"Sounds can matter. If you're trying to wring everything you can out of - I haven't even explained this part yet, though I did know I'd dropped enough to derive it. In a sentence: how powerful our magic is - not the shapeshifting or clothes altering stuff, that's constant, but our individual powers - depends on how pretty we are."

"So Paladins, who actually care exactly how many pounds of force they can hit a kaiju with, have sound systems in their helicopters and they have theme music," she says. "I think some people have superstitions that smell matters; I haven't heard of anyone imagining that it might do anything if they tasted better and I think the evidence is a solid nope against magic being interested in texture from a non-visual perspective. We get fine-grained enough feedback on how pretty we are to A/B test things, which is useful for small changes, but it's easy to get caught in a local maximum if you start with a generic dress - uh, magic likes skirts, you can get decent quality magic with pants if you insist on it but it's much harder - and iterate from there. Human aesthetics, if they've been trained on what works for magical girls in a general sense, are or at least can be better. 'Magical girl stylist' is a profession and Xander wanted to be one."

"Sound systems and theme music are part of prettiness? Does it matter how pretty the helicopters are?"

"Surroundings matter, but only fairly immediate surroundings - lighting conditions, what you're standing right next to. I do think they have unusually pretty helicopters for the Paladins who operate from aboard them instead of flying around. I mentioned the sound systems because you asked if people tried sounds."

"I'm curious if most things that are considered pretty in your society, where aesthetics have been so influenced by this, are similar to the things considered pretty in ours."

"I don't have a lot of outfits memorized to the necessary granularity to show you more examples and be confident I was being faithful to them - you'd get an idea of cuts and colors but I'd miss lots of ornaments and seams and stuff I didn't pay close attention to. Xander could talk more about it, maybe I should have made him come after all. Before I starscaped I wore the culturally default outfit pretty much every day."

"And costumes intended to be pretty in movies here, things like that... approximately the same sensibilities, or noticeably different?"

"I mean, I can tell that the costume designers aren't optimizing for pleasing magic's aesthetic sensibilities. But movie costumes for non-magical characters don't do that either, because magic's opinions are not the same as everyone else's. I can tell that they are a different culture but apart from everybody wearing gloves it's not more different than, oh, historical Chinese dramas set before China's garment industry Westernized."

"That makes sense. Are there other avenues that'd occurred to you at home as promising to explore?"

"Avenues toward what?"

"Understanding magic better, having more of it, doing more with it..."

"I mean, I might eventually have dropped money on a Paladin-grade stylist, but that seems maybe not to have been the question... most of the research I would have wanted to do requires more than one girl or I would've just, like, done it myself."

"That makes sense."

"Anyway. My magic is stopping things. In this outfit I have better range and can stop bigger things than I could in something shabbier. Maybe with more improvements I could stop more things at once or something. Xander's read books on stylist techniques that I've just skimmed if you have some reason to want some very big thing stopped, but it's not a conceptual wordplay kind of stoppage, I'm pretty sure I can't stop, like, poverty, or whatever."

"Ships, though? Planets?"

"The diminishing returns on stylist time are such that I would be astounded if I could stop a planet. I am not sure how big your ships get but probably a small one, I can do a car now."

"Do you know the range limit?"

"Not precisely. I didn't have testing equipment, Xander used to throw baseballs and my reaction time was the limiting factor in figuring out exactly how far away I could operate. Uh, I have it memorized as 'about a block' but blocks are longer here. - oh, there's a thing I didn't mention but I don't think it matters, magical girls can sense swarms to pretty good precision, enough to aim with in the dark, at a range of a few blocks. You don't have 'em, so. This was used for testing outfit quality hypotheses with better precision, they'd catch a lot of bugs and space them out and see how far out their test girl could sense them before the bugs got lively enough to escape and had to be killed."

"That's interesting. I'm terribly glad we don't have them, though."

"Yes, not having them is generally the better deal."

"Do you know if in your timeline they show up only on Earth?"

"If they showed up at even a fraction of the rate on the Moon you'd have be able to see the resulting kaiju with the naked eye by the time we're from, since nobody would have been killing them up there. They haven't seen any on Mars with telescopes either. I don't remember if low pressure can kill them - they start out pretty fragile but maybe ones that appeared on a different celestial body would have different starting specs anyway. We don't have a way to rule out outsystem planets having them."

"Fascinating. That was everything I had in mind to ask you."

"My career path if I hadn't thought of anything more interesting or found any other leverage was seeing if I could be useful in arresting things like blood clots while conventional doctors did things that depended on those blood clots not having moved much - I think I could probably also kill tumors, if I knew enough about where they were - but I hadn't gotten that far, practicing medicine is regulatorily fraught in the US. I don't know if any problems of that nature are still an issue here or if it seems like a worthwhile application."