There's apparently a pretty high ceiling on this. She can now stop a loaded box truck. Pacific Kaiju can get bigger than that, but she'd be able to respond to a lot of Rockies or Atlantic monsters.

That is a power that seems worth some investment. 

(Separately, the Pax Corps recruiters will receive a quiet report that Isabella didn't seem particularly interested in manufacturing work, but nevertheless handled her internship tasks without complaint.)

How does she handle the aerial training? 

Her dyspraxia doesn't hinder her in the air but she has no native athletic talent.

"No native athletic talent" is not an insurmountable obstacle! There's only so far they can get in two weeks, but the trainers are very good. If Isabella wants to fight kaiju one day, and is willing to put in quite a lot of practice, that can probably be arranged. They also have some advice on combat wing designs. 

A bit of aerial patrolling is part of this internship, but in areas that are well-patrolled enough that it's just swarm duty.

They'll have to coordinate with the stylist about that but she's not fussed about exactly how long her feathers are for her own self. She doesn't mind patrolling but her advantage is very much at coalesced monsters, not swarms; anything she has to shoot at or step on is a whole separate ballgame in terms of making her limbs cooperate.

Yeah, they don't dock her points or anything, it's mostly just a way to give the trainees some amount of genuine combat experience, even if the stakes are no higher than "minor treatable nibbles before you fly away". Every now and then, someone who did fine in training freezes up when an actual swarm goes for them, and it's better to catch that sort of thing before mistakes are lethal.

After a final stint at a physics lab, Isabella's internships wrap up for the summer! She gets an official communication summarizing her work experience, both for her own benefit and for potential future employers, including some (generally positive) comments that the Boulder team and others were willing to mark as shareable. It includes some rough estimates of the value of the work she might find in manufacturing, medicine, physics research, and kaiju-slaying. 

She also gets a follow-up call from Roshaun, inviting her to talk about her future plans and ask any questions she may have. 

Bella appreciates the work they did finding stuff for her to spend her summer on, and especially the stepping stones to Paladin-class performance and the exposure to several types of workplace. She will probably hit them up again next summer and would be interested in one-off weekend- or take-a-couple-days-off-school short term gigs if any that are especially good fits come up.

They have a longer-term summer training program in partnership with the Paladins, though they warn her she'll need some extracurricular practice during the year if she's serious about going that route. They also have a medical program, if she'd rather do that; her power has fewer direct uses in medicine, but it's not zero.

She'll get a few offers for gig work over the coming year, mostly from labs that want to do SCIENCE with stopped things.

She'll take SCIENCE gigs, she likes money. Extracurricular practice like what?

Getting better at flying, mostly. The joint Pax Corps / Paladin magical girl equivalent of JROTC can teach key practical skills, but flying stamina and muscle memory take consistent practice to build and maintain. It's not required, but Paladin training is reportedly pretty tough if you do no outside practice and people do sometimes fail out that way. 

Doing approximately any kind of coordinated team athletic practice (including, of course, flying ones) also helps somewhat.

She's in the magical girl club at school and it has a flying section but not really a hardcore one. She can push herself harder during those, though? Is there some kind of curriculum for this she could be following?

As a matter of fact, there is! It's mostly cardio and the flying equivalent of pushups and situps (and some actual pushups and situps, because flapping uses rather a lot of muscle groups), plus some basic aerial maneuvers. Most exercises come with multiple alternatives for the same muscle groups, and there's some fancier aerobatics that can be worked up to if one is so inclined; cadets are encouraged to pick what works for them. There's some overlap with the flying club, but the later workouts have a much higher difficulty cap.

The athletic requirements for the program aren't that high; there are, however, labels of what proportion of cadets typically reach which workout milestones at the beginning, middle, and end of training. The recommended milestones can usually be hit with a few hours a week of practice.

She can do pushups and situps, those don't involve balance at all. Though maneuvers are far more fun.

Then she'll be in decent shape for next year's summer training program! 

Hooray!

(Xander has spent that year on, effortfully and with many many false starts, managing to squeak her up a hair past the pro stylist's standard.)

(There's an option to do additional power testing every few months. If Xander and Isabella document their progress, Xander's work is impressive enough to go on a resume when he's looking for stylist programs.) 

The summer program is challenging, but not brutally so. It involves a lot of exercise, drills, target practice, and auxiliary skills like first aid and emergency evac. There's also some individual power-coaching tailored to combat applications. (Isabella's mostly consists of practice acquiring and switching targets under pressure.)

It's not quite full military discipline, but they are uncompromising about respecting the chain of command even when it includes non-magical superiors. One magical girl takes offense to this and is unceremoniously flunked from the program.

(There is, however, a mandatory training about illegal orders and where to draw the line.) 

Cadets who pass the basic screening, and who thoroughly demonstrate the ability to follow (legal) orders, are allowed to accompany a Paladin team in a well-patrolled region where the few monsters to be found aren't too large. 

(She doesn't have routine access to stoppable loaded box trucks but he does make her write down when she's got improvements.)

She's interested in evac and first aid, but dubious about military discipline. Like, she gets it but it's just going to be constantly uncomfortable like wearing something itchy. What things make orders illegal in this context?

Mostly orders that violate international law, which boils down to "don't do war crimes" for fairly broad definitions of war crimes. (This rarely comes up for Paladins in real life, though it's come up for similar organizations in other countries.) Also, while the military can recruit willing members from the Paladins in times of need, Paladins are not obligated to perform non-kaiju-related military work and should at least report any orders they receive which might constitute such. (This usually doesn't come up.) 

Well, the worst they can do if something bad comes up is flunk her, she's sixteen and not subject to court martial. Probably the orders are all going to be field coordination shit.

In practice, basically yes. 

It is okay to frame "efficient battlefield coordination" as "following orders". Sure.

Well, some people do sometimes want to find excuses to ignore their squad leaders. Or, like, fail to show up to their assigned postings on time. And orders also include things like "you're camping in the mountains for a low-support scenario drill and the squad leader issues KP duty and monster watch assignments that seem unfair." 

It is a little weird to have magical girls peeling potatoes instead of bringing along someone cheaper for that kind of thing but if the point is to know how to work with the camping equipment sure.