"Thank you thrice."

So she goes to the restroom. The flight uniforms are relatively quick to put on and take off, thankfully.

She takes a deep breath and inserts the pink rose to her skin.

The stem burrows into her arm and grows from there, splitting off a few times to coil through her body and then emerging again from other points. She ends up wearing a sort of minimal bodysuit made of unnaturally tough pink rosepetals stretched between thorny yellow vines.

And breathing pretty heavily. But it turns out it's true that the anticipation of pain is almost worse than the pain itself. Right now she's not even feeling as bad as after a long patrol.

She tries the... Weapon-like feeling, aiming for a very simple spear.

Yellow vines and pink petals grow rapidly, forming into the shape of a spear, which solidifies a moment later into a pink-and-yellow spear made of something more like wood and metal than like rose parts.

Huh. Neat. Not like using mana at all. Highlander will love these - she'll probably like them more for the fact that they hurt and she won't need to retire if the flight power is fast enough.

She lets the spear go, and absorbs the other roses one by one, and walks back out to the bar, folded clothes in hand.

"Nice going," says Anna, observing the many-coloured petalsuit. "You okay?"

She is visibly affected. But not that much. "I'll want them gone sooner or later, but I've had to keep fighting and keep focused feeling worse than this. Adrenaline gives you wings. Unf. What kind of practice do you recommend? Just go over their basics, fly, make and heal some scratches, TK some stuff, manifest and unmanifest weapons?"

"It's actually really hard to practice healing on yourself, or on anyone else with a flower in, because the flowers usually heal it faster than you can," says Anna. "When you get really good with one flower's first specialty it'll let you pick the next one from its group that you want to try, but I don't know if there are kinds of practice that work better or worse than other kinds."

She starts playing with the minor powers, leaving off the healing. "These are delightfully powerful. Our kind of magic runs out completely if you try to do too much, and your power level goes down sharply as you get older. It's really inconvenient that the most experienced fighters lose their magic. Running out of mana also hurts like hell, but then mana burn is less of a concern than, you know, actual burns."

"I haven't had flowers for long enough to know if anything happens when you get older, but it'd surprise me. They don't run out of anything or anything like that, they just hurt."

"Makes sense. I'll be on the lookout." She levitates one of her boots, but only for a moment. "Please tell me your world's in better shape than mine."

"My world's pretty great. A total lack of giant murder monsters."

"We've had people try to talk to them. Apparently they're not even sure the Neuroi know humans are people. They're very alien aliens."

"Huh."

"Anyway, as long as I'm here I think I'll have a nice steak-and-whatever's-recommended dinner, with real-for-certain-values-of-real Corunda coffee. Got plenty of pay saved up and I haven't had steak in ages. The ice ships are too slow, it just spoils before it can get to our base and there are hundreds of more important things to reserve teleporters for."

"Ice ships?"

"Yeah, big old ships with special insulated rooms full of ice. For moving things that spoil around."

"I don't know what we do about that kind of thing in my world but I'm pretty sure it's not that."

"Well, where do you get cold from if not ice? Magic? Some kind of fancy steam or chemistry thing? I don't understand science much."

"Honestly, I couldn't even tell you. I'm not that big into science myself. It just sounds weird, like, ice ships? Maybe we have giant refrigerators."

"...The translation is giving me chained lightning going into a machine and it making cold."

"...You don't have refrigerators?"

"I'm starting to think our technology is terrible. It was even worse before the Neuroi, the bloody Church lifted its ban on science because otherwise we'd all die... Do you recognize this map? The year thirteen twenty four?" The globe she illusions is... Not quite Earth. China, parts of America, and parts of Africa are wrong.

"It looks mostly right. My geography isn't the greatest."

"...You know if we're going to be talking for a while, I'm gonna take everything but the yellow one out." She does that. White/black first, hunching over breathlessly as it goes.