"So what happens when someone begins to have the option to be a magical girl is that her vision - no other sense, just that one - is replaced by an external perspective of herself and what she is wearing, against a background of stars. The stars always look the same for a given individual girl as far as I know. Somebody was curious enough once to get two girls to compare and their stars looked different, but this is not the most rigorous study you could do. The stars do not look like the stars as seen from Earth, but they might look like the stars as seen from somewhere even given that two girls who happened to be convenient that one time didn't match."

"- huh. Do you want to draw yours out for us, later -"

"No, that sounds tedious. I can change my clothes by magic and you can take pictures."

"Oh, it's externally visible? Then we can definitely do that."

"No, if I starscape it just looks like my eyes aren't focusing on anything or I'm closing them, but when I'm in there, I can look at the stars, and make something I'm wearing match the stars. Then you don't have to rely on my memory of the constellations."

"All right, that sounds good. We can see if it matches anywhere we've explored. We've explored most of this galaxy excluding Presger space."

"I was hoping you'd also have fancy technology to determine what stars would look like from various places by 3D modeling them but I suppose there wouldn't usually be much call for that if gates are generated deliberately and you're not fetching up on the far sides of wormholes with no idea where you are instead."

"It's not something we've had a lot of use for but it doesn't sound like it'd be that difficult to spin up, 3D modeling is useful for lots of things."

"Cool. Okay. So some girl between the ages of eight and sixteen, inclusive but there's a bit of bellcurve and twelve is the modal age, starscapes. She can get out of starscape right away if she wants - you ever hear of this causing car accidents but it's not usually going to be a big deal. The option to go into and out of starscape at will remains for a week if she ignores it completely - or if she, like, uses it as a mirror - but what she can also do is change things about her body." She wiggles a wing. "If she does any of that she gets longer to think about it - fix a chipped tooth or clear up a zit or fix a bad hair day and then she has about a month."

Nod.

"I don't have the point system memorized beyond knowing what temporary practical changes I can safely do for healing or seeing in the dark or things like that, but there's a system of points to guess how much you have to change to get magic, and how much you can change before you turn into a cryptid. The rule of thumb for the first threshold is that you can't pass for nonmagical human. Girls who want to get as close as they possibly can to pass as human can pass to casual inspection - hide extra toes under shoes, hide pointy ears under hair, pretend they just have really good posture and didn't fundamentally alter the evolved human spine. Pointy ears won't do it alone and I don't remember if toes do for any reasonable number of toes but the spine thing can. Uh, to clarify, the points are a human invention based on noticing who does and does not get magic and turn into a cryptid after trying stuff, it's not part of the magic itself in numerical form."

"And if you change back to less than that, you lose magic?"

"If you go over the 'get magic' threshold, you can't go under again. If I broke both my wings, I would have to remove and replace them one at a time, or do something else to compensate before I tried to take them off. Girls sometimes lose or relinquish their powers but they lose it all at once and can't make any more changes after that so they're stuck too."

"Huh. Do you happen to know if the threshold is different here where humans look more varied than we once would have -"

"I don't know, but I guess I could check as long as I was sure enough everything I checked was way under the cryptid zone. That being - if you continue along the axis that gets you from not magic to magic, there are some mental changes. The one you can't get away without if you're gonna be magic at all is that we're what's called 'thaumosexual' - only attracted to other magical girls. Ones who've changed enough, not new starscapers who haven't done anything. Other things are less obvious and quantifiable but include also being specifically attracted to the kinds of body mods magical girls do - these traits are idiosyncratic, I was not attracted to every magical girl I ever saw, I had, like, a type, but I was straight and did not have that same type or an analogous one before I starscaped. Also magical girls, and particularly more modified magical girls, score higher on a personality test trait called 'openness to experience' which has knock-on effects like a higher rate of interest in polyamory, are more interested than a control group asked what they'd do if they became magical girls in fighting swarms as a sideline or career, and, even if they were ambivalent about taking magic to begin with, more attached to remaining magical after they've gotten that way. And if you go too far, like, a cartoon anthropomorphic animal is right about on the borderline depending on implementation details, then you fall off a psychological cliff and you're not the same person any more."

"What, ah, kind of person do you become?"

"- I'm not a cryptid. Wings isn't nearly enough to turn you into a cryptid, plus, like, Xander still regards me as his sister and I'm having a conversation with you. Cryptids are not psychologically human. They do seem to have some continuity with their old selves - they will sometimes react differently to 'familiar' people, places, and things - it seems likely they retain the ability to speak their languages at least some of the time; occasionally you hear about them speaking though I've never seen it caught on video - they're generally not hostile but they don't participate in society to speak of."

"Huh. Do magical girls have a normal lifespan, can they reproduce if they prefer to..."

"We have a better than average lifespan because we can hack the shapeshifting power into a self-healing power, which doesn't work for everything because it's a very cosmetic power with incidental health side effects and not in fact a healing power, but sure doesn't hurt. Some girls get healing powers, but they're usually not as impressive as that sounds - they tend to specialize oddly - and nobody's gotten de-aging, I made a point of looking into it. We can reproduce unless we've done something weird and torso-affecting."

"Does your society know that people are made from a blueprint in each of their cells, and do they happen to know whether this changes when someone gets powers..."

"We know about it, we call it DNA which stands for deoxyribonucleic acid. Shapeshifting can change DNA, especially if we copy things from animals, but magical girls do not have to have the same DNA across our entire bodies."

"How likely are the children of magical girls to be magical?"

"About ten percent. - If they're girls, so I guess five percent overall, which might have been what you were asking. Same with the siblings of magical girls. Identical twins only gets up to I think fifty-five percent likely."

"Do you have clones?"

"The concept but not, in humans, the practice - I think somebody's cloned a sheep? I wouldn't expect that to have a different success rate from identical twins."