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Priscilla     BEFORE:

    "I was told that I would meet all kinds of unreasonable people. Unfortunate. I would have preferred to quietly finish my work and then settle things in a polite fashion with the luxury of time afterwards. But this has been a persistently vexing interruption. I see little else to do, if I am to finish."

    Then the maid's posture shift, her head tilts back, the hair-shadow slips from her closed eyes and monochrome pale face, and she speaks most of a sentence to the sky, save a single word that appears on her lips and yet utterly fails to register. Not just silence, or an omission of sound, but a place where a word used to be, and no longer exists.

    "My apologies for the premature call, however, I need you,        ."

    There is one last instance of that short, obtusely conversational delay, and then the maid figure is suddenly struck from above by something, and enveloped in a rapidly pulsing corona of white light, flickering at the rate of a photosensitive hazard with a sharply electrical flywheel drone loud enough to hurt the ears. The corona condenses a hairsbreadth with each pulse, rapidly solidifying into a blurry ring shape, and then splits apart completely, broken into three cohesive halos of light that are each surrounded by an identical array of abstract lines and host to an inner iris. The glyph-halos attain a sort of buoyant stability around her, and form up into an interlocking triangle behind and above her. The Marie Broom twirls through the air in a flurry of lightning quick revolutions and snaps to attention in the Maid's hands as if it were a deadly weapon.

    "Sigma, Lamba, and Tau. This should be plenty." says the Maid.

    CLEANING IN PROGRESS . . .

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-blwjXkZow
Kale Hearthward BEFORE:

"Let's dress up as maids and infiltrate the secret society of assassin maids," says Kale, proving why you shouldn't skim the mission briefing.

NOW:

Still dressed as a maid.

Unrelated image: https://i.imgur.com/FbXgsfV.png

"Okay. I gave you your broom back - I'm sorry you feel the need to do - whatever that is," says the hawkperson, looking at the new additions with a bit of wariness, as if expecting them to bite.

"Look - Marie? Is your name Marie? Can we... de-escalate here, before anyone does anything they'd regret?"

He eyes Mack and Tamamo - warily, not accusingly or in any way implying that they're *wrong* for taking threatening stances - Kale's not sure himself, and he also just stole her broom (even if he gave it back right after) but he's watching them to see if they're going to escalate further.

He clutches his own broom - which is just a regular cleaning supply store broom - and waits.
Tomoyo Daidouji BEFORE:
    "There are just some who can't tolerate anything unusual. They feel that anything that does not fit in should be expunged. Anything that doesn't look normal should go away."

NOW
    Tomoyo is having to talk around her two bodyguards pushing her back as The Maid stances up to throw down. "There's no need to fight!" she insists with all the naive air of one who doesn't understand how these things go. "She's just here to clean. Just... let her. It's okay to just sometimes let people be, and do their thing. Even if they resist you asking, even if they resist you telling them not to. Just leave her alone."
Roxas Roxas isn't actually a part of the most unreasonable people. He seems a bit confused by the assertion that this whole thing isn't really causing actual problems for the people for whom the service is being performed, but isn't altogether certain that he really understands. For that matter... why is it that the 'complaint' universally came from a nonspecified third party?

His attention swings towards the bare foundations. Instead of stancing up with the people getting ready to fight The Maid, he heads over towards one of the bare foundations and examines it. Was the whole building just swept into the 'disposal area'?

He fishes the candy given to Xion and then to him out of his pocket and unwraps it, taking a look at it before popping it in his mouth. While he does so he thinks about everything that The Maid has said.

Something there stands out, though.

An ordinary person would probably parse that 'something' as nothing at all, as indeed it is. But there's a texture to it that's familiar.

Close.

Absent-but-present.

"Excuse me,        ?"

The texture of the non-name is different coming from Roxas, hanging metaphorically at the horizon.

"Is something the matter?"

He's not sure whether to anticipate a response or not.
Karlan Nobles Pramanix: "She wasn't doing a bad job."
SilverAsh: "Quite a good one, at that."
Pramanix: "It really wouldn't hurt to hire her if she's open to it."
SilverAsh: "... Perhaps for you. Not for-"
Pramanix: "What's that supposed to mean?"

As the snow leopard siblings bicker, they find their miscommunication session interrupted when the curious maid gains those strange halos along with that ear-stabbing noise thathas them both flinching and tugging their hats down to shield themselves a little more than not at all. Once they get a little more accustomed to the noise or it stops, they exchange glances briefly before looking towards the maid once more.

The one with the halos, not the bird.

"If she hasn't hurt anyone and the most she's caused is some inconvenience while cleaning things up, then there's really no reason to stop her." Pramanix really does't look like she has any intention of fighting at all, only glancing somewhat cautiously at those halos and keeping one hand on her hat in case she needs to tug it down again. "Especially not if fighting would cause an even bigger mess than before."

"I wouldn't call it just 'some inconvenience', but the cost of replacing any missing items couldn't possibly match the savings from cleaning everything so thoroughly." SilverAsh seems to share the same intent to not get in the Maid's way, albeit in a more roundabout way as he squats briefly to drag a gloved finger over the street. "A bit too thorough in some cases, but certainly cheaper to fix where necessary."

Once they realize they're actually in agreement, though, SilverAsh smiles with a refined, yet smug aura while Pramanix breaks eye contact to try and feign indifference.

Pramanix: "Anyway. Miss Marie? Please, keep up the good work."
SilverAsh: "You've done a fine job here, and I look forward to seeing you continue. Should anyone opposes you by force, then I shall respond in kind."
Pramanix: "That'd just make a bigger mess, you know."
Xion Xion can sense the battle music. Just the agitation of combat nearby gets her to bounce slightly from one foot to the other, her eyes tracking onto people as they get close to her or stance away. It's not...

It's not what she expected. But then again, the Maid summoning mysterious allies and powering up like one of Vexen's Data Hard Mode EX Simulator Fights is something Xion is oddly used to, even if it cements her dread into place that she doesn't just 'kind of not want to fight the Maid right now' but in fact 'Definitely does not want to fight the Maid right now'.

"It'd be pretty lame if we pushed things to the point that she powered up early to recieve people's feelings, but then everyone decided that their feelings weren't *actually* enough to justify a fight. Still, um..."

She grimaces. "Maybe that's the proper use of just enough force?"

