The clothing stores were as delightful as Penny remembered. The possibilities were myriad, a cornucopia of cloth. The only restrictions she imposed on herself were that the clothes must not be so small they'd limit her range of motion, nor so large they'd flop.

For even a single store—not even a single store, but a single department in a single store!—that left twenty pairs of pants, eighteen pairs of leggings, thirty skirts, eighty-five tops of various descriptions, and twenty-two jackets, for in excess of 1,047,200 outfit permutations, without even counting shoes or accessories.

Her modeling software could spend all day chewing on all that.

She had, at least, discovered she preferred skirts-and-leggings over pants, for reasons her Analysis subroutine was at a loss to explain (to its consternation). Even that restriction left vast possibilities.

Penny might not know which of those were "cool" or "hot" or "cute" as Yang might use the terms, but just thinking about what might be could occupy her for hours. There was a reason she'd been in the stores until closing time, back on the night she met Yang.

The thought tinged her shopping with melancholy. "Trying on clothes" was supposed to be a Friendship Thing. Where were her friends?

She drowned her melancholy by modeling her looks in all these different outfits, submerged herself in data until nothing else existed. It was an escape, Analysis knew, and it wouldn't last, but she did it all the same.

She wondered if she ought to buy a few things while she was here. She had a stipend from Beacon and her personal expenses were almost nil. She could afford it.

No, she decided, it would be better to make purchases with someone else's input. Not only would she get a better result, but the process would be more fun.

She felt the pain of not having her team with her all over again.

Empty-handed and empty-hearted alike, Penny left the clothing stores and walked deeper into Vale to complete her circuit. All that was left was From Dust Till Dawn, where she'd refresh her supply of face tattoos.

What little good cheer she could muster went obsolete as she turned the corner.

The store was dark and the storefront smashed. Glass littered the sidewalk and street in front of the store. There was no sign of the door, while the doorway was marked off with bright yellow police tape. There was no police presence; they must have already come and gone.

Analysis needed no cycles at all to conclude the obvious: the store had been robbed again, and successfully this time.

Penny felt a wave of gloom wash over her. Did that make her earlier actions moot? Had anything she'd done been meaningful? Did it make any difference at all?

What was she even doing here?

"Oh, are you here to investigate, too?"

Tactical had noted the approach of a new person, but hadn't expected them to address Penny, so it was startling all the same. Penny turned to see who it was.

It was hard to tell, which seemed by design. The figure seemed vaguely female. She wore a logo-less red hoodie with the hood up along with dark sunglasses, which combined to conceal almost all identifying features. Both her hands hid in the belly pocket of the hoodie. She wore a red thigh-length skirt over dark leggings and sturdy red boots. It was the sort of figure Tactical would have barely registered if Penny had passed them in the street, yet here she was demanding that attention.

Penny liked the color scheme, but otherwise didn't know what to think. "Investigate?" she repeated.

"You know, check out the break-in, look for clues, that sort of thing," said the strange girl. (Analysis noted the irony of Thesaurus using the word "strange" to describe someone other than Penny herself.)

"I hadn't intended to," said Penny. "I didn't even know this place had been robbed until I got here." She sighed. "It makes me very sad."

"Well, are you going to do something about it?"

Penny blinked at the newcomer. Thesaurus had parsed the words correctly, but no subroutine could generate any response.

"I'm a woman of action," said the girl in red. "When I see something wrong, I feel like it's my job to help. It's fine if you're not wired that way, but I'm gonna check it out, and I thought I'd like some company, especially from someone else who cares."

A part of Penny she hadn't even known existed went th-thump.

Something about this little speech, something about the earnestness of the speaker, resonated with Penny, not with any of her subroutines but with something deeper. "Can we do that?" said Penny, full of wonder.

"Sure," said the girl in red. "I'm supposed to avoid strangers and not talk to them, but if we're here for the same reason, then we're on the same side, so you're not really a stranger." She walked past Penny towards the Dust store. Penny felt herself drawn along like iron filings pulled by a magnet.

The girl in red ducked under the police tape, but that stopped Penny in her tracks. "Are you with the police?" she asked.

"Nope," said the girl in red with a pop of the 'p'.

"Then we're not allowed to go in," said Penny. After her first encounter with Torchwick, and Professor Goodwitch's lessons on the evils of vigilantism, Penny had researched interactions between Huntresses and law enforcement, and she was confident on this point.

The words rolled off the girl in red. "I'm allowed," she insisted. "The rules are a little different for me."

