"What kinds of things have successfully been done with magic?"

"That's kind of a broad question? Like, is the answer you're looking for 'generate electricity but not really competitively with baseload grid methods', or 'fight kaiju', or 'make pearls fairly inexpensive', or 'cure cancer', or 'create a really weird-tasting apple/orange hybrid fruit'?"

"All of those, yes. Is that fairly representative?"

"It's a list of things that came to mind. The pearls thing isn't a spell, it's an application of shapeshifting, but I can't say it appeals to me so unless you have a really weird reason to need authentic organic material of some kind it's not where I'm angling to be. Some girls have kinda classical-element-control powers - lightning or fire or water or air or earth or ice. The most common single power is energy bolts, which come in different colors and make different noises and have minor tactical variants but are all basically alike. Healing powers tend to specialize strongly or generalize weakly, a cancer cure would probably be, like, someone who's really good at kidneys and cancer of just the kidneys in particular. Some girls do things with plants, or animals. My power isn't commonplace but there's similar ones, there's speedsters and teleporters and people who can empower ammo they shoot and illusionists and weather control and this is actually really hard to just list out, maybe you should think of things you're interested in and ask if I've heard of them and if they sound like the sort of thing that might ever happen? The really rare ones are people with divinatory abilities and those aren't usually as major as you'd maybe expect."

"Invulnerability? Invisibility? Resurrection? Finding someone who is in hiding, or looking at an accident and knowing how it occurred? Duplicating inorganic objects? Enhancing another person's abilities? Looking at a statement and knowing if it's true, or at a theorem and knowing if it follows?"

Isabella looks at the list of these as the tablet subtitles them for her. "Exists in handicapped forms, exists, doesn't, maybe but I haven't heard of it specifically for both the divination ideas, yes, for some values of ability, in handicapped forms yes. Uh, most of the really fancy, cool, system-breaking magic is more usage limited than something like mine or like energy bolts or whatever. An energy bolt girl can keep shooting all day long. I could stop a cushion in midair and sit on it all day without even paying attention to it. Somebody who could do theorem proving probably couldn't do it at will and might only get, like, one a week or something, and maybe only for a somehow constrained sort of statement, still a big deal but much more annoying to harness."

"That makes sense. Is there any known pattern to what abilities people get?"

"Not really. I think people like what they get more than chance? It's not, people get their favorite or what they would have chosen or what best suits them, not by a long shot, but it is better than throwing darts at a list of extant powers. They don't run in families. They don't change. There isn't a connection with how old you are when you starscape."

"Huh. Do they sometimes syncretize well with each other?"

"I'm not sure exactly what you mean but they don't seem designed to be parts of sets or anything. Some teams can cover for each other's weaknesses better than others, you generally don't put nothing but energy bolts on a squad? If you have more healing magic in one hospital you can cover more things?"

She nods. "But you can't, say, have a hundred people make a mega-energy-bolt..."

"Yeah, no, it's not additive in that way, maybe unless you get into obscure rare magic I haven't looked up - I was looking, you understand, but I'm fifteen and I had school and our internet isn't as advanced as yours."

"I'd feel pretty bad about myself if it were. Is there a special school for magic students or do you attend the one you were qualified for before getting magic?"

"In our country there's free public education which is ostensibly the same for everybody but actually is paid for by local property taxes and also affected by things like population density, and some people can get scholarships or pay their way into assorted private schools, and home schooling is also legal but usually too much of a time commitment for the parents. Xander and I went to public school. There are some magnet schools for magical girls, but they're mostly oriented around things like flight sports, not studying magic, since our magic isn't improved very much by studying it - you can find a few creative applications but we didn't have any way to benefit from collecting us into a whole school."

"That makes sense. And magical girl employment is similarly eclectic?"

"Not as eclectic - magical girls systematically have advantages as emergency services, especially the pseudomilitary organizations that fight kaiju, called Paladins, and the local versions of the same that hunt newer swarms. Healers usually find that healing's the most effective way to make a living even if they don't love the job in itself. We're also overrepresented in modeling, acting, and professional athletics of the forms that don't ban us all for cheating. Any magical girl who doesn't insist on constantly walking around on the borderline of going cryptid can make a quick buck turning out pearls or exotic wood or things like that. Some people want magical girl egg donors, if they're interested for whatever reason in having magical children. Other than that we do whatever jobs, though, yeah."

"Can you do arbitrary biological tissue samples or do woods and pearls have some particular properties that make them easy -"

"In principle we could do other stuff probably there's no observed hard limit. In practice, we do things that don't have nerves in them and that we can look at with mostly if not exclusively visual desired properties, because the shapeshifting power is, if not strictly confined to, at least emphatically geared toward making us personally look however we want. This means it is easy to grow flowers out of my arm and hard to make a transplantable aorta or whatever you have in mind. We also can't generate independently alive organisms, I know someone who wanted to try being part cloud of butterflies but it didn't work and I would have advised her not to try because if it had it seems like the sort of thing that'd turn you into a cryptid."

"And can all of you adopt an approximately arbitrary physical appearance any time, or does that take a lot of adjustment -"

"We can totally do that, but we can't save state, so anyone who cares about being recognizable as her original self and has any impulse control doesn't disguise herself as random other people without a very good reason and very high resolution photographs she intends to later pin to her shirt for starscape recopying."

"And precisely copying someone else is similarly time-intensive, I assume -"

"Yes, and it'd require going into and out of starscape a lot unless you had the high resolution photos to pin to your clothes. Plus the thing where we can't look like a nonmagical human, so we could only ever perfectly copy each other."

"Do you have any guesses about whether cybernetic augmentation of your vision would let you create more complicated things that look cool to you but don't look interesting to anyone else?"

"Some girls do eagle eyes. They can get better resolution on their outfits and stuff that way. I've done temporary eye mods occasionally but the current version of my outfit doesn't rely on anything quite that detailed, it's a work in progress."

"And visuals consistently seem to be the only thing the magic is tracking? People've tried sounds, smells, chemical reactions..."