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Priscilla	Elites of a certain calibre respond to a lot of disasters, if they're of the persuasion that shows up at all. Most of them are as strange as they are dramatic, or else otherwise too action-packed to even resemble anything the average person worries about. It's pretty rare that the sorts qualified to do those things ever address the other kind; those that statistically cause the most disruption by far. Mostly, it's a matter of talent spent and force directed. A hurricane is a terrible thing, but it's something well within the domain of vast numbers of ordinary people to correct, or else teams of the more numerous, less glamorous, Elite who seek to earn a living or make a difference in ways that don't involve as much life-threatening peril.     So, normally this wouldn't even blip on the scanner. It wouldn't be filtered into the appropriate frequencies by the unfathomably complicated band-matching processes that lie behind the white noise of the radio and job boards most famous in Sector Zero. A fairly typical Earth-standard city, precociously built along the coast line of one of those slightly differently named and shaped continents, large enough to be a major port city, but not important enough to be the capital, hundreds of miles away, despite eclipsing it in both revenue and relevance. Partially ravaged by exactly one of those hurricane events. A pretty severe one. And also, quite a while ago.     There's no sign of the storm's recent passage, at this point. All the water that was ever going to has flowed back into the sea, especially grey and sullen on a cloudy, damp, half-cold day. There are no sirens, no rescue workers, no ambulances in the street. Piles of rubble exist for people to sit outside in plastic tents, or sit on top of eating cheap sandwiches in listless quiet, or sometimes vainly sift through in small groups.     Chunks of overpass lie scattered on either sides of major highways, where work has already cleared the main road, and the glittering dock lights of the seaside industrial districts are right back on, but a vast tapestry of suburbs and small business, parks and hostels, stores and schools, are exactly as they'd fallen, save perhaps immediate family or community volunteers clearing things by hand, with painstaking slowness. No lights. No telephones. No running water, in most of it. No workers to restore any of these things in sight. Occasionally, police cars loitering around piled-high makeshift vigil and memorial spots, or flanking the movement of armoured trucks that must pass through to banks still standing in the inner city, or small encampments of paramedics and postal volunteers surrounding overstrained homeless outreaches, but otherwise, it feels eerily as if everyone outside the area had just forgotten, weeks ago.
Priscilla	Certainly, nobody *from* this area has given a call of any kind. Any of the very few who could, due to working somewhere far across the city sprawl, likely wouldn't, after moving their families. The request is a bizarre one. It'd come from a now- useless HOA, complaining about activity on their defunct property, which had filtered up through a community outreach, then taken to civil complaint, then bounced to police scanners, escalated to municipal government, taken to state specialists, and then finally bounced out to Syndicate boards hoping for someone else to fix it so they can all stop thinking about it. Someone complaining about some weirdo, dressed as a maid, standing out in the cold, wet, filthy streets, cleaning up a street with an old-fashioned push broom, and making them feel 'uncomfortable', has become a highly paid problem, exceeding the involvement of 'just call the cops'.     The issue is a farce to figure out. 'She's cleaning the streets', in so much of a baffled tone of delivery. Pressing inquiries into why this mystery woman isn't supposed to only land in 'no, you don't get it, she's cleaning *the streets*' in all of its skit-like frustration. Finding the location where the first sighting had taken place is the only thing that finally puts this useless information to bed.     Specifically, a long patch of former suburb, perfectly vacant on all sides, with even the people who have nowhere to go now giving it a wide berth. There is no previous evidence of houses having stood there, save for neatly rectangular gaps in freshly mown lots. The street sign, which surely should have bent away in the winds long ago, is pristine and completely blank. The pavement is immaculately swept, and so is the road, to the point that there are no longer even any markings. It even looks like it's been sanded. Bleached, maybe. Pale grey and smooth, instead of the coarse black of asphalt. A frankly eerie number of light posts, roadsigns, standing mailbox, aluminium fencing, and other straight, tall, fragile, standing things, all without remaining markings, are all neatly and immaculately arranged down a long trail of nothing, disappearing a whole drive into the distance. For some reason, the street lights here, and only here, turn on as the sun starts to set, humming with steady, washed out light. It feels like an abandoned runway at a secret government base like that.
Kale Hearthward	Kale misunderstands the mission briefing. "Alright, I'm ready to help infiltrate the evil cartel of corrupt maid assassins," he says once he arrives at the staging area (up the road from the site the maid's cleaning), brandishing his feather-duster menacingly. "I wasn't sure if these were French-style or Japanese-style maids, I'm not sure if it said in the briefing? So I stitched together sort of an in-between for now, and I figure I can adjust it based on which style of cartel we're going after." "I brought my own feather duster - oh, and a mop and a broom, but I thought bringing along a handheld vaccuum might be a bit overkill? What do you think?" He gives his best maid-pose, brandishing the duster, with the mop and broom attached x-style to holsters on his back. "Oh, that the infiltration target right there? Wish me luck," he says, spotting her and then heading off before anyone can correct him. And then he starts cleaning up the street next to her, mirroring what she's doing, assuming there's some purpose to push-brooming the street itself like this.
Mack	Did you know that the number one pop-up business after major disasters in a seaside metropolitan area in a fairly modern Earth-alike is questionably-digestible food carts? It's true! Don't look it up, just trust the narration on this pertinent statistic. This is only relevant because of one of Mack's curious little travelling quirks. The first thing he does in a new town is look to see if there are any easy jobs to do, to pad out his credstick's balance for when he needs to pay a street doc or bribe someone next. The second thing he does is look for an example of local cuisine to mark the place in his head as different from all the others. Thus: perinent statistics. It all comes back around, see? And so, there Mack is. His cargo-laden hoverbike is parked at a lot not too far off, and he's walked his trash-heap self down towards the only consistently well-lit street within what must be a six block radius. He walks down the side of the road, an object clutched in both hands. It looks like a burrito, or some kind of pastry shell, wrapped around sticky-looking beans, with chunks of some unidentifiable meat sticking out of it. The vendor said it's the best natto-gator wrap in the whole city, so he decided to see if it was. So far, he's correct, but only because he has no idea what to make of it. Mack stops when he sees the maid...s?... in the road. He stands just in the street, watching them. Eventually, he makes a sort of shimmying motion and shakes loose some kind of collection of pipes from the backs of his legs, and then leans back on the scrap metal seat he's deployed. He munches on his evening meal like a man on a stake-out that has taken too long. Incidentally, it leaves crumbs absolutely everywhere.
Karlan Nobles	SilverAsh: "Is this going to be like the chicken thing?" Pramanix: "Yes." Two of the Elites responding to this 'situation' look like they'd be right at home with the HOA if the HOA was made up entirely of the filthy rich's owners. One, dressed in a blue and black coat and dress combo with a purse on one hand and a bell holding up the other. One, dressed in an immaculate gray coat with an umbrella in hand and a falcon on the shoulder. Both, donning stylish hats matching their clothes, keeping white hair down that matches the giant spotted white and black tails coming out from behind them. They're not locals, and the one in blue isn't even trying to hide it. For as worried as the HOA sounded, Pramanix looks more excited than anything else as she does that slower-than-jogging but faster-than-walking as though she was trying to get ahead of a flashing don't walk sign. SilverAsh, meanwhile, is keeping up just by walking with his stupidly long legs, looking less excited and more inquisitive about the curious situation. Naturally, their attention is both turned to the immaculately cleaned streets. Pramanix, seeing Kale joining in on the work, laughs and starts ringing her bell to call down a gentle wind to help gather whatever little scattered dust, debris, and other crap might still by lying around to make the job just a little bit easier. "Greetings, friend. What's all this about?" SilverAsh, meanwhile, sighs and glances at the falcon on his shoulder, raises his hand, and the falcon goes flying into the sky to get a literal birds eye view of the place to see if there's any other potential causes it can spot from the sky.
