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."

"If I see the garbage filled up, I take it out; if I cook a meal, I clean up what results; if I take something out, I put it away. Sometimes I spend an hour organizing. I don't really remember to vacuum or dust. I don't need to launder clothing, but I do launder rags and towels, and I do that at a laundromat."

Margaret nods. "Sounds reasonable. I'm a bit of a neat freak, but it mostly manifests as washing the kitchen table and counters a lot, and occasionally moving people's stuff or asking them to move it if it's in the way. And I'd be extremely surprised if you had my last roommate's tendency to leave dirty clothes on the floor," she adds with a smile.

Jaime produces a white, silken glove, conspicuously stained, and drops it to the ground; it disappears.

"Oops."

Margaret cracks up.

Was that a smile? That might’ve been a smile.

Their names are called; they can fetch their respective drinks.

Drinks are retrieved! Margaret focuses on hers for a bit and doesn't start talking again immediately.

Neither does Jaime. 

Sip, sip, sip, delicious matcha tea, sip, sip.

Eventually Margaret solves the urgent problem of eating all her whipped cream before it melts and says, "Hmm, anything else we should talk about before we commit to sharing space? Maybe how to handle the grocery shopping? Like, communal staples vs. each of us having our own supply of flour and milk and stuff."

“Everyone has a different color of sticky note, if they bought something and they want it to be non-communal they put a sticky note on it. Or an outright sticker. Stickers are less likely to fall off.”

"That's clever, that way you can get something for a recipe, mark it yours until you're done, then let the leftovers be communal. So, I think I'm all set for this roommates deal if you are." 

(Is it weird to agree to be roommates with someone after one meeting? Nah, this is basically the same as picking roommates in a dorm, and anyway if Jaime was a serial killer her danger sense would have noticed.)

Eh, you know what, why not. 

”Sure.”

"Great!" Then they can schedule a date to move in.

Margaret shows up to move-in with an elegant silvery push cart containing a few boxes of mostly books, plus some dishware and cooking equipment and her laptop.

Jaime comes by, bearing no wings and a previously nonexistent set of arms. Those arms hold a suitcase each, rolling merrily across the floor; each suitcase is wreathed in wispy darkness. 

“Hello.”

"Hi! . . . Why the darkness on your suitcases?"

“Thrift shopping is easier when you can buy something incredibly tacky and fix it up with a wave of your hand.”

"Ah, I see. I'll be sure to shield my eyes from the horror when you take the darkness off." She puts everything other than the book boxes on her bed, then vanishes the pushcart and lets the books go Thud.

Jaime sets down her luggage. It fails to disappear, or brighten.

”Otherwise you might encounter... neon green. You’d go into viridescent arrest. Your death certificate, as written by an extremely confused coroner, would have question marks trailing off the edge of the page.”

Breathless giggling!

"Or maybe," she gaps between giggles, "I'd just swoon!" She adds in a horrendous British-aristocrat accent: "Neon green! It's too much for my delicate nerves!" and makes a small fainting couch and collapses onto it.

Jaime approves of this person. She starts unpacking miscellanea.

”I hear that they have Xanax for that.”

Margaret gets rid of the couch and starts putting away her own possessions. "Funny thing is, I am actually more likely than average to get hurt by unexpectedly being tacky. One of my powers is a danger sense."

“I’m still unclear on what your specific set of three is.”

"I never did list them, did I? It's the danger sense, the prophecies, and then I can see where projectiles or swarms are going to go before they do it. And sometimes people. I can't turn it off and on, but it generally comes on when it would be convenient--mostly during swarm fights."

“My darkness doesn’t do much for swarms. I make up for it with aim.”

"I don't work swarm response anymore; I did for a bit in high school but lately I've had too much going on. I'm amazed you find time for it; I hear dancing is very demanding."

“I only do it for fifteen hours a week, and I have the time. Dancing professionally is normally very demanding but I’m filling a different niche than most dancers; I put up videos and busk and perform solo, I don’t have to work with a company or stick to a schedule, and I mostly rely on my sporadic corporate work for income.”

"Oh, cool. I watched your Swan Lake video by the way, I don't have the aesthetic discernment to say anything interesting about it but it was certainly enjoyable!"

“Thanks.”

She unpacks most all of her everything, and leaves.

Naomi arrives, does the minimum amount of setup needed to make her bed, and immediately crashes, asleep, after mumbling something about needing to do something all night.