Xion elbows Roxas, leaning into his shoulder. "Hey, who's        ? I don't feel a         around here. Do you?"
Roxas Roxas looks sidelong at Xion, flashing a lopsided grin. "I dunno. I heard        , but I'm not sure I really follow it either. It just felt important, you know? Sort of like... I don't know. The Castle. Or The World."
Priscilla     At Roxas somehow almost 'correctly pronouncing' the name that doesn't exist --or perhaps a name that was lost, or simply cannot be understood-- the Maid's attention is clearly drawn. "It's as I said. She can't speak to us, but she can see and hear us." However there is a detectably meaningful pause. "But it wouldn't be incorrect to say that I have a good feeling of her mind, if I listen carefully. A knack for intuiting what she is thinking, you could say."

    "What the matter is here, is something we agree on. She would know more than me, but this city is soon to only slide into decay and become unlivable. There are too many things wrong with it. She required a place to begin. To test our methods. This was as good a place to try as any. Up until just now, there had been no motions at calling anyone to assist these people, after all."

    She glances sidelong to Pramanix, still stanced up. "I'm not Marie. I'm the Maid."

    The building, on close examination, doesn't appear to have been possible to simply 'toss down the chute'. It seems, somehow, as if it'd actually been scrubbed away. As if, by perceiving the ruined, uninhabitable housing as a stain, it became possible to mop up. The exact dimensions of the lot have been kept exactly intact. Fences, mailbox, power post and all, with a house-shaped space a slightly lighter shade than the lawn-shaped space.
Mack Mack's response to the intrusion is to become a porcupine covered in increasingly specialized quills. It gets her away from him, and gives him clearance to recover from the whammy that his own psychic resilience and techno-wizard bionics scrambled. His mind comes back to him, and his body lurches into an uright position. He hears a tinny ringing in his ears, and, distantly, a voice.

Without preamble, Mack whacks the heel of his hand against the side of his head. It makes a metallic 'clunk' noise, most notably into his implanted radio transmitter. His audials snap back into alignment at the same time, and his eyes focus on the clearly ready-to-brawl Maid across from him.

"Sorry, miss; no can do." He widens his stance, addressing Tomoyo while he watches the Maid. "There are far too many ways this could be the start of something terrible, especially if she can get in our heads like that. Do me a favor and get back, alright? I don't want to see you get hurt."

The same is not true of the Maid. Mack thrusts his right hand forward, and an inverted dome of what looks like molten glass snaps forward, a telekinetic pulse strong enough to lift and toss a normal person off their feet and clear out of the Zone of Cleanliness. He is under no illusions that she is a normal person, but he has to scale it somehow. "Alright, let's get a move on!"
Kale Hearthward A brief radio conversation is held. Kale nods to Mack. He's not *certain* this is the right move, but he's no more certain that *inaction* is the right move.

And in situations like these, being indecisive is one of the worst things you can be.

"Apologies!" he says, casting and focusing his wind magic on the maid. If she's going to resist the Official Paladin Attempt to remove her from the area, then she's going to be going up against strong winds focused on keeping her from doing... whatever it is she's doing.

Kale's just sort of covering all the bases at this point.
Xion "It's really odd, right. Like an X-" Pronounced Key "-term just being dropped in the middle of a sentence, but it's missing. An Xword of darkness."

Xion has to confront the idea of an important phrase that is aligned with darkness, and the meaning becomes muddied when she considers the Maid.

"But she seems to be a Maid of Light, right? She's removing all of the bits of the place that are out of alignment with it... Well, maybe we can't just apply our logic to places. I'd really like to though! It'd make things way easier."

Xion makes this lament as Mack becomes an Aggressive Countermeasures Porcupine and starts swinging away.

"Do you think Maidbuddies will show up? Maidlesses? Uncleaned?"
Roxas "Oh, sorry-- I didn't catch that," Roxas admits to The Maid, rubbing at the back of his head and leaning back from the foundation. There's nothing about it that really strikes him as 'off' except that the building itself is gone. You could put a new building here, if you wanted. On the other hand...

"What sort of living environment are you and        trying to make? Is there a... I dunno, The Builder?" He wonders, gesturing off into the horizon without a particular target.

"Would it look something like this?" He gestures into the open air and produces a swirling portal of darkness-- but through it there are white halls and silver floors, differences in texture demarcated more by different levels of brightness in specific segments of construction rather than because any other color is truly used.

It's a sharp contrast with the portal itself.

Roxas doesn't keep the portal open, though. It shuts shortly afterwards.

He kicks the ground absent-mindedly, looking uncomfortable with the fight that's winding up. To Xion, he replies, "I guess she seems kinda Light, yeah... 'Maidbuddies' sounds right for some reason, but if it was named by the guys who come up with terminology in OUR world, it'd definitely be the Uncleaned. And they'd definitely be the cleanest thing in the room."
Tomoyo Daidouji     The lines are drawn. Mack is making the call that preventing the potential bad is worth preventing the potential good. He asks that Tomoyo stand aside. Realistically, there's not a lot she can do to stop him. She's a normal girl, and he's a psion hulked out on cybernetics, accompanied by a bird mage dressed as a maid.

    But that won't stop her from trying.

    She gets out from in between her guards and rushes out to try and intercept the wind magic Kale is throwing out. Her guards rush after her, one taking the brunt of the spell on her arms as it shreds cloth and skin while the other grabs their charge and hunkers down with her.

    "You don't need to do this. I can't just stand idly by is all," Tomoyo says to her bodyguards. "Don't talk. Focus only on the target," the one holding her rebukes before standing and producing a collapsable baton. The one who blocked the magic backs up and talks into a headpiece. "We need assistance. Bring the van."

    The baton-packing guard rushes Kale, swiping with some fairly impressive speed and force to try and put the birdmaid on the backfoot!
Karlan Nobles "Oh! My apologies, friend. Er. Maid." Pramanix lets out a relieved sigh when it almost looks like things might be settling down, although there's still a hint of unease at the overall situation. "Might we ask who this 'she' is? I'd rather not guess too much about anything if I'm not on duty."

SilverAsh sighs lightly at that admission while getting back up on his feet, tapping his cane against his shoulder as Mack starts becoming distinctly more porcupine-y and visibly threatening the Maid via stancing up in turn. He raises an eyebrow at the dome-ish attack, gripping the cane with both hands in his own form of stancing up. He doesn't swing immediately, though, glancing from the metal man to the maidly bird when Kale goes after Tomoyo.

That settles that for the siblings, then. Pramanix still seems vaguely disappointed even as she brings out her HOLY BELL, ringing it loudly and proudly to call down an unnaturally chilling wind around Mack. As she does so, SilverAsh flicks his CANE BLADE out towards the metal mutant with a dramatic flourish before and afterwards, as if trying to confound him with where the actual attack is coming from before it strikes low in a attempt to throw him off balance.
Kale Hearthward Kale focuses his wind spells on the other maid-

- And they're intercepted, handily, by the intervention of a baton-twirling human. Kale pulls up short on the wind assault, not quite sure what to make of this at first.

