It's late evening and Nagisa is in her room. It isn't the bright pink and white affair you might expect of many young girls, instead decorated with an array of browns, dark oranges and greens, and other earth tones. It's Japanese style and very traditional at that, like the rest of her home, and so rather than a full bed she has a futon mattress resting upon tatami mats. Kept impeccably clean, the rest of the room contains a small kneeling table, under which sits her school backpack, and off in one corner is a jarringly out of place kitchen play set complete with tiny fake oven and sink- likely a hold over from years past.
The girl sits on her futon curled up, resting her arms on her legs, something in each hand, her eyes studying one and then the other, moving back and forth between the two. The first is her Soul Gem, slightly darkened but not nearly so bad as it had previously gotten. The other is a grief seed, and it's this that the girl studies most intently. Small and black, almost like a round ball with a needle jammed through it. These are now her lifeline, without them she can't survive, and yet she knows so little about them.
The seed is spent, completely used up, and that's why she has it out. Akemi-senpai told her Kyubey would come around to take it after she'd used it, and so here she waits. She hadn't seen her Contractor since that first day other than briefly earlier with Madoka and Homura, but in truth neither had she wanted to. Briefly she had started to really hate him for not having warned her she could have made a better wish -before- rather than after the contract was made, but she quickly decided she did not want to go down that particular road and had intentionally worked at calming her feelings on the matter.
In the end, that had been her poor decision, not his.
Kyubey is first staring at Nagisa from the window, two beady red eyes and a mouth, before he stretches out and walks in, head low and tails brushing against the wall as he does so, just like a cat leaving his scent. Part of the act. Was Nagisa's window even open? Probably not.
"That one's all used up." Kyubey says, matter-of-factly. "You'll need to find more, if you want to keep using your magic like that. It's really dangerous for girlsl like you to go all out in fights that don't have witches." he adds, having witness Nagisa's recent adventure. He's a little annoyed, or at least as much as an Incubator can be. Without her allies, Madoka might have been driven to contract.
Nagisa looks away from the grief seed to the window just in time to see him sitting there before jumping down. She sits up a little more properly and smoothes her dress out as he jumps down, setting her Soul Gem beside herself on the futon. "I know," she offers to both comments at once, her voice mildly taking on the tone of the chastised child she is. "I shouldn't use so much magic when I don't have any more of these, but I don't think I had a choice this time. He really could have killed me."
She assumes Kyubey knows the 'he' she means. She looks at the grief seed again, and then tosses it lightly towards him, in an arc that unless interfered with will have it landing in front of him and rolling only slightly on the tatami mat before coming to a rest. "Akemi-senpai said you take those once I'm done with them."
A lingering pause.
"She also said there are things you're supposed to tell me." That comes out as a bit of an accusation, though she adds, "You can answer some of my questions, can't you? Now that you're here?"
Kyubey leans down, and launches the jewel seed into the air with his tail, catching it and rolling it on top of his head between his ears, before it rolls down and vanishes into his body via the design on his back (which opens up like an actual hatch).
"Yes, disposal is one of my duties." he says, in answer to the first comment. He then lays down on the mat and rolls a bit. "You know, it might be dangerous to consider Homura Akemi your senpai. I don't know who she is. She might not know as much as she thinks she does. As far as I know, she didn't contract with me like you did." he says. This is all true - he has hunches, not knowledge. So it's not a lie.
"But yes, I can answer your questions. I'm sure you have many of them."
Nagisa's eyes widen as Kyubey does tricks with the grief seed, forgetting her manners for a moment and rolling forward onto her hands and knees, even leaning closer in that crawling stance as he tosses it up and than catches it! For the moment it's so adorable she doesn't realize how /weird/ it is to have a compartment in his body.
Sheitting back on her legs she laughs while clapping her hands, "That was funny! Do you do that every time?" Whether or not it was intended it has the effect of disarming her to a large degree and putting her into a slightly better mood.
"She's way stronger than I am," Nagisa replies, relaxing her polite speech patterns now that she's feeling playful herself. "She was also the one who gave me that seed." With a sigh she momentarily closes her eyes and mutters poutily, "I think I'd be dead if not for her, I would have used up all my magic in that fight."
