"Can you get that?" Emily asks, intent on her sculpture.

"Hello Edie," says Janine. "I am sorry to bother you, but I was recently kidnapped by villainous minions and I thought you should probably know."

"Ugh." She puts down her sculpture and comes over. "Hi, Janine. Evil's afoot?"

"Evil is approximately half a mile away from Carousel Mall," says Janine. "Imprisoning people in an abandoned factory for unclear nefarious purposes. There were about two hundred and fifty kidnapped people there when I left. Some of the other kidnapped people helped me escape because I said I knew some magical girls. I think the person in charge was an artifact user, not a sorcerer, and there was a space-warping effect on the inside of the building but it seemed to be stable so it might be useful if I drew the layout for you."

"That sounds very useful, yes."

"Do you have a pen and paper?"

Edie fetches a pencil and some graph paper.

"Okay...did you get any idea at all where one might leave this area to find the big bad and/or his artifact?"

She shakes her head. "I am not sure. I only saw part of the maze. The people who helped me escape told me about the dead-end branches I marked, so the artifact is not in any of those or someone would have said so."

"Okay, we can work with this. ...Are you okay, you just escaped from being kidnapped, do you need some food or water or something, should I call your mom?"

"I am fine. Go rescue people," Janine says firmly. "If you do not mind I will wait here until you are done."

"Sure. If we're not back by the time either or both of our parents come home, I'd appreciate it if you'd explain the situation to them."

She places the first two fingers of her right hand against her temple, props the left one on her hip, and exclaims, "Truth and Beauty of a Magical Mind, Activate! Fervor and Will of an Impassioned Soul, Come Forth!" Her body is enveloped in the shimmering lights, she lifts up off the ground, and spins in place while waves of stronger light pass over her body, leaving garbed in her magical girl outfit. The lights vanish, and she drops to the floor in a crouch, before rising to her feet and pointing imperiously at nothing in particular. "In the name of Love and Equity, I arrive to right the wrongs of a distorted heart! The Psychic Maiden, Cerebella is here!"

"Alright, let's go."

"I will explain things to your parents if I see them," Janine promises. "Good luck."

"Thanks. Here's hoping we don't need it."

Once they're outside the house, she casts, "Stormwing Flight!" Wings covered in razor-sharp steel feathers spread from her back.

"Wing's of the Mind's Eye." Edie's feathers are crystal, glinting with flashes of color and hints of images, there and gone to fast to see on such small surfaces. And: "Perception Periapt." A faintly glowing orb appear in her hand.

The two sisters take flight. It's a bit of a trek to the mall, but it shouldn't take too terribly long, flying.

Periodically, mirrors appear surrounding Edie, wisps of some kind of vapor flowing out of them and into the orb. It happens more often when they're above large numbers of people. Not coincidentally, no one notices them.

"So how are we doing this? Any bright ideas besides, 'find villain, smite villain?"

"...I don't like how many hostages he has. And the implications for why someone like that would want to have that many people captive...I'm going to get everyone out I can. You should see if you can figure out what the fuck he wants them for and get his artifact away from him if you can--your powers are better for that than mine."

"True. Alright, just let me--Si Vales Valeo," she casts, swooping down to leave a silver dot on her sister's forehead.

Edie casts the spell too, twisting up to leave a reciprocal mark. "Standard minor injury code applies?"

"Yeah, of course."

They fly for another half-mile, which only takes a few minutes, before landing and dismissing their wings for the narrow corridors. They find the door Janine pointed out on her map, and slip inside under cover of the Periapt.

The twins wind their way through the corridors, Edie firmly tracing the path that Janine set on paper and Emily following--she'll split when she sees a likely-looking doorway, but no point in just running off to get lost without a sign it'll be productive.

"Fuck."

"Plan B: Smiting?"

"Might as well, at this point."

Emily considers casting a Mass Driver, considers the possibility that the spacewarping is more insidious and she might hurt the prisoners, considers a Shrapnel Barrage, considers that that seems less than likely to be able to pierce the walls, and casts, "Prismatic Railgun!"

That punches a large hole through several successive walls. The blackened, rippling edges begin to flow back together, but only very slowly.

The villain has excellent reflexes. He manages to dodge--almost. The actual projectile doesn't--quite--hit him, but having something that large and fast pass so close by you is not generally beneficial. He staggers, but frustratingly, the wall opens around him so he isn't thrown into its unpleasantness.

It's not as hard for him to dodge that one.

So when he backhands her again she presumably doesn't end up writhing in pain again!

True! It is still not pleasant.

And while he is distracted by hitting her sister, Emily can try to Mass Driver him again!

That...does not comprehensively work either. But it sure as hell distracts him.

"A short while ago, a friend of ours came frantically knocking on my door. She said she had escaped from a villain who had a few hundred people kidnapped for some reason, and gave us directions to his hideout. We came here and snuck in, which was working great until the alarms went off. Which...I am guessing was not actually us."

"...That would be where I was sneaking, yes. Absolutely."

"Oh good. Then you can rescue the captives and I can dismantle his sacrificial apparatus."

"That was originally going to be my job, but you're welcome to it."

The tiny stranger smiles. "Thanks."

"We have a map to the prisoners, so that should be relatively easy. ...Unless they moved the prisoners after the breakout, I guess."

"And I want the prisoners out before I start trying to collapse the maze, and it doesn't seem like you have a good way to take down these walls one at a time without potentially harming whatever's on the other side."

"Yeah. Okay, weird question, how good are you at learning codes?"

"Extremely, why?"