"This is - hey!" He cuts off as he's rushed with the twirling baton, and reflexively brings up his broom to try to block it. "This is an official action by the Paladins! We're moving a potentially dangerous - SQUAWK!"

She gets past the broom and lands a very solid hit on him. "So if you'd just stand down and- AWK!"

He degenerates into more bird noises as the baton strikes home again.

"Okay, yeah, if you'd just - *SQUAWK* - Oh ENOUGH OF THIS-"

He just simply gets fed up and opens his beak to blow air at her.

Usually, blowing air at someone is merely rude and unsanitary. In Kale's case, it's like being point-blank in front of a wind tunnel suddenly turning on - the innate magicks of the Windswept Continent giving him a set of lungs that could rival any dragon you could name.

If he can, Kale pushes Tomoyo away - and keeps her away, giving him a bit of breathing space to work up his next strike!
Priscilla     "A new Zone." the Maid replies to Roxas, as if that is an answer at all. "There is no Building. Now, there is the Maid, the Puppeteer, and the Sun." Her expression doesn't notably change when he displays the portal, but he and Xion could briefly swear she opened her eyes a little. "I like how clean it is. But four elements have already been chosen. There is still room for a plus one, but the four can't be changed."

    Yet it seems out of the whole crowd, it seems only Mack and Kale have been determined to Be A Problem on part of the Paladins. The fact that Tomoyo rushes out to intercept one of them seems to impress itself upon her. "There's no need for a young mistress to dirty her hands with this business." she says. "I will be more than sufficient."

    That said, Mack's attack collides with her fairly easily. It's difficult to tell whether she was unable to see it coming, or uncertain of what to do, though a quick shift of her broom and both arms against it catches the center of the curved blast at the last possible second, launching her a considerable distance backwards down the street. Those 'halos' both flawlessly follow her, and also apparently pull her back down again, landing not half the distance he intended to throw her. He could swear he heard a sound vaguely like tearing paper. There are a few bright red droplets --far too brightly red-- of what look like blood on the ground where she stood, even though no skin was broken. They fade away, turn transparent, and disappear, in the course of only a few seconds.

    "So that's how it works." the Maid says aloud, without obvious tone or inflection. "Let's try it then." She starts off back towards Mack at an alarmingly sudden dead run, the dress fluttering a little too dramatically and a pair of classic mary janes finding traction a little too easily to attain that speed, as if not quite matching up with the space she rapidly crosses. Approaching him, she gracefully leaps into the air, and turns fully over him. Three quick swipes of the broom crisscross over him across the arc, eaching 'sweeping' a dramatic splatter of white . . . energy? Of some sort. Over him. It looks like a hazard logo for a quarter second. Like one you find on the back of something you aren't supposed to keep on the counter.

    The Maid used Sweep With Clarity!

    Mack may be familiar with the principle of elemental damage. How being hit with 'fire magic' or a 'fire element' enchanted weapon isn't quite the same as being being hit with actual fire. A magic fireball is different from a literal flamethrower.

    Somehow he has been attacked with a technique that is, on an elementally aligned level, the element of CHLORINE. Not just the broom, but the element itself, are both far more effective as weapons than can be explained by common sense.
Roxas "A Zone? The Maid, The Puppeteer, and the Sun...?" Roxas looks perplexed by some of this terminology. But he seems to understand the concept of the Elements forming fundamental lynchpins. On the other hand, that signals something else to him entirely.

"You're... a young pantheon, then? But..." He gestures towards the surroundings, "This place is already formed and habitable... and you make it sound like your world... Zones? Are already partially formed. Are you making them far apart?"

"What elements? How do you 'add a new element'?" He wonders.
Mack Tomoyo... does not step back. Mack suppresses the urge to grimace. Kale can handle it, though, and he gives him a quick nod, looking away before he starts making injured bird noises and thus preserving his pride... at least as far as his partner-in-justice(??) is concerned.

The Maid's shorter flight makes his steel-shod lip twitch downward. The red droplets catch his eye, momentarily bringing a pang of alarm. He's trying for non-lethal, inasmuch as he's able; his telekinetic powers are much more flexible and more naturally able to be used for that sort of thing, given his own practical experience with it, but it shouldn't be cutting her... and it doesn't seem to be. Sparks, maybe? Or --

Mack's implanted sensor suite alerts him to the sudden and unnatural changes in air pressure and temperature before he registers the ringing sound to be aggressive. Frost forms on the outside of his scrap metal shell, and he flings himself at the swiftly-approaching SilverAsh to escape the cloud of cold. Mack's low profile aids him, making it awkward for Ash to fight something squat and quick, the cyborg's previously limping gait and aided steps vanishing in an instant as he dives clear over the incoming sword-strokes.

The Maid intercepts him with her graceful leap. Sweeps of white energy pass over him. Where it passes, it cleanses, sanitizes, and burns. His filtration systems immediately start working, the burning in his lungs made bearable while layers of his scrapyard shell flakes away and vanishes before it hits the ground. It leaves weird stripes of gleaming chrome where it connects, digging into his armor and peeling off the uppermost layers. It hasn't scrubbed through to the skin just yet.

Mack returns fire before he's completely passed beneath her. He performs a front-flip in the air, turning over to face her momentarily, the fingers on his left hand spreading as a red-hot glow bleeds up to the clawed tips. Blasts of magical flame erupt into the air where she passes, pockets of oxygen transmuted into balls of fire with a series of dull thumps, leaving a flaming arc passing over his head.

He comes down on his feet in a crouch. Mack immediately rotates on his heel and whips his right arm across his body, as if he was throwing a handful of something. A spray of iron needles leap off his arm, whistling down-range towards Pramanix -- specifically, aimed at the arm holding the bell.

"Wish you hadn't done that," he sighs, only after the fact.
Tomoyo Daidouji     Kale is having a bad day when it comes to servants. One won't heed his authority and now another is beating him like a drum. She constantly jabs and swings around his broom, the baton making satisfying thwacks as they make contact.

    But the massive gust of wind catches her entirely off-guard, and sends her sliding down the smooth, marble-textured road. However, the other guard had pulled Tomoyo away, and is now closing the distance to pick up where her compatriot left off. She drops to her knees, using the smooth road to slide up to Kale, wraps her arms around his knees, and lifts! The classic MMA takedown, lifting him up while pushing forward to put him on his back!