Penny had no way to know if that was true, but the girl in red said it with authority, and Penny wanted to believe her. Ignoring Jiminy's protests, she followed the girl in red into the store.

It took no effort to see what the thieves had been after. Every speck of Dust, both granular and crystal, was gone, irrespective of type. The thieves didn't seem to have been interested in much else.

"The register appears intact," Penny said. "They weren't after money. Just the Dust."

"Weird," said the girl in red, who'd moved to the vertical tubes along the walls that had held granular Dust. One of the tubes was opaque. The girl in red flicked it with her finger; the sound that came was solid and dull. "Except they left the Plant Dust. Aaaand… yep, there's the level indicator. Plant Dust is photoreactive, that's why the tube's not transparent like the others, but this says the Plant Dust is still here."

"Maybe they forgot to take it," Penny said.

"They had enough storage to take every grain of every other Dust, safely, without blowing themselves to smithereens," the girl in red replied. "Look—they didn't even have to rob any of the Dust containers the store was selling, they brought all their own. They had this op planned to a tee. Pretty sure them leaving the Plant Dust was a choice."

Penny nodded, feeding Analysis resources and getting back alarming results. "The only Dust they deliberately left… is the kind of Dust that's hardest to weaponize."

"Bingo," said the girl in red. "I've brainstormed ways to weaponize Plant Dust, but unless you have a plant on-hand for the Dust to augment, the Dust could generate, say, algae, or pond scum, or grass, instead of anything dangerous or useful. It's too random."

"They didn't care about anything that wasn't a weapon," said Penny. "Ergo, this was not the work of common criminals."

"Nope," popped the girl in red. She looked back at Penny. Penny found herself wishing the girl wasn't wearing sunglasses; Penny was hanging off her words, and any extra data to help parse them would have been appreciated. "Who does that leave?"

Penny took care to organize her words to present a complete answer. She wanted to impress the girl with her thoroughness. "It is possible that a militant organization not previously known to work in Vale was responsible. It is also possible that criminals perpetrated this and left the money and Plant Dust to confound investigation. The simplest explanation, however, is that this is the work of the only militant organization known to operate within the Kingdom, namely, the White Fang."

The girl put a hand to her head and scratched, though Penny doubted it was doing much through her hood. "That was a lot of words to just say 'the White Fang'."

Embarrassment swept Penny away. "I wanted to ensure we covered all possibilities," she said, unable to look up at the girl in red.

"That's fair." The girl hummed thoughtfully. "I know some people who really like it when you nail down every little detail. I have a hard time with that, but I manage when it's important, like with weapons."

Penny's eyes snapped up. "Do you deal with weapons often?"

"Yeah, all the…" the girl's face twisted and her voice sounded choked, like a less-effective version of Penny's freezing when she made a mistake. "When I need to," she croaked.

"I very much like dealing with weapons," said Penny, hoping this was a bridge she could build. "Designing, forging, and modifying weaponry is very gratifying work. And it's important, too, since I am training to become a Huntress."

The girl in red's mouth opened wide in excitement. "You are?!"

"Yes," Penny said proudly. She presented her provisional trainee license. "I am a student at Beacon Academy."

"So cool," cooed the girl in red, before she inexplicably stiffened. "Does that mean you outrank me? Should I be calling you ma'am?"

"I have no rank to speak of," said Penny, "and I would prefer if you called me by my name."

"Weird, but okay," said the girl in red, looking at the license again. "Penny Pallas, huh? That's a nice name."

"You think so?" said Penny, almost bursting with pride.

"Yeah, I like the sound of it."

"I am glad to hear that! I picked that name myself." Penny replaced her license. "And what is your name, if I may ask?"

"My name is…" the girl in red started, but she put a hand behind her head and looked away. "You can call me Garnet."

"I can call you something that is not your name?" Penny said in confusion.

"Something like that, heh," said the girl in red (identity updated: Garnet), sounding very nervous.

Penny had to put a stop to that. "I like that name very much."

"You do?" said Garnet.

"Truly," said Penny. "I am almost unable to lie."

"Huh," said Garnet, and then she smiled so brilliantly the shop seemed brighter.

Tactical alerted.

Because, Penny realized suddenly, the shop was unlit. It was dim, especially here in the back. With her sunglasses down, Garnet should have been all but blind.

There was no evidence she was impaired at all.