Jaime returns with her dog - Madeline - and some miscellaneous personal possessions which declined to be put in luggage. Her dog is sleek and black and very small and very enthusiastic and very cute. Margaret is peered at with mild suspicion. 

Margaret has finished unpacking and is curled up with a book, but gets up on seeing them enter. "Aww, your dog is super cute!" She walks over, crouches down, and holds out a hand for the dog to sniff. "Who's a good little dog?"

Madeline sniffs her suspiciously, and wags her tail. “Ruff, ruff!”

”That translates to ‘I am’.”

Giggle. "She's correct!"

“Yes.”

She makes up her bed, and Madeline, after further barking and petting and wagging of tails, is set upon it. She circles around on a particularly fluffy pillow, and proceeds to nap.

She leaves, and returns - bearing groceries instead of canids, this time - and cooks. Her labors produce spanakopita, paired with a sour cream dip and oddly oblong meatballs and caesar salad. Naomi and Margaret are unceremoniously offered plates.

"Ooh, thank you!" Margaret resolves to return the favor tomorrow, and digs in. "This is excellent!" 

Naomi is drowsy and similarly appreciative.

“You’re welcome.”

She leaves, again, after having given Madeline a set of meatballs of her very own. Madeline is very excited about this, and seems to content to watch her go and mess around with some sort of tennis-ball-and-rope toy.

Jaime doesn’t get back before morning.

Margaret sleeps in a pile of fluffy blankets; she spends ten minutes in the shower and forty re-accessorizing in the living room. If Jaime still isn't there, she probably stayed over at her girlfriend's. Margaret flies off to a day of classes.

Jaime arrives in the middle of her re-accessorizing. 

She doesn’t look bedraggled, exactly, it’s tricky for a magical girl who’s had more than five seconds of free time to look properly bedraggled, but she seems pretty close. 

She’s also carrying a box of glitter and a large stuffed alligator, for some reason.

Margaret hears someone come in, finishes the ring she's working on, and drops out of starscape to see who it is. "Hi Jaime. All-nighter?" she asks sympathetically.

“Let’s go ahead and call if that.”

The stuffed alligator is given to Madeline; the box of glitter is given to a shelf. 

Sounds like not the fun kind of all-nighter, then. Or she's just tired. She wants to know if her guess that the glitter is for a performance is right, but that can wait until Jaime has had some time to sleep. She says, "Okay" and goes back to meticulously assembling her jewelry.

Jaime de-wings, removes some less comfortable parts of her outfit, and crashes face first onto her bed.

Her dog, now the proud owner of a stuffed crocodile, putters over, and contentedly curls up beside her.

She sleeps.

Aww, sleepy dog snuggles. Margaret walks out in temporarily felt-muffled shoes, then takes off for campus.

She returns while afternoon is turning into evening, bearing groceries.

Jaime is awake!

And compulsively clicking a pen. And on the phone.

”Isn’t that nice,” she says. “I think that’s your problem, actually... I’m sure... No. Fuck you... Don’t you just say the sweetest things... Don’t think so... Have you tried acupuncture, I hear it’s great. Mmhm. Try me.”

Margaret goes to say something, realizes Jaime is on the phone, and instead starts assembling the majority of her groceries into a large batch of stir-fried veggies in honey peanut butter sauce. 

Jaime, still on the phone - “Has anyone ever told you that you’re a horrible person. Yes, I’ll be over tonight” - disappears into the hallway. 

Margaret cleans up after herself, eats her bowl of stir fry and gives one to Naomi (who eats it and then promptly rushes off to a capella practice), and puts the rest in the fridge, with tomorrow's portion labeled and the rest left up for grabs. Then she settles in at her desk to do homework for three hours straight.

Jaime comes back towards the end of when she’s doing homework.

She apparently hasn’t had a moment’s starscape, yet, because that is one wicked looking gash on her cheek.

This apartment notwithstanding, most of the people Margaret interacts with aren't magical girls. She blurts out, "Oh no, are you okay?--Of course you are, you can heal--what happened?"

Jaime blinks into starscape, fixes the gash, and blinks back.

“It’s been a day.”

"I'm sorry to hear it. I hope everything's okay now?"

“Let’s go with that. How’ve you been?”

Margaret can hear "stay out of my business" when somebody says it. "I've been well. Lots of biochem homework. I'll probably be seeing carbon rings behind my eyelids tonight, but it's fun. There's stir fry in the fridge if you haven't had dinner."

“Thanks.”

She peers at the stir fry, heats it up in the microwave, adds chicken broth and four different spices, and eats it.