    And then she just starts working his beak with her fists while Tomoyo backs off to help her other bodyguard back up. "Are you okay?" "Winded," they reply, with no hint of irony.
Karlan Nobles SilverAsh: "A Zone, The Building, the Maid, the Puppeteer, and the Sun. How mysterious. I wonder who among us will discover the true nature of these things first."
Pramanix: "I already said I'm not on duty."

SilverAsh doesn't let Pramanix take that wind out of his sails too much, although there is still a light sigh from each of them after that. With a fight beginning in earnest, however, they find their attention focused elsewhere. The elder SilverAsh looks pleasantly surprised when Mack comes right at him and evades that testing swing beautifully, stepping back to watch his maneuvers against the high-flying Maid.

Pramanix, meanwhile, doesn't quite get to watch their battle with such ease. The iron needles coming her way are partially intercepted by SilverAsh as he steps in the path of some of them, but several others embed themselves into her arm and coat alike despite her best attempt to evade them via twisting sideways and taking every single one in her bell-holding arm.

It's not a particularly good attempt, but it was an attempt nonetheless. She very nearly flings that bell into the sky, too, but manages to muster up enough coordination to switch hands with a quick toss of the chiming thing behind her and fighting the urge to yank those needles right out as she catches it in her non-stabbed hand. She keeps ringing that bell in a steady rhythm, the snow starting to build up in its intensity as she tries to restrict the metal man's movement with sheer cold (and also from getting too close for comfort).

SilverAsh, meanwhile, just yanks those needles right out of himself. The wounds heal over relatively quickly, enough to stem the bleeding before it can ruin his suit (too much). After seeing that stunt, however, he opts for a considerably more aggressive strategy, going lower to the ground himself as he aims for Mack's center mass instead with rapid thrusts aimed far more carefully than his initial fanciful maneuver.
Kale Hearthward Finally, Kale has some breathing room.

"Okay, if you're not going to listen to reason, I'm going to have to - OH COME ON," the inverted bird says, right before he gets thrown to the ground and punched repeatedly.

While the bodyguard continues to punch him, he manages to get a spell out - shaping it in his hands, and throwing it wildly into the air. He can't focus like this - managing to fend off one combatant, only to be tackled by another.

The wind picks up - or rather, it picks *down*. It's a punishing downdraft - hurricane force winds, pushing down and then blowing outwards, likely causing a bigger mess in the area as collateral damage.

Kale really, really hopes this'll get him some breathing room and there's not, like, another bodyguard waiting in the wings to launch another assault.

Like, with a van or anything.

That'd be unfortunate.
Priscilla     Again, Mack has surprisingly little difficulty striking the Maid. Despite the obvious combat aptitude shown by the strange attack just now, she takes the fireballs head on as if she's never seen them before; or even like she's never seen someone point at something and make ranged attacks come out before. She twists backwards away from the blossoming explosions, bouncing loudly off the ground with another off-tune thunk-crunch, then deftly flips back up, briefly using four points to find her feet again. A thin, slightly gruesome trail of too-vivid blood follows, then fades away like a particle effect. Her dress is unburned.

    "I wish you hadn't insisted on this." replies the Maid, eerily prim and collected as before. "I would have preferred to compile battle information in a better environment." Compile. That's a word you don't usually hear maids say. "I will attempt to accommodate you." That one is, but it's usually not that ominous.

    She barely moves a hand for the floating halos --those 'Add-Ons'-- to come swinging out from behind her, and form a perfectly interlocked, rotating trio ahead of her. The cascading series of discordant, yet somehow harmonions, flashes, pulses, screeches, cracks, booms, strobes, and other such danger-adjacent events, is practically impossible to make out over the jumble of its own simultaneous disunity. Hardly a combination attack, but certainly multiple attacks happening at the same time.

    Sigma used Recursive Praxis!
    Lambda used Destructive Interference!
    Tau used Sophisticated Design!

    The 'elements' get weirder from there: LOGIC, ELECTROMAGNETISM and GEOMETRY. Outside of the effects of destructive resonant frequency to all those metal bits, and being folded in ways people aren't supposed to fold, the cognitive effects of trying to process it are, at once, dizzying, nauseating, and blinding.

    Speaking of Elements. "That is the Puppeteer's decision." the Maid replies to Roxas. "Though I wouldn't like being compared to a God, the Sun's creative capacity might seem 'godlike' to you, when it actualizes. But this place was both unformed and uninhabitable when I arrived. Hence the necessity of cleaning. In the process, it's natural the unsalvageable mess is thrown away."
Tomoyo Daidouji     The massive downburst lands on the bodyguard's back like an elephant, crushing her down against Kale before yeeting her down the road to join Tomoyo and her compatriot. The little scion is looking mighty exposed right now.

    But from down the road, the squealing of wheels on the cleansed roads. That cream van is speeding towards them, taking the perfect right-angled turn with precision as it races towards Kale. Two more bodyguards can be seen through the windshield as the driver grapples with the gears to execute a tight turn, pivoting the whole vehicle on one wheel to swing its entire mass about like a bludgeon, aimed squarely at Kale!
Kale Hearthward At last, all of the people are under control.

"Okay, listen - All we need to do is just temporarily - why do I hear an engine -"

**WHAM**

Kale, who is very light (because bird) gets slammed into and goes flying - not literally, but then a moment later yes literally.

"OKAY!"

And now he's up in the air, the jet boots that were hidden under his maid dress firing off and keeping him hovering in the air, even through the localized storm that's still ongoing.

"CLEARLY!" he yells. "YOU DO NOT ACCEPT MY LOGIC! THAT'S FINE! WE CAN AGREE TO DISAGREE! BUT ALSO VERY CLEARLY, YOU DO NOT ACCEPT MY AUTHORITY HERE!"

He zeroes in on Tomoyo, focusing his yelling on her.

"AND THAT IS NOT SOMETHING WE CAN AGREE TO DISAGREE ON! IT'S SORT OF HOW AUTHORITY WORKS! I SAY THAT THIS IS A DANGEROUS SITUATION AND WE NEED TO HANDLE IT THIS WAY, AND YOU EITHER HELP OR YOU GET OUT OF THE WAY!"

"BUT FINE!" he says, continuing to yell, even as the storm continues unabated. "IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO ACCEPT MY AUTHORITY HERE, THEN I HAVE SOMETHING YOU CAN'T SIMPLY REFUSE TO ACCEPT, THAT I CAN USE TO RESOLVE THIS DISAGREEMENT!"

The wind sorceror focuses - and some very targeted blasts of air are launched at Tomoyo, who seems to be the ringleader of whatever all this is.