Before Penny even knew what she was doing, she'd swapped to infrared to inspect this mystery girl, looking for any telltale features. Anything that would confirm Garnet as a Faunus…

No!

Emotion Signifying clenched Penny's jaws together as she overrode Tactical. Even that brief scan had picked up some anomalies, not obviously-Faunus features, but definitely non-human-standard features… except that Penny didn't want to know. Her hyper-sensitivity to Faunus was why she was in this mess in the first place!

She forced her vision back to the visible spectrum. As she did, Garnet tilted her head in a fashion that reminded Penny of, well, herself. "Are you okay, Penny?"

That Garnet was concerned for her made Penny inexplicably happy. Emotion Signifying whipped her face into a smile as fast as it could process the commands. "Yes, very, thank you!"

"Oh," said Garnet. "I was kinda worried for a second."

Another show of concern, and Garnet wasn't edging away from Penny or disengaging like people did in 90% of the interactions where Penny showed non-human behavior. This was going better than she could've imagined.

Analysis completed a task and submitted its results to higher consciousness. "You are not a Huntress, then, are you?" said Penny.

"Nope," popped Garnet. Penny liked the way she said that word. She'd only ever heard Yang pronounce 'nope' that way.

Jiminy, though, refused to let this line of questioning die. "But if you are not a Huntress, and you are not with the police, what are you?"

Garnet put a hand behind her head once more; Penny was now interpreting that gesture as embarrassment. "Well, I'm kind of… a special case."

"That does not answer my question," said Penny.

"I'm a… project."

"That is no more specific," said Penny.

"It's my job to help people," said Garnet at last; the hand behind her head dropped to her side and her voice became deadly serious. "Someday, it'll be up to me to save the world. You could say that I was born for it."

Penny didn't know how old Garnet was, but her age had to be measured in years, and Penny grew impressed. "It's been your job to help people for years?"

"For as long as I can remember," said Garnet. "I spent a lot of time getting ready, but I've been helping out for a few years now, and I think I'm getting to where I need to be. That's why I came to Vale, actually."

Penny's processors seized on that detail, but before she could say anything, Garnet's face scrunched up again. "Oh no, I wasn't supposed to say that! Can you pretend you didn't hear that?"

"I can do better than pretend," said Penny, updating the metadata tags for those memories so they were less likely to come up. "I think it's amazing to have that kind of purpose. I know a few people with that level of purpose, friends of mine." Penny thought of Yang. "But my purpose is... unclear. While I try to figure that out, all I can think to do is try to make friends. I try very hard, but I might not be very good at it."

"'Friends'?" repeated Garnet.

She said it like she'd never heard the term before. That was impossible, wasn't it? "You know what friends are, don't you?" said Penny.

"Oh, sure, totally!" said Garnet. It was a lie so obvious Penny hiccupped.

And it left Penny stumped. She'd woken up with that word in her core vocabulary. Garnet had been alive for years; how had she not heard it?

Well, she couldn't very well leave this alone! "A friend is a companion," said Penny. "Someone who helps you in times of need, someone whose presence you enjoy and seek out."

"So… like a teammate?" said Garnet, turning her head this way and that like she was trying to fit the words into holes in her head and not succeeding.

"Teammates are assigned by higher authority," Penny said, "and they have a distinct purpose. Friendship is made of bonds of affection between people. It's voluntary and treasured. It is personal attachment independent of purpose, that can serve any purpose."

"Huh," said Garnet. "Yeah, this is all new to me."

Penny realized in a rush of pity what it meant that Garnet didn't know the word. "You've been alive for years and years with no friends? That sounds unbearably lonely! Everyone needs friends! I don't know what I would do if I hadn't met my friends!"

"I guess the boss thought I didn't need friends," said Garnet. "I mean, I went this long without any. I was always too busy for friends, you know, helping people and training and… stuff. Wow, that sounds super lame when I say it out loud."

"Well," said Penny definitively, "even helpers need someone helping them. For you, I will be that person."

"You want to be my friend?" said Garnet.

"Absolutely," said Penny.

Garnet chuckled nervously. "That might be harder than you think. My life is… kinda crazy."

"My tolerance for crazy is quite high," said Penny with Jiminy's approval.

"You know," said Garnet as she looked Penny over, "I believe you. I don't think I'll get in trouble… and you're definitely not a stranger if you're my friend…" She hesitated another few seconds, then smiled that brilliant smile again, the one that seemed to light up the whole shop. "Okay, Penny, it's a deal."

