Crowds of people flowed down the packed sidewalks of downtown mainstreet on a late Monday morning. A canopy of umbrellas was spread across the pedestrians, as a sheer downpour of rain washed between the tall skyscrapers that lined the street. The sight was a sea of monochrome, black on gray on white, broken only by the stark orange glow of the street lamps that stood, still glowing in the morning, as a testament to how dark it was.

To any one person that walked shoulder-to-shoulder in this crowd, this would have been a perfectly ordinary sight, one they had grown used to and seen over so many years. Little did they know, however, that flitting between them were two fairies. One was a rather pudgy mint-green cat with a pair of fluffy, feathered wings, while the other was a cheery yellow puppy with a single horn in the middle of its head and a tail like that of a lion’s.

The fairies darted from person to person, floating lazy circles around them, looking at them close in the eyes, or patting down their arms as if hoping to find something. The pedestrians showed no surprise, and with each person the fairies would let out an exasperated sigh before moving on to the next. Soon enough, they rose back up and looked over the road, packed bumper-to-bumper with a herd of dully-coloured sedans.

“Ping, we’ve been at this for hours,” the yellow fairy said. “We’ve gotta get out of here before the daemons realize we’ve trespassed, and then we’ll be in some real trouble!”

“I thought you said you weren’t scared of daemons, Cant,” Ping cooed. “Besides, it’s not like they patrol the cities! Who’s gonna rat us out anyways? It’s not like humans can see us or anything.”

“They still come through here now and then!” Cant insisted, stomping their hind leg in mid-air. “Nobody’s going to bail us out this time! We’re in deep now, and you know it!”

“Oh will you be quiet already? Look, we’ll find someone, we’ll break the Veil on them, and bing bang boom we’ve got a new Magica to fight with!”

“But we’re not going to find anyone! Other fairies have searched before, and they all came back saying the same thing: there just isn’t anyone out there with genuine, pure hope anymore! Some even tried breaking the Veil on a normal human, just to try and see if they can... convince them to have hope or something, and no! Nothing worked!”

“And maybe they just weren’t looking hard enough? Come on, you can’t expect me to believe that there isn’t a SINGLE human out there who can’t dream anymore!”

“Look!” Cant said, moving their paw onto the bridge of their snout in some imitation of pinching it. “Even if we find a human who still dreams, like, hypothetically we do, how are we going to break the Veil on them anyways?! In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re still sprites! We don’t have enough magic on our own to do much of anything!”

“Oh can’t we?” Ping said, producing a small, blue marble that glowed brightly, reflecting clearly off of Ping’s smug eyes.

“Where’d you get that?” Cant asked, eyeing the marble suspiciously.

“Oh, let’s just say I paid a little visit to the Arcanum before we left for our trip.”

“You stole that, didn’t you!”

“Stealing is a harsh word! I’m just borrowing it!”

“How can you borrow something you can’t return after you’ve used it up?!”

“I’ll think of something! Besides, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission!”

“Do you know how hard it is to make a curse breaker that strong these days?! They’ll wring our necks before they forgive us!”

“They’ll be THANKING us when we show them a new Magica fighting on our side!” Ping insisted, tucking the marble away. In that moment, Ping’s whiskers shivered and their eyes darted around, scanning the crowd.

“Oh I’m not falling for this again,” Cant said, crossing their paws. “No way! We’re going back and that’s final, and you’re going to return that curse breaker as soon as we get back!”

“Oh will you shut up? This is for real this time!” Ping said. “There! Running against the crowd!”

Cant looked where Ping pointed, and sure enough, pushing and shoving through the crowd and carving a path in the sea of umbrellas was a lone, human girl holding a newspaper over her head in some desperate attempt at staying dry. She wasn’t especially tall, nor especially… anything in her appearance. She couldn’t have been older than her early twenties, even. Yet, apologizing endlessly, there she went weaving through the crowd. Cant produced a small, golden eye loupe and held it up, doing their best to track the girl as she ran through the crowd. The image through the lens was dark, but after a few minutes of tracking her they could see it: a faint, pink aura that glowed around her.

“C’mon, say it,” Ping said, floating close to Cant with a mischievous look in their eyes. Cant sighed as they put the eye loupe away.

“Fine. You were right.” Cant said, shaking their head. “Now what are we supposed to do?”

“Just follow my lead!” Ping said, darting into crowd.

“Hey! Wait for me!” Cant flew after Ping, and the two disappeared into the sea of people.