Hmm. Somewhere dark and hidden - presumably underground, where it won't be easy to find her. If it has access to dead bodies she can reanimate, or open space she can fill with plants, or something like that, that'd be ideal! Every large city has places like that. 

This city has a ludicrous amount of similar places, even considering the part where it’s a very large city! There are entire businesses and buildings underground! People live there! Some of the catacombs are uninhabited or can easily be made so, though.

Catacombs are maybe a little low-status, but they sound like the best options! Dyva sneaks off into the catacombs, finds or claims a good stretch of tunnels with some human remains in them, and starts reanimating some skeletons to be her labourers. It's not really her style, but it's very easy magic and plant-servitors take time. She'll start setting up magical light for what plants she did manage to snatch, and then she will Cultivate them, and the land here, turning it into her territory. From there, her aspect lets her prompt the plants to flourish with unnatural rapidity (with the skeletons serving to repot and replant as the garden expands), turning skull-lined corridors into a skull-lined underground jungle (complete with carnivorous plants) before the day is out. With that, she's quite spent, though, and settles in to expand and fortify more slowly for a few days while her proper plant-servitors grow. If Providence will allow her that kindness, that is. 

She appears to have gotten lucky here, at least for now - nobody comes into her garden. Does she take the time to look at the papers she stole?

Gil, meanwhile, is doing less well. He lost his papers, a decent amount of money, and kind of humiliated himself. Oh well.

None of this exactly matters though, because he has a project! How did that spark control her plants? Simply super-fast growth would make simple enough sense, but control like that was much more complicated, and he didn’t see any obvious machines she was using! …Hopefully it didn’t work in a way similar to the hive engines? No, those used different controlled bugs… hm… some sort of seed or spore released without him seeing it, specially modified to respond to… voice commands, maybe? The Latin…

 What is sleep, that sounds fake, nonstop SCIENCE! is much better anyway, go away Wooster, or go fetch coffee, he’s only being doing this for three days straight anyway.

If he takes samples of the plants (the scene of the crime is positively overflowing with them), he'll find that some of them are ... weird. They produce or consume strange energies, or they behave in ways they shouldn't. Some of them twitch and move, like they were made of muscle and not plant. It's all just a little wrong somehow. If sleep-deprivation results in an incautious pause in his work, some of them might even take a shot at wrapping around an arm and beginning to digest it. 

In the meantime, Dyva will indeed look through the stolen papers - it would be foolish to ignore something so likely to be relevant to the story! And she has spare moments, while she waits for things to grow. 

Those are pretty weird, and the villainess is definitely a master biospark! It might try to digest him, but this isn’t even close to the most dangerous plant he’s studied in a laboratory, he dodges just fine.

The papers appear to be schematics for various machines. Some of them are readable, some are in some kind of code, and some are nearly indecipherable due to terrible handwriting. One appears to detail some sort of liquid-lightning shooting device? Another few appear to be for some kind of flying metal tube?

Nope, nope, nope. If the people around here want to get killed for violating the no-technology laws, that's their problem. Hopefully she can be out of the country before it gets destroyed. 

... wait. That man said she wasn't in Calernia anymore. Maybe the gnomes don't have reach here. It might be valuable to learn more. But these notes aren't probably the best way to do that, if they're some Hero's project notes. 

She'll do her best effort to decode the code, and when she gets bored of that, she'll get together a bodyguard (of carnivorous plants wrapped around skeletons, all covered in improvised cloaks to conceal their nature) and consider going shopping. She needs supplies, and also books. 

It’s a very complex code. She doesn’t get anywhere in a few hours, at least.

A person in odd clothes with a multitude of bodyguards wearing head-to-toe cloaks is pretty weird, even for Paris! She’ll gets a few stares! Boy is she in the right place to buy supplies and books, though.

She will preen under the attention and buy some books! She will buy books on history and technology, and while it's not particularly strategic, also on horticulture and botany. 

She will also consider if she has enough money to get into Fashion. No point getting stares *only* because she's mysterious, when it can be because she's beautiful and also mysterious. (Well. *She* thinks she's beautiful, but the local aesthetic idiom seems to be rather different. And she's still wearing muck-covered gardening-clothes.) 

She really only barely has enough on her for the books, and getting into Fashion seems to be very, very pricy in this city. She’ll need more money.

Dammit! Well, she'll have to skulk off to her hole in the ground and read some hopefully informative books. And think about how people normally get money, when they didn't inherit it. She thinks there's something about ... employment? Or daylight robbery? That sounds easier.

The books are reasonably informative!

Paris isn’t part of the Wulfenbach Empire, but is on friendly terms with it. It has a very long history, and is ruled by the Master (of Paris). The Wulfenbach Empire is ruled by Baron Wulfenbach, who is a former baron who formerly adventured with the Heterodyne Boys! (It seems to be assumed that everyone knows who the Heterodyne Boys are.) The baron conquered most of the continent after he got really, really fed up with sparks mismanaging everything and turning the place into an apocalyptic hellhole. His tax laws are apparently extremely sensible and fair.

