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Without a true commanding officer and with her mission fulfilled, Chrysocolla had been drifting around Destiny City on her patrols, bereft. If anyone had asked her, which they didn't, she would've defended herself as scoping out the area -- figuring what was good patrol territory, good draining territory, since she'd come and gone and had her own stomping grounds -- but nobody was asking, which was good, because it wasn't exactly true.

It was, and it wasn't. Mostly she felt bereft and aimless. Mostly she felt weirdly lonely, in a way she didn't know a source for, and that infuriated her -- she'd spent all that time alone with nobody knowing who she really was but her, and now this was what set those feelings she didn't understand? She wanted to pulp her own feelings and bleeding heart the way one would an orange, tear the rind off and peel them apart piece by piece, like maybe the juice and meat of them would make more sense.

What'd pulled her out of her funk, a few weeks past, had been the prospect of a project. A real, capital-P, Project. And it was one that the Database had been helpful for, too!

Chrysocolla had seen him first as a civilian, as Poppy, and she'd tried not to stare. The outfit hadn't sparked any hint of recall in her, and that alone was strange enough; unless some new Royal had popped up while she was gone, he bore no sigils of Knighthood, and he seemed maybe old to be a Senshi, and the glowball... it was niggling some old thought, something she'd read once. She'd said nothing to him, then; but the next week she'd come back in uniform, by the rooftops, and felt the aura - unrecognizable, strange, new - and she'd put a name to a face, cautiously.

Kurma, maybe. It was hard to say. Nobody had put any updated reports on him in in ages, but she'd never seen anyone else with that sort of aura, with an object like that. And she'd learned patience, over these past few years; she watched him, for a bit, chatting with vendors like he hadn't a care in the world, and then she'd taken off before he had the chance to really look at her, or before the chance any Senshi or Knights got funny ideas about her her aura was lingering too long in one place, alone.

It'd taken Chrysocolla a few weeks to be certain that this was part of his routine, but, well, she was certain enough, and she was getting tired of waiting; she sat on the roof of a nearby building, kicking her legs aimlessly. He should be showing up around this time, right? She was basically certain. After that, well, she'd figure out what she was going to do from there, but ideally she'd drag him to Laurelite by the starseed; and if that didn't work, she'd improvise.

Any minute now. Okay, maybe she'd jumped the gun and gotten here a little early, but... that was just being prepared, right?

She didn't fistpump, or anything as visibly half-undignified as that, but Chrysocolla nodded fiercely at this little victory. She wasn't crazy! She'd been right, he was on a schedule, and even if he had sensed her before or any of these times it hadn't been offputting. Why should it be? It was a big city. Plenty of Senshi and Agents and Knights were always out at god-knows-what hours of the day at god-knows-where locations doing as they pleased, within reason, and ideally her aura blended.

Or maybe he wasn't sensing her at all? The database report hadn't been all that clear. Magical almost always meant aura-sensing, but Chrysocolla had meant people who could do it in their sleep and people who could barely do it even if they spent all their energy and concentration and focus on it. He could've been the latter.

She might've been a little frustrated, but she wasn't going to be rude about it. 'Prospective ally' that he'd been all the way back when, violence would ruin that prospect all too quickly. So instead she slipped out from between shadows and walls, tried to sound like a Normal Human Girl, and went "...Kurma?" in a tone of voice that implied more uncertainty than anything else.

Improvisation. Was she good at it? There were better by far, but, well, she was passable. It should be good enough. If that didn't get his attention and pull him over, she'd try something else.

"Oh! I mean, um -- yes, of course. Take your time."

It'd made its way out of Chrysocolla's mouth without any real mental input from her, all autopilot; she winced a bit and walked over to lean against a wall, out of the way of the line, persistently visible.

"I'm not rude," Chrysocolla said as she tentatively took the plate, vaguely offended in a way that didn't ring out in full clarity via her voice, "and I figured you probably weren't going to run away, so I wasn't going to just go after you in the middle of a public place," like that explained everything. To her, probably it did.

"You are Kurma, right? I've been out of town for a while, but I recognized the..." she gestured vaguely. "Orb. From descriptions."

"You've been gone for a while."

"It's a while for us," Chrysocolla interjected, eyes wide. "A lot of people have died since then, so it feels longer than it is, too." A moment of contemplation, then, looking for phrases and words; this wasn't first-nature, even if it was easier than it'd been, once. "If you want another slice, you can have this one, I'm really not that hungry right now..."

She ran the fingers of her free hand through her hair, soothing flyaways back into place. "There's not anybody like you, though? Or at least not anybody the Negaverse knows about, anyway. Do you mean you're not the only one now, or that you weren't always...?"

"Sorry," Chrysocolla said, sounding unapologetic, sounding more like she was commenting on the weather than making any kind of apology, "but I'm not done? So you don't get to be, either."

Her hand flashed out, through cloth and flesh; after the split second it took for her to confirm to herself she had him, it was time for focus-shift-step and a teleport landing in Negaspace. Nobody should be in this area, not at this time, not generally ever; it wasn't near her office, wasn't near anyone's office, was a flat stretch of dark hallway and ruin. There were auras at the edge of her senses, but no Generals or Eternals; nobody who might get in her way.

"I asked you a question; it's not nice to ignore that, you know? I wasn't even going to hurt you if you just answered me." She hadn't been planning on it, anyway. Not that it meant much. Violence came so easy.

There was something half-undignified, then, about the slow transition of Chrysocolla's face; she knew what she was supposed to be feeling, what she was supposed to be holding -- certainly she had pulled enough starseeds, held her own in her hands enough times, to know where a starseed sat in someone's body. Had she somehow overshot? It was comical, even, how certainty gave way to distressed confusion.

But there was -- there was nothing, in reach of her fingers. Nothing to hold. Here she stood with her hand in a man's chest, and she had nothing to show for it.

He had no starseed at all. Of this, she was certain. Or if he had one - which he had to, somewhere, didn't he, that was how it worked - it sat elsewhere, and his body sat empty. Which - it had to be that. It had to be, didn't it? The same way she could pull hers out and still function. (But, no, it couldn't be that either; nothing made sense to explain it, and it was the worst sort of paradigm upheaval.) It was --

The movement was ungainly, sudden; she jerked her hand out in a spastic movement, eyes wide, and took an unconscious step backwards. "What -- what are you?!"

"Wait --"

But by the time the word made its way out of her mouth, before Chrysocolla could formulate anything further to say, Kurma was already gone.

Stupid. Stupid. She shouldn't have let go of him, no matter how startled she was, how distressed her discovery had made her; she scuffed her heel across the floor, half-furious and half-upset, and tried to make her hands stop shaking.

Metallia had seen that. Of course Metallia had seen that. The first time she'd ever really gotten Metallia's attention, something Chrysocolla had dreamed of and wanted for years, and it was this, a failure, it was --

She dragged the heels of her hands down her face, took a deep breath, and tried very hard not to cry even the slightest bit. She probably needed to go talk to Queen Laurelite, but maybe that could wait -- at least a few minutes. Just while she caught her breath and got herself under control.