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Alexa had fallen down the research rabbit hole hard that very first night. There was a lot to look through. Even if she kept the search strictly to Western European fairies and ignored any other spirits or creatures that could have kinda fallen into that category, there were dozens of stories to look through. It didn't take long until she found some stuff that hadn't made it into her kid's books. There was this one story about a girl who saved her boyfriend by holding onto him even though the fairy queen turned him into all kinds of nasty stuff. There was another one a fairy goddess who bit off a jerkface king's ear , which, through some loopholes meant he couldn't rule anymore.

The fairies she was reading about seemed pretty hardcore. Hopefully some snacks would be enough to get on their good side.

She never did quite get to figuring out what the fairies ate, though. Food came up pretty often, since bad fairies liked to mess with people's pantries, apparently, and there were lots and lots of warnings to never, ever eat the fairy food. It didn't say too much about what the food was, though, other than presumably very yummy looking since they needed all those warnings.

A bunch of the fairy stories seemed to be set in Ireland, so she tried looking up Irish food, which seemed pretty normal except that apparently they ate their potato chips on sandwiches.

That was the story of how Alexa ended up eating a potato chip sandwich at five in the morning. No fairies showed up.

That was pretty much the end of her research journey, though. She had work the next day, and after that her brain was too mushy to focus on anything but dog videos, and the next day she ended up looking up dog stuff instead, and before she knew it it was a couple weeks later and she was getting a text from Mariposa.

She grinned at her phone. "I. Love. Pizza." she texted back first, because that was the most important part. "Cheese or pepperoni is good."

She spent the next few minutes pawing through her parent's cuboards. There weren't a ton of extra baking supplies, although she did pocket a bottle of vanilla before texting back, "Give me like an hour to get groceries and I'll be there! I'm excited! ❤️✨"

True to her word, she showed up about an hour later with a bulging grocery bag and began to knock enthusiastically on door 417. She was grinning. There had been some stuff at the store that she was excited to show off. "Mariposa? It's me. Hi," she said.

Alexa might've been imagining things, but she was pretty sure that she could smell pizza through the door. That was enough to get her bouncing up and down on her toes a little, but it wasn't until her new friend opened the door that she grinned.

"Mariposa! Hi," she said with a little wave as she stepped into the apartment, her shoes coming off the second she got permission. "It smells so good. Even if this experiment doesn't work, you figured out how to summon me. It's pizza. And soda, that sounds awesome." She looked around wide-eyed as they made their way into the kitchen. It was cute, in a cozy kind of way, which made sense given who's house it was. Mari was cute in a warm kind of way, too.

She was prepared, too. Alexa had to do a double take at all the baking supplies, and she focused the longest on the two whole mixers. She'd known she was coming into the house of a semi-professional, but that just kicked it up a whole other level. "Okay, I'm impressed," she said, looking back towards the other girl. "Here, wanna see what I got?"

She dropped her shopping bag on the first available sliver of counter, and she she pulled out the eggs and flour first. "Here's what you asked for, and then-" with extra flare, she held up a plastic tube with something sparkly inside. "It's glitter you can eat! Oh, and these." It was a small tub of the fancy sprinkles, shaped like flowers and leaves. "The label says 'garden party' so I figured since they were in a garden?"

There hadn't been any fairy shaped ones.

Alexa gave the tube of glitter a little shake, just to show off the full extent of its sparkliness, and wow, was it sparkly. It was so sparkly that she couldn't help just flipping it around in her hand for a couple seconds and staring, even as she heard the oven door click open and the glorious pizza smell got even stronger. "Yeah, that's what I thought. This stuff is like, mesmerizing," she said.

The call of pizza could only be resisted for so long, though. Mariposa didn't have to tell her twice. Alexa did her best to put the sprinkles and glitter in as neat of a pile as she could with her other ingredients in between Mariposa's stuff. When she was satisfied it wasn't about to fall over, she skipped across the kitchen, grabbed a plate and the first piece of cheese pizza that she saw, and shoved it straight into her mouth.

Then she winced, put the rest of the slice down quick, and started fanning her burned tongue.

"Ow. Ow," she said, working on getting herself a soda. "Okay, maybe I should have waited, but in my defense it was delicious. Good job, Mari." After she poured herself a cup, she took a big gulp of cola, which seemed to go down much better, and she gave a satisfied little sigh.

Leaving her pizza on the counter to cool for a second, she went over to peek at what the other girl was writing. "What's your idea?" she asked. "I bet it's something super cool. You seem good at this. And since I'm sure it's gonna be great-" she looked up with her best puppy dog eyes. "We do get to eat some of the batter, right? Since I bought ingredients and everything?"

She had not gone grocery shopping just to not eat any sweets.

Alexa didn't mind the giggles. She laughed, too. It was kinda funny that she'd burned her tongue from getting too excited about pizza. It didn't stop her from taking another bite while Mariposa chose her food, although she did at least blow on it this time.

Oh yeah. Now she could really appreciate that cheesy deliciousness.

"Of course!" she said. "I only work part time so in the summer I've got plenty of time for shenanigans. I'm probably gonna be all swamped again once classes start, though." She pressed her lips together at that, but only for a second. Education was important. She didn't wanna work at the mall forever, and she was liking school a lot more now that she was taking more design classes and less math.

Speaking of which, Alexa wasn't any stranger to messy concept sketches, and her eyes went as wide looking over the sketchbook as they would have looking at a full-on ten layer wedding cake. "Woah, this is great," she said. "Way better than anything I could have come up with, and little mini cakes? That's so smart. Like, a fairy buffet." She beamed."We're gonna explode their little sugar loving brains!"

There was a slight pause. "But in a good way, obviously. Vanilla seem fairy-y, I brought some of that, too." Chocolate was probably Alexa's favorite, but it somehow seemed a little, like, heavy.

She giggled again at the reassurance that they'd get to eat some cake, only looking a little bit like she was actually relieved. "Okay, so how do we start?" she glanced over at all the spoons and mixers lined up on the counter before she offered, "Mixing stuff?"

As they chatted, Alexa reached in a pulled the last thing out of her bag- the vanilla. Although, she didn't look quite as proud of this one. In fact, her face fell as Mari mentioned vanilla beans and she looked over the label again.

"Crap, this is imitation," she said. "Not vanilla bean at all. Do you think they're gonna notice?" She sucked in her cheeks. If these fairies were as finicky as they seemed, having gone back into hiding and everything, they would have to notice if the vanilla was less than perfect.

It wasn't like she could do much about it, though. The last of this week's spending money had gone towards the flour. She'd gotten name brand for that, at least, and large eggs instead of medium.

The measuring had to go on, though, so after another quick bite of pizza, Alexa made her way over to look through the cups and spoons. "Those are some weirdly specific measurements, but okay," she said. "This isn't too bad, though. You should see my room." The ring of measuring spoons wasn't too hard to find, and she slipped off the ones they needed. "Actually, I'd probably clean if you came over, but right now? Imagine a tornado." She found the two-thirds cup, too, and headed back to hand them over.

"Okay, what's with baking powder and baking soda, though?" she asked. "I get that they're different things, so shouldn't they have, like, actually different names?" It seemed like that would save a bunch of people a bunch of confusion.