Roxas	A swirl of darkness emerges at the end of the avoided street, and Roxas steps out of it looking like he's expecting something totally different. That's because he is; he expected a gas station or Denny's in a bad part of town, because that's where these sorts of exit points usually dump out to. A Waffle House might stand in for either of those. In this case, though, he just finds himself in a city recovering from disaster next to a street that is... Is... Suspiciously clean. Roxas closes his portal and looks around, comparing the 'outside' with the 'inside' of the well-maintained street. After looking back and forth a couple of times he rubs at the back of his head uncomfortably with his left hand-- in the right, he's holding an empty soda bottle. "Aw, man. This looks like a spirit haunt," he mumbles, skirting around what he guesses to be the boundary and nudging at it with his toe. There are maids, and one of them is a bird. Sticking his empty bottle in his pocket, Roxas crosses his arms over his chest and surveys the situation quizzically. After stalling there for a minute or two as others -- here more intentionally -- probe the area, Roxas summons the silver-and-black Keyblade he favors, prodding at the general "adjustment in cleanliness" between the area and its surroundings in search of a reaction from an invisible portal.
Tomoyo Daidouji	"There's a maid cleaning the streets."     Tomoyo is sold immediately. That sounds delightful, like something out of that whimsical mixed-medium movie about the magic nanny. In her research however, she learns that the originating town was struck by a hurricane in an incidental meteorological report. That, she feels, should probably warrant more attention than a maid cleaning up. But it adds another layer to things. That street is probably especially filthy. So why clean it with a push broom, in a maid outfit?     Two vehicles roll into town, carefully navigating the detritus as it heads for the street in question. One a black sedan with tinted windows, very much a 'the passenger of this car is more important than you' vibe. The one trailing behind is a cream step van. The two arrive, and immediately come to a halt.     "What's wrong?" Tomoyo asks from the back seat of the sedan. "The tyres are losing grip," the driver reports, one of the heiress' four bodyguards. "We should get out here." The front doors open, on the sedan and truck both, four women clad in suits with dark sunglasses emerging to open one of the rear doors in the sedan.     Out hops Tomoyo, who immediately bends down to touch the road. "It's... clean. No grit in the least. Smooth too, like polished stone." She looks around at the cleared, rectangular lots, the straightened street lights, the only parts of town that seem to have power. "Did she do this?" The bodyguards are bunching around their charge now, as if something is about to emerge from behind the nothing to attack her. Something is weird here.     But Tomoyo just pushes past them and approaches the group gathering around the bird maid. "Hello! Are you all from here? I was wondering if I could ask some questions." She has a video camera up and pointed.
Tamamo	From Tamamo's perspective, this is less 'a job to remove a suspicious individual' and more 'a mysterious rumor that bears investigation,' her particular flavor of curiosity-seeking compulsions honing in on both of the keywords 'cleaning' and 'maid.' She arrives (somewhere in the city) in her usual mode and dress, and makes her way at a casual pace toward the area of interest.     Along the way, she moves around the edge of an overloaded homeless shelter, asking for more information on 'the maid,' and ~~paying~~ expressing gratitude for any interesting note or story with one of the charms of good fortune she strives to keep stocked.
Priscilla	Tomoyo may be wise beyond her years to pay attention to the road. Living in a mansion and all, it takes no time at all to see how professionally cleaned it's been. No doubt it's been exposed to the elements all day, but it'd pass a white glove test easily. Has it been waxed? It smells vaguely of apple and salt, but only just.     Actually, more important than that, up close, she recognizes the texture. Under the cellophane-thin faded vestiges of asphalt, the substance is --it has to be-- marble. It even makes nice little clicks under a pair of polished mary janes.     Jabbing things with the keyblade as a blind poke and prod strategy, (un?)fortunately doesn't open any special portals or spirit boundaries. It (un!)fortunately opens a perfectly square hole in several feet of road, into a black pit that just seems to go on forever. Not the kind that suggests some kind of interesting extradimensional cavern or something. An opened way to a dead end. A seal over a room that contains nothing. This is definitely much more dangerous than it is useful, unless he really feels like possibly falling forever, if that's even possible.     The falcon going high into the air confirms the general shape of things from up above, by the brightly lit strip of white light reflecting off transmogrified road. Literally, the shape. The bright stripe carves across dozens of blocks, pulls a sharp right angle, and repeats the process twice more, having almost completed a full square circuit, and being perhaps a mile away from the starting point by now. It also confirms some other vehicles 'on the scene', though they're totally abandoned now. A delivery van. A garbage truck. A squad car. An armoured truck. An ambulance. A cement mixer. Most with their doors still hanging open.     The temporary outreach campsite for everyone out of a home in this area welcomes Tamamo with a sense of palpable strain. It doesn't seem to be for her appearance or suspected motives, but a pre-existing kind of tension that 'something weird showing up' stresses. Her questions on the subject are met with relief, rather than suspicion, however. Like someone else is reaffirming that those who have anything to say about it aren't crazy. Superficially, it's as the call had presented. Some weird stranger showing up in full maid costume a day ago and going around as if cleaning a hallway all throughout the day, night, and morning. What's more specific is this process of 'cleaning' has rubbed some people as the wrong way, as most of the evidence of their former home had disappeared when they weren't looking, and only some of them were fortunate enough to find small piles of sorted and dusted possessions left in the empty impressions. Supposedly, trying to get any information out of her had gone nowhere. Attempts to argue her into leaving had those people, instead, mysteriously leave on their own. There must have been an altercation with police, because people heard gunshots last night, but then nothing since.
Priscilla	Kale doesn't have to *look* hard to go chasing after perceived maid assassin cabals, though. With the information about the pattern of the affected area, all he has to do is double back through dark, damp, rain-soaked, wind-strewn, undrivable roads, navigate his way around fallen trees, carpets of torn brush and broken glass and brick, overturned cars, broken power lines and water main craters, and reach the ghastly husk of the area's elementary school, crumbled all to one side in such a way that incidentally shielded its perfectly cursed-looking vacant playground. The first set of street lamps that he can see turned on in the distance are those that hang over the only figure in this whole area.     Neither French nor Japanese really hit the mark. If anything, the outfit in question resembles a perfectly stylized, nationally nonspecific, period-vague cosplay. The kind that instantly registers as 'that's a maid' in the modern brain, without really being completely accurate. The woman wearing it, of middle height, short dark hair, and oddly closed eyes, looks almost bleached monochrome under the lighting quality of the lamps.     True to the report, she is cleaning the street with a broom. The quiet scrape of the bristles is the only thing that can be heard here, almost deafening for the crisp clarity of its long-distance echo. Where she brushes, the asphalt, the road lines, the repair tar, the weeds, the cracks and potholes themselves, are swept away with the dirt and debris, 'revealing' the smooth surface beneath. Every so often, she stops gathering her pile of strangely peeled street-surface, and sweeps it into a rectangular gap that just suddenly appears in the ground whenever needed, disposing of it into a garbage chute into nowhere.     Unbeknownst to him and Mack at the same time, she looks up at precisely the moment the latter begins dropping crumbs all over, fixed exactly in his direction, though her eyes are essentially invisible under the stark shadow of her bangs. Halting her forward process for a moment, one more pair of street lamps flicker on of their own accord, bathing the area white around her.