Sulking only for a moment she looks up, "So in those ways, Homura Akemi is assuredly my senior."
Then comes a relieved sigh, followed by a nod, "Good! I do have a bunch of them for you. The first thing I want to know is something Akemi-senpai told me. She said my wish had a price besides just being a magical girl and fighting; she said if my wish had been bigger or more important, like-" pause.
Does she really want to know? This may be a bad thing to ask. It hurts even just thinking about it, and the answer might hurt even more. But as the Incubator would well know by now humans are innately curious, "Like wishing my mother back to health. That if I'd done that instead, I would have to be miserable while fighting to balance it out."
It's a question that in many ways cuts to the core of the contract itself, but worded so specifically to have wiggle room.
Kyubey looks up at Nagisa, and stretches. "Just be careful around Homura Akemi - she wants something very badly, and I don't think she'll let anyone get in her way." is all he suggests, before brigning a back leg up to scratch his ear. Of course, Kyubey knows what she wants - to prevent Madoka from forming a contract - but that's not really relevant here. "It's strange that she would do that - give you a grief seed like that. Usually, magical girls fight over them. You've also met Kyouko Sakura? Most magical girls are like her, or end up that way."
A pause. "There's a price for wishes. I told you that, too. You accept a life of combat. If your soul gem completly darkens, you die." That's not the whole truth, but it is the truth. "The strength of your soul gem, and your powers, also come from your wish. Even I can't tell how your destiny would change if you made a different wish." Also not a lie. Though omitting an actual answer, as well. He just looks up at Nagisa, with his red eyes and unmoving mouth.
"Wether or not you now desire to have made a different wish, your wish was granted exactly like you asked. It was a miracle." he states, plainly.
Nagisa closes her eyes, "I get it, I get it. I'll be careful around her. I'm not going to be stupid and do anything to hurt that girl she cares so much about." She lets out a little sigh and wonders aloud for a moment, "I wonder how they know each other..?"
But that's tangential, and she has important questions, so she dismisses it for the moment. "So it's true, then. We have to have grief seeds to survive, grief seeds come from Witches, where are only so many Witches to fight." After another short pause she comments, "There aren't enough of them for all the Puella Magi either, are there?" It's spoken like a rhetorical question, but she's giving Kyubey a slightly narrow eyed expression that demands answer.
When he gets into answering her questions about wishes she doesn't look satisfied, "It's so complicated you can't even tell, and you're the one granting the wishes? That's stupid!" She throws her arms up into the air while exclaiming childishly, and lets herself fall backwards onto her futon, head hitting the pillow, the girl now staring up at the ceiling.
"Of course I 'desire to have made a different wish'!" Another little flair of anger and she shouts, "You're a jerk!"
She huffs, but then calms back down and sits up again. "...but you're right. It was a Miracle, and even if I want something better than I wished for now, I don't wish I hadn't had a wish at all." And for Nagisa this is key. Her voice soften, "You gave me one of the best memories I'll ever have, and I was able to see Mother smile and eat cheesecake and be happy one more time. She was in terrible pain before that..."
She cries. She's alone in her room, and so she cries. Kyubey is there, but he in many ways doesn't count as a 'person' to her. It's why she's been able to relax and stop worrying so much about how she's presenting herself while talking with him, something a consummate observer such as Kyubey couldn't possibly have missed. Whether he cares, however, is a different story.
When the waterworks die down she brushes her tears from her eyes and cheeks with her blanket, hugging onto her pillow and watching him over it with most of her face covered up, "You're not completely right about that, you know. The other magical girls, the ones that don't need grief seeds, most of them are very kind and helpful. They can fight witches too. They can even destroy them and pick up the grief seeds, can't they? If I had their help, I'd have an advantage over people like Kyouko Sakura, wouldn't I?"
And that is the most important question she's asked all night.
