She is sitting in the library, studying. It's her most common pastime, by hours; spending time with her sister is more enjoyable but Jaromira prefers to socialize more broadly and Katarzyna would only get in the way. This is better on net; the two of them share a room, so it isn't as though her sister's time is entirely hogged by the other girls who call this boarding school "home." Or at least "prison." Katarzyna doesn't mind it, though; the school library is excellent, and basic manners and care for the books has endeared her to the librarian to a sufficient degree to lubricate the interlibrary loans process when there's something she wants to read that they don't have.
A moment later she is not studying, because something much more interesting has come up.
She has always wanted magic, does not understand those who are offered it and turn it down. She has not fantasized about it actively in many years--supposedly her great-grandmother's sister was a magical girl, and this is enough to fuel the imagination of a little girl who wants more than anything--but an older girl, who has learned to see the world more cynically, who comprehends statistics--an older girl has better areas to focus her attention on.
Until now.
She remembers, from her extensive childhood research, that wings are always enough.
She is not choosy. She can be choosy later. For now--a set of generic feathered angel wings, pure white.
Yes, well, her dress sense has been totally irrelevant so far in her life, not being a social sort anyway.
She stands up from her carrel, spreading her wings. The librarian squawks. Katarzyna ignores her, striding towards the bathroom with its irritatingly inadequate but at least extant mirrors.
Alright, the pants are the first to go. The shirt isn't great either. The dress she coveted as a little girl--a knee-length amber gown with short puffed sleeves, a square neckline, and bow in the back--is going to need to be improved upon, but is at least a better starting place than this.
She was wearing pants before. This does not bode well.
She darkens her hair a shade and lightens the dress a few, then remembers that looking human isn't a good bet. The wings are enough, but that doesn't mean they're enough. She points her ears, and then--can she gather her hair into a high ponytail and then turn the ponytail part into heatless flame?
She takes deep breaths. She is over the minimum, she has magic and no one can take that from her. She would rather not present herself to the general public without a halfway decent outfit but if it turns out she needs Jaromira to dictate her look then that's fine. It is much much more fine than accidentally encrypting herself in a panic.
Okay. Calm. Magical girls need fanciness--for that matter, she doesn't love this color as much as she did when she was five. Let's start over.
Hair back to its original color, dress red, hugging her upper torso perfectly but not embarrassingly. Long sleeves ending in pointed cuffs that sweep over the backs of her hands. Embroidery in--what color, fuck--gold--no--yes. Don't overthink it. You don't need a good outfit now, just one that isn't embarrassing. Gold embroidery at the neck and hems and cuffs. Topaz cabochons on the cuffs over the backs of her hands. A gold sash.
Okay. She snaps some selfies so she can get back to this if whatever she tries next doesn't work.
...What does she actually think would look nice?
Seafoam, is the obvious answer, once she actually asks it of herself. Seafoam green, in--hm. Let's just start by palette-swapping the current dress. Seafoam green dress with dark blue embroidery and cabochons, and make her eyes the same shade of dark blue. Lighten all the blue a little so her eyes look less like black with a hint of color.
...Lighten the blue some more, make the cabochons opals, and color her irises to look like blue opals too.
This looks like something she wouldn't mind people seeing, at least. She's not going to get anything really impressive off her own sense of style; anything really interesting is going to need Jaromira's help.
But she can thread silver in with the blue embroidery, and turn her hair silver, and make her feathers silver with a gyrfalcon pattern of crescent stripes on the primaries in opal blue.
...Huh. Well. Perhaps it does something else under other circumstances.
Still.
She just did magic!!!
Time to go find Jaromira! Her sister has an actual sense of style, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
She leaves the bathroom and then the library altogether. She will probably get reactions from people in the hallways who are not her sister, but she can just ignore those.
"Sure," she agrees, giving the girls she was with a brief wave before linking arms with her sister and striding off.
She had been hanging out in the dorm area anyway, so it doesn't take long to get back to their room.
She inspects her sister's transformations so far.
"Try a circlet," she suggests, "in titanium anodized the same blue, with a seafoam opal centerpiece."