Xion	From the same swirl of darkness that disgorges Roxas, Xion also chases the blond-haired nobody into what she expects to be a Completely On-Fire spiritual realm. "Maybe it's the World That Never Was!" Xion calls, finally landing both-feet on the pavement and-- It's not. The order, clean and pristine, oozes from every concrete pore and asphalt crumble. "... Is it... The world that never was messed up in the first place? I don't get it!" Xion continues to be baffled by the state of affair, leaning down to wick her finger across the ground and rub index against thumb. "Huh. This is... *extra* clean. This is so clean it could probably make the ice cream machine work." The Maid, in the distance, finally earns a direct look. "Wow, that must be... the best cleaner in the whooooooole--" Xion grasps her forehead like a sudden headache comes on. A tinnitus ring blares in her ear. "... aaaaamong the best cleaners in the world!" Better. No headache. She has not Direly Insulted All Other Cleaning Professionals. It's important to not do so, as they will Mr. or Ms. Clean her clock for talking mess.
Kale Hearthward	"Hmm?" says Kale, looking up at the camera in his face. "I don't know what you mean," the undercover bird says. "Questions? I am a perfectly normal maid, helping to do my part to clean up. I can also clean up whoever else you need. I mean, whoever's *home* you need. Tee hee." Kale gives his best maidishly giggle, and pushes some dust off of the street. It's not nearly as interesting as a magical street-repairing broom is, though.
Roxas	Roxas looks absolutely baffled at what his prodding results in. He swings his Keyblade back to his shoulder and surveys the hole. He shrugs and takes a moment to dig around in his inventory, producing a quartet of traffic cones that he puts around the... sinkhole? He's not even sure what he just opened up. It seems like it must be significant in some way, but he doesn't know how. Or, he doesn't until he catches sight of the maid cleaning this place, and just sweeping things away into oblivion. He frowns at the hole he left. Well... she'll probably get to closing it up later. But why's it that flimsy? "No... it's clean, but not sterile in the same way. And the sky is all wrong," he replies to Xion. It's always night in the City, and there is only one thing serving as a moon. Shrugging, he leaves the traffic cone-surrounded hole he caused and beckons Xion to follow-- but stops when the ACTUAL maid here starts doing funny things with the lights. He stops, and grimaces, his keychain jingling audibly as he adjusts the keyblade against his shoulder. "That's... definitely some spirit-adjacent stuff. What do you think, though? And, er... why are you saying things like that? This is some pretty crazy cleaning, even if it is also spirit stuff."
Karlan Nobles	Mack and his crumby food gets a disapproving look from Pramanix. SilverAsh, though, doesn't seem too care much. He actually looks amused while only being passively interested in this whole thing. Roxas' inquisitiveness about the cleanliness comparison gets a curious look from the both of them, more blatantly from Pramanix while SilverAsh is holding back at least a little, even if he's totally staring. Tomoyo's question, meanwhile, has Pramanix chuckling and shaking her head. "No, we're from elsewhere entirely. It's an interesting sort of mystery here, though, isn't it?" SilverAsh, meanwhile, asks his own question instead. "Are you with the media?" Tamamo's search in the homeless shelter, meanwhile, goes unnoticed by the siblings for the time being. Later, perhaps! Xion's spirited arrival is met with another chuckle from Pramanix, although it doesn't seem like she quite understands. SilverAsh, though, rests a finger on his chin at the comment, especially as he gets a better look at the maid at work. SilverAsh: "That might not be so far off the mark, miss. The entire area is immaculate, truly as though we were staring at a pure space, free of any dirt or grime or imperfections. A 'Dimension of Clean', you could say." Pramanix: "If not for the missing houses, I doubt we'd have heard any complaints from that HOA in the first place." Now there's just the matter of figuring out what to do about this, if anything. Lacking any answers from their mystery person, SilverAsh is instead drawn towards the abandoned vehicles. He checks them out to try and find some physical evidence of a struggle, of their inhabitants even existing, of any kind of imperfection that might show a limit to thise strangely square cleaning area. Pramanix, meanwhile, is still busy trying to get info from the maid directly. She's still helping out with light gusts of wind to gather up stuff, although she's slowing down in that once she gets a better look at how the cleaning is even happening. She looks up when Roxas mentions the sky, then does a bit of experimenting of her own as she begins her ritual anew to start calling down a gentle snowfall to blanket the area. At best, it might aid the cleaning efforts. At worst... She's kind of curious what'll happen at worst.
Tamamo	Tamamo isn't wholly certain, upon seeing the strained and stressed looks, the inevitable 'not enough' of both material and active distraction in a post- (even post-post-) disaster campsite, that she needs to move on to the strangeness afflicting the merely nearby area in all too much haste. On the other hand, she doesn't plan to stick around long enough to be a resident goddess. Compromising, she riffles through her supplies, selecting and distributing charms of 'favorable meetings' to those who spoke to her. Whether the ones they most need meet are lost friends, lovers, business partners or saviors, she doesn't stop to check, but that will do something to reconnect them to the outside world. She has full faith in that.     Once she does learn of the particular area and arrive at the edge of the scene, Tamamo begins looking about for any sign of magical tampering with the area. In particular, if the maid's work is some ritual preparation, there should be signs such as an artificial reweaving of weaker leylines, of hidden conduits prepared for later application of magical power, of particularly and precisely orderly geometry, or of recently bothered local spirits.
Mack	Okay, thinks Mack, there's now a sinkhole(?), a reporter(??), and a Xion(???) in his general vicinity. The bird-maid isn't weird to him; he assumes they're whatever the Multiverse calls D-Bees (probably "people," they're accidentally enlightened like that) and totally normal. Normal like he, a runty mobile trash-pile eating some kind of wrap made of fermented soy beans and local predator, is totally normal. The faint amber glow from the eyes in his lumpy, scrap-armored head trails briefly over to Pramanix and SilverAsh. Mack makes eye contact with the former and very deliberately takes another bite of the food(????) in his hands. More crumbs. He doesn't seem to care that they're being left behind, even. Mack looks down for a second, then up at the lights, momentarily lowering his compact and messy meal. He chews with a constant metallic scraping noise as a strip of metal affixed to his jaw in a facsimile of a beard(?????) scratches against an adjacent piece. It doesn't seem to bother him. Idly, Mack pulls a pole from behind his shoulder, unattaching it from a bit of exposed flesh with a wet, sticky noise, leaving a faint red mark behind. He pokes at the ground with it, the end of the long, thin pipe shorn off and sharpened like a makeshift spear. A short, thin scrape is dragged across the previously immaculate surface. "Huh. Not asphalt. Nnneat." Mack takes another bite, munching with an irritating mix of metallic and biological noises. He has not stopped leaving a flaky mess in his general vicinity.
Tomoyo Daidouji	It's a bizarre sensation, touching something and realizing it feels like something totally different. As a tailor, Tomoyo can tell different fabrics apart by touch. She knows the feel of wood, of plastics and coral and bone and anything else used to make clothes. But she does also know marble, having grown up in privileged CLAMPland. And this road feels like marble, not asphalt. It's even waxed.     She asks Kale, and gets... an answer. Yes, that's what she's going to call it. The camera pans down to watch that broom, sweeping a road that Tomoyo knows is spic and span. "Ah, I already have plenty of help, thank you. Good luck with that~" What 'that' is she leaves deliberately non-specific. This isn't what she's looking for.     She peeks down that hole Roxas opens up. Just a bottomless pit, out of nowhere, where a strange maid was spotted... "Ah! It's the disposal chute!" she says, with all the certainty one can have in such an uncertain situation. After all, the debris must have gone somewhere, right?     In response to the intense SilverAsh, Tomoyo shakes her head. "Not at all. All my recordings are for personal use~" At this point, one of her guards interrupts her. "What are you going to do?" It's said with that perfectly clipped, professional tone, but you can practically hear the silent plead that they leave, and handle this to everyone else coming to investigate.     "Two of you take the truck to the relief centre and distribute the supplies. The other two come with me." The bodyguards nod and disperse, two taking that cream truck back into town while the other two drive Tomoyo around the perfectly square, cleaned roads. They drive slow, as if on ice, on the lookout for any more bottomless holes, until they reach the school. Now THIS is a maid!     Tomoyo is out of the car and approaching the maidliest maid to ever maid, dipping into a curtsy. "Hello ma'am. It's a pleasure to meet you. I'm Tomoyo Daidouji. I take it you're the woman who cleaned the streets back there?" Now that something Weird is confirmed Happening, she's putting on extra respect. Her bodyguards stay close.
