"Well, you have a fallback if your wicked stepmother triumphs, I guess?"

Snort. "Yeah. Honestly it's more along the lines of in case of immediate-term expenditures that exceed my allowance--like if the Sunday appointment does let me do synergy and I want to pay people to hang around for an hour while I play with their magic."

"Shouldn't be too expensive, unless you want girls with very high opportunity cost."

"Girls with a very high opportunity cost sound like they would have high overlap with girls whose magic I want to play with!"

"Inconveniently, yes."

"Honestly my biggest qualm about the coral thing is that presumably the market for coral is finite and it feels selfish to take market shares away from magical girls who need them more."

Giggle. "I'm sure if the price drops enough people will think of more to do with coral but it'd make the hourly rate kind of pathetic."

"Yes. If I need more money than I have access to I can probably find some higher-hanging fruit."

"Power diagnosis for people with frustratingly hidey powers, if you can do that?"

"Ooh! I can't do it yet but I'll probably be able to in the future!"

"It'd be a dumb impulse buy on their part probably, nobody's still clueless a month in if they're trying at all, but you'd clean up."

"And it would be fun, if I never need money I might still do it."

"I guess if you're doing it recreationally you can travel to them."

"Yes. It would probably be harder to filter, but I'd figure something out."

"Inconveniently since the window of uncertainty is so small you can't just batch them and do twelve a city."

"Yes. But there would still be enough of them that deciding where to go and who to go to would be a problem."

"Yeah, no being in Toronto and Jacksonville simultaneously."

"Unless I hire an assistant slash power source who has some kind of self-duplication power."

"That'd be convenient."

"It really would! I don't know if anyone like that exists, but they well might."

And in a predictable enough fashion, Sunday rolls around.

Katarzyna is so excited!!!

...She tries to keep this contained, as she walks into Mr. Blake's office. She is only partly successful.

Mr. Blake's office has stage-type lighting mounted on the ceiling, photography backdrops on wheels draped with white cloth, a fancy computer, and a large article or possibly several concatenated articles of card-catalog-like furniture with scores of little drawers each neatly labeled in handwritten all-caps - BUTTONS and METAL SAMPLES and LINEN and SEMISYNTHETICS 1-30 and such.

Mr Blake greets her politely, shakes her hand, and tells her, "You can take pictures of that before we start if you care to, it's your time slot, but as soon as you're done with that get rid of it, I'm starting from the beginning with you."

She solicits and receives permission to record the session and replaces the outfit with a plain white bikini. "I took pictures before I came here."

"Good, that will save a few minutes. Attached to the wings, the hair, anything like that as a fixed point -?"