Margaret takes a break from homework during this process and tries to get Madeline to play tug-of-war with the stuffed alligator.

Madeline approves, in a wiggly sort of way! And packs a surprising amount of jaw strength into her petite frame.

Then she will make Margaret almost overbalance! What a good dog! The best dog, even! (What makes her the best? Why, the best dog is the dog that is in front of you right now.)

Madeline is indeed the best dog in the whole world and she is very happy to have that indisputable fact recognized! Wag, wag, wag.

The stuffed alligator loses a leg. Madeline merrily runs off with it, scattering fluff higher and thither and barking.

(Jaime definitely isn’t smiling faintly at her food.)

"Boy, I'd hate to be you," Margaret remarks to the three-legged alligator, then goes back to her homework, starscaping the dog hair off her dress.

“I pity him.”

The rest of the day might pass unremarkably, if Margaret refrains from prying.

She will only pry into the secrets of chemistry.

For a while. At one point, she looks over and says, "If you want me to mind my own business I will, but if you want to talk about whatever happened, I'm happy to listen."

“My girlfriend has unusual tastes.”

"And this led to you getting stabbed somehow? . . . She didn't stab you, did she?"

“- I’m not clear where on a scale from ‘you’ve never heard of BDSM, and I have to explain the basic concept’ to ‘you have heard of it, and I have to explain how my relationship isn’t really safe, sane, or consensual, but I’m fine with it’ to ‘you don’t actually want an explanation’ I should be aiming, could I have a hint.”

"I'm--familiar with the concept? I think it involves, um, tying people up and stuff. Unsafe and not sane sounds pretty unpleasant, do you want, like, help?"

Jaime considers a number of potential responses. None of them are affirmative; most of them are bitingly acerbic.

“No.”

"Okay. The important thing is that you're happy." She doesn't seem very happy, though.

Margaret has no real way to tell whether she’s just sort of like this all the time, alas!

She doesn’t verbally respond, takes out a large canvas - already layered with a deep purple background color - and miscellaneous supplies, and starts painting something abstract and unnervingly metallic.

"Unnervingly metallic" would also describe some people's opinion of Margaret. She watches for a few minutes, then goes back to homework.

The next morning, Margaret catches Jaime on her way out the door. "Hey, is it alright if my board games group meets here tonight? Naomi's going to be on campus all evening so she doesn't care."

Jaime seems to have actually slept the previous night through, in her bed! Hallelujah. 

 “Are they going to smoke, drink, or have sex?”

"A couple of them might have a beer, but nobody's going to get noticeably drunk? They definitely will not smoke or have sex, and if they get potato chips all over the carpet I will vacuum."

“That works. Have fun.”

"Cool. You're welcome to join in if you feel like it, by the way."

“I’m good.”

Her and Madeline aren’t there, later on in the day, but a large bowl of extremely-delicious probably-homemade bean dip is in the refrigerator, and a large bag of tortilla chips is on the counter. The bean dip is labeled ‘you can use this at the DnD game and in general, it’s vegan ~ Jaime’.

The appetites of gamers expand to match the amount of delicious food available. At the end of the night the bean dip bowl has been emptied and washed, and there's a note on the fridge saying "Jaime--your cooking is fantastic and you have been voted Best Roommate in absentia. Margaret".

Jaime quietly appreciates this.

Time passes. She continues being at the apartment only sporadically, and being generally evasive about anything more personal than ‘can you pass the salt’.

Margaret continues being around slightly more often than that. She's open about her own life to the extent she doesn't seem to be boring Jaime, and frequently asks about her day but accepts the usual terse answers.

There’s a day when Margaret doesn’t see Jaime - or Madeline - at all, which is mildly unusual.

And then there’s another one. And then another one.

Her bed doesn’t seem slept in, and none of cooking ingredients are being used up.

If she went on vacation and forgot to tell anybody, that's weird. If she moved out and didn't tell anybody, that's going to be a problem when the rent is due. If she got hit by a bus, that would be awful. 

Margaret still has Jaime's phone number from when they first arranged to meet; she sends her a text.

You seem to have disappeared. Did you decide to go be a hermit in the Canadian wilderness or something? :)

It's probably fine, she probably just ended up crashing in random places a few nights in a row. 

There’s no response. 

Margaret's prophecies definitely don't always do what she wants, but she can steer a bit, focus on a certain subject and "reach".

"She wants to leave Ulyanovsk by any means necessary."

Ulyanovsk is a city in Russia.

Well, crap.