Xion	'The Sky Is All Wrong'. Xion looks up, shading her eyes, and nods. "I guess-- Maybe our sky's the weird one. Do you think the brightest object in the sky should be something you can look at? Or is it better for it to be too bright?" Tamamo is R I G H T T H E R E. She may have an answer! "Plus, it's pretty sterile here. I bet I could cook an egg on the street!" Xion adds, before Mack's monch-monch-monch and scrape-scrape-scrape gets Xion's still-extremely-divided attention. The energy of the whole place after the Maid's passage screams into the space where a heart should go. Clean. Clean! Clean!!! Roxas' second set of questions gets a whispered response. "Because saying someone must be 'the best everywhere' is just being wrong, and so wrong someone is gonna come get you for it. I just knew. I could *feel* it. In my Xs." Pronounced 'keys'. "Hey, hey guy! Stop! Stop littering! Be conscientious! The... the cleaner may get you!"
Priscilla	Poking around the inside of the abandoned vehicles along the way is, perhaps, regrettable, in that they are exactly the same as everything around them, despite ostensibly coming in from outside. Surely there had been any number of ruined cars and trucks in the wake of *that* storm, and those would certainly be incredibly difficult to move away, but it is only these most recent additions that break up the street. Empty. Pristine. Haphazardly parked. All doors open. Keys in the ignition.     Actually, quite notably, all of their license plates are blank. The company on the van is a mystery; it's marked DELIVERY. The squad car just says POLICE with no department. They have that slightly unpleasant 'new' smell that weirdos claim to enjoy, yet at the same time, there's still hints of cigarette smoke here and boxed lunches there, hanging on the air like gun smoke. It also seems like they all arrived in the order that SilverAsh finds them.     The best of Tamamo's efforts (which is quite a considerable benchmark) turn up absolutely no sign of magic whatsoever. Neither hide nor hair of any familiar kind of spell or magical particle. The rest of her expectations, however, feel far too plausible. In matters of auspicious designs and geometry, potential conduits and intentional reweaving, the site feels almost uncomfortably unmistakable. Nothing like any brand of occultism she knows of, but the longer she looks at it with a sorcerous, or indeed even a calligrapher's eye, the more the angles and distances of everything stand out to her. The perfectly regular shadows and corners and the repetitive spatial relations and demarcating boundaries. It feels exactly like some kind of Feng Shui she's never read up on. Like a magic circle without any characters or designs past the superficial level, just right angles all the way down. The fact that the circuit is about to complete one gigantic square in a short while is definitely Very Important.
Roxas	"I dunno about whether it's the way things should be, but I like it that way. You can do much neater things with lights if you've got some dark to work with." Roxas replies to Xion, smiling. Her answer gets an odd look out of him. He drags the teeth of his Keyblade across his shoulder, and shrugs, "I guess... there's faeries that would get pretty offended if you suggested they're not the best at that sort of thing." He blinks towards Tomoyo. "Shouldn't it have a bottom, though...?" On this very subject, Roxas inclines his head towards Tamamo and gestures back at the curiously specific "sinkhole" he'd opened with minimal probing. "What do you think? Does this sort of thing mean anything to you?"
Priscilla	Tomoyo's truck squad gets the easier job, driving off to alleviate the more mundane miseries of post-disaster commonfolk and be welcomed with eager relief, glad both for the help, and the break from the tense, disbelieving boredom. Dismounting her own ride however, Tomoyo's gaggle of bodyguards don't seem to elicit any response from the maid at all.     In fact, her own greeting seems to take several seconds to register. In the strange quiet, the scrape scrape swish swish of the broom is weirdly piercing. Footsteps around an empty alabaster hall. That vibe. When they stop, it seems like she's having a tough time, at first, processing the rhetorical question. Like it took her a little time to rev up the mental gears to answer that yes, she is clearly the woman who cleaned the streets.     It'd be easy to assume that she'd failed to even notice Kale prior, despite how absurd that sequence of words is in almost any situation. Up close though, the air is that of professionally courteous feigned ignorance. Like Kale's maid play came across as a particular eccentricity of an invited guest that simply goes without saying that it won't be mentioned outside the halls. When, for a moment, she briefly sweeps her bangs aside, the absence of the extreme shadow reveals she's still got her eyes closed.     "Yes. I'm the maid." says the maid. Strangely gentle, yet almost menacingly calm. "If you'll excuse me though, I have work to do. This place is full of chaos. This is only the first mess of several to clean. I'm still on the clock you see. We won't know that it works until I've finished up here." She seems to respond to the word 'home' from Kale as if it were a red-tinted keyword. A trigger that activates a response, from a whole lot of dialogue that passes by without registering. "Everywhere is someone's home. This home is everyone's. This kind of disrepair doesn't happen overnight. It took many years to become this disorganized. Most homes do, and the residents simply get used to the mess. Do you live here?" What a useless question. Obviously the bird maid thing does not live here. Anyone could tell that.     "One moment please." she says, then, in that eerily unconcerned-with-anything tone. The pristine serenity of it clashes with the harsh noise that follows, and a ring-shaped flash of light, lasting only a moment, and leaving an empty space where she had just been stood. An identical ring of light deposits the maid three feet back from Mack and one foot off his right shoulder; just close enough to feel sternly imposing. "Sir, if you wouldn't mind. This area is set to be Cleaned shortly." He can hear the proper noun there, somehow. "Some noise is to be expected, but I can't have you contaminating the area."     The snow falling, however, doesn't seem to bother her at all, despite being infinitely more of a mess than some gross crumbs on a single street corner. He can see her step on one of the scraped lines in the marble, grind the tip of a shoe on it with a little squeak, and come away with the line completely gone. It doesn't *seem* like repair to him. More like rubbing a rubber sneaker mark off a gym floor.
Tamamo	Tamamo finds a certain measure of answer, which she can put together with another measure, and come to a probable, if vague, conclusion. Outwardly, she "Hmm"s, as if this were all somewhat interesting and only slightly worrisome, before fixing her attention onto Roxas and Xion, and Tomoyo not far off, all fairly familliar faces. The maid she first notices at this point, but keeps her eyes first on the key-wielders.     "Oh, have you arrived to search the truth of this strange rumor, as well? That is well, for this is poses a curious problem." Only on getting closer does she refocus in the direction Roxas points, toward the sinkhole. "A pit, is it? Away toward... nowhere, that I can see."     She looks up again, as the maid momentarily disappears. "More so than a singular pit, the whole shape of this space is concerningly orderly. It has the appearance of some grand magic, entirely foreign to any of my knowledge, but definite in its presence. The immediate transformation of this land is as the drawing of the ritual circle. Ah, although, it is a square, it seems."     She continues watching as the maid speaks to Mack. She doesn't recognize that one. "Squares, now... they are incomplete shapes, on their own, but useful in organization. One needs squares in placing many things together, every one of them the same, neatly, in rows upon rows. When this one square is finished, something will occur, in order. It will not, I think, be kind to those who live here, for they have not been kindly consulted in the matter of their homes being flattened into neat and orderly rows. Whether it shall be 'good' for them would be harder to guess, 'goodness' being a far more ambiguous matter than 'kindness.'"     Tamamo considers the remaining, unfinished portion. "It might be helpful to block her progress, yet this would surely cause some conflict, and my own talents in barriers may not be quite suited. I believe I shall ask her a question. Two, perhaps."     And then Tamamo walks over to do just that, not to where Mack is, but to where the maid had disappeared from, with the assumption that she'll return to the same spot. Her first question, prepared, is, "Might you tell me who ordered this cleaning?" Another, of greater importance to some and less to others, is, "Will you return those possessions as have gone missing in your cleaning?"
