“Something that makes matching irrelevant - I can make darkness, and cloak things in darkness, and perform elaborate dance routines in the park involving darkness, it’s handy.”

"Huh. And you think that'll cover nonmatchy stardarters?" Lauren says.

"Dunno if it'll be any use in the field," muses Betty.

“I don’t think that the magic cares about what a stardarter identifies as when it writes in its stardarter diary, I think it cares about whether it looks black. If I’m wrong I lose a week and twenty seven bucks, I’ll recover.”

"Twenty-seven?" says Lauren.

“Yes.”

"That's a steal, do they work?"

(The truck has pulled out of the lot and is trundling along on its search pattern through the city.)

“The website I bought them from has a decent reputation and they supposedly vet everything they resell, I think they’ll be okay. They aren’t going to be in peak condition, obviously.”

"No kidding. I'm gonna want to strip them down and make sure they aren't going to jam on you before we get anywhere near counting on you to shoot at bugs," says Lauren.

“I have no objections.”

"How much do you know about how this all works, do you watch Dart Squad or anything?"

“I don’t watch television. Or movies. I read a summary in a book?”

"Okay, and what'd it say?"

“We ride around in here and do various personal tasks: when we detect a swarm, we get out of the car and shoot at it. If we get a call about a swarm, we drive over, and then get out of the car and shoot at it. I stay in the back and shoot at it less assertively, and use darkness strategically if I can figure out how to and you approve. We have to be careful around artwork, pets, major property damage, and people; we can be less concerned about the first three if we encounter an older swarm.”

"Good enough for government work," says Betty. "Which this is! Do you have any questions for us?"

Jaime approves of Betty’s sense of humor.

“I’m curious about your respective magics. And names. I lost track of your names during the introduction, there was a Lauren involved.”

"I'm Betty," says Betty. She's got hummingbird wings and feathers in her hair and a green-gold-pink color scheme. "That's Lauren -" Lauren has purple bat wings, purple hair, and four arms; she has four stardarters to match. "And that's Pam." Pam, conventional white angel wings and white robey clothes with a ton of malachite on top of everything. "For whose outfit our squad takes its name. I'm energy bolts, Lauren can make darts phase through walls and there's probably other applications -"

"There are," says Lauren.

"- and Pam's a hydrokinetic!"

Jaime takes out a pen and scribbles down inscrutable curlicues on the bookmark of her latest book.

”Thanks. Do you have any questions you’d like me to answer? On a formal or social scale.”

"Is that a code?" asks Pam. "You writing about us in code?"

“It’s more of an invented language. It says ‘hummingbird:Betty’, ‘dragonfly:Lauren’, and ‘seraph:Pam’.”

"...dragonfly?" says Lauren.

“Six limbs, wings, bright color scheme, pretty? ‘Bat’ would’ve also been distinguishing.”

"I have eight limbs," says Lauren.

“- six human limbs, then. I didn’t deliberate at great length before deciding on the reference.”

"Why do you write in code?" asks Pam.

Jaime does not really want to deal with this at eight in the morning. 

“If you could write notes in curlicues, wouldn’t you? My dress has a quote from Hamlet written on it, twice, and most of the other curlicues are significant.”