"Looking up my old friend.  Or trying to."

She folds her arms.  Probably won't get an answer, but might as well nag.  "Do you know what happened to her?"

"And what'd you mean 'anomaly'?"

To Jenny: ::It is possible.  You have not provided me with information sufficient to know if I know of the 'friend' of which you speak.::

To Lila: ::Diana Vitalis's soul gem is aberrant in form and unclearly altered in function.  I cannot advise continuing to interface with it.  It may pose a danger to your wellbeing.::

"Kiri Dermot, as you should very well know!"

And Diana's soul gem seems to have been working well enough so far; good for her.

Oh - well, she'll need to talk about this later once she has a better idea what soul gems do.  It has to have something to do with Diana's wish.  "May?  How?"

::The fate of Kiri Dermot is that she disappeared on July the 6th a year ago, and no Incubator has since seen her.  You knew this, Jenny Burton.  Why are you looking into something that will likely only bring you grief?::

::...It is unknown; that is why it is an anomaly, Lila Roisen.::  Incubators do not sound peeved.  They do not emote at all.  Nonetheless, if it did emote, it likely would have been.  The anomaly is an anomaly because it is anomalous.  Why Lila thought it would know what was happening with the anomaly is a mystery to it.

"If that's all you know, then that's why I'm looking more!  Don't you have any friends!?"

"Yeah, do you?"

::There are some that consider me to be such.  I do not ask this of them.  My purpose is my work.::

Diana really doesn't even need to third that question - and it's not like she doesn't know what the answer will be, as clear as the stars in the sky - as clear as the stars in her eyes, constellations swirling in an intricate dance as her wish demands she know something about the Incubator before her - "...You don't.  You only have the numbers; you don't know what they mean.  You don't have internal experiences.  And when you're working with magic that is fundamentally dependent upon emotions, that is your problem.  Maybe the next wish that you con someone desperate into making for your benefit should be for a proper understanding of emotions, instead of this sloppy hack.

"Not that I intend to sit back and let you continue doing everything you do, to be clear.  The atrocities need to stop.  But someone needs to give you a firmware update, and wishes do what we mean - which is why you can't make them.  You don't know what meaning is.  Who made you?  Were they turned into paperclips?"

::Is the history of Incubators really worth so much investment, when witches menace your people?::

...She is transformed in a swirling flash of magic, and growls, in response: "It is precisely because Witches threaten my people that I will come to know of the history of the Incubators, you, you - puffed-up chatbot, you store-brand ELIZA imitator, you insouciant marshmellow pretending to be a cat!"

She holds a warhammer like one might a golf club, or some other sort of mallet-game device, ready to cry 'FORE!' and send an uncooperative Kyuubey very far out of her way.

"You know so much more than us about witches and magic and all that, that of course we're trying to ask you!  But if you don't know friendship, then don't correct us when we're trying to find our friends!"

As Lila's saying that, they might hear someone fiddling with the door's lock.

A couple moments later, the door opens to show a woman about the age of their mothers, looking out at them with a tentative frown on her face.

The anger washes from her face in an instant.

"Good afternoon ma'am, my apologies for the ruckus."  No Kyuubey you do not get to vanish mid-conversation.  Hope your catbot is engineered to survive being scruffed.  "Emotions have been running a bit...intensely, because of what brings us to your doorstep, and this...creature, and its ilk, stand suspect as the proximate cause of the tragedy I for one would like to bring some closure to, if I cannot make it whole --"

She pauses.  Passes the Kyuubey to Lila, lets her weapon vanish into sparks, clasps her hands together almost like she's praying and certainly like she's rather stressed.

"...I can't promise anything; I may look like I know what I'm doing, but I've known magic existed for precisely five days, and - well.  I'm still figuring shit out, pardon my language.  Nonetheless - your daughter disappeared last June.  I want to find out what happened to her, because - it surely wasn't just some mundane crime, nor kidnapping, nor flight - I can tell you for a fact that any magical girl in existence is proof against mundane criminals at least in the sense of fighting off an assault, if not, necessarily, surviving the emotional strain of the aftermath - and - if I can - I want to find her, and bring her back home.  Now, do you have questions, do you want to just shut the door and hyperventilate a bit, or I guess you could yell at me if it'd make you feel better?  We, uh, weren't planning for this meeting to go this way.  Which probably explains why the puffball did it.  ...Kyuubey, so help me if you don't apologize to this woman for the stress you've put her through right this instant, I will as my first priority go figure out how to make you."