Karlan Nobles	EARLIER Tomoyo gets a business card from SilverAsh for Karlan Trade Co., Ltd. He knows a business opportunity when he sees one! NOW Pramanix is going to remember that, Mack. (Not really.) SilverAsh, busy as he is with checking out those vehicles, doesn't quite notice what might be going on between Pramanix and Mack. The strangely 'clean' properties of all these vehicles and how bare they are of any identifying information hits him rather strangely, especially in light of the lingering smell and the keys still inside. "It seems these vehicles were cleaned by our industrious maid as well... Spreading out from where she's working, even, like a..." He's got better words for this than 'robot vacuum cleaner. They're just not coming to him now, and he's getting visibly irritated by that.  "But that still leaves the question of where their inhabitants went." That question, rather than being posed to whoever might be within earshot, is at the forefront of Pramanix's mind as she listens to the maid speak. The sudden disappearance from besides Kale and reappearance next to Mack has her gawking for a few moments, though. "So when you say cleaned, miss... What do you mean? Where's the..." Pramanix gestures at the abandoned vehicles, taking particular note of their scrubbed identifying details. "The drivers? The license plates? Did they all decide to leave this equipment behind?" There's a whimsical tone in her voice as she asks that, although there's hints of discomfort in there as well, as though she's bracing herself for the worst.
Tomoyo Daidouji	"Not necessarily," Tomoyo says to Roxas, halfway into her sedan before heading out. "In a normal garbage chute, someone has to clean out where it leads eventually. But if it's bottomless, there's no need. Clean and efficient, just like this road." She also accepts the business card! Properly, with both hands, as one does.     After she greeted the maid, she waits as long as she needs for an answer. Having received an affirmation, she starts to ask further queries, but is cut off. There's more to be done, and 'other messes' to clean. And there's something she can't be certain will work.     Again, before questions can be asked, the maid vanishes in a harsh flash. Immediately the guards are in front of Tomoyo, but she simply vanished. "She seems nice," Tomoyo says with a smile off-handedly to Kale. "We should help her."
Kale Hearthward	"Yeah... um, what's going on?" Kale considers something... ... and then he goes over to the maid. (The other one, the one that's not himself.) "Here," he says. "I think you missed a spot back there. Let me give you a hand, one maid to another." And then he attempts to take the broom from the maid - not forcefully (yet), but just to see if she'll react.
Mack	Mack's headware alerts him to the maid's apparition. He turns to look up at her, the runty mutant still leaning on his weird metal kickstand-seat. It looks like a pair of C-shaped pieces of metal affixed to his hip somewhere. Maybe actually to his hip, come to think of it. He's nearly done with his amalgam-wrap by now. He doesn't seem physically able to chew with his mouth closed, making the mess inevitable; he doesn't really have much in the way of lips, though he seems to have some kind of flimsy metallic strips embedded in his parchment-like skin to make up for it. "Oh, *I* wouldn't mind one bit, miss," Mack says, tone a muddled mix of polite and food-stuck-in-his-cheek. "But the locals are freaked out by what you're doing here. I'm gonna have to ask you to leave, and to come back when you've gotten permission from everybody around here to scrub the place like you are. Transmutation is a form of vandalism, you know." Mack does not obey the 'say it, don't spray it' suggestion of cafeterias the worlds over. Mack, in fact, does the opposite of that. He plants his sharp pole and pushes himself up, using it as a cane, to rise to a shaky stand. He gives off an elderly or infirm sort of vibe when he does it. He also puts another divot in the not!pavement. Whoops.
Roxas	// Have you arrived to search the truth of this strange rumor, as well? // "Oh, nah. I just wanted to grab a drink," Roxas explains, tugging his empty soda bottle out of his pocket. "Figured this would let out near a gas station or something, but instead it's this weird place. Looked kinda... ghost-y, you know?" He nods towards Tomoyo. "Yeah, I suppose... but that seems like an awful lot of 'trash' would get wasted instead of reused or recycled. People leave a lot of things just lying around." Roxas falls in behind Tamamo, evidently deciding that her judgment on what's going on here will be the most reliable thing to go by-- or at the very least, that she'll have the best answers. "Ah... do you need a broom? Here," he interjects towards Kale. There is a ringing noise as he withdraws a broom from some pocketspace and offers it one-handed. The broom has a black handle, with a light green stripe where te bristles connect to the brush.
Xion	It takes a while for Xion to figure out her 'feelings' on the matter, seeing as she has so few. Thoughts on the matter had been, largely, functional. She lived in a blinding white castle. She walked through paths of dark on dark, with only the glimmering lights in the distance as guides. It's the sinkhole she finds more normal than the way the asphalt has barely any dirt, dust, grime, or patina at all. Like freshly poured and cooled in a lab - absolutely spotless. Clean in a way that only the whites of her life were, yet it was dark. A dark pit into ??? was just a stage gate. "Roxas had an intuition, and I... thought this place felt pretty much like home, so together we decided it may be some lost Nobodies. But..." Xion looks at the maid and squints, the strange woman's heart a deep mystery that she had only begun to catch wind of. And, next to the radiance of the sun that was Tamamo's presence... Well, basking in one made seeing other lights harder. "I think it's nice in the dark... But I stare at lights all day. It helps me move places. If a light is too harsh to look at, you can't navigate by it. Going 'towards' something that hurts you is difficult. For designs..." She picks at Roxas' outfit. "I think some white would suit you great though. On black? It's your style! But..." She claps her hands together and lets the fingers curl. "Balanced. Half-and-half, like your weapons. Two - becoming one." The pothole meanaces with its bottomlessness. There is only top. Top only. Roxas says his intent was different... And Xion blushes fiercely. "Well that's what I thought it was. Sorry."
Roxas	Roxas glances sidelong at Xion. He shrugs, "I DID say I had an intuition... I just wasn't very specific about it, so I'm sorry about that. If you were working off of a feeling like that, I would've wanted to look into it anyway. That's not something to be embarrassed about, you know." Turning to the less serious topic of his clothes, he pinches his current hoodie between his fingers. It's a simple black garment, more than passingly worn down. It doesn't have the sheer outlandishness of his longcoat, but it's pretty light as jackets go, considering the kind of places he gets to. "Yeah... we can go shopping after this, if you want. Probably going to have to find one the hard way, though..." With a tug-and-flick of the fabric of his hoodie, he asks, "What about you? You do a lot of outfit-swapping when you're in the field, though..." "I think you need something with a lot of punch," he suggests, "so your look's just as flashy without being transformed into a bunch of armor."
Tomoyo Daidouji	"Take it from me, he would look good in white on black," Tomoyo says as an aside to Xion and Roxas. "And if you would like some good-quality, sturdy clothes at a reasonable price, come to my Boutique~"     Business cards are proffered to the Nobodies.
