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Over the past few weeks, Sylvite had managed to get a bunch of evidence collected for a couple of her personal projects. There had been houses that vanished into thin air. There had been alien merchants. The most interesting one of all had been the fairies, since it had been the second time that she'd seen something like that around during a festival season.

She knew it wasn't gonna last forever. The festival was over now. The workers had been fast about breaking everything down, too. Just yesterday, most of the temporary stalls had still been up, even though all the stuff that had been for sale was gone, but now even the bigger structural pieces were mostly folded up and getting packed away into trucks and trailers.

Now that the gates were closed and the area wasn't packed with people, it was harder to blend in, but that wasn't gonna stop Sylvite. She needed to figure out if the magical creatures had left, too. They might just have been attracted to the energy of all the people that had been here, but if they were still around, that meant it was something else. Her powers made it easy for her to jump the fence, and then it was just a matter of finding some shadows behind a stall to hide in while she looked around and got her bearings. It looked like there were still a handful of workers cleaning things up. Hmm. Maybe she could get some energy, too.

The empty grounds were pretty quiet. They weren't silent or anything. The workers Sylvite was watching would grunt instructions to each other every once in a while, but they were far away and it was quiet enough until she heard a voice not to far away mumbling something. Sylvite pressed her back flat against the stall to make herself even tinier while she looked around the shadowy, behind the scenes area she had settled into. "Funnel cakes?" she whispered to herself. That did sound pretty good.

As she focused in, she noticed something that had slipped her attention during her fence hopping adventures. There was a Negaverse aura in the area! It was just a basic one, but it was still exciting, and she let herself lean forwards a little with a smile on her lips.

After searching for a couple seconds, she found a smushed and very stale looking pile of french fries, then a popped balloon, and then the flash of lamplight on someone's hair. A lot of someone's hair. Wow. It took some squinting to see the girl underneath.

Sylvite scooted over to the edge of her shadow. "Pssst." She waved, still smiling. "Are you a senshi? Also, hi!"

It was a senshi! The second Sylvite got that confirmation, she hopped out from behind her stall and went to join the other girl behind hers.

"My name's Sylvite," she said, sliding down into a seat a couple feet away from her as she got a better look at her. It was hard to make out much detail in the shadow, but the gold trim on her uniform caught the dim light. "Oh wow. Your outfit's super cute!" Her smile cracked even wider into a full grin. The senshi always got the cutest clothes. "What're you the senshi of?"

She glanced out her side of the alleyway at a few of the so-called easy pickings, and she tilted her head. "Nah, my commanding officer isn't too nitpicky about where I go," she said, "And I'm actually doing okay on my quota from when the festival was in full swing, although more is always good." Sylvite had always preferred the subtle, bumping into passerbys approach to draining, which was great if you could find a crowd, but if you wanted to just choose a target, this place was probably the place to do it.

She shifted into a comfy, cross-legged seat. "I'm doing an investigation!"

Sylvite beamed at the compliment, fluffing out her ruffly little half-skirt as much as she could in the narrow space. There were plenty of interesting people in the Negaverse. Sylvite knew that, deep down, but she'd run into a few of the stuffy ones back to back recently and it was always great meeting someone who was down to chat about fashion without looking at her like she was crazy.

"Rumors?" she said, leaning a little closer. "Woah, that sounds awesome! Do you get to hear what the rumors are saying? Do you know things?"

Oh, right. This was the thing where she got into people's personal space. She was supposed to be working on that. She sat up straight again, sitting on her hands. "I'm in Information branch, right? So it's kinda my job to know as much as I can about everything, and that includes rumors." Her grin softened the tiniest bit into a smug little smile.

She peeked back out towards the main area, just for a second. Still no floating spirits, just the same people and the same smell of old food. "What I heard about this place was that there was magical stuff. Not just the stuff we're used to, either. Fairies. Aliens. Shiny rocks." She released her hands and wiggled her fingers. "And there totally was! I mean, while the festival was here at least. I'm trying to see if they're still around or not."

She rolled her shoulders back, still the picture of confidence. "And yeah! draining gets easier once you get promoted. You don't have to touch people anymore. You can just walk by and like," she gestured like she was tugging energy from a passerby.