"Hmm. Let's try making the bodice a bit looser and then adding one of these," she says, gesturing at a picture she's pulled up on her phone, "but in silver for the metal and blue opals for the stones. And we'll probably want to alter it a bit more to avoid the plagiarism thing--let's turn the ropes into filigree like the necklace and tiara and so on, and the centerpiece...how about an eight-pointed star."
"Wonderful! Now, remember you'll be representing St. Lucia Academy, so--I understand that you've had some difficulty socializing in the past, and of course this is completely normal for a girl your age, but with your new gifts we feel it would be more appropriate if you were to put in more of an effort in that area."
"Hmm. Try doing this," she pulls up another image, "with the hair that isn't in the crown braid."
Katarzyna stays. Going back to the library would involve more interacting with people than she wants to do right now; the internet is an acceptable source of information, and, when it comes to magical girl stuff, much better than the library.
She waits patiently until the end of classes the next day.
The big public school is in Phoenix, and its magical girl club has seven members not counting Katarzyna:
- Mercedes, the club president, who introduces herself and everyone else, and has green dragon wings and a dragon tail and horns and wears a lot of gold silk;
- Natalie, approximately a naga, probably culturally appropriating the Roma or at least the pop culture conception thereof with that outfit, jingles when she slithers;
- Alexis, with rabbit ears and a cotton tail, leaning unnecessarily on sex appeal for costume interest but also themed around lavender (plant, not color);
- Faith, who is three feet two inches tall and going for a vaguely period effect with her clothes in homespun-ecru and shades of brown;
- Isabella, with pointy swift wings and nothing else, drapey dress over a clingy underlayer in dark red and dark blue festooned with a motif of circles with circle cutouts;
- Gabrielle, yellow ballgown and sunset-colored wings;
- Brooklyn, managing pants with enough layers and embroidery and rose-themed accessories accenting the black and gold base color scheme that it must take her an hour to get it all right every time she needs to redo it, black bat wings with gold tats of roses.
"I wouldn't be surprised if they have a deeper than average understanding of magic's sartorial preferences, due to having a stronger reason to care and an absurdly high magical-girl-per-capita ratio, and given that magic seems to care about something as anthropocentric as prettiness I wouldn't be shocked if there was, in fact, some intelligence behind the allocation of magic, and that the Thaumotologists had some hypothesis about its characteristics that matched reality, but I do not take their premises at face value."
"Broadly accurate. There are other factors, too--I don't only judge based on the people I meet, for example, and since sensationalism sells it's often easier to hear about crimes and other human-caused disasters than, say, the Norman Borlaugs of the world, if you aren't motivated to go looking."
"I don't know if I would find him personally interesting but I certainly appreciate him on an abstract level! There's also the fact that harm is usually easier than good, so if the bad people are doing much more bad than the good people are doing good that doesn't mean the bad people are worse than the good people are good, which is something I might not have thought to factor in if Jaromira hadn't pointed it out."
"I like it too, but I would probably like it less if it took a form other than narrating my internal monologue to my sister and listening to her commentary, supplemented with writing things down when she's not there so I can recount them later. It's so useful to get another perspective."
"She'd be a terrible psychiatrist, though, always getting too personally invested in her patients. It's--remarkable how much I love it about her, I think, given that it's a trait I don't especially want to cultivate myself. Something about the--integrity of it? It's not a good way for everyone to be, but it's a very good way for her to be, and she really commits to it."
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.
"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."
"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."
"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.
"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."
When they get back to the school, the first thing she does is hunt down her sister to talk to.
(It's not gossip if it's the core of your introspection process, right?)
She outlines the club meeting (thus and such was the agenda, this is what my power does) and then launches into details and internal monologue.
"I knoooow." Sigh. "Okay, I have my hair-related notes from the meeting, let's try some things--"
They try some things.