Margaret tries the police; they're doubtful that an unreproducible piece of magic is a valid thing to use in a missing persons report and also if she is in Russia they can't really do anything. Typical.

She emails all her professors to ask for an extension on her homework (she might not end up needing it, but better to be sure), tells Naomi to call her immediately if she hears anything from Jaime, and gets on a series of cheap last-minute red-eye flights from San Francisco to New York to Moscow, which is within flying distance of Ulyanovsk.

Assorted airlines appreciate her business and are only terrible in ordinary ways.

And now she is in Moscow.

She Google Translates her way through acquiring convenience store food and flaps off for Ulyanovsk.

And so she is soon in Ulyanovsk!

No suspicious characters immediately assail her. The sun is setting.

No further prophecies are immediately forthcoming, so she tries the law again. Hello local police station, her friend went incommunicado and last she knew she was here, have they seen a magical girl with darkness powers and this typical appearance, and if they haven't do they have any idea what might have befallen her?

The police have a translator on hand.

They haven’t seen anyone of the kind, but, uh, is she aware that this is a city. With over six hundred thousand people. They... can’t... really... keep track of all of them? The translator politely suggests that her friend might have gone out drinking, forgotten to call about a change in plans, lost her phone, actually why was she in Ulyanovsk anyways and how long ago did she lose contact...

If she hasn't been involved in anything dramatic enough to get the attention of the police, that's probably, if not good news, at least not bad news. She thanks the police for their time and says she probably has just lost her phone, hopefully they'll find each other soon. Then she goes off to find a library or a park or something where she can try for another prophecy. Eventually she manages to emit an address, and starts making her way toward that that instead.

Someone starts walking in step with her.

She’s 5’10, or so, and something’s a little strange about her posture, and - is that a tiny bulge, mostly covered by the placement of her purse? - but she mostly seems like an unremarkable, if pretty, woman.

“Has God guided you as one would hope and desire, during your stay in Russia?” she asks, in mildly accented English.

Oh dear, a religious person. Margaret can sort of see the Thaumatologists' point, but is firmly agnostic nonetheless. "I'm not religious, but my stay has been nice so far, thank you."

“God may work through many ways and paths, in fortune and misfortune. What path do you walk on, now and here?”

"Do I know you?"

This is what she gets for being subtle. 

“God may have sent you on a path to a specific address. To find a specific and particular person, who wishes to be sought. Down a specific and particular road, which you are currently on. And if you do go down that road, to find that person, at that address, you are going to die, divine favor or no.”

Margaret slows down, starts twisting one of her rings. "Okay. Thanks for the warning. Do you have advice on how I could find the person and avoid dying?"

The woman flicks a folded slip of paper at her.

”Be there, tomorrow, at six in the afternoon.”

Margaret grabs it and memorizes the contents. "Alright." She isn't getting any sense of hostile intent from this woman, so it's probably better to trust her than to assume they're at cross purposes and by assuming make it so.

And the woman - who never bothered introducing herself - turns, and walks away.

Margaret doubts a name would have meant anything to her anyway. And she was in that grey area where she could have been a magical girl trying to pass for baseline, so maybe the face doesn't mean anything either. 

She goes straight to the place on the card to scope it out.

It’s a building! It looks exceedingly fancy and exceedingly large, but it doesn’t seem to be open, and it doesn’t have any convenient labels attached for her viewing pleasure.

As long as it isn't a seedy warehouse for murdering people in, it's better than it might have been. She'll be there the next day, about half an hour early.

There are a number of extremely rich people present and milling about; only a few of them give her a second glance. A uniformed woman at the door smiles warmly and asks her what her name is, first using Russian and then switching seamlessly over to English.

Rich people: exotic and slightly unnerving. "Margaret Perry."

What is going on and how does this lead to her finding Jaime. Hopefully all of this will be a hilarious story five years from now.

The uniformed woman beams at her and ushers her inside.

There are... even more rich people! They seem to be having an extravagant party, as rich people do; there are statues, and tables filled with food that looks ridiculously delicious and also just ridiculous, and a hundred different conversations going on in languid Russian. The light is dim; the music, produced by a small orchestra, seems to consist entirely of instrumental pop and hip hop. There are several other magical girls in attendance; none of them look particularly like the one who told her to come.

None of the rich people immediately approach her.

She circulates, looking for 1) anyone she recognizes and 2) anyone who seems to recognize her. She especially makes sure to exchange glances with all the magical girls; any of them could be the mystery woman or for that matter Jaime in disguise for some reason. If the ridiculous food isn't also dangerous, she tries it.