"MY STRENGTH!"
Mack Mack had hoped to disarm and deter Pramanix with those needles, but no such luck on his part. Instead, the ice storm builds with each peal of the bell, pelting him with precipitation and starting to impair his movements with frozen joints -- or... something like that.

The real problem is that he's got a lot of pieces of metal fused with his skin, pressed into it seamlessly, which are becoming extremely cold and near-instantly dropping his core temperature. To say it is uncomfortable is a vast understatement. He's shivering, teeth chattering with a rattling, ringing sound as he cringes in on himself. He doesn't have the time to try to get out of the area this time; SilverAsh is already on him, coming in with aggressive thrusts and a desire to hurt him.

"Th-th-that's it," Mack grunts. He raises his artificial hands to parry. The first slips through, but impacts weirdly-overlaid armor plates, stabbing into a piece of something with a Stark Industries logo. The next goes low, and Mack prevents it from being a gut shot by pressing his foot down and then bringing his knee upwards. A slot opens at the top of his kneecap, a hidden blade launching upwards and clashing against the sword. Mack moves along with it, sinuously stepping into SilverAsh's guard as the blade cuts a red slash along his side, slipping between frozen armor plates. Hot blood spills from chilled flesh.

Totally without grace, Mack hurls himself at SilverAsh, looking like a child tackling a grown-up but with far more strength behind it. He throws punches at his midsection, then hooks his left arm towards SilverAsh's right side, the oblong object attached to Mack's forearm smoothly unfurling as it comes near. A wooden spike fires with each almost gentle touch, Mack making a motion like he was armed with the needle of a sewing machine and SilverAsh was in dire need of stitches. He disentangles himself immediately afterwards, a pulse of telekinetic force meant to seperate the two also hurtling scrap metal debris -- and possibly Ash -- back at the bell-ringing Pramanix.
Mack "C-c-can't always pick where you get your -- your combat t-test," says the increasingly hypothermic cyborg. He flexes his left hand, and that heat bleed that was in his fingers runs up his arm, a heat haze shimmering into sight as he tries to counteract some of the wintry conditions he was absolutely not prepared for. Some of the shivering dies down, but, much like the Maid who apparently hasn't seen any of this before, he hasn't seen whatever it is she's doing over there, either. He braces himself --

-- insufficiently. He braces himself insufficiently.

Mack's body twists into something that, from the outside, looks an awful lot like a knot. The forces at play try to pull the metal bits he's apparently wearing in multiple directions at once, but, and here's the important part, he's only wearing *some* of them. Wires pull on his scalp; his mouth gets jammed shut; his arms and legs try to escape the joints they're attached to; his 'coat' billows outward, then crushes inward, bending into a ball of useless scrap and taking the Metal Morph it's implanted into with it.

Mack ejects the lot of it.

A junkyard's worth of scrap bursts off of him like feathers off an exploded cartoon fowl. He collapses to the ground, an emaciated body of taut skin pulled over sallow flesh being held up by arms and legs of sheer bionic artistry, incongruously affixed to his wasted form. His neck is too long, his head too big, and apparently too heavy for his thin, bony neck to support without some kind of external aid. He's covered in quickly-developing bruises that equally quickly seem to be erased, as if something moving under his skin was equipped with a very specialized eraser.

The air around him turns into fragments of broken glass. Telekinetic force cloaks his body, distorting the light around him as it lifts him up. The mounds of twisted trash all around him rattle like they were in an earthquake -- and then rip free of one another and of gravity's hold, rocketing towards the Maid in a jet-stream of jagged scrap. It splits, loops, and dives like a swarm of homing missiles, each piece of refuse repurposed into a telekinetically-propelled tool of violence.

This is, Mack will reflect later, entirely more escalation than he was anticipating doing.
Tomoyo Daidouji     The two bodyguards get out of the van to reinforce the other two, leaving Tomoyo with her full entourage. They look up at Mack with mirrored shades at implacable faces. Tomoyo, at the very least, looks a little more uncertain, but she responds to his loud words with quiet ones.

    "You're right. I don't. Not like this," she explains. "I understand you came out here to investigate her. But there's just not enough to say that she's doing anything dangerous. Extreme, yes. Uncompromising, yes. But that, in and of itself, is nothing bad."

    She looks up at Kale, looks him right in the eyes. "With authority comes accountability. I expect you'll have to justify the use of force later. Be honest with me; do you think, with all the information you had at the time, that the use of force against The Maid was justified? I, personally, don't see it. Implications of a ritual that may or may not be harmful. Some cases where she got rough in self-defence. To me, at least, it's not enough. And obviously, you don't answer to me. But I don't want to live my life regretting the time I spent toeing the line when I should have spoke out. I'm sorry."

    The wind blasts come, and Tomoyo is struck. But as she falls, she ukemi's, and tumbles safely on the ground, yelling to her guards, "Take them out of the air!" The four move in concert. Two interlock their hands to form a platform for a third to leap at Kale, grabbing him and dragging him back down.

    Once lowered, the other three descend on him, striking in co-ordinated fury with those batons. And then Tomoyo walks up, holding a handmirror made of jade. She presses it against Kale's leg, and electricity arcs about its frame, flowing into him.
Priscilla     After the full barrage seems to be completed, the Maid wordlessly calls back the trio of Add-Ons merely by pulling back her hand, returning to their fixed configurations around her that seem to make her presence seem much larger than it really is. "That seemed more effective." she says. "But draining. Perhaps something in the middle." It feels . . . unclear, why she's saying all of that out loud. "Perhaps examining the invader for weaknesses first would have been prudent. Nevertheless, it is our first time."

    Speaking of which, Mack doesn't get to be that fortunate a third time in a row. With the grace and alacrity with which the Maid responds this time, it almost feels like the first two times had been some kind of failure to move at all. Failure to notice? Failure to respond? Some kind of 'lack of calibration', certainly. Ultimately, it's a shock that she can defend herself from that massive saturation attack at all, never mind by utilizing a push broom like that. Spinning it end over end, darting and shifting it back and forth, extending and retracting through her grip, changing hands and swatting away clouds of metal. There are faint, sharp, repetitive shearing noises here and there, drops of irreverently scarlet particle-blood falling free from mystery injuries --including from the Add-Ons-- but it doesn't seem like he's getting anywhere as fast as he wanted to be.

    He sees her bring up the Marie Broom between gloved fingers almost like a rifle, pointing it in his direction. He sees very recognizable (though somehow not literal?) targeting indicators flash into his field of vision from several directions, overlapping and blinking white over his center mass, and then doubling on his opponent's end, appearing at her feet. Swishing the Marie Broom back into its proper posture, the Maid outright begins clearing the reticle over the marble ground as if it were an X-marks-the-spot, exactly how a professional would if they needed a floor thoroughly dusted in a hurry.

