People move around the hotel in the night, but if that doesn't wake her, nobody disturbs her until morning. 

She sleeps lightly, but not that lightly. 

She goes down to the grocery store again. "Hello again, I don't think I actually got your name," she says to the clerk. "I'm Thorn." 

"That's a weird name. I'm Adam."

"Alas, we don't choose the names we're given. Have you seen Lucy today? How often does she come in?"

"No, not today. Every three or four days, usually, and she came the day before yesterday." 

"Mind if I hang around the store for a bit? It's just this is the only place I know where Lucy goes. I promise to buy more sugar cookies."

"Hah, sure. I'd welcome the company."

So she hangs around and gets a basket and fills it with boxes of sugar cookies and a jug of milk to go with. And then she hangs around some more. 

A few hours later, an albino woman who looks to be in her late teens or early twenties pushes the door open. She flashes a quick smile at Adam, then turns seriously to Thorn. 

"Hi. Can we talk? Outside." 

"Certainly." She waves goodbye to Adam.

He looks vaguely confused but waves back. 

Lucy leans against the wall outside. "Hello. You've been asking about me and my friends." 

She glances around quickly to see if anyone is watching them. 

Prestidigitation. She holds up her palm and makes a spark dance across it, then has it flicker into a ghostly flame and then wink out.

"Yes," she says seriously. "I have. Because I expect you have answers and might want to share. I could take advantage of old Zadok Allen and maybe what he'd tell me would be something like the truth, but..."

She relaxes slightly when she sees the spark. 

"You could," she says mildly. "But I've never found prying into other people's secrets behind their backs to be the friendliest thing. Howabout you tell me what you want to know, and why, and I'll tell you what I've got permission to tell you, and then we go from there?"

"Now you've got me calculating how much I'm allowed to tell you. Feels a bit like a sliding-block puzzle."

"I want to know everything that's not directly personal, everything you can tell me about Innsmouth and its magic; as to the why, well... That's complicated."

"I'm... seeing if Innsmouth would make a good trading partner for an extremely large, extremely powerful entity that's a bit like a corporation and a bit like a deity. We hate slavery, we love magic, we want magic to be more available to everyone, we have a lot of magic. Paradigm-shifting amounts of magic. In order to bargain fairly, we have to understand what's on your side of the table to offer, and what's not. We need to understand you in all your complexities, to the degree that a single scout like me can manage anyway. We understand privacy. But we are willing to trade a lot for the chance at new magic."

"...Okay. Well, assuming you're telling the truth, that is very good to know. See, the thing is, there are people in this town who aren't exactly human, and there's a lot of people on his side of the information gap," she waves at the grocery store, indicating Adam, "who react...aggressively...to finding out that people who aren't human exist. Or magic."

"Yeah, we're familiar with the general situation regarding magic being persecuted, it's common in a lot of places. Nonhumans less so but still common. I am, myself, not exactly a standard human. I only need four hours of sleep, for one thing."

"I only need a few hours of sleep a month. I am much less human than your average Innsmouth resident, even if I don't look it at the moment. And, honestly, 'paradigm-shifting' amounts of magic isn't that much, for most of the humans hereabouts. You do the weest hint of necromancy in public and suddenly they're breaking out the torches and pitchforks." 

"Sounds like a good design, we might have to buy that from you. As for necromancy, we approve of it when it's not slavery. Getting the public on side can definitely be tough, though."

"It's not slavery. Not, uh, magically anyway, unethical practitioners have existed. Buy that off me? I don't think you can, it's just how I am."

"My patron is very good at working from examples, and if someone owns your body other than you we generally consider that A Problem. If you want proof I'm legit, then I can contact my patron in front of you - I just need a safe space where we won't be walked in on."

"I don't even know what you're claiming to be able to demonstrate. I'm--I'm a spawn of Yog-Sothoth, I don't know how replicating me would be possible without Yog-Sothoth itself, and even then, we can be pretty different from each other." 

"I don't know what you being a spawn of Yog-Sothoth implies. What I do know is that my patron is very good at duplicating things once it has an example, even with edits. I was custom-built in order to make contact with the local magical community, for example. But this is beside the point. I'm offering to show you my abilities that I can't show off in public, if that would help you understand what's up with me. I can fly. I can levitate heavy things. I can mend broken things without any parts to do it. I can open a gate to the place I came from and bring through magics and technologies that don't exist here, sufficently varied that you'd need a catalog. You'd also get to meet one of my patrons in person if you went that route."

"--It implies things about the level of power you'd need to make more of me. I'd like to see your abilities, should we go somewhere more private?"

"Power we have, it's finesse we're looking for. I would appreciate that."