The hair length thing turns out to be less good than keeping it partially up in a hair-flower-thing with gems woven in; of other things they try because Jaromira thought of them, replacing the leg laces on her sandals with helixes like her bicep bracelets, adding toe rings, and turning all the metal in her jewelry into diamond and opal of the same colors constitute improvement. She is mildly put out that she will not be able to see the effect this has on her magic sense until next week when she can interact with other magical girls again.
Katarzyna has a fight with the school administration over them, due to weapons being Not Allowed on school grounds no matter what.
Katarzyna does not win the fight, exactly; weapons are still Not Allowed inside the school no matter what. But she is stubborn and while she isn't good at people Jaromira is, and is on her side. The stardarters and ammo live in an equipment shed, to be picked up when she leaves for a magical girl meeting (...or for other reasons, if she really wants, the administration is worn down into conceding) and returned when she returns to campus.
It's not optimal, but it will do.
Katarzyna spends much of her free time studying, now, but less.
Flying is not against the rules.
"Nothing in particular, it's only that I go to a boarding school and I'm the only magical girl there so outside of a club meeting they ferried me to at a larger school I haven't met many other magical girls. And my power is that I can sense magic! Or, at least, magical girls; I have thankfully not yet had the chance to test if it registers swarms."
"I didn't wanna get too far into the weeds of mental mayhem so I considered doing even less, bare minimum, pointy ears and such, but wings are so practical, so I did that and very, very minimum cosmetic cleanup - plus hair and makeup, those don't seem to affect things the same way."
"I don't--intend to be obnoxious about it--my sister noticed I had a crush on you after I came back and had spent a significant quantity of time telling her how thoughtful and interesting you were--but I like you, I have no intention of making my feelings more relevant than you wish them to be."
"He refers to his mental model of me as 'shoulder Bella' by analogy to 'shoulder angel'. - I stopped going by Bella when I activated, it's not obvious if name aesthetics matter but they might and I didn't feel that strongly about it, but Xander's still allowed to call me that. He can draw. He's not very academic, but he's good at stuff I'm not - the clumsiness doesn't run in the family, that's just me, hence the skating lesson - he's funny, not always in a nice way but in a good-natured way, if that makes sense."
"Like, he'll accidentally poke fun at things in ways that actually upset people, and it'd be predictable if he were really trying not to, but he's not trying to upset people, he's just not trying very hard not to, and he's usually just aiming at keeping the overall mood light."
"That one's good too. Occasionally I take advantage of my naturally overwrought diction to tell someone something explicitly disrespectful to their face in terms they won't successfully parse and a tone that doesn't tip them off, but only if I'm very certain or reasonably indifferent to the consequences of failure."
"Not usually, but how overwrought it is varies, and the high end can get moderately incomprehensible. Speaking like this is genuinely easier for me, in the long run--it makes me think about what I say, in a way that prevents me from saying things I would regret. I used to have problems with that, as a small child."
"No, if she were I wouldn't have dropped it. But when I was a little girl I used to play make-believe that I was one, and draw pictures, and do research, and Mother always encouraged me. But between when she died and when Father remarried, we had a nanny, and when I told her that when I was going to be a magical girl when I grew up she told me the statistics, and when I pointed out that it runs in families she told me that a great-grandmother's sister wasn't a close enough relation to make my chances high enough to be worth counting on."
"I am uncertain. Legally speaking, it would be possible to withdraw from my current school and begin homeschooling, and I am sufficiently autodidactic that I expect to pass any homeschool evaluation tests without the input of an adult, but convincing my father to cooperate with this plan would be more difficult."
"You make me very very happy. When I expressed concern to my sister that having a crush on you put me at risk of becoming one of those objectionable persons who expect reciprocation as their due and are offended when it fails to be forthcoming, she asked me if I would want to hang out with you if I knew for a fact that you were permanently disinterested, and I said of course--simply being around you makes me much happier than I am used to being."
"I am in no way permanently disinterested! Forty percent of the reason I show up to magical girl club is that I now have such a small dating pool I can't rely on encountering people I might like without going out of my way to surround myself with magical girls and I was pretty thoroughly disappointed with the selection till you showed up!"