    The Maid used Respectable Dusting!

    Each time the broom sweeps over the spot, a wide, raking slash of *something* is transmitted over to Mack, scraping sweeps of pure whiteness battering him like the blade of a chainsaw being run the wrong way. This one doesn't seem to have an 'element'. It is 'cleanliness', of some sort, concentrated in significant amount of pure power.
Karlan Nobles The Maid's strange manner of speaking is not lost on Pramanix and SilverAsh, although the former certainly has a concerned furrow of her brow like she'd prefer if it was lost on her.  The pair join up once again as they watch the halos firing off their disorienting array of horrible noises, flashes, and physics-mocking whatever thatfolding is all about.

SilverAsh: "Wouldn't throwing away an unsalvageable mess go against your title?"
Pramanix: "So what? If it's really unsalvageable, it'd be easier that way. She could always clean up the leftovers and replace it later with this... Sun."

Pramanix sighs. She said she wasn't going to try getting into all that speculative name-deciphering, and yet she's already doing it. As the fight continues, though, she does have to focus more of her attention on Mack than what the Maid is doing, although she almost looks more inquisitive than outright hostile despite... Well.

Trying to freeze him solid while her brother is very much trying to stab the crap out of him. In his haste to attack, however, SilverAsh loses track of his defense, and he's caught off guard by Mack's sudden charge from below. He weathers the first few strikes somewhat, even bringing his arm down to actually try blocking after the first few gut shots. It helps him to not get stabbed too terribly in more sensitive organs by the wooden sewing needle that hammers into him, too, although shoving sideways against it as it's stabbing probably spreads the bleeding more than it really should.

Also, it is doing terrible things to SilverAsh's suit. Pramanix even looks concerned right until the moment her brother and all that debris are hurled right at her. Thankfully, getting mildly crushed by SilverAsh shields her from the worst of the debris, although her coat is in a similarly bad state as the sharper chunk tear into it and the off-duty saint.

Silverash: "This could be going better."
Pramanix: "It could be going worse!"
Silverash: "Worse indeed. But at least it's entertaining, isn't it?"
Pramanix: "Yes, whatever. Are you going to get off or what?"

After picking themselves/each other back up, the siblings get right back into the fray with their own somehow-coordinated attacks. As Pramanix starts ringing her bell again, it's not snow that falls this time. Instead, the ground around Mack starts to frost over with frigidly cold air gathering around it while SilverAsh sheathes his sword into its cane. He maintains a firm stance and just stands there... MENACINGLY.

Abruptly, icicles burst out of the freezing ground, and SilverAsh draws his blade with rapid swings from way too far away. Despite the distance, however, cutting waves are unleashed with each slash, carving those icicles and launching them as projectiles in a combined storm of cutting and puncturing.
Roxas The ongoing battle is starting to stress Roxas out, in a way that he'd have a hard time articulating. It crawls underneath his being -- not under his skin -- and gnaws at him in a most unusual way. He's not certain to make of precisely what The Maid's 'Zone' will be for the people who already lived here. It doesn't sound strictly 'bad' precisely, but those elements that are coming out are seriously bizarre-- or at least, seem to come from a weird place.

But...

A 'weird' place isn't necessarily a 'bad' one.

Weird people and things need weird places to exist.

"So... if you and        finished here, would the old residents be able to move back in? Or would somebody new come?"
Mack Mack is doing his damnedest to not try and outright murder Pramanix and SilverAsh, whose only crimes are that they sided with the classy maid instead of the junkyard warrior. He isn't even sure he *could*, come to think of it, but it's nonetheless preventing him from leaping past SilverAsh and very deliberately attempting to geek the mage.

The Maid, on the other hand, is another story.

The weird reticle tells him something is up. He has a guess as to what it might be. (He's wrong. It works out anyway.) The fragmented light around him distorts between himself and the Maid, layers of fogged glass building up between them. Each sweeping motion cuts through one, turning it into a molten streak in mid-air, back and forth, back and forth. Despite the cold, he's sweating with the exertion required to actively rebuild the psionic barricade each time. It's sticking to his skin immediately, amplifying the numbing cold being poured on seemingly endlessly.

Mack tries to muster a counterattack, and can't split his focus enough. Instead, he goes to his backup problem-solver, extending his right hand out to one side and making a brownish shape jump out of the scattered bits of scrap and into his palm. He levels what looks very much like a black powder pistol at the Maid, all polished wood except for some kind of stone inlay where the metallic components ought to be. There's a gemstone instead of a trigger. Mack mentally engages something in his bionics, and the reticle on his HUD stops shaking as his artificial arm compensates for his violent shivering.

Predictably -- for anyone who has any experience with magical weaponry, anyway -- it does not fire a bullet. Instead, it fires a fast-moving dart of what looks like concentrated starlight, the bolt bursting into flare-like luminescence as soon as it connects with (and potentially vaporizes) something.

Mack turns his head (slowly, laborously) towards Pramanix and Silverash. He's dressed in literal rags at this point. He extends his hand to one side, palm up, as if to say, 'Well? Anything else?'

Yes, actually.

Icicles burst up out of the ground. Mack pushes downwards with his telekinetic field at an angle, trying to slant them away from him and break off the worst that get through. He gets battered instead of pierced, a state of being that still hurts like hell (and reports damage nearly as alarmingly) but is nonetheless preferable to the other. Then the sword-waves come out, and he instantly regrets making the hand gesture earlier as he disappears into a storm of ice fragments and cutting force.

He pops out the other side like a cork ejected from a bottle. Bits of ice scatter off of him wherever he lands, and he lands a couple times, bouncing down the road. He eventually rolls to a stop, then, with an audible groan, kicks himself back to his feet. His odd pistol is affixed to his chest, though to nothing in particular even if it looks like it ought to have a bandolier with that angle, and his left hand is pressed against himself near it. The heat haze is boiling off of him again.

"Gonna kill me with all that ice," he pants. "Look, I'm sorry about the clothes; maybe after this we can get dinner, and I can reimburse you for the-"

Mack abruptly shoots lances of blessed sunlight out of his eyes at the two of them. It's accompanied by a chord from an angelic choir, and a sensation much like the worst sunburn you've ever had.

"-damages," he finishes, without missing a beat.
Kale Hearthward Electricity arcs across Kale's body.

The storm subsides - Kale's taken too many hits. The electricity is the last straw, as it were - he can't maintain the wind spells stirring things up. The result is not *exactly* a calm day - the environment's just been innately stirred up too much for that, even with Kale no longer messing with it.

