Welcome to Gaia! ::

She wasn't sure if something happening twice counted as a pattern or not, but this was the second time that Sylvite'd had the seemingly unique experience of having to go after someone in the Rift, getting them back safe, and then having them end up as her subordinate.

No, it wasn't quite as dramatic this time. She hadn't literally carried Fulgurite's unconscious body from a youma trap all the way back up to the castle infirmary, or hand-delivered the transfer paperwork that made him hers to a General king.

She had taken extra care to shield Fulgurite in the battle with the youma they were calling Whim, though. She'd kept an eye on him, along with several others, as they made their escape and rode back up to Negaspace in an exhausted caravan. It made her happy, seeing the transfer paperwork delivered to her and knowing that she was gonna get to keep an eye on him longer term.

Like, she was already emotionally invested, so it only seemed right.

She sent a message over the tablets to see if he could come check in and then spent some time making sure her office was in perfect shape. Since she'd had a meeting with another new underling not too long ago, the piles of paperwork mixed with cute stationary were already pretty tame, but she made sure to re-stack them just in case. She dusted off the Squishmallows on her shelf and the picture frames on her wall. She changed out the batteries in her fairy lights.

Then she sat at her desk with her hands folded in front of her and tried to look like she knew what she was doing.

Sylvite grinned when she saw him, especially when she saw that he was looking mostly okay after the whole Rift thing. Then she hopped out of her chair so that she could have a little bit more elbow room and kinda beckon him inside with both hands.

"Hi, Fulgurite. Welcome, welcome. I'm pretty excited about all this," she said. In fact, she was practically bouncing as she headed back over to her chair and plopped down, cross legged. At least she folded her hands in front of her on her desk so that she looked a little more professional.

"You can sit down, too. Tell me if my new pillows are any good." She nodded to the two chairs across the desk from her. Once, they'd been standard issue, but now each one had a very fluffy pink cushion on it that, along with being adorable, hopefully made them less awful to sit on.

"Plus there's snacks," she said, pointing an elbow towards a plastic bucket that was already filled with Halloween candy. "I know. I'm not as fancy as Axinite. Maybe if they ever make me a sovereign I'll figure out how to make the homemade stuff, but this is pretty good."

Maybe she wouldn't, even then. It turned out trying to measure and mix flour and stuff was just not her thing.

It wasn't exactly hard to impress Sylvite, but her grin stayed wide as she watched the face that Fulgurite was making as he sunk into her pillows. She always had a soft spot for seeing other people happy, so if the pillows could make people smile like that, they were definitely keepers. "Just Target when they were running clearance on dorm stuff," she said. It was actually pretty impressive that someone else hadn't snatched them up first. She considered it a lucky find.

While Fulgurite talked about his curry making skills, Sylvite dug around in her bucket until she pulled out a pack of Skittles. She popped it open and started chewing on one of them. "That's really cool," she said, and she meant it. Making food was confusing. "I dunno if I've ever had curry, but. I'd try it."

She didn't know if she liked spicy food at all. The closest thing she'd had to, like, spice or seasoning growing up had been ketchup. The menu at her house had been super basic, and she hadn't branched out much. The steamed buns that Gismodine had brought her the other day had been pretty good, which had her feeling a lot more curious about what else was out there.

For now, they had business to focus on, though. Sylvite drew her hands away from the Skittles and folded them in front of her all official. "Okay, so this is get-to-know-you time. I know we kinda met before, but," she gave a sharp huff just at the memory. On top of being awful, the Rift was kind of a blur.

"I don't know your magic, or even your sphere. I wanna know how long you've been in the Negaverse, too, and what you've been up to. That kind of stuff."

She was sure she'd have more questions once she figured out the basics.

"You're gonna spoil me," said Sylvite, already salivating a little bit as she tried to imagine what kind of homemade stuff Fulgurite might bring over. Would it be weird to to order her underlings to make her food if they turned out to be good at it?

It would probably be weird. Like, power-trippy, the kind of thing that she was trying really hard not to do.

Oh well. She'd just have to ask nicely, instead. That worked a decent amount of the time.

She nodded at the description of his magic, grabbing a piece of cat themed paper and a sparkly pen to start taking notes. Although she stopped pretty quickly to blink at him when she heard when he'd been recruited. For some reason, she hadn't expected him to have been around for longer than she'd been.

"I guess that's about a year before I got involved," she said. "I remember, uh," she clicked the pen a few times, "A little bit of the old stuff? Like, I was fourteen and a Lieutenant at the time, I wasn't really into organizational politics or whatever, but I definitely remember the invasion," her lips twisted, just saying the word, "And how it felt like everything got overhauled afterwards."

That had all been forever ago. Which, coming back to Fulgurite, meant that the senshi had a decent amount of seniority. It sounded like his promotion had been about a year before hers, which meant they'd been on the same pace back then.

Then this year, she'd gotten a second promotion while he'd gotten transferred to her, because he was in a rut or something. Apparently it was because of his sister? She was gonna need to find out more about that.

"Yeah, that sounds awful," she said, and then paused before she asked, "Is she okay?"

Sylvite had done a couple of missing person investigations at this point and none of them had ended up great.

Keeping it casual, Sylvite quickly added, "Was there something specific you got your promotion for? I'm trying to figure out, like, your strengths."