"Plus as long as it's arranged randomly at least there's a defined point at which you stop planning your life around the possibility. I don't know, maybe I'm just rationalizing because I don't know how to change it. I wonder if you can diagnose incipient magical girls, do you want to strafe an elementary school sometime and find out?"
"So there's different ways to be fast, and what I wanted was sustained overland, not diving - that's peregrine - or short bursts - that's something that eats swifts, I think - and there are still birds that can outperform the swift, but not all their adaptations translate well to a human."
"Thank you. Initially I just went with a pair of generic angel wings--I wasn't trying to achieve flight, at that point, just 'wings are always enough'--and then since I was doing the gyrfalcon crescents thing anyways I just shifted to those once functionality came up, I haven't done all the research I want to yet and that includes into wing designs."
"That makes sense. If I get attached to these I'll keep them as part of the lineup but I don't think I'm likely to mind not always having something I'm attached to. If it weren't for the risk of going cryptid I would probably have played around far more with my body plan than I was ever likely to want to keep."
"It's...very rules-oriented, in many ways. There are schedules we're supposed to adhere to, even when classes aren't in session--you can get away with deviating from them, but not with flaunting it. Many of the teachers are excellent, but some of them are also uncomfortably authoritarian. We have an excellent library. The cafeteria is adequate. Rooms are usually shared--there are singles but not many. I room with my sister; having a roommate I disliked being around would be uncomfortable and I'm glad I don't have to deal with it."
"Yes. I don't love him the way I wish I could, but he is objectionable only in relation to the standards I believe it is reasonable to hold a parent to; in absolute terms he is entirely inoffensive to interact with. I believe if he were a coworker or classmate instead of my father I would like him."
"That makes sense. Since genes influence likelihood of acquiring magic it seems that small towns where the gene pool has stayed relatively consistent over time would be more likely to be demographically unusual than large cities, but in the absence of specific information using general demographics is most likely the best option."
"Oh--a few months ago there was a biology lab assignment and I wanted to do an interesting variation that didn't exactly match the lab handout, so I went to Jaromira and explained the issue and she told me exactly what to say when I was asking permission to do it differently. Two weeks ago we had a group project in history and one of the girls in my group was flat-out insufferable, so Jaromira would distract her any time she started talking, so that the rest of us could get the project done."
Giggle. "Oh, it was definitely subtler than that--Ava, the girl's name was Ava, would say, 'oh, you know what I think we should do here?' and Jaromira would come up with a guess and engage Ava in trying to shoot down Jaromira's idea--and then Jaromira would let her succeed so Ava felt like she was being listened to, and the next time she tried to speak up Jaromira would notice beforehand and say something to her completely unrelated to the project--"
"Neither am I. --Actually come to think of it I changed several things at the same time, it might be that the hair didn't change anything and I failed to notice--I'm usually better at controlling variables than that but my magic had just come in and I was too excited to think as clearly as I normally do." She changes her hair back to blonde to check.
"I have mine memorized except for the exact layouts of circles. Those I let vary when I get dressed in the morning, and I take pictures and rate the results on a scale of one to a hundred, and we're going to try to derive a general principle I can condense into a circle-arranging algorithm I can memorize."
"Synergize with a healer and stop aging, synergize with someone who does something permanent, if those exist, to stop things and make them stay stopped--I'm thinking less 'permanently anchor an object in place' and more 'and now this object is no longer radioactive'--actually, that's a thought, can you stop radioactivity at all right now, even temporarily, that seems like the kind of thing that would make sense to let the Red Cross know is on the table just in case..."
"Nuclear power is a valuable thing but both the possibility of something going wrong with a nuclear plant and the possibility of something going wrong with a nuclear weapon are low-probability extremely-high-danger scenarios--I don't think either of them are going to happen any time soon, the latter more than the former, but if they did I would prefer that the people who deal with these things have plans to effectively deploy you, if you're alright with being deployed."
"I don't...like the idea of doing that, to another magical girl--I suppose perhaps unless I knew she was about to turn herself into a cryptid, but I'm dubious that I could know that with sufficient certainty beforehand. It feels like it would be violating something that shouldn't be violable."