Tomoyo's bodyguard still has a grip on him. Kale's limp, non-threatening. And he's talking. Talking is a free action, so to speak, and Kale has things to say.

Because he's been questioned on something for which he has a ready response. "Do I think the use of force against the maid was justified?"

"No. Probably not."

The corners of his beak turn up in a dry smile.

"I'm not going to expect you to understand it - you're not the first wandering hero I've had to explain this to. You're not going to be the last. So far, none of you have understood it. That it doesn't flow the way you think it does - the power doesn't come *with* the accountability, like a collar and leash around one's neck... the power comes *from* the accountability."

"The power comes from the rock solid certainty that it's up to you to make a call - and that people with heads on straighter than you or me have looked at the big picture and the little details and handed out that authority *because* you've been tested against that accountability time and time again."

"There'll be reports to write, boards to speak in front of, reprimands and retraining or worse - if I've messed up. I can depend on that. I can hold onto that like a shield, like a tether, like a life preserver keeping me above the water line if need be - I have to answer for my actions, and *therefore* I'm never not certain of the actions I take - and this time..."

"... This time, the right action was supporting my comrade, who was making a decision I don't agree with personally. I was ready to let the Maid be - I was much less ready to let him attempt this operation solo. That's the other side of the coin - the other side of accountability - I get to make calls, but the middle of a mission isn't a democracy. Sometimes, you need to go along with a decision you don't agree with, accept responsibility for it, and if it turns out to be a mess - well, hopefully I've been good at my job, so it'd be a mitigated mess."

"And that..."

The hawk moves. There's no artistry to it, no sublety or tricks, only motion and force - he surges to his feet, breaking free of the grapple, and grabs his discarded broom from the ground and attempts to jab Tomoyo in the gut with the handle.

"... is what you've been interfering with."
Karlan Nobles SilverAsh: "What an interesting fellow... It's quite generous of you to offer. Sadly, I must inform you that these clothes were-"
Pramanix: "He just asked us both out at once."
SilverAsh: "Wait what"

As innocuous as sunburn would otherwise be, these two hail from a snowy mountain region of their world. Sunburn isn't really a thing they have to worry about, especially considering the coats that they're usually seen wearing even now. With so much coverage on at nearly all times, it may not be a complete surprise that even that would be akin to blasting them both with an all-encompassing fire.

Fortunately, they're not actually on fire. Unfortunately, the holy lances come out too quickly and too precisely for either of them to not get hit square in the everything, and the best they can both do is try to brace with futility. There's some small respite for SilverAsh, at least, as the physical pain takes his attention off what he just heard from his sister.

Pramanix totally deserved it, though. Regardless, they've both been sufficiently floored by the impact, and neither looks to be in a rush to get up between all the assorted cuts and scorched fur that'll be incredibly difficult to explain away along with the copious amounts of clothing damage also from getting stabbed repeatedly, cut up, and even burnt.

At least the latter's somewhat easily solved by liberal application of money later.

Pramanix: "Ngh... Fine, we'll back down from this. But please, don't go too far or do something you would beat yourself up over later, fr-"
SilverAsh: "You did that on purpose."
Pramanix: "Did what?"
SilverAsh: "You know what you did."

Pramanix deliberately avoids looking at SilverAsh while (badly) hiding a grin, just keeps her gaze focused on Mack and the Maid instead. She does, however, also steal some glances towards the site of the battle between Kale and Tomoyo with her bodyguards.
Tomoyo Daidouji     Tomoyo gets close to listen to Kale's words. It's the least she can do, after ordering his beating. She frowns lightly as he gives his reasons; that as a Paladin, accountability is his power. Not just accountability to higher-ups, but accountability to his comrades. "But... if you disagree with it, as a person, you can-"

    She never finishes her sentence. There's a good reason she's been doing her best to not get hit, a good reason why her bodyguards have been keeping her covered. Because if you slam the end of a broom into her gut as hard as you can, she's going to immediately double over and struggle not to throw up. The bodyguards drop Kale like a sack of potatoes and immediately swarm on their ward. One picks her up and starts giving orders. "You two get the car. You stay with her in the back of the van. I'll drive, we're retreating to the camp."

    The four get into action as Tomoyo croaks, "Him too..." pointing at Kale. "Open battlefield is no place for someone too injured-" She coughs. "To protect himself." The one giving the shots sighs aggressively, and goes to help Kale into the van also.
Priscilla     This time it's almost taking the piss. The Maid doesn't react to having a gun pointed her way. TW or otherwise. There's no way someone couldn't get the idea of what a gun is via context, but she takes it straight on anyways. Not bracing to catch it; it just hits her dead center while studiously melting through Mack's barriers. There is quite an emphatic ripping sound, and a dramatically magnified blast of faux-blood wetly spattering the marble, before once again cleaning itself up. When the starlight clears, the Maid physically flashes red several times before stabilizing.

    "The Add-Ons aren't working proactively. Only one at a time with myself. I suggest that the level of input is too great, and the metaphysical mechanism too complex to deftly control." she says, out loud, to . . . Mack? No that can't be right. Shortly after she says so, the triple 'eye' halos spring to life, one showering white sparkles, another pulsing colourless, electric waves, and a third making a starkly mechanical flywheel-slash-jet-turbine noise as it begins sucking in energy lines over the Maid's head.

    Tau used Form over Function! Defense raised!
    Lambda used Resonant Wavelength! Competence restored!

    Sigma used Secret Principle!
    The Maid used Crucible Dusting!

    The reticle on the ground, still remaining after the technomagic blast, is struck twice with a powerful, X-shaped double flourish of the Marie broom, each stroke leaving a scorching, white hot trail across it, seared onto the floor. Accordingly, outright steel-melting heat splashes across Mack in that same X formation, attacking him with the element of CARBON. At the same time, the topmost Add-On finishes its charging vwooms and begins its firing VWOOMs, sweeping him with a laser of the RELATIVITY element, compressing and stretching at the same time, spaghettifying like a linear gravity well.

    Probably due to . . . whatever counts as her physiology, the Maid is still able to primly respond to Roax with "Homes aren't cleaned only for someone else to move in. The Residents should merely leave it to the professional until everything is in top shape."
Kale Hearthward There's a lesson in there, somewhere, about relying on flashy aerial techniques versus relying on a good broom handle to the gut.