"Sensational, Friend Garnet!" said Penny, permanently updating her lexicon with that honorific.

"We can be friends and do teammate stuff still, right?" said Garnet.

"I think the best way to do Teammate Things is with your friends," Penny replied.

"I bet they'd disagree… anyway," she said without further explanation, "let's get back on-task! How do we figure out if this was the White Fang or not?"

Penny replied with gusto, "I do not know!"

Quiet settled over the shop.

"I thought you said you were a Huntress in training," accused Garnet.

"I thought you said you were a special case who was allowed to get involved in investigations," said Penny. Retrieval was certain of it.

"Well, yeah," sputtered Garnet, "but that doesn't mean I've ever done one before!"

"Then this will be a learning experience for both of us," said Penny, feeling more excited than ever. "I love learning, especially with friends!"

"Yeah!" said Garnet, raising a fist in sheer shared energy.

"Maybe we should start with the library," said Penny. "I have to believe it has books on how to do investigations."

"I'm not much of a reader," said Garnet.

"They have videos, too," said Penny.

"Now you're speaking my language!"

"I thought we were both speaking Valan?"

"…you know, that saying doesn't make much sense to me, now that I think about it."

"Idiom seldom does."

"Hey, don't call me names!"

Weiss did not gracefully deal with uncertainty. Some people did, she knew. Penny relished getting into new situations, especially those for which she was unprepared. Yang was a habitual under-planner, though Weiss could never tell if Yang was bad at planning or just preferred not to.

Weiss had no idea how either of them could stand it, how either of them could function like that.

Maybe it was because she'd grown up in a life where everything was choreographed and years of her life had been laid out well in advance, but any kind of large-scale or willful uncertainty made Weiss' skin crawl. So she'd asked for their destination, and when Blake had offered up the address, Weiss spent the time the team took walking to look up their target.

"It's a Dust shop," she announced to the group. "Not a particularly large one. There are plenty like it all over the city. Standard prices, decent but not stellar reviews." She looked up at Blake. "Why are we going there, again?"

"That's the clue I was given," said Blake, her voice devoid of emotion. "Something there is important, I know it." Her eyes narrowed. "And if there's nothing there, that will tell me a lot about my source."

"You want me to call your lockers in?" said Yang with a wave of her scroll.

Blake thought for a moment, then shook her head. "Not yet, but keep them queued."

"They're one button press away," said Yang.

"And we're one block away," said Weiss, checking her map. "Left turn ahead and we're there."

"Right," said Blake.

"No, left."

Blake blinked in confusion; Yang snorted. "We'll make a joker of you yet, Ice Queen."

"I pray we don't."

They rounded the corner—and stopped in their tracks. Weiss looked down at her scroll, up again. Down again, up again.

"Well," said Yang, "looks like the rush beat us to it."

Weiss didn't have the spare brain power to chide Yang over that ill-timed joke. According to Blake's note, their destination was From Dust Till Dawn, and that store had seen much better days. It didn't look blown up or broken apart, but the door was missing completely, parts of the storefront were smashed, and its tubes and display cases were bare.

To her surprise, a figure in red came out of the stricken store, ducking under the police tape that blocked off its front. Her surprise intensified when someone else came out the same way, moving with an uncanny stiffness Weiss would recognize anywhere.

"Is that Penny?" breathed Yang.

"It looks like it," said Weiss. Impossible as it seemed, Weiss had to believe her eyes.

"Let's go," said Yang, and she stepped forward in their direction.

Blake's arm came up across Yang's path. "No," said Blake.

"I've gotta know if she's okay," said Yang.

"She looks okay from here," said Blake as Penny and the figure in red turned away from BX_S and went up the street in the opposite direction. "If she was in distress, I have to believe we'd be able to see it, and I have to believe she'd have contacted us by now."

"Because that's what you do?" Yang snapped.

Blake flinched, but stood her ground. "Penny's not like me. But she did ask for us to stay away from her for now. I'll honor that request."

"She just said not to look for her," said Yang stubbornly, "and we weren't. We just happened to find her."

"Looks like it's moot," said Weiss as Penny and the figure in red turned a corner and vanished from sight. Yang crossed her arms in a huff; Weiss could feel the heat of Yang's frustration radiating from her.

Weiss saw regret flash across Blake's face and thought she understood. As sure as Blake was of her course, it didn't make Yang's frustration any easier to suffer.

Blake lowered her arm and looked back at the defaced Dust shop. "We came here to do a job, so let's do the job. We'll see where that leads us after."