"Edibles can be done, but due to both the mass of edible organics consumed each day and the fact that some people are going to be squicked by eating something that used to be a person, we're not going to be able to replace killing animals for meat the way we've essentially replaced killing elephants for ivory."
"Reasonable. I think I'm glad that it's theoretically possible, even if I'm completely disinclined to do it--if I were ever trapped somewhere with a knife but no food source--it's one of those things where I don't ever expect it to come up but still find it soothing to have a contingency."
She lands and goes inside, earthbound now but still floating, getting a few odd looks from those who know enough about her to realize that it's odd for her to be so thoroughly blissed-out, and wends her way back to her room and flings herself onto her bed to scream her delight into a pillow.
There are hundreds of squads to maintain round-the-clock readiness on both coasts, and more squads covering the Rockies (and adjacent flyover areas), Alaska, and island territories including Hawaii, though the Coast squads are the best known. There are twelve thousand magical girls actively enrolled as Paladins in the United States. Teams currently featuring in the photography on gopaladins.gov include Squad 302 (Alaska), Squad 118 (West Coast), and Squad 89 (East Coast).
302 is five girls: ice powers, terrakinesis, energy bolts, sonic attacks, and a tactical teleporter who carries a grenade launcher.
118 has two girls with different energy bolts, their own healer, a temporary matter conjurer, somebody who works a little like Isabella, a hydrokinetic, and an aerokinetic.
89 has a girl whose power is summarized as "luck", a lightning girl, a plasma girl, somebody who supercharges ammunition, someone who screws with ambient pressure and gravity, a girl who does blasts of force, a telekinetic, a speedster, and one of those apparently commonplace energy bolt girls.
Luck. Matter conjuration. Pressure and gravity. Teleportation, telekinesis.
Well, it seems like the Coast Paladins would have an easier time tempting Katarzyna than she'd thought, if they put their minds to it.
Alright, practicalities now. She looks up local stylists and their hours and pricing.
"You should be aware that a professional style consultation involves wearing very little at times so that Mr. Blake can see what lines he's building an outfit over, and that there may be times when he will be able to best serve your aesthetic by touching you, such as to investigate the range of motion of a wing, inspect your hair's texture, or augment a visual check of your muscle to fat ratio. He can still make improvements to your costume without this but it will not be his best work. Is this acceptable?"
No, she doesn't whine about our allowance, and she doesn't actively complain to Father about it anymore, but things like academic materials and, now, magical girl things, don't count against our allowance, and when we lived with her she used to corner us and try to convince us we were being selfish for it.
Well, she says it's not about the money having a specific better use, it's about habits of frugality vs. frivolousness, but actually it's that she spent the first three years of her marriage to Father trying to get him to revoke our trust funds so there would be more money for her children to inherit.
She's better at pretending to be a decent human being to Father--she never outright said those words to his face, it's just not hard to read between the lines if you're more socially aware than Father, which even I am.
Her children are currently in exactly the same boat Jaromira and I are, financially speaking, she just wants each of them to inherit one-third of Father's wealth instead of one-fifth. She's pretty much the closest thing you're going to get to a real-life fairytale Wicked Stepmother.
I haven't actually tried to find out yet and I would if I were actually going to do this, but based on her personality she would almost certainly hate it if the charity was to fund research to cure a really gross disease and would probably object to a charity to help homeless people if it did things that drew attention to the more unpleasant aspects of homelessness instead of just funneling money places. Same for lots of other causes that have unpleasant aspects. Oh! I bet she'd really hate a charity that helped drug addicts instead of just throwing them in jail.
They are called down from their flying interlude to listen to Natalie and take shots at targets while they're doing so. Natalie discusses Britain's history of organized and militarized magical girls due to their island status and naval incentives, and inland Prussia's ability to deploy magical girls against non-swarm targets due to the low incidence of kaiju.
After which Katarzyna screws her courage to the sticking-place and announces that apparently she has metamagic, she and Isabella ran into each other over the course of the week and discovered that Katarzyna can maintain, nullify or mimic Isabella's stopping but at a weaker magnitude, does anyone want to try anything with that.
