Jaime takes out her journal - she’s carrying a satchel which she absentmindedly wreathed in darkness during the ride along, otherwise she’d have to keep her book in her hand and her phone in a pocket - and spends a minute sketching out what she’ll need to change, and how everything should fit together, and how she should implement the outfit and each mod in a maximally pretty way.

And then she looks completely different!

So does the other girl! They are walked through the poses they want to try while lighting changes around them; they are coached through mod and outfit tweaks.

Jaime continues to be graceful and efficient and visually intelligent. 

They take a ton of pictures and hand both girls checks and send them along with a free company logo phone case each.

Jaime reinstantiates her previous outfit and set of mods, minus some details, and inquires about whether this is a ‘we might contact you again if we liked your performance today’ kind of deal or if being potentially re-booked would require some more elaborate process.

"We'll get in touch if we have more work for you!" says the representative for the magical girl modeling agency. "This double booking isn't typical, the company just wanted to hedge."

“Understandably.”

She flutters back home, devours a deeply belated lunch which is really more a dinner - just storebought pasta and unelaborate meatballs and leftover charred broccoli, she’s starving - and fixes up the details of her outfit based on her assorted photos.

It occurs to her to try producing two streams of darkness at the same time.

She can do this, once she's fixed up her details.

She cannot physically pat her power on its head and tell it that she loves it; she can, however, create a blob of darkness, pat it, and tell it that she loves it. She makes the blob of darkness grow a short little tail; the tail wags, the blob wiggles.

The fashion dictionary gave her a few ideas; she sketches them out, and implements them.

She removes her current earrings, and replaces them with a different set - still stylized silver feathers, but five of them per earring, not just one, in a longer version of this arrangement, and with all the previous diamond studs replaced by little diamond flowers, rimmed with vantablack, fading from gold at the base of each petal to rose gold at the tip. She adds on a larger diamond flower, of the same kind, at the circular base where each earring connects with her ear; after a moment of contemplation, she makes the base metal form a gradient, fading from deep black at each earring’s circular base to bright silver at the tip of each feather.

Her hands tentatively acquire handflowers, almost identical in form and color to her snazzy new earrings - the silver feathers connect loosely and directly to her dark not-gloves, lacking a circular base, and the second-to-last outer and inner feathers of each handflower connect to sleek, thin silver rings on her pointer and ring fingers. She fiddles with each feather’s range of motion until she doesn’t feel substantially impeded.

The color-scheme of her nails seems a little off, with the handflowers - she adds in swirls of rose gold, to complement already extant silver and gold swirls, and she adds a thin line of deep black to the edge of each nail.

The earrings are a slight negative to begin with but it all adds up to roughly neutral (hard to tell, with a gap between the states) when she's added the handflowers. The nail polish update is an improvement.

Well, she spent a while refining her previous earrings and the new ones are a first pass, she’s not that surprised.

She tries various different configurations, making each change simultaneously with the earrings and the handflowers insofar as she can - what if the central feather made a sort of S-shaped curve and then sharply pointed downwards and the rest of the feathers had more curviness to them, what if she tries less extreme ways of adding wave, what if she makes them less symmetrical, what if each feather’s thinner or thicker or longer or shorter, what if she does various slopes of thinness and shortness?

More curve is worse. Asymmetry works better in some iterations. Sloping their thickness and shortness just so is good.

She’ll take it.

Next on the agenda: messing around with the fundamental structure of her face!

She’s not really enthusiastic about messing around with the fundamental structure of her face, but needs must.

She takes a dozen ‘before’ pictures, and then her jaw and her cheeks and her nose and her lips and her eyes become - slowly, carefully, steadily - more symmetrical.

This is a much more substantial jump than she's gotten out any jewelry adjustments.

Being judged on her face feels much more personal than being judged on her outfit and she doesn’t really like it, but she can cope.

She looks up whether she can still squeeze elf ears into her modification budget.

She has enough room for that on top of cosmetic touchups, wings, hair foliage, and shoulder feathers.

And so she acquires elf ears! Relatively tame ones: she has no desire to look like she has antennae.

Sketch, sketch, sketch -

Her fancy new ears acquire several additional earrings apiece - five helix earrings and three forward helix earrings, each. The lower four helix earrings are small, and resemble the flower on the base of her feather earrings; the top helix earring resembles a much larger version of the same model, and the forward helix earrings resemble smaller and more individually monochromatic versions of the same model.

And then she thinks she’s done for the evening.

She wakes up the next morning, goes to school...

... you know what, fuck it.

She unceremoniously sits next to a pseudo-randomly selected gaggle of magical girls during lunch.

There aren't enough in the school for more than one principally magical gaggle to have formed. It includes Serena and Nina, who she's met, two other magical girls, a boy, and a nonmagical girl.

"Hi Jaime," says Nina.

“Hello, Nina. And Serena. And people who I haven’t met.”

"Khadija," says one magical girl.

"Ludmilla," says the other.

"Benny," says the boy.

"Rachel," says the nonmagical girl.

Jaime -

Doesn’t need to write down this sort of information visibly or lament her inability to write down this information visibly, come to think of it. The inside of the not-glove on her left arm acquires curlicues.

She doesn’t immediately say anything else.

"You look nice," chirps Nina.

She still can't believe she's actually doing this.

Magical girl contacts are potentially valuable and she has nothing better to do, magical girl contacts are potentially valuable and she has nothing better to do, magical girl contacts are - 

"Thanks. I've switched over some of my reading from history to fashion. Has anything interesting happened to you over the past three days?"

"We had to take our dog to the vet but he was okay," says Nina. "You?"

"I attended a dance class, danced in the park and attracted a crowd, rode with a swarm response team for four hours, ordered stardarters, danced in a different part of town with an added tip jar, had a photo shoot, spent excessive amounts of time on the phone, worked on my outfit, and did many other things. It's been interesting."