Priscilla	Again, when Tamamo makes contact, the maid figure seems to require a moment or two longer than someone normally would to process being asked questions. A small but noticeable lag in the flow of thought and communication. "This people, this place, cries out to be cleaned itself. A home in disarray must be sorted straight." There's a break, then, from that almost storybook, prim matter-of-factness, to a strange twist of tone that is impossible to confidently put a specific emotion to, which lasts two sentences. "If perhaps you mean to speak to who decided to begin here, you may at your leisure. She can't speak to us, but she can see and hear us."     "Any outstanding items have been organized or disposed of, regarding whether or not they need to be replaced. Any unaccounted items of sentimental value are currently in the safekeeping of the residents of those houses they were found in. Most of them have expressed interest in moving back in, once the place is tidied up." That one gives even Tamamo a run for her money in terms of operating on multiple simultaneous layers of potential meanings and verbal obfuscations.     And yet, she still manages to sound perfectly, tranquilly, absolutely certainly level-best confident when Pramanix asks her something considerably more charged. "Those visitors were interrupting my work. So they were politely but firmly persuaded to leave. I believe they were specifically directed to return to their homes. Their lost items will be recycled, though they didn't belong to them in the first place. Are you here to retrieve them?"     Kale's credentials as a maid are, still, somehow, not called into question. When he reaches out for the broom, though, he finds himself whacked rather smartly on the knuckles by the end of the shaft. It takes a second after the initial sting to recognize the frankly unnatural quickness and accuracy with which he'd been reprimanded, given that the maid's broom has barely rotated a few degrees around unmoving hands. "Apologies, but we are not in need of maid services. I am the maid." Again, the weird singular.     When Mack gets up, stances up, and becomes a Problem Guest, however, things . . . still don't change, but in a way that feels extra uncomfortable, because this is exactly the point at which they're supposed to change. The atmosphere becomes charged, tensions rise, words are chosen carefully, feelings are suppressed or explode. The cool, calm, collected properness that he gets doesn't feel brave. It doesn't feel like self-control. It doesn't even quite peg as professionalism. Or disdain. Or even obliviousness. It's like he'd asked an SAT question and someone had answered him with perfect recollection --literally with their eyes closed.     "That's incorrect. Transmutation is a process of making one thing into another. Vandalism is a destructive pursuit with intent. Please leave professional matters to the pertinent professional. It's necessary sometimes to leave the house for it to be thoroughly cleansed. Those who were unable to leave the premises have already been notified and consulted. If you'd politely step aside for twenty minutes, there should be no issues with cleaning this residency to specification. Then I'll move on to the larger mess in this city. If you continue to be a nuisance though, I will be forced to ask you to leave."
Kale Hearthward	Kale's knuckles get rapped. He takes a step back, reflexively. "Whoa, okay, no taking the broom, that's fine..." Then Roxas hands him a very colorful broom. He looks down at it, not quite sure what to do with it. "You... um, I don't actually need the broom, I'm - why is it colorful. I don't get it." He attempts to push the broom back into Roxas's hands, or just drops it if he won't take it back. "Alright, anyway," says Kale, taking a few steps back. "Miss Maid, I can tell that you're feeling... territorial. So you just go along and do your thing..." He gets to a spot that he feels is sufficiently far away - a building's width or two - and then focuses on the maid... and specifically on the broom she's holding. He waits till Mack makes whatever move he's going to make - and then when she's hopefully distracted, a very strong, very very localized wind picks up, attempting to yank the broom out of her hands with hurricane force and send it tumbling through the air towards Kale's outstretched hands!
Mack	The tension that builds is palpable. The automatic answer to his comment makes him think that this isn't really a person being a maid, but an entity purpose-made (heh) for the job and title. It worries him a little, actually; things like that tend to incidentally have things like superhuman strength and the ability to vaporize matter. There's a quiet hum from somewhere in Mack's vicinity as his bionics come out of standby mode. The green-ringed spots on his arms and legs brighten very slightly, looking for a moment like a reflected bit of light was playing across the surface. In-built arcane capacitors sigh out the first of their current charge. He feels less heavy, and it makes him roll one shoulder in mild relief. It's the arm that was doing most of the food-manipulation. Maybe he tired himself out with that alone? "Ho-kay," Mack sighs. "Listen, I won't take the professionalism crack personally, but there's at least one concerned citizen that really wants to know what's up before you finish. So we're going to go talk to them all calm-like, and if it checks out, you'll be back in, oh, ten minutes, tops. No problem, right?" He smiles. His face makes a crinkling noise when he smiles. Mack lazily reaches over his shoulder, sliding the pole he had back over it. It presses against the patch of exposed skin and sticks, sinking in slightly, like the surface of his body had momentarily become almost liquid. He lowers his arm, making a 'this way' sort of gesture -- and then goes to try to scoop her up with a giant cupped hand of telekinesis, to carry her along as he starts to mosey on out of the weirdly clean square of space. It's sudden, but kind of like being swept up by a giant invisible pillow; he's not being rough about it. Meanwhile, a bit of his internal computer power goes towards finding the contact info for the job poster while he's at it. It's a bit buried after all the times it was kicked downstream...
Karlan Nobles	"If it was persuasion, then there's nothing to worry about. Although..." Pramanix pauses, glancing towards where there used to (probably) be houses. There's certainly something strange going on here, but identifying how it's happening still seems to be out of reach for her and her brother. Figuring out all those double meanings and understanding her manner of speech is another matter entirely, but all in due time. "If they're truly free to return once your work's done and they're okay with it, then I guess there's no problem here. I don't suppose you make house ca-" She doesn't finish that sentence. SilverAsh gives her that distinct 'what the hell, sis' look, and there's a distinctly tense energy as she only then notices that the maid is addressing Mack and all those crumbs. She does, however, look pleasantly surprised when Mack suggests a different plan of action to try and get the maid to work things out with the HOA.
Xion	Xion still feels the flush of embarrased, even if she doesn't *feel* it. A twist in the stomach, a heat to her cheeks. She doesn't follow through with lowered posture and averted eyes, because there's no bite to the thing that happened to her beyond 'I physically feel mildly ill'. Tomoyo powerslides in to offer a business card to the Nobody, who takes it and glances over the details. "Nice! That wasn't hard at all. Ooh, she does custom orders too." The matter of becoming FURTHER CLAD IN RIGHTEOUS THREADS is cut short by, broadly, Mack continuing to Pop Off About Rituals And Their Completion. "If I only grab keychains off people with good looks, my look will be good. That's the transitive drip property! Demyx told me about it." Demyx once more is a villain. And the Maid... "So you cleaned the place up and made it nice for everyone and they're going to come back? That's great! And..." The nobody pats down her self for a quick pocket check. The nobody with the *magic inventory*. "I don't think I've lost anything, let me see..." She starts flicking her finger through the air like browsing a touchscreen list. And browsing. And browsing. And... "Nope! It's all here. Thanks for asking, Miss!"
Roxas	"Ah! Thank you, er..." Roxas takes the business card like a filthy westerner, because nobody has taught him this specific custom. It vanishes with a faint ringing a moment later, "Miss Daidouji. We might take you up on that, actually." He takes the broom back from Kale. It, too, vanishes with a pronounced ringing noise. Seeming content to let Mack make his attempts, and to defer to Tamamo's own intentions with the maid, he converses with Xion, "I guess that makes sense. And guys like X do look pretty cool..." With a ringing noise he transforms his Keyblade into the X-themed keyblade, in white-and-blue, with gold highlights, and a red triangular gem entrapped between the teeth of the key. "... But something about that does still make me nervous," he admits. It's Demyx. Demyx giving advice makes him nervous.