Xander's experience with math appears to amount to "why can't I hold all these limes".
"I looked into it, because I might be able to stop the progress of a problem even if I couldn't heal it, give more time for healers and doctors to do stuff, but you have to carry insurance and have parental permission if you're young and if you have a weird power you have to test it under controlled conditions at a research hospital, and it might be worth it but it's not just a matter of walking in."
There's a big branching tunnel made of wire hoops and fabric, like the kind children can crawl through but with room for fourteen-foot wingspans and then some. There are slalom poles, vertical and horizontal both. There are elevated starting blocks that people are practicing 180º turns and landings on. There are clusters of heat lamps to create dramatic updrafts, and a couple of giant fans to make interesting air currents. There is an elevator up a cliff for people who just want to jump off something and glide down.
Jaromira extracts the whole story from her, over the course of a few hours, then steals her sister's phone.
Her sister's phone has Isabella's number in it.
Hey Isabella this is Jaromira.
Sorry if this isn't the best way to talk for the first time.
Katarzyna tried going to an air park and failed to synergize some powers so she's extremely socially burnt-out and disappointed.
I figured she'd want to tell you if her brain was less worn out.
You're welcome. I'm hoping this limitation is a feature of having an extremely amateur outfit and not a hard limit, and will go away after Sunday, but Katarzyna is burnt out enough that right now it's better for her to collapse on her bed being sad than to look on the bright side.
"Oh, I've been researching ways for magical girls to make money--not because it was specifically relevant for me, but just because I was researching magical girls in general--and there are enough options that have payouts ridiculously high for a random teenage girl that I was including a lot of things that are strictly mundane but cost money."
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."
"I strongly prefer to continue to have wings and weakly prefer that they be feathered but I don't mind replacing this set. I weakly prefer to keep this hair color but I'm not attached to the style. I strongly prefer my face remain recognizable as me but don't mind making arbitrary minor changes."
"These will be fine for that, I just don't think they're Olympic grade." He pulls up a computer image, with a few angles of sketched wings and one 3D model. "I'm going to print this out and tape it to one of your wings, that's unfortunately the state of the art with the equipment I have available. If you come back next year I might have a dye sublimation printer but even that isn't workable for wings." His printer is fast. He tapes the sketches to her left wing.
When she's done he's holding up various kinds of silk near her face. Eventually he picks one, puts the others away, calls up some more references on his computer. "I can print these too but I don't want any of them copied straight, obviously, take the bodice shape of this, the skirt of that, this part from this one, make it all out of this," (he brandishes the chosen silk), "and put the hem, mm, a little higher than she has it, up here -" He reaches out and taps her mid-thigh. "And we'll go from there." The resulting frankendress has a halter top that crosses at her throat, turns (magically) into a single piece of material at the collarbone, and has a few more separations and rejoinings; the skirt is wraparound and three layers deep, different parts peeking out from under the others at different points. His reference photos show several angles. Once she has it on he starts rearranging the separation-and-rejoining elements: "I'm going to pinch the connections in the fabric and tug them while you're in starscape, see if you can follow me by feel."
"My first instinct is black, actually, but let's see whether the magic likes that or something else better, and once we have a base, time for gradients and detailing. Time, time... okay, we have time for this, yes." He mixes up a shade of black, a dove grey, a seafoam a little greener and dimmer than she had before, and a bright dollop of sky blue. He dabs a bit of each on her arm. "Try those for the dress, see what it says, change nothing else."
It prefers black!
"The good news is that means I'm on the right track, the bad news is that means such an explosion of accent possibilities. Okay, I have a complicated pattern in mind, let me sketch for you real quick -" He takes a photo of her from the front and from the back, desaturates them enough to show pencil marks on top, and then crosshatches in his vision for where the accent color should appear and how it should fade into black. "Try the other three color ideas and also -" He adds to her arm-palette a bit of pure white and a bit of silver.