Ah, so these are the Names to watch. The Master (of Paris), clearly a regional rulership Name, like the Tyrants of Helike. Probably very powerful, probably has some sort of command or rulership type powers. Seems to have a strong narrative of beating down interlopers, so she'd need another angle to deal with him. The Baron, has clearly retained his Name even after conquering an empire. It must be very closely tied to his identity, his self-image, that he's a Baron and not an Emperor. What could that imply? Heterodyne (Heterodyne Boys? If they were brothers, they might just have both been The Heterodyne, that's ever happened, to Names who were siblings.), clearly very famous, very important. Heroes? Her new mastery of French and Romanian doesn't extend to the meaning of the word, though she gets some implication of ... differentness? changing? But mostly - The Heterodyne is the Heterodyne, all the way down in her understanding of the language. An old Name. A powerful one. One she should not mess with, at least until she's transitioned to her final Name and reached the apex of her power. 

So then, with this information, she needs a plan. What are her options. Plan A: expand her territory, get stronger, fight that Hero and then the Master. Plan B: Flee the city, find somewhere small and isolated she can take over and garden properly. Pros and cons. Pros and cons. Pros of plan A, it actually gets something done, she beat that Hero easily the first time they met, this place is a wealth of power and influence and it'd all be hers. She gets the impression that Paris is even richer than Ater, though it's hard to tell without spending much time in the underground. It doesn't seem to have any abandoned districts, though, and Ater's great walls tend to encompass a lot of land claimed only by ghosts and devils. And giant spiders. Cons of plan A, it's a bloody difficult story to tread. She can take that hero, sure, but the Master has a good long history of beating down everyone who wants to take his city from him. It'd be like launching a crusade against the dead king - it can only end the way every previous one did, in bloody defeat. And she's not a Hero, to win by providence when the sweat of her own brow wasn't enough, so there's no story she can sell there. Plan B pros. It's safe. She can almost certainly find somewhere not even this Baron cares about and take over, even if it has to be raw wilderness. Maybe he'd be fine with it, even, if she was careful not to disturb the peasants and payed her taxes on time. It'll give her a place for her gardening, which Paris really isn't good for. (Maybe it would be, if she was it's Master, but she is not, and she probably never will be). Cons of plan B. She hates it. It's cowardly. Unambitious. She didn't become a Name because she wanted to live a quiet life. She's not even sure she could manage to keep her Name, if she ran away like that. Even if she went and conquered some other city, some other jewel of Europa, she's got the chance to take Paris by storm, and how would Below permit her to do anything less? How could her conscience permit it of her?

So. Die the death of a petty Villain, or retire to obscurity. Neither of the plans suits her. She needs a third option. She ruminates, and the air in her little catacomb-fortress grows heavy with potential as the decision weighs on her. Normally, her family would be there for her, schemes older than anyone alive and deep reserves of power and cunning. They'd let her take on the Master, maybe, but what they'd really be for is to anchor her, give her ambitions beyond herself. Her family has given her so much, her inheritance is rich, so it's natural to pass that on, make sure that her schemes, when they get her killed, do so to leave her family better off, better positioned to help the next child who tries to climb the tower. But now, she's far from her family. If she dies here, nothing she's been or done will make it back to them, for good or for ill. So she has to decide for herself, how she wants to fail, then. Pyre flame, or grave dirt. 

Her family tried to teach her to always pick fire, to always strike deeper. If you die, that's fine. You'll make someone else stronger. Iron sharpens iron. But she's the only iron here. She needs competition, goals. Things to strive for, that aren't just dying to make the biggest explosion. She's heard of enough villains who died that way, and were left as nothing more than case studies in tomes of Name-lore. Villains like her, Warlock types, they're strongest when they have time to build and a backer, someone to handle the martial matters for them while they work, and to provide funding and so forth. They're supporting characters, you think, until it turns out that every weapon, every bane, every wonder, was brought forth from their workshop. That's what she wants her garden to be - the wonder of an age. Not the overgrowth on a newly ruined Paris, not a little country vegetable patch. But who would fund it. Who is the greatest Villain of this age, in dire need of skilled wonder-workers for his empire? 

The Baron. Klaus Wulfenbach. Ruler of this new empire of Europa. An Empire no doubt in need of High Ladies to rule its cities, and wonder-makers to fill its vaults. A "spark" who is known for his fosterage of other sparks, and for his sensible style of rule (when he is not unduly antagonised by a world which does not bend to his will) No Dread Emperor, but not that different, either. 

The decision clicks. The air settles. Dyva, The Heiress, shall seek to enter the service of the Baron Wulfenbach, and there find political advancement and opportunities to ply her arcane arts.