...

...

...

The young woman in an outfit that looks like an astronaut suit and a set of plate armor had a whirlwind romance continues glaring at the That Is Definitely Not A Cat her friend(?) is holding.

Anna Dermot is still spending some sleepless nights in tears wondering what happened to her daughter.  There've been moments of hope and moments of moment-to-moment waiting, but fewer now that it's fairly clear the police have basically given up the case.  Now more of her (and her husband's) sleepless nights are wishing they hadn't moved here in the first place.

But it's been long enough that she's not going to immediately break into tears or scream at this random teenager in a Halloween costume talking about some magic Kiri had been involved with.

"And who are you?" she hisses.

Jenny - still in her Muggle clothes, jeans and T-shirt - steps forward.  She shoots a glare at Kyuubey and Diana for interrupting her nice plan on how to open the conversation, but then trying to soften her face to talk with Kiri's mom.

"Hey, Mrs. Dermot.  Remember me, Jenny?  I was talking with my new friends about your daughter, and how we'd been talking about..."  She stumbles over the word "magic," not sure how to raise it.  She and Kiri had never dreamed of actually telling her mom about it.  "... some things before you moved here, and she'd even mentioned maybe running away from home..."

"And?" she interrupts icily.

Kiri hadn't been happy around the move.  And at the moment, the thought of her having just run away from home is like a sudden flash of hope; it means she's still alive!  But she's not going to let herself feel it now.

"And where does this... magic come into this?"

...She'll just pull her battle dress back off real quick, shall she.  Fucking Kyuubey.

"Well.  The magic comes into it in a few different ways, being as it's - well, first, the common factor between the lot of us, and what I'm hoping will allow me to find Kiri in the first place.

"Though, please first allow me to introduce myself before we continue; you can call me Diana, this is Lila, and the...not-a-cat, that she is holding, has called itself Kyuubey when we asked.

"...Hm.  I should probably actually ask if Incubators know what gender is enough to have one, at some point, but now is hardly the time, I know I look insane enough as it is.  Sorry about that.  We had a plan for how we were going to approach this and everything, and then this fucking not-a-cat showed up and - effectively, picked a fight.  Which caused the ruckus you, uh, noticed.

"Kind of concerning that it felt the need to do that, honestly...

"Anyway.  Magic explainer.

"...Jenny, you're on Grief Seed demonstration duty if that comes up.  I presume you've been using more magic than Lila has, and I don't think I'll do normal things to them.  Which I want to figure out, but not here and now.

"Uh.  Shit, I hadn't actually been planning to breach the Masquerade today, I don't even have, like, cue cards.  But I'm going to try.  You deserve to know what's been going on.

"So.  I already said that the four of us have magic in common.  If you've ever watched, like, Power Rangers or something...

"It's kind of like that, except...uh...

"Worse, unfortunately."

::Anna Dermot is not entitled to operational information, Diana Vitalis.::

"...Oh now you fucking talk.  She's damn well entitled to operational information, it's her child you drafted under false pretenses in the war against entropy, you little shit.

"...I mean, to be fair, we haven't caught him in a lie yet, but...

"Well, faeries don't lie either and yet they certainly know how to mislead.  Metaphorically speaking; as far as I know they aren't real.  I guess they could be, somewhere, somehow, but this guy is what we've got as far as magical creatures go and I'm half convinced that he's more like sufficiently advanced technology.

"So let's talk about what the Incubator does, actually."

Anna Dermot is looking rather shocked and overwhelmed.

(She's maybe comprehending half of this.)

"What... does all this..."

"...Right.  Right.  Sorry.  I tend to really go on when I have something to talk about.

"To cut a long story very short: The bunnycats -" diagram, a Kyuubeyfigure, a bunch of stick-figure people in various shapes-sizes-colors, "pick out certain people to be magical girls - and it is mostly girls -" Kyuubeyvision scanning people.  Little bar graphs.  A target lock.  "- and...manipulate them into...

"Making a wish, is the only description of the process worth using.

"Wishes...

"I don't have a good sample.  Both Lila and I wished for rather subtle things and I haven't asked Jenny.  But I'm pretty sure they can do anything and everything if you're smart with the wording, they're reflected in your magical form and powers, and the Incubators somehow harvest - the opposite of entropy - from the people who make them.

"Unfortunately, there are also magical problems, not just magical solutions."