He traces the revised line. He takes a step back and hmmmms. "Lot of empty space. I think this isn't terrible, you have a good silhouette, but I'm going to need to do something with the arms and legs... while I'm thinking about that let's talk hair." He finds hair references and has her try twelve things and adjust the one that's best. Then he has her loosen the dress slightly to have a sheer silver under-dress with sleeves that go past her knuckles and a sheath skirt that just brushes the floor, then adds some basic black embroidery to the parts of the underdress that the overdress exposes and the skirt and the sleeves. Then he starts piling on the jewelry, producing samples and references as necessary, pausing only now and then to let the magic break ties.
Katarzyna has never trained as a model, but she has nigh-photographic short term memory and impeccable attention to detail and she never needs to be told the same thing twice. She is brisk and efficient and doesn't waste time and on the inside she glows at how much better the magic likes this than her previous outfit.
Towards the end of the session he's visibly hurrying, trying to get as many references in front of her as possible, for makeup, for nail art, for black henna patterns that will subtly show through the sheer underdress, for feather patterns. When his timer goes off he slaps it and gives her an extra fifteen minutes - "it's gratis, nobody's waiting, I just so hate being rushed" - so he can continue trying different ways to place little chatoyant beads in various kinds of stone on the overdress, and in her silver jewelry, for a little color. He and the magic jointly settle on blue apatite, though when he sends her off it's with a list of things to mess with on her own, and trying more stones (and facetings of stones, and placement of stones) is on there. He takes pictures and confirms her email address and thanks her for her visit.
I love you.
And after some sneakery, a bus ride and some walking, Jaromira walks in. She's dressed nicely enough not to get too many odd looks at a magical girl venue. She spots her sister, makes a beeline for her, and hugs her for a while before peeling off to go talk to people and solicit permission to mess with copies of their powers.
"I'm going to run it by Isabella just in case."
She takes out her phone and texts Isabella.
I'm finished with my consult!
He started over from scratch and I like the result.
I went to the air park to see if I could do synergy, had one conversation that went basically okay except for how it was an extremely horrible experience, realized I couldn't deal with a repeat of last time, and called in Jaromira to interface. She talked to someone who said if I'm scrupulous about consent I sound dangerous and every time I ask people they ask if it's going to affect them in any way and I say no *but* the scrupulousness thing and I think as long as I'm not creepy about it I can probably just mess with copies of powers but it seems important and I'm obviously biased and you're the most effectively ethical person I know so I'm running it past you.
hoo boy
so there's two things going on here, one are you wronging people if you pirate their powers, plausibly you aren't
two, is that a good idea, plausibly it isn't, a combat power could surprise you, or one with niche combat applications, and someone or something could get hurt
also it could be a context thing - if you ask in a way that's at all weird, like going up to people at the air park, then it's like 'why would you do that', but if you skip it and somebody notices they might just as easily be like 'why didn't you just ask first', you know?
Yeah.
I thought it might be something like that, thanks.
I think there's a case to be made that it's not pirating if literally all I do is testing but "There is a case to be made that not X" isn't the same thing as "not X"
I had a REALLY frustrating conversation that started with the other girl that started with me asking about magic and her pointedly going "My name's Dawn, what's yours?" which would have been entirely reasonable of her except that at the end she got my name wrong.
Yeah! He was focused and professional and despite the fact that he's paid by the hour he not only didn't waste time he--actively anti-wasted it? He was glad that I took pictures of my old outfit before coming so we wouldn't have to waste time with that, he gave me notes on what to try on my own, he was an artist who cared about his work, it was overall an extremely pleasant experience.
I want to figure out if I can synergize different powers at this level of magic sooner rather than later but finding magical girls with powers that might combine interestingly is difficult when you have to sort through the magical girls at an air park and every one you check you have to socially interact with. I emailed the survey people but who knows when they'll respond.
That seems a little elaborate - you'd have to rearrange the whole genome, at least in part of the body. I don't know if magic gets that good at detail work! More realistically they could have improved sexual functioning, maybe be able to carry to term even if the conception had to be handled with science.