Okay, so his sister had turned up eventually. That was good. From a practical, General perspective, it saved Sylvite having to go look through all the services the new hospital provided and seeing if she could get him grief counseling or whatever. She was happy working at the hospital now. Fulgurite was back doing Negaverse stuff. That was all okay.

Now she just needed to make sure he was as equipped as possible for said Negaverse stuff. That meant making sure he didn’t walk out of the office feeling like he didn’t have any strengths.

“Everyone’s good at something,” she said, smile bright. “You did a bunch of missions? That shows loyalty. Initiative.”

To emphasize, she started a column called strengths on her notes, which she wasn’t hiding from him. Under it, she wrote loyalty and initiative and debuff magic in glittery ink. Arguably the initiative had gone away a little bit recently, but that was okay. They could work on that.

“So you’re in GenOps,” she said, clicking the pen shut again. “And you’re a Super, which means that you should probably know that just because it’s the default and ‘cause it’s, like, General Operations, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have a specialty. GenOps is the big draining branch, and then at higher levels, they do a bunch of the training for new recruits.”

She shifted a little bit in her chair, looking back up towards Fulgurite. “Is that what you want to be focusing on?”

“I dunno if I’d say suggestions, exactly,” said Sylvite with a little shrug. “For that, I’d have to talk to you for more than five minutes of time when we’re not, y’know, almost dying.”

Yeah, she might’ve been able to have gotten some information on him in the youma fight if she’d known she was supposed to be scouting him, but again, there had been other things to worry about at the time. She underlined loyalty as she thought back to it, though. She remembered him staying pretty close to her and watching her back.

“I can tell you about the options for now, and you can think about it for next time we meet up.” Sylvite kept physical copies of pretty much all the Negaverse’s basic files around her desk, partly so she could highlight and bookmark them and partially because she knew Axinite did it, and he obviously knew what he was doing. She dug through a drawer, tossing a few papers off to the side before she set the one with the branch descriptions in front of him.

Information had a bunch of sparkles drawn around it.

“That’s the handbook definitions, but, like, from what I’ve seen?” Sylvite leaned back, popped another couple Skittles. “Information’s my branch, yeah. It’s all about scouting and knowing the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses. Makes you feel like a total spy. There’s also a science side to Information, like, resource development?” Sylvite grinned. She was always ready to talk about her branch, but she moved on.

“I dunno if you can just ask to join Infiltration. A lot of people just get recruited for it, like journalists and celebrities and stuff.”

Sylvite didn’t think about Infiltration much, but, apparently they were the ones who had been working on securing the hospital, so she’d give them credit for that.

“SpecOps might be a good choice if you like missions? Or like,” she squinted, thinking back to the youma cave, “If you wanna work on running missions, so they go better than whatever happened last time. Someone really should. I guess Information can help with that, too?” She was determined to help, after all. Hopefully she could get the others involved.

“Plus SpecOps obviously sees the most fighting.”

Oh hey, he liked the sparkles! She sat up a little bit straighter in her own chair, wiggle her shoulders happily, ‘cause she was pretty proud of her ability to make boring paperwork look cute.

Also, she just really liked her branch.

“Yeah, I can tell you pretty much anything you wanna know about Information. It’s my whole thing. No pressure to join, though. You gotta find something that’s your whole thing, y’know?”

He didn’t say he was a scientist, and he only seemed so excited about the whole concept of being a spy. Then again, Sylvite hadn’t been that interested in a branch called “Information” until she’d started dipping her toes in.

She went quiet for a couple seconds, pressing the back of her pen into her notepad. All of her subordinates so far, officially, had been lieutenants that were just getting started with the basics. She hadn’t had much time to think about what to do with someone who was farther along between the time she’d been told she was getting assigned Supers and the time they’d started showing up at her office.

She clicked her tongue once, then said, “That can be your first project. Choose a branch. If you wanna stay GenOps, that’s okay, but I want you to choose it, yeah?”

She put the pen down and folded her hands, back to being all official. “I like to do check ins once a week, when you do quota. Just like this, nothing fancy or scary, but you can tell me what you’re thinking about branch stuff then.”

The formality didn’t last. She reached out to open another pack of Skittles. “I’ve been doing Thursday nights with the others, but if there’s a time that works better for you, I’ll see what I can do.”

He got it. He understood that he was a Super now and that it meant having, like, convictions, and personal projects and stuff. Plus, if his sister going missing had been throwing him off, and if she was back now, that would mean he should be able to focus a bit more on Negaverse stuff.

If he kept having a hard time with it anyway, she could help.

It was all gonna be great. She'd make sure of it.

The question about if they were a team had her sucking in her cheeks for a couple seconds, then popping another Skittle to give her more time to think. "I mean, up until now I just had two Lieutenants checking in."

It had been three for a while, but. She wasn't gonna get into all that right now. Nope.

"I just got assigned you and another Super, though, so maybe we could start doing some team stuff? If you did wanna stay GenOps and get more into training stuff, I did think maybe you could help with the Lieutenants. "

She chewed some more candy and thought some more, then flipped to another page in her notepad and scribbled something. This one was labeled Gismodine and she wrote down Fulgurite???

"Might put you with one of them anyway, actually? He'd had some nasty run ins with Order, doesn't like patrolling alone much."

Yeah. A team sounded like a decent idea, then the others could support each other, too.