Tomoyo Daidouji	"There's no need to go anywhere."     Tomoyo ceases rubbing elbows to instead rub her nose where it doesn't belong i.e. superpower business. She stands between Mack and the Maid, holding a cellphone.     "I sent my people on to the relief centre to hand out supplies. We can ask them to find whomever complained." She makes the call to the two bodyguards who left with the truck and asks them to look around for whomever filed the complaint.
Tamamo	Tamamo is, while waiting to have a split of the maid's attention, distracted by several as-if-highlighted keywords, first looking at Roxas at Xion's mention of black and white, then at Xion, at Roxas' mention of flashiness. "There was that one outfit that did attract my attention, in particular..."     But then the maid is answering her. The Maid, specifically. She tilts her head. She listens. She had already been listening, to the place, and to the people. "No," she says, finally, and unusually blunt, "they have not called for you. You are mistaken."      As Mack makes his move, Tamamo takes a few paces into the yet-to-be-cleaned area, and begins her own ritual. Hers is a great deal smaller and faster, though probably not any less immediately mysterious. Outer circles, inner circles, curving and connecting lines like supporting braces, words too old and faded to read. It first appears as lines in the dust, summoned as if by the dancing step of her geta on the road, then burns into something harder, more permanent, inscribed into asphalt after it flash-melts smooth. <J-IC-Scene> Tamamo says, "I suspect that there will be no such option, though I shall not impede your attempt, by any means. There are those who respond only to due authority, and of those, should they recognize no authority but their own calling, any attempt to hinder their efforts is, for all that the word can ever hold meaning, 'evil.' The two options provided are to allow the mysterious ritual, or to stop it, and to stop it, the Maid must be made to halt, herself."     When she's done, she removes some rolled-up material from her sleeve, flicking it open into a woven mat, sets it in the center of her layered formation, and sits there. She has every appearance, now, of being immovable. In fact, the outer circles are for just that purpose. They'll form a substantially difficult obstacle to any sort of attempt to overwrite them.     The inner circles are for 'listening' or, perhaps, for 'feeling.' She was told that there was one who began this process, but that they were not the one who ordered it. If there is a connection, even if the other side is unable to speak to her, then she can follow that outward, to see for herself where and what sort of being that is, assuming they exist at all.
Priscilla	There is a feeling, implicit, that the maid smiles at Xion. She doesn't really, instead wearing that half-face-visible expression of complete calm, but it sort of feels like she did. "Very good, young miss. If you still need something later, I'll be happy to help after I'm done working."     The maid then escalates the surreal dive into nested layers within layers of character method by reaching into her cosplay-esque apron pocketspace and leaning over just enough to press two somethings into Xion's hand. It looks like wrapped candy, with no brand on it at all. The candy itself is bizarrely bright silver. The not very appetizing kind. "For your friend, too." she says. It'd be straight out of some real shoujo trash if it weren't still slightly eerie coming from someone whose eyes she can't even see. That nebulous aura of nondescript pleasantness hangs around her when speaking to Tomoyo, saying "That's very generous of you. When we're finished here, there shouldn't be any need for further trips; they should have everything they need, right here."     She is less dotingly polite with Mack by far. "I am aware of those complaints. As they don't come from a resident, I have no reason to pay them any mind." There's an almost imperceptible shift of verbal gears. A little tick-tick-tack of fine gears starting to lock together and come into use. "No. I have any reason to pay them no mind. That's right. My time is valuable. Theirs is not. If someone must wait, it shall be the one with the time to sit around and complain. I have work to do, and you're being a nuisance."     Cyber trawling for the original request means going through the strange backwards loops it'd done around people's desks. No *specific* crime reported, yet the entire thing, up and down, exudes the kind of aura that comes from upper class white people feeling threatened by a scruffy looking person outside their grocery store --except coming from people rendered literally homeless by a storm, all the way up to nominally armed response officers. Reports of showing up around people's property (as much as that might be only a spit of lawn now) and escalated arguments resolving in them 'acting weird'. Reports of passing through aid centers and doing nondescript 'weird things' around injured parties. That report of shots fired on the scanner is real, but indeed ends with both officers involved returning home and refusing to comment or file a report, claiming that they 'realized they shouldn't' and little else. Mentions almost like a cryptid at first, before this street design had become the undeniable disturbance. A mass of grassroots complaints that had since ceased, caused people to complain about the fact the complaints had stopped, and rippled outwards until it finally became a government problem.     Tamamo doing what she does is evidently even more of a problem than spraying crumbs (in much the same way that a stranger setting up shop and squatting in your house would be, granted). The maid turns away for a moment, striding with a purpose, to say "Miss, you're becoming a problem. If you cannot wait for me to finish cleaning before walking all over, then--" A simultaneous confluence of telekinetic shepherding and wind magic cause her to stop mid-sentence. The broom flies out of her hands and tumbles into Kale's. Out of the direct lamplight, he can see that it really is just stunningly white with pitch black bristles. There seems to be nothing even slightly unusual about it, save the minor detail of 'Marie' being stenciled in very fine, flowing script in a corner, like an autograph on a piece of memorabilia.
Priscilla	No such name appears in Tamamo's searching. In fact, no particular personage comes to her all. It could even be called a distinct lack of one. Trying to follow 'who ordered this' feels like drifting out of her body, high up into the sky, hovering over where the buildings would be and staring down at herself. Gradually, the light from the lamps in this vision is eclipsed by a blinding white from above, stymied in Icarus-like fashion by her apparent ascent towards a tremendous singularity of brilliance that probably anyone but her would assume is the sun. Floating beneath this imaginary sun is exactly where following the maid's point of origin takes her, however, under a cloudless blue nothing of sky.     In reality however, now deciding she is definitely not going to be swept away to talk to an unhappy civil service crowd, that same maid digs her heels in. At least it seems like it. She comes to an abrupt halt, stanced down slightly, but it doesn't make any sound. She holds her hand out towards Kale, and from his perspective, it's as if time comes to a standstill.      An obliging pause, just for him. Infinite time to think. To make up his mind. Choose between the options silently presented to him; two options he instinctively knows that he has, like they're pulled straight out of his brain and dangled before his eyes. And in that moment, they are the *only* choices. That strange out of body experience feels like it'll wait forever until he picks one of them. Third options don't count. A damning rejection of the idea that the trolley problem would never resemble the practical world. Like being held at the lever by some unearthly force and told he can't go home until he picks. >Give it back >Retreat     "You're all being very disrespectful. Please don't force me to raise my voice. I won't warn you again." says the maid. In doing so, the exact same thing happens to Tamamo and Mack. Subjectively exposed to an infinite second that waits for their input. Two choices, revealed to them like the absolute truth. As plain and obvious as seeing two tunnels and knowing one has to decide which one they'll take, or else just walk straight into the wall until they do. But something is wrong about it. Because those choices are: >Stand aside >Stand aside
Kale Hearthward	Time stands still. Kale has time to think. It takes him surprisingly not infinite time to come to a decision. >Give it back "Yes, thank you for letting me borrow it," he says, approaching her and putting the broom into her outstretched hand. Something... ... Just seems to suggest that this is the right answer, more than just running off with it.
Tomoyo Daidouji	The answers start coming in. No official complaints. No real wrongdoing. Those people sent after her are alive and well. It's just people not minding their business, not willing to let someone strange live and let live.     "She hasn't done anything wrong, hasn't hurt anyone," she reports. "I'm sure people here are on-edge after the storm, but all she has done is tidy things up in anticipation of reconstruction. She's probably saved everyone millions in clean-up." What comes next has the air of being worded very carefully. "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."     Tomoyo very pointedly does not look in the direction of the mutant cyborg, the fox woman, the strange cult teens, or the bird dressed as a maid.     "Either way, there is no official job, no reward on offer, no warrant issued. I think the matter is sufficiently investigated, and we would all be better served helping out with relief, rather than interrogating someone trying to help."