Quite. While not wholly immune to the charms of charismatic megafauna I don't quite find that a compelling enough reason to find poking animals a good use of my time.
I'm smart. Having a magical girl power that couldn't be leveraged particularly intelligently would still have been--on average--a hundred times more fortunate than lacking one altogether, but I suspect I would nonetheless have found it somewhat galling.
It was--straightforward delivery of salient information. It could have been formatted better but it just didn't occur to me that there was anything wrong with it.
Mind, this was in the interval between Mother's death and Father's remarriage, when we had a nanny, and the nanny refused to let us have any books that weren't "age appropriate" so I was somewhat starved for intelligent reading material.
Not quite that bad--the specific instance I'm thinking of is Disney's Hercules, where in addition to making a satyr not have visible genitalia despite not wearing pants they portrayed the Titans as quasi-mindless monsters ravaging humanity for no apparent reason and Zeus just stepped in because he was Heroic.
That I have no opinion on. However, the movie portrayed Hades as Satan and Hera as Hercules's mother, married to Zeus in an apparently completely non-dysfunctional relationship, and Pegasus was made out of clouds for Hercules instead of springing from the neck of Medusa when she was slain and being companion to Bellerophon, and the adorable will-they-or-won't-they love interest the movie gives Hercules is--at least in nomenclature--the same as Hercules's first wife in the mythos, who he slays along with their children in a fit of insanity.
Legible clothing that conveys the sentiment. If I want to wear a shirt that says something completely innocuous, that's fine, and if I convey the sentiment verbally--not to a teacher, and not loudly enough to disrupt class--that's fine, but if I wear a shirt that says "you must be this smart to talk to me"--or politer versions, I checked--then I'm being "antisocial" apparently.
She's better off in ways that aren't just NRE or other standard relationship benefits; she...always knows intellectually that pulling a Norman Borlaug would be a good thing but you make it more attention-getting compared to, like, whatever interesting problem is right in front of her.
"You look real good. Do you get a lot of boost?" Gabrielle says.
Mercedes coughs. "In our last poll people were against keeping order with sound muting but we can re-run that poll any time. Anyway. If this goes well and we establish something regular with our peers I may also want to organize something like mentorship with middle school and elementary aged magical girls. Thoughts on that?"
Skin repigmentation carries point value (but not much) and the other two don't. Makeup can smudge easily, but can get effects that can't be straightforwardly managed with tattoos alone, such as gloss and the cool magnetic nail polish thing which with this one weird trick can be applied to non-nail surfaces that don't have to bend or stretch much. Tattoos are ideal for any situation where they'll serve but can smudge or stretch if left unattended for a long time - not something that newish magical girls constantly updating their looks run into, but it happens with older ones.
"Maybe we'll find out why magical girls are a thing in the first place! Although I've heard some people think they existed before the historical record suggests and that they just died of it for some environmental reason as soon as they starscaped and it folded in with all the child mortality."
"Indeed. For that matter, magical girl powers are sufficiently diverse that an established policy might be counterproductive--for example, the Tesses of the world may be best as enforcers, but someone with the right healing or ice power could be useful in collecting repayment in the form of internal organs."
"I think the answer is that the organs are sold to people on waiting lists and laundered through legitimate-looking organ sourcing methods and the doctors themselves are either legit or corrupt and trying not to get caught while also performing their legit job, but this information comes through mystery fiction so I take it with a grain of salt."
"Some teenager my dad took in for graffiti once told him 'high school bullies become nurses if they're girls and cops if they're guys', he was just trying to needle my dad and that's not how my dad got into the profession but it seems like it probably has anything truthlike to it."
"Oh, I know this one--yes, it's definitely erroneous. Coma patients aren't in critical condition like some of the sets of people in ICUs, but they still require large amounts of care--you have to move them to avoid bedsores, and eating and voiding are complicated matters, for example."
"Yeah, that's dumb - for one thing it undersells the diversity of human experience and probably the diversity of alien experience too - and for another there's a huge gulf between 'the aliens have a point' and 'there's definitely no good reasons humans wound up making this compromise and not that one'."