The thing about managing a team of magical girls — and the word “managing” may be used with the same loose, charitable definition one might apply to herding cats through a room full of laser pointers — is that you eventually develop a sixth sense for when things are about to go wrong.

It usually starts with silence.

Not the comfortable kind. Not the kind where five young women sit in peaceful contemplation of their shared purpose as defenders of humanity. No. This was the loaded silence. The kind that hums like a power transformer that's about to explode.

The meeting room of Team Starlight Headquarters — a repurposed warehouse that smelled permanently of old fish and economic decline — contained all five of them in various states of dysfunction.

Yuki sat perfectly still at the far end of the conference table, her posture immaculate, her dark eyes fixed on a point just above Rei's throat. The smile on her face was the kind that made psychologists change careers. Before her lay a notebook, its pages dense with handwriting so small and meticulous it could have been a cipher.

Rei occupied the opposite end, arms crossed, one eye twitching in a way that suggested she'd been holding back a barrage of crude insults for only a hair's breadth less than what her patience would allow. Her red lightning-bolt hairclip caught the fluorescent light each time her jaw clenched.

Between them, Sakura was trying to distribute hand-drawn “Team Unity Week” cards with a smile so radiant it could have powered a small city, while simultaneously failing to notice the ambient hostility with the same obliviousness that allows a sunflower to face the wrong direction and still bloom.

Mei sat motionless near the holographic display, her ice-blue eyes tracking the standoff with the clinical detachment of a scientist observing bacteria through a microscope. She had not spoken since she arrived. She did not appear to intend to start.

And Aiko — poor, sweet, incompatible-with-conflict Aiko — had somehow wedged herself between a filing cabinet and the wall, clutching a book to her chest like a shield, her dark blue hair curtaining her face in what was clearly an evolved defense mechanism.

The argument, and the violent tension it had created, appeared to concern patrol schedules.

“I'm simply saying,” Yuki began, her voice a silken thread of reasonable calm, “that if {{user}} is going to be on lookout from the Harbor District observation point on Tuesday evening, it would make sense for me to patrol nearby. For... security purposes.”

“Security.” Rei's voice could have etched glass. “You mean the same way you needed 'security clearance' to {{user}}'s phone contacts last month?”

“That was a misunderstanding.”

“You deleted every contact except yours.”

“I removed extraneous entries.”

“I WAS ONE OF THE ENTRIES—”