Kale Hearthward	Kale looks normal. It's the rest of you that resemble strange, rather ill pigs.
Xion	Xion, a strange and rather ill pig, has two candies pushed into her hand with the exact energy of a cut piece of wooden dowel rod wrapped up in pure white. "Oh hey, piece of candy." She oblidgingly passes off the second candy to Roxas and unwraps hers with both thumbs and forefingers, lifting the wrapper to her mouth to pop the candy in and adding 1x WHITE WRAPPER to her inventory. She's not littering. Not right now. She is Absolutely Certain that littering right now is Wrong..
Roxas	"What outfit was that?" Roxas asks Tamamo, failing to remember the specifics at this moment in time. It's not a topic that gets lingered on at length however; he'll address it when it comes back up again, but at this particular moment several different people are attempting to address what is increasingly looking like a problem. Roxas, however, banishes his Keyblade. It disappears with a ring just like the other items he's been handling this whole time. He glances towards Xion, and then back towards The Maid. He hasn't seen her broom, nor the name that is etched upon it. So he doesn't have a place to start, save for what's right in front of him. The haziness of the Maid's features; suggestions that aren't "really there" in a truly tangible way. She might not be a Nobody, but in terms of external presentation it's clear to Roxas that she's considered about as unsettling as one. "I'm Roxas, he introduces himself, "the one you gave candy is Xion, my partner. It sounds to me like Miss Daidouji has the right idea... but, Miss, if you present a little too strangely, or don't work like everyone else does, people get bothered by it. They'll run you off,or worse." He accepts the candy from Xion, and tucks it away in pocketspace immediately. "Anyway, I guess what I'm getting at is, why don't we take you to go talk to the people who lived here? That'll clear this up really fast." He suggests. If it occurs to Roxas that he's not REALLY talking to a person, it doesn't show. If history is anything to go by, he might not actually have a true conception of a person-shaped nonperson.
Tamamo	Tamamo feels as if her only choice is to stand aside. However, she can't. There's an immovable barrier surrounding her, just outside the (now used up and irrelevant) divination circles. She made it remarkably sturdy, with the expectation that she could wait for her opponent to break it apart while she prepared something else from inside. She hadn't thought of a need to quickly exit, otherwise.     Tamamo chooses to stand aside, and does stand. She looks at the intricate layers of defense. She could unravel it, much more easily from within than without, but it would still take time. She could destroy it in an instant, but that would cause its own, wide-reaching mess. Normally, the time needed to unravel it wouldn't be any real issue. Here, it is, because the moment has passed, and the prompt is gone.     She looks at the maid. She still feels like she should move out of the way. She will, when she has a chance, but in the meantime...     "When you next attempt to decide my choices, all your efforts will fall to ruin as your body rots. This curse I pronounce will persist until your final day." Tamamo claps her hands, once. That's really all it takes. The geas is laid. Whether the rot is survivable, she doesn't specify. The ruinous misfortune almost certainly is, but that's more about forcing an irredeemable failure in one's objectives.     "Please do not do that again."     Tamamo's next words are delayed as she examines her own self for curses, whether a geas or some other foreign effect. Curse-breaking is well within her areas of strength. "I will, of course, move when I am satisfied as to your actions here. I would, naturally, move if you made some legitimate claim of authority over myself. You may, as you wish, attempt to move me by force. This would be unwise, and I recommend against it. It would be very difficult to complete your cleaning, should you insist upon this route."
Mack	Telekinetic force connects with the mysterious, single-minded cleaner. Mack had aimed for enough to sweep a human off their feet and comfortably carry them in mid-air, something that most bog-standard humans can't actually do anything about. The Maid is not at all that, but he had to come up with a baseline somewh-- Time stands still. Two choices present themselves, as Mack looks down on the scene in a disconnected sort of way: >Stand aside >Stand aside This is not reality, Mack thinks. This is in my head. Green sky. Blue macaroni. Orange grass. The speed of thought is, to a psychic, a speed one can operate at. Disassociation sets in. Hard carpet. Sharp fur. Minty shit. His frame of mine begins to uncouple from the choices presented, and from his present reality. Neurons fire, some connection bridging in his mutant brain. Something carefully implanted within it, for occasions remarkably similar to this, triggers. An electronic signal carried through heavily-enchanted, gem-encrusted pathways moves fast enough for this eternal second to register it as hauling figurative ass. >Stand aside >Stand aside >[Mamono] Countermeasures. <-- Mack goes from walking along with his would-be maid balloon down to a defensive crouch mid-step. The telekinetic field vanishes, and instead, Mack immediately curls himself into a tight ball, head down and arms pulled in tight. His partly-merged, partly-worn layers of scrap armor fit into something like a shell, though not perfectly. It's enough to, say, cover himself from a savage mauling, or keep him from walking up to something with pointy fangs. It takes about a second. In the next several, the space around him begins to fill with things that are very clearly meant to do harm. At first, the aura of bright, warm sunlight that erupts into being, conjured by pinpricks of solar brightness ejected from gaps in his scrap-shell and hovering in his immediate vicinity, seems pretty harmless. Immediately after, though, what looks like thick hairs stand up all over the exterior of his armored body -- and then violently eject themselves in every direction, the spray of two-inch wooden splinters rapidly losing momentum outside maybe three meters around him and becoming a nuisance rather than a hazard. The dark, dull iron nails and the bright, gleaming silver needles that spring up and do the exact same thing in the follow-up waves -- and in a similarly disconcerting volume -- are a little bit more worrying. And then... And *then* he bursts into flames. There's even a satisfying 'fwoosh'. It looks like someone had doused him with gasoline and threw a lit torch on top. It doesn't seem to actually be doing anything to him, but good luck physically touching him, assailants-that-are-probably-also-assholes. On the bright side, he's not trying to manhandle the maid anymore!
Priscilla	The maid retrieves the Marie Broom without incident. "I would appreciate no further interruptions." she says to Kale, but menaces him no further, looking as if she's about to turn back to her maidly duty. "Money is no concern of mine." she says to Tomoyo. "But reconstruction will be handled as well. Rather, the cleaning is a necessary step to achieving just that."     Xion eating her candy finds it's kind of squishy in her mouth. It isn't a texture that really fits any kind of candy. More like eating a hotdog or burger. It tastes disconcertingly fruity instead; not bad at all, but at odds with its texture. It's also difficult to place any specific fruit to it. Just 'fruit-flavoured'. She has the distinct impression she'd probably have gained health or something if she weren't in perfect condition.     "I understand your concern, young man." she says to Roxas. "But doing things in a meek and agreeable fashion is the method of ordinary household servants. I am the maid, and I have a duty that exceeds all of those meagre jobs combined. When one's home has decayed and degraded to this level, it isn't their place to gainsay the professional who arrives to save it. Even if they stubbornly insist that it needn't be fixed up."     "This particular house fell over so easily because of neglected foundations, which turned black some time ago. So, simply put, I have nothing to tell them. All they have to do is stand aside. They were doing that just fine before, when nobody was coming to help them."     Unfortunately, she doesn't get to go right back to 'cleaning'. Tamamo and Mack *both* become problems, where Kale did not. One is an immediate physical harm, from which the maid jumps away from with quite sudden and surprising alacrity. Her shoes make no sound at all when she bounce-steps several times to a safe distance. The other is a mystical harm. One esoteric and threatening enough for the maid to suddenly halt altogether. For a moment, it's as if in deadlock, being unable to reconcile some kind of contradictory routine perhaps, but finally that pause eventually ratchets an invisible mental wire up to the point of a reply.     "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