"Fine," huffed Yang, and they all stepped forward towards the shop.

Even if Weiss had a strong sense for what they'd find.

The book's title was "Junior Detectives: A How-To for Novice Crime Solvers". Penny flipped through it as fast as she could. Ingestion first, comprehension later. Once she'd committed the text to memory, which took less than a minute, she replaced the book on the shelf and came back out to Friend Garnet.

Garnet was squatting on a chair before a monitor, apparently too restless to sit properly. She looked up excitedly as Penny approached, though how she'd noticed Penny was a mystery almost as deep as why she was wearing sunglasses to watch videos inside in a dimly lit building. "Hey, look at this!"

Penny came up alongside Garnet. "What did you find?"

"I didn't know where to start searching, so I just put 'spy stuff' in the search bar, and it gave me, like, eleven million results," Garnet said with barely hushed enthusiasm. "I had no idea this many videos of anything existed! And this one looked neat, so I clicked, and turns out it's a video all about ways to find out if someone's broken into your room. Like, if you turn up the corner of a rug before you leave, then someone who sneaks into your room will think they messed it up, and they wouldn't want to give themselves away, so they'll smooth the corner back down, but then that is the giveaway that they were there, because you'd know it's supposed to be…"

"Shhh!" hissed an irritated library-goer nearby.

"Have you not been in a library before?" said Penny quietly, almost under her breath (if she'd needed to breathe).

"No," whispered Garnet.

"It is a convention to be quiet so as to not disturb the other patrons," said Penny.

"Oh, gotcha," said Garnet. She stood up on her chair and said at large, "I'm sorry for being loud!"

"Shhhh!"

"Right!" she said in a carrying whisper and squatted down again.

Penny found herself smiling, and it took Analysis several seconds to catch up to Emotion Signifying in understanding why. "Would you like to know something funny? Usually, I am the one who doesn't know social conventions and is experiencing them for the first time. It is absurd that I know these things more than someone else!"

"Well, I don't get out much," said Garnet defensively. "This is the first time I've been able to just go places, anywhere… outside."

Even as Thesaurus tagged the word 'outside' for future reference, Penny warmed to her friend. "I assure you that you'll simply love it here. Vale and Beacon are wonderful places to be, with innumerable new experiences available to you. Even I have done barely 1% of the many things available to see and do."

Excitement welled up within Penny. "And now I'm having trouble deciding whether I want to show you things I have done so you can get similar first experiences to mine and we can bond that way, or whether I want us to do things I haven't done so we can have our first times together and bond that way!"

Garnet looked a little overwhelmed. "Shouldn't we be focusing on this investigation first?"

"Yes," said Penny without thought. Oh, no, was it happening again? No, no, not now! She shook her head, hoping that would do something to clear the uncertainty away (and knowing it would not).

Perhaps misinterpreting Penny's dismay, Garnet said, "Well, this is my first investigation, so we're having this first time together, aren't we?"

Just like that, Penny's good humor was back in full force. "Right you are, Garnet my friend! May I?"

Garnet seemed only too happy to stand up at last. As she moved behind the chair to put her arms on its back, Penny sat down and navigated to the Vale Police Department's crime reports. This was one of her Junior Detective tips: look for similar crimes.

She didn't have to look very hard. "There's been a whole string of Dust shop robberies," she said. "Starting shortly before the Beacon semester began. The first attempt on that store was the second in the string."

"Huh," said Garnet. "I guess someone really wants a lot of Dust."

Penny spoke slowly as she tried to make sense of things. "Dust is a very valuable commodity. I would think that Dust stores would be robbed often."

"If they were robbed often," said Garnet, "wouldn't they start installing better security? Anyway, the more Dust you're handling at a time, the more dangerous it gets, especially since they're stealing granular Dust. Granular Dust is more volatile. If you have to travel with Dust, it's usually safer to convert it to crystal form for safety."

Penny nodded. "Meaning the robbers have extra equipment to let them take so much granular Dust safely."

"Or they're just that reckless," said Garnet. "But who would be that reckless?"

"The White Fang," Penny said automatically, before abashedly adding, "potentially. But what could be their purpose?" She didn't know how she was supposed to answer these questions, and that was a problem.

An unsettled feeling was taking hold of Penny. She knew from her core how to approach dilemmas like this. In the same way that her subroutines knew to pass off tasks they were not equipped for, she knew with certainty that her teammates and friends would have a lot more to say on these subjects than she did. It was like she'd told Jaune: efficiency demanded cooperation. Division of labor was powerful.

