Margaret's touchdown outside the cafe is noticeable even through the window; her silver scales and profusion of opal jewelry throw little glints of sunlight all over. She has clearly been seen by a top-notch pro, and in addition to scales she's pushing the point limit with wings, horns, heavily modded eyes, and a skull shape not often found in nature. She spots Jaime easily as the only other magical girl in the cafe and heads over to her, wings folded tightly to maneuver between chairs and tables.

"Hi! You're Jaime, right? I'm Margaret."

“You remembered my name correctly. Naomi’s unable to make it, but she said that we should persevere with lunch in her absence.”

"Yeah, she's been really busy lately. I don't know how much she told you about me; all I know about you is that you dance and do swarm response and come to classes sometimes, which is all neat."

“I know that you have divinatory spells, major in biochemistry at Stanford, and intern at the CDC doing something unspecified. If you look up ‘shadowland swan lake’ on YouTube you can find one of my better recorded performances, I recommend it - I can create darkness that behaves in preprogrammed ways, it’s a one woman show with several dozen silhouette extras.”

"Oooh, that sounds really cool, I'll check it out."  The words "shadowland swan lake" appear on the inside of a bracelet, not that Jaime is likely to notice.

"'Diviniatory spells' is basically right but 'spells' makes them sound more controllable than they are--my main thing is I spontaneously say true things I have no way of knowing. Weird, but useful--my internship this summer was a mix of predicting disease outbreaks with statistics and doing the same with magic." 

“I would be deeply frustrated by having magic less perfectly controllable than mine, but that sounds useful enough to compensate. Do you have any hobbies.”

"Yeah, you sound like you have amazing fine control, I'd be jealous if I didn't like my thing so much. I have a campus lab job and I TA freshman bio, but I don't know if those count as hobbies. I do a lot of reading, mostly nonfiction. I cook a bit but nothing fancy, and I like taking walks around town, just sort of wandering and exploring."

Jaime shifts a bit to the side, so she’s in line to make an order and not just sort of standing around.

”Reading anything right now?”

Margaret also gets properly into the line. "I just finished someone's account of salvaging a sunken submarine, and I'm starting one on the history of food safety. How about you, what do you like to do when you're not dancing?"

“Read, get into arguments on the internet, cook, watercolor, fly, do miscellanea with my girlfriend. I just finished A Storm on the Ocean of Ink.”

"That all sounds fun. Well, maybe not the internet arguments, but I can see why some people like those. What's A Storm on the Ocean of Ink about?"

“Fantasy in a world where swarms behave differently; they start out as microorganisms and stay that way for years before starting to form into bugs. All of the oceans are black, not blue, they have to be careful about boiling water before drinking it, people at sea regularly die horrible deaths. The main characters are pirates.”

"Sounds interesting. Thank goodness swarms don't actually work that way, that'd be disgusting even after you mitigated the dangers."

They get to the front of the line; Margaret orders something with a moderate amount of caffeine and a large amount of whipped cream and caramel.

Jaime orders a ridiculously large serving of matcha tea!

They can sit down while they wait for the their respective orders.

”It was horrifying, but the prose was well done. How’d you meet Naomi?”

"We were in a couple classes together the past two years, and we're looking to get out of the same overcrowded dorm. You?"

“She saw one of my performances and asked me out for coffee. I admired her confidence.”

"Nice! Speaking of Naomi, we should talk roommate practicalities. What hours do you like to make noise and what hours do you like to sleep?"

“I normally sleep from midnight to seven in the morning, and I’m most likely to be in the house and making noise between seven and eight in the morning, and five and eight at night. Give or take.”

"I sleep roughly eleven to six, and don't do anything particularly noisy first thing in the morning unless showering counts. I probably make the most noise around seven to ten in the evening, since that's when I'm most likely to have someone over to study or hang out with."

"That's fine, then. Who would you have over often?"

"Classmates, mostly, and I might end up hosting the occasional board game night depending on how the inconvenience of hauling Quentin's board game collection a few blocks stacks up against the inconvenience of the dorm not having a good space. Nobody who won't be gone well before midnight. Who are you likely to have over, you mentioned a girlfriend?"

Jaime has a vivid mental image of a large shark encountering a hapless, dragon winged, opalescent minnow. The jaws of the imaginary shark go click, casually; the minnow's blood leaks quietly into the surrounding ocean.

"No. If I had my girlfriend around regularly you would have grounds for complaint, she has a... style. I do have a small dog, who can spend some of her time at Alexandra's place but not all of it."

Margaret interprets "a style" as meaning something like "obnoxious sense of humor" or "plays heavy metal all the time", and resists the temptation to be nosy about it. 

"I happen to love small dogs, though I've never actually had one. I can't speak for Naomi, but if you do all the walking and feeding and she doesn't pee on the carpet I'd love to have her around."

"Her name is Madeline, she's a miniature pinscher and we fly, sometimes, instead of walking, she has a harness. And I have a treadmill I can put in my room or elsewhere, she likes using it. Naomi already knows her, she's a fan."

Margaret has a mental image of Jaime flying with a small dog strapped to her chest. "Awwww. I'm glad Naomi likes her, that should work out nicely. Hmm, what else, we should make sure we have similar attitudes about cleaning."