target practice, her hair still in its latest example.

Katarzyna...does not have stardarters. 

She can fix that more quickly than most people, but she cannot fix it immediately. She loiters slightly, feeling awkward. 

"Do you want to borrow one?" Isabella asks, holding out the one she's got in her left hand.

"Thank you--I would love that," she says, relieved. 

"I've told the school they should buy one for this exact situation but they didn't think it was a good use of two hundred dollars," Isabella says, trotting over to her target to gather her ammo.

"Irritating. If you don't mind my asking--why did you think this was a good use of two hundred dollars? You don't strike me as the type to swarm-hunt."

"I'm not. Got them for my birthday. It's not hard to make two hundred dollars with the right powers, though, my dad's a cop and he hooked me up with a gig where I ride along on car chases and stop the car they're chasing, I can do that again and a few days of being on call and one car chase gets me well over two hundred bucks."

"That makes sense. My reasons, on top of having a rich father, include: 'it seems like an asset when networking with magical girls,' and 'magical girls are, absent relevant powers, not significantly less squishy than baseline humans and I would be surprised if a magical girl carrying stardarters wasn't legal more places than anyone outside of police officers carrying pepper spray or a tazer.'" 

"It is. I mean, these won't stop somebody who really wants your purse, they don't even hit hard enough to kill a swarmling that's been around for six hours and you can still kill those bugs if you step on them hard enough, but you can sure take them places. Not on planes, though."

"I cannot imagine the planes are interested in having any weapons whatever on them." She picks up the stardarter; she assumes the magic will ding it for being off-theme but the magic can cope. "I am consoled by the fact that everyone else on the plane will also have been stripped of weapons." 

"Swarms don't manifest on planes much but when they do people get hurt before all the bugs get geeshed. I don't think stardarters'd improve the situation though."

"Eesh. No, I imagine not." She take aim at the target, taking her time to line up the shot, and fires. 

She isn't a great shot. She doesn't take it personally. 

Isabella's okay but slow at picking up her ammo since she walks carefully instead of jogging over.

"Do you want some help?" Katarzyna asks once she's gathered her own (technically also Isabella's, but).

"If you don't mind!"

"I don't!" she assures her, then goes to collect Isabella's darts.