~~~

“…So, what did you have in your ear, Samantha??”

Hermione sits up a little straighter. She’d been lounging back in her chair, boredly listening to the wolves’ idle chatter for the last fifteen minutes, but this was important. “Samantha. Tell her it’s just-”

“Oh, it’s just an AirPod!” The girl brushes back her hair to show Clover her ear. “Nothing out of the ordinary!”

Hermione blinks. …What? Perhaps the girl had just gotten caught up in the flow of the conversation.

Lorene narrows her eyes a bit from behind them, but keeps a smile on her face. “What’re you listening to?”

“O-oh, uh, nothing right now!” Samantha laughs nervously. “Sometimes I just like to keep one in, even if I’m not listening to anything! Just a weird quirk of mine!”

Hermione purses her lips. Well, at the very least, she’d made an adequate recovery.

“Gotcha.” Lorene pauses. “Anyway, you were mentioning something about a ‘coordinator’ earlier? Did you mean Clover, since she’s the alpha wolf?”

“Heh heh!” Clover’s ears perk up at her name being mentioned in the same sentence as the word ‘alpha’. “That’d only be natural!”

“U-uh-?”

“Samantha. Say that you honestly don’t know what a Coordinator is, and were hoping to find out. Ask that girl if she has any other information.” Hermione considers what she’d been able to glean thus far. One of the girls’ names was Clover, and there was a girl with a wolf-tail present… and it’d been a meeting for magical girls, according to the dream message. It was most likely Clover Beets, that peasant who’d bitten Rivers the day before; it’d be far too coincidental otherwise. Frustratingly, she’d gotten practically no information about the other girl present.

“Y-yeah, I’m not sure! Is Clover a Coordinator? I kinda came here to find out!”

>?