Could she do that? Could she go back to her team just like that? And if not, what did she have to do to get there?

Penny wasn't sure, but she wanted to find out. Even if Weiss would have huge problems with how Penny had been hiding this secret all this time, and Yang would be so disappointed Penny hadn't trusted her when Yang had been so giving, and Blake would have to question if she could trust Penny as a subordinate...

Penny was doing it to herself again, wasn't she? Winding herself up with worry, like a clockwork watch torqued to bursting.

"Friend Garnet," said Penny, "have you ever had to keep a secret from someone that you really wanted to tell them?"

Garnet, to Penny's surprise, put a hand behind her head. "Would you believe me if I said I'm doing that right now?"

"Yes, unfortunately," sighed Penny.

"Not like a bad secret," Garnet hastened to add. "I'd love to tell people if I could, especially you. It's just… I've been told it's not safe for me to say, so I have orders to stay quiet."

"Why do people have to be so hard?" said Penny.

"I know what you mean," said Garnet. "I haven't ever had a chance to be with people or figure out any of this stuff out before, so I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm actually glad I ran into you, because you seem, I don't know, kind of okay with me being clueless?"

"I over-relate," said Penny.

"Well, there you go," said Garnet brightly. "Even if other people are hard, I feel like we kind of understand each other, and that's a hundred percent more people than understood me yesterday."

Penny marveled at Garnet. "You are an incredibly positive influence," she said.

She could see Garnet's embarrassment even around her sunglasses. "Is that a good thing?"

"It might be the best thing," said Penny.

Garnet looked pleased by that, and opened her mouth to say more, but a chirp from her wrist got her attention. She drew back her left sleeve to reveal what looked like a bracer on her forearm. It reminded Penny of the bracer that Pyrrha wore, partly as armor and partly as a projector for sights and ranging when firing her rifle. Garnet had fiddled with it before when Penny had suggested the library, but Penny hadn't seen what she was doing or why.

She got little more information this time. Garnet looked at her bracer for several seconds, though the angle was all wrong for Penny to see, too.

"Really?" said Garnet, and even Penny could hear the disappointment there. Garnet tapped at the bracer, then dropped her wrist with a humph. "I can't stay any longer. I really wish I could, because I feel like we're just getting to the good part and you're just about the coolest person ever and I was starting to really like being around you and… I mean, forget I said all that!"

"I will," Penny said, and hiccupped.

"The point is, I have to go to check in, and that'll probably be it for me going out today."

A new feeling swept through Penny, and Thesaurus struggled to pin down the right word for it. Disappointment? Loss? Bitterness? Or maybe it was all those things and more, which made Thesaurus petulantly point out that no single word described all those things at once.

"I hope this isn't the last I'll see of you," Penny said with a hint of desperation.

"I hope not either," said Garnet. "Though I don't really know how I'd contact you again…"

"Do you have a scroll?"

It seemed to take Garnet a few seconds to process the question. "Oh, right," she said, "so we can point-to-point. Yeah, that might work!"

"Here's my scroll number," said Penny, displaying the device.

Garnet… tapped the side of her sunglasses? "Got it," she said.

"Sensational," said Penny. "And what's your number?"

Garnet's bracer chirped at her again. She tapped it with visible annoyance. "Sorry," she said in an ever-accelerating voice, "but it looks like I really have to run, but at least I got your number, so I'll be sure to call you sometime tomorrow if you're available so we can get more time for us to be together okay thanks bye!"

As she turned and dashed for the stairwell, someone rose and called out to her, "No running in the library!"

"Shhhhh!"

Penny's gaze lingered on where Garnet had been. Something about this girl was resonating with Penny. This, whatever it might be, was unusual and special.

She couldn't wait until Garnet called her again.

"I'm back."

"You're six minutes late, Garnet."

"That's just a rounding error!"

"It's a pattern. If it happens again, I won't be able to let you go out alone."

"Wouldn't that kind of defeat the purpose of sending me here in the first place?"

"Maybe, but my instructions were very clear. I'll keep you out of trouble one way or another."

"I understand... spoilsport."

"What was that?"

"Nothing! Just saying how excited I am to be going out tomorrow."

"Did you find something interesting?"

"More like someone."

"You're mumbling again."

"My bad. I'll just head back to my room now. See you in the morning."

Next time: On the Case