"Maybe they should, he did a good job with your outfit." 

"I'll tell him you said so!"

"What part of Arizona? What do you get up to there when not interning?"

"We live in Phoenix. We're in high school. I'm bookish, mostly, I don't go out and do a lot."

"Are you planning to stay through to graduation?"

"In... school? Yes. In the internship, probably."

"Oh, sorry, I wasn't clear. Some of the magical girls I've run into opted to test out or homeschool or do some other thing. I did, but I was interested in the Pax Corps even before I got magic, so it was an easy call for me." 

(Monica seems content to just listen in, for now; she's mostly here to make sure the girls don't get lost on their first day.) 

"I have considered homeschool but decided against and expect to continue to do so. My mom's a teacher."

"Neat! What does she teach?" 

"Kindergarten, but she's pretty bought in on the whole system."

"That makes sense. I thought about starting a school one day, before I starscaped and changed my plans. I want to share things, not just see them." 

"Even if you don't draw, you could conjure pictures of what you look at and get them scanned or photographed. Fill out a load of textbooks."

"Oooh, I like that, that's a really good idea! I had been thinking, maybe one day when I'm fabulously wealthy and retired, I'd still open a school, but this is a...concrete thing, a now thing, and that's much better." She closes her eyes for half a minute, concentrating, and then suddenly she's holding a gilded scroll on which is painted a zoomed-in picture of a stainless steel grain structure, in full color. "It works!!! This is my spoon, by the way." 

"Nifty! It looks like a mosaic!"

"So many things are like this if you look closely enough! That's exactly what I want to show people. Grayscale microscopes and colorized images just aren't the same." 

Monica looks impressed as well. "The team's gonna love this...why the scroll?" 

"You know, I'm not really sure," admits Nora. "I wasn't particularly focused on the medium, but I do like the aesthetic of old scrolls and such. Maybe this is just what my brain associates with 'show off this beautiful thing I'm looking at'. I wasn't thinking of not scrolls. I can do paper instead for scanning, though." 

"I think scanners like it when things are flat," Isabella agrees.

Nora giggles, still staring at the scroll.

"At some point I want to know if I'm limited by mass or volume. I haven't had the opportunity to check yet. Though I assume whichever it is the exact threshold will go up when I'm prettier."

Monica nods. "We can check this afternoon if you like. It's relatively less scheduled than the morning, because we knew we'd have a bunch of results to process and new ideas to try after the morning."

"What other experiments are you guys excited about?"

"How much faster can we assemble, say, a small custom engine, if we don't have to worry about holding the framework in place? How much more precision can we get out of our instruments when they won't suffer vibration noise or bend out of alignment? Also, I bet there's a bunch we can learn from scanning Nora's pictures, that opens up a lot of options and probably bumps some other tests off the priority list, we'll see. The tentative plan for this afternoon was to time ourselves cutting and drilling custom parts from stopped raw material. We probably still have time for that, but some tests might get pushed to tomorrow."

"Are there a lot of custom engines in the world, I'd expect most things to run on some mass-produced sort."

"By sheer number, yes, most are off-the-shelf models. But you'd be surprised how many projects and prototypes require a handful of specially-tooled components. Enough to keep labs like ours in business, at least."

"What kind of thing needs a special custom engine?"

"Space probe thrusters, high-performance racing vehicles, marine vessels with nonstandard hull designs and highly specific noise or efficiency needs...also hobbyists and history buffs doing restoration projects where the originals aren't manufactured anymore. Every now and then we get a request involving an aerobatic propeller plane engine, that's always a treat."