Kyubey watches, with intense red eye staring, Nagisa's entire little show of reactions before he responds. "Well, Kyouko Sakura is a veteran. And she's got a lot of power, just from raw potential. She's been strong from the first night, and now she has a lot of experience. Plus, she's got a ton of grief seeds. She's part of why it's so hard to find witches around here right now - she's hunting them really aggressively. It's possible she means to starve all of the other Puella Magi here out" he says, his tail flicking from side to side.
"I don't know anything about the other magical girls, or what rules they follow. I can really only talk about Puella Magi - girls like you." he adds. "It would be surprising if they somehow got a miracle out of the deal though - it takes a tremendous investment to make miracles come true, after all. That's what you pay for, with your life of conflict. Your miracle."
"There might be enough seeds for all the Puella Magi if you were all very careful about your use of the magic, but you're not. You get involved in fights that don't concern you, or fights with each other, and every time you spend magic, you have to cleanse your seed, so it's inevitable sometimes there's simply not enough." he says. "And especially not when there are girls like Kyouko Sakura who horde the seeds and push others out of territory."
"I know that. I didn't say it'd make me stronger or better than her." Nagisa is finding it increasingly difficult to get a straight answer out of Kyubey as her questioning goes on, and it frustrates her. "A Puella Magi that refuses help and would even pick a fight in the middle of a Labrynth, someone like that could only rely on their own strength and magic to defeat Witches. I'm not like that, though. Many people have offered to help me, so if I could rely on their strength, even a little, it would mean using less of my own magic to defeat Witches." There's no question coming this time; she's explaining it as if Kyubey didn't understand rather than was obfuscating on purpose, and in doing so has convinced herself.
It might be annoying, to hear a Puella Magi who had been so close to running out of magic and surviving only due to the intervention of another to speak of essentially rigging the system of competition. There is little future for weak, unsavvy Puella Magi, and merely witnessing the contest of wills and wits between Homura and Kyouko had made Nagisa keenly aware of this fact. She had to find -some- way to get an edge, or she was done for in an environment so rich in veteran Puella who could out compete a newbie like her without breaking a sweat.
If Kyubey is listening to her thoughts, that's where they lie.
"So there might be enough, if we all work together?" Even the mere possibility of it brings a ray of hope into her eyes, the young girl perking up. "I hope we can, some day. I don't know why she's doing it, but Akemi-senpai is willing to work with me instead of against me. And if she will, maybe others will too, like Mami-san. I should talk to her and see what she thinks."
With a deep breath and a sigh Nagisa pushes away the tension all the questioning had built up in her, and then scoots forward on her futon, closer to Kyubey. Without much warning she reaches out and tries to pick him up, holding him in front of her and staring into his beady little red eyes, and then looking over his bizarre double ears. "You look funny," she comments, but it's entirely without malice. In fact she laughs, and tries to hug him like she would a cat, "I look funny too! People make fun of me sometimes, so I know better than to treat something based on how it looks. It makes sense that a strange looking girl like me would have a strange looking thing like you to Contract with."
She'd set him down, and then try to pet him some, "...you can stay a little longer, right? Just until I go to sleep? It's too quiet here now with just me and Papa."
"Well, and you'd have to stop or defeat the other people - like the boy you fought last night - who are also collecting the seeds. Even I am not sure what they intend with them, but they're not Puella Magi like you." he responds.
Kyubey thinks on the situation now.. There's a lot to take in. He wasn't expecting Nagisa to last long, but now that she's here, there's a lot turning on her. He's seen it before, too, a single young Puella that everyone likes - when something bad happens to her, it can bring more grief to everyone. So for the time being, he reasons, it's better to have her around now. To make the girls with their silly emotions grow close to Nagisa, so that the grief can be made all the more impressive. That way, he's bound to collect a lot of energy all at once! One step closer to the quota!
But for that, he knows that he needs to also remain a point of contact for Nagisa. When his plan fell through, he was out on a branch, and she wasn't fond of him. Making her attached to him now is good.
And thats why he leans into Nagisa's hand, rubbing the side of his face against her hand, furry and soft. "I suppose we both do look funny, yes - I can stay, Nagisa. I hope you can think of me as a friend." His words are carefully chosen, as always. It would be a lie to say that he wants to be her friend, after all. He doesn't understand friendship, only how to manipulate the idea of it.