Kale, who as it turns out is too exhausted to really continue doing anything past that, makes a token effort to resist getting helped by the people he was just fighting, and then faux-reluctantly takes a spot in the van to be driven towards safety.
Roxas Roxas regards The Maid with interest... and seems to finally make a decision. He turns from the fight and walks to one end of the street, where he waves a hand. There is a shimmer as a silvery-white fence comes into being, stretching thinly across the road. It has an otherworldly appearance to it, disjointed, wrong. Like it doesn't quite belong in the world, because it doesn't. It's a piece of The World That Never Was, spread thinly across this world.

He produces his Keyblade, hooks a gate shut, and presses the tip to it. It shimmers for a moment, a large keyhole superimposing itself across its face. Then it locks, with a resounding and final click. Then he turns, walks to the other end of the street -- past the battle, without a thought in the world -- and repeats the process.

Fencing.

Road.

Lock.

Then he returns to the vicinity of the fight, banishing his Keyblade with a pronounced ringing noise.

"Mack," he calls. They know each other passingly, but not well at all. Roxas looks a little upset. He folds his arms over his chest, "I'm not gonna get in the way if you feel like you've gotta finish your fight, but this was a Syndicate posting by a chain of third parties. The Paladins don't have a mandate here, and..."

"... Even if they don't call themselves as much, I get the impression of divinity from this lot. And it's true based on what we saw that any uncleared area of this city wasn't livable."

He gestures towards the silvery gates.

"If you really think they'll do something terrible, I can't say they won't. Divine beings are like that. But I'm not going to have the Paladins do the dirty work of some offended spirit or neighborhood busybody without anything better to do. So I've locked up. The job poster doesn't get to benefit from this."

A swirl of darkness opens at Roxas's back. He nods towards The Maid.

"I think it's better to walk away from things like that, but I've got a weird perspective on death for people like 'us'. So... I'm leaving this open." He raises a hand, waving.

"Bye. See you, too,        ."

Then he steps back, and disappears into the swirl of darkness.
Mack Almost as an aside, Mack casts slightly apologetic finger-guns towards Pramanix and SilverAsh, who seem too baffled and burned to continue opposing his oppression. It's better this way. Now he can stop practically setting himself on fire to keep warm. He's never going anywhere without an emergency parka ever again.

Meanwhile, Mack is now pretty much positive that the Maid has zero experience with the things that are happening. She's adapting to them quickly, but the monologuing makes him think that her solution to first contact is to take the hit and retaliate with greater force while adapting for the next swing. The fact that she doesn't react to what is clearly a weapon...

The reticle remains, and the Add-Ons go into motion. Mack makes a pulling gesture with both hands, and debris sweeps itself up and jumps towards him, making a messy but solid sheet of person-shaped armor. Ice scatters into the air, making a frosty smoke screen that rains down in a glittering cloud. At the last second, he splits his attention with effort that causes a similarly-splitting headache, and nothing appears to happen.

Heat cleaves the frozen cloud and splashes across the scrap-metal plate armor, curling the edges like burned paper and filling cracks and dents with now-molten metal. The entire space the armor is planted at stretches and compresses, and the plating deforms along with it, turning into something like a strand of spaghetti pretending to be a drill bit. It makes a groaning sound and topples over with a crash, bits scattering across the pavement.

Mack clicks back into sight and mind off to the Maid's left, diving out of the cloud as his invisibility falters. He skids across the pavement and cracks the curb when he hits it with his shoulder, hands extended and making a swirling motion. The ground underneath the Maid cracks in a perfect circle, throwing dust into the air, and then twists with a short, wrenching grind of pavement on pavement.

The same circle, apparently encompassing a cross-section of the ground underneath it, promptly flips itself like a pancake with the Maid angled to end up underneath it.

"Okay," Mack gasps at Roxas. "Thanks!"
Priscilla     "These attacks don't seem to affect the main target. I believe target prioritization may be in error." the Maid says, out loud, to nobody. "It's good that they work just fine, and the current cost isn't untenable, but the schedule lacks flexibility, and the apparatus isn't capable of executing chores on its own just yet."

    Pavement attack. Flip, swoosh, crunch. That one would get a perfectly experienced fighter, never mind this . . . person. Again, oddly, the chunk appears to simultaneously crush the maid figure, and not crush her, at the same time. Like its thunderous clap back to earth is an 'overlay' rather than a solid physical interaction. There's a rather nasty 'splatting' sound, and the coffee-stain-circle of blood that ends up around it takes considerably longer to fade than before. The Maid is consistently flashing red now, though her halos do not.

    "Cleaning functions are now below thirty percent. Sigma, Lambda, Tau, are working normally, but they've not been fully trained. Need I remind you that healing hasn't been implemented into the schedule either, nor have Objects." She really, *really* can't be talking to Mack, but it at least seems inferrable through context that this has gone rather poorly.

    ". . . Of course." she then *replies* to nobody --and then finds the time to curtsy, formally, in Roxas' direction in proper response to his farewell. "You as well, young man.         will receive you at any time.

    There's that obnoxiously harsh, electrical noise again, and a grainy wash of circular white static that shoots up from the ground around her, causing her to disappear in an almost comical, though more uncanny, manner of bewildering suddenness.

    A second interaction of Roxas' keyblade, performing the opposite function to its prior use, exists on the site of his physical presence after locking. Gleaming blocks of grey-white marble half-rise from the ground in densely arranged, cubist form. Patches of gleaming silver, which Mack would recognize as aluminium, have sprouted up like grass, and grown over posts and poles like climbing ivy, in those narrow areas. Half-obscured 'windows' appear to also be transparent aluminium, as are dense, solar-cell blue-black tiles on paths and block-tops.

    The locked ends of the street have fallen away somewhat, forming ponds, like sections of anotherwise dried up creek, that briefly fill up with clear water which smells like floral things and antiseptic. The handful of adjecent post-like-objects have turned charcoal black, and sprouted flowering buds all over, straight from the metal and painted deadwood, fruiting bizarrely in several nonsense colours. A handful of steps on both sides of the road lead upwards towards something that hasn't materialized.

    It's a bit of a pain, though it doesn't seem immediately threatening. The more pertinent question is how to get rid of it.
Mack Mack dusts himself off about twenty seconds after the Maid makes her disappearance. He's got a couple minor hunches about who she could be talking to, but that's not his current concern.

His current concern is whatever the heck just happened around here. Mack does a slow turn to look around at it all, and then says to nobody in particular, "This is officially getting kicked up the chain."

Again.

He sits on the side of the weird creek. Mack uses sluggish telekinesis to pick up the twisted remains of his lucky stop sign, and the chunk of Stark-tech he'd salvaged, and starts ever so slowly assembling himself a new structural framework. It's going to be a few minutes before he can actually walk out of here, but walk he will. Him and his sense of pride and accomplishment, he guesses.