Sylvite frowned, just a tiny bit. “I guess that would be too much to ask. It’s not very attack-y to eavesdrop on people. Useful,” she added with a pointed tilt of her head, “But not attack-y. It still sounds really cool to make people squirm, though! If we find any troublemakers you should show me how it works.” Her magic investigations did focus on senshi magic more than anything else, and it was nice when her life wasn’t on the line and she just got to see all the cool things her Negaverse friends could do.

She shook her head a little when she heard about her draining tactics, though. “I mean I try not to drain people until they fall asleep? Not unless it’s an emergency. If you just take a little from a lot of people, you don’t have to drag anyone around.” That didn’t sound fun, and also it seemed like it wasn’t the nicest way to do things. Getting drained didn’t hurt, but getting treated like a sack of potatoes for too long might. “Although it does take forever when there’s not a festival on,” she added with a little sigh.

“And yeah, of course! There was a garden display thing over at the edge of the festival. That’s where the fairy was.” Sylvite squinted, obviously deep in thought. “I mean, unless it was a ghost. It was a little weird. I got lured into a hedge,” she said. Actually she was pretty sure she’d ran right into that hedge mostly under her own willpower, but this super fashionable girl who would hopefully be her new friend did not need to know that. “And even if they are all gone I bet we can find something fun to get into!”

There was always fun around if you looked hard enough.

Sylvite grinned even bigger. "Awesome! Let's see what we can find," she said. "The garden display was over on that side." She nodded to the left and then peeked out from behind the stall to see what the situation was looking like. Luckily, it seemed like the workers had mostly gone back to, y'know, working, and that left the coast pretty clear.

"We should be good to head over there," she said. "Although we should probably be sneaky unless you wanna knock some more people out." That was always an option, and maybe the one that she should be encouraging, since energy was always good and all, but knocking people out when they didn't have to was also the kind of thing that would get Order saying they were evil.

Sylvite hopped from shadow to shadow, pressing herself flat against the backs of stalls like she was a ninja and sprinting through the extra visible areas with all her super speed before she glanced back to Aletheia. Okay, maybe it wasn't super necessary to be all secret, but it sure was fun!

It didn't take them too long to get to the garden, especially at powered speed. It seemed to have lasted better than the rest of the festival, too. There were still tall hedges and arbors with climbing roses and plenty of other stuff that you could expect from a garden. All of the lights and crystalline sculptures and the seasonal decorations that had given it that over the top sparkly magical quality were gone, but there were still enough plants that Sylvite thought a fairy might want to hang out there.

"No. No. Yes," she answered as they reached the outer hedge. She ducked under an arbor and into the garden proper, then stopped to give the senshi her full attention.

"I've seen little ones before, but this one was like, the size of a person. It was all shimmery and see-through and hard to make out, exactly. Uh, what's the word?" Sylvite paused and spent a couple seconds chewing on her lip before she brightened. "Ethereal! It was ethereal. And yeah, it was beautiful."

She clasped her hands in front of her chest and spun around slowly now that they weren't hiding, entranced just by the memory of it.

Then she squinted into the shadows, wondering if it would pop out again. "I could see wings, which made me think it wasn't a ghost."

In that moment, everything fell into place. Sylvite's eyes went huge.

The queen. That would explain why she was so big. That would explain why all the other little fairies she'd seen had been tiny, and why the big one had seemed to have an entourage. It would explain why she was just so mysterious and just so fast.

"That makes so much sense," she said, talking a little faster than usual because she was so excited. "You're so smart, Alethia!"

What to do with the information took a little longer to figure out. Sylvite sucked in her cheeks and stayed quiet for a couple seconds as she looked through a rosebush for any sign of this fairy queen.

The mention of wishes caught her attention, though, and she glanced back over, grinning. "Oh, that would be cool! Maybe if we're lucky it'll be one of those where if we catch her she has to grant us wishes, like all those stories about people catching golden fishes and leprechauns and stuff."

It was a stretch, sure, but still fun to think about. "We'd have to be pretty fast to catch it, though," she said. She tilted her head. "What would you wish for?"