"The Si Vales Valeo is a healing spell that lets the caster know any damage that happens to the target's body. So we have a code--we put the spell on and then bite our hands in coded ways in order to communicate. Unless you want to take one of us with you we couldn't give you information that way but a one-way line of communication is better than none." She bites her left ring finger at the second knuckle to demonstrate.

"Clever. But depending how it works exactly, you might not like to cast it on me just now."

"...Feedback and 'also feeling the pain' are different or I'd've been screaming when she hit the wall."

"How different? Well, you can if you like, anyway. But if screaming is a risk, you're risking it."

"It's not." She pokes her forehead and says, "Si Vales Valeo." A silver dot appears on her forehead. She blinks. "...Do you want me to fix that?"

Shrug. "If it's bothering you. I'm used to it."

"You're used to it? When did you hit that wall?"

"Just before I stabbed him. I will be fascinated to discuss the particulars of your spell after we're done here. What should I know about your code?"

She gives a brief overview of the basics of the code.

"All right. Let me see your map?"

She proffers the folded piece of paper.

She studies it intently for a few seconds, nods, hands it back, incants something in a foreign language, and vanishes again.

Alright then. So the prisoners were down this corridor over there, and then...

Nod. "Disruption Pulse."

The wall is unaffected.

A few seconds of silence; then a muffled voice calls back, "Who are you?"

"I'm Psychic Maiden Cerebella! My sister Iron Maiden Magnetar and I are Janine's magical girl friends!"

"...Can you do anything about the walls?" asks the person on the other side.

"Good," says the voice. "Okay, I'll get everybody away from the wall. Just give us a minute."

"Okay. Let us know when it's safe."

This opens a hole in the wall, not really big enough for any people to come through it, but big enough to look through and see the large open space with a crowd of people huddled together on the opposite side.

Well, as long as it didn't hurt anyone, she can just keep blasting the wall until the hole is big enough, can't she?

Yes she can! That works just fine.

She steps through, surveying the room. "Is anyone injured badly? We have healing."

"Over here," says someone in the crowd. Not the person who was talking to her through the wall.

She goes over there.

Emily follows! Two healers is more efficient than one on several levels.

...Yeah, bruise man is the lowest priority here. Emily begins healing the rest, dotting one and healing them before moving on to the next--it probably wouldn't leave her nonfunctional to sympathetically heal several people at once who had been walled but she's not eager to try it.

Edie does likewise, although she does note the kid who was beside the doorway. "Are you the person we were talking to?"

"Yeah. Are they going to be okay?" he asks, frowning in concern.

"Physically, yes. Mentally--they've been through a traumatic experience. How well they hold up depends a lot on them." She glances at him again. "...How much of this did you organize?"

"Some," he admits. "We weren't sure Janine made it - her team came back unconscious."

"She did, thankfully. She's at our house right now." Healing someone by Si Vales Valeo doesn't take a long time--they're down to bruise guy. Edie heals him. Edie catches Emily's eye, and glances meaningfully at the kid.

"...You think so? Yeah, I can see it. Mercurial Metal Manipulation." A tendril of probably-steel, presumably from one of the guards, flows over and forms up into a rectangle about the size of a business card with an email address engraved on it. She hands it to him. "Give us a ring in a couple of years, okay? It's always best to have a mentor when you're just starting out."

"...What?" he says, warily accepting the card.

"Edie thinks you're getting magic when you're old enough. I don't disagree."

"...I'm not a girl," he points out, in case they hadn't noticed.

"Not everyone who gets magic is. Magical Boys are rarer, but they exist."

"I guess," he says dubiously.

"You'll see. Was that everyone who was hurt, or just the worst?"

"Anybody else injured?" the kid calls into the crowd, and a few people come forward with bumps and bruises and one twisted ankle.

Twisted ankle gets dealt with first because that could actually be an impediment, but healing for everyone. "Is there any particular reason that any of you know of for not just getting out right now?"

General headshaking.

"I'll go in front and my sister can take the rear in case we run into guards."

The kid nods; so do several other people. The kidnappees organize themselves into a procession and prepare to follow Edie through the maze.

Unfortunately they can't keep the sides covered, but she is very careful about looking both ways whenever they cross an intersection.

There are no conscious guards waiting for them on the way. A few unconscious ones.

"You must have met Star," says the short girl standing at the maze entrance holding a pair of honest-to-God lightsabers.

Her costume is very reminiscent of the assassin's, but with a slightly more elaborate design, a colour scheme favouring deep blue rather than black, and paired moon and sun symbols instead of a set of stars. Also, she is glowing with a fierce silver-edged golden light that silently sings of help and healing and heroism.

"My sister and I were fighting the guy who set this place up when she killed him. Nice aura, by the way."

"We actually thought we had set it off somehow until we met your twin. It's possible if we had known that we would have just kept sneaking instead of starting to smite the walls."

"Oh, are they smiteable? That's convenient. Well, I was going to go in after the prisoners, but you beat me to it, so I guess I'm waiting here until Star either collapses that mess or comes out asking for help."

"Beam attacks do better than projectiles, but yeah, which is good because the prisoner room didn't have natural doorways when we found it."

The sun-and-moon girl snorts.

"Who, me?"

"...I think I have met you before, in passing. Half of you. The healer half. Probably? I volunteer at Crouse Hospital sometimes."

"...ooooh, hell, back when I still went out solo," she says. "Yeah, maybe. Listen, can you do us a favour and maybe not talk about us much? We're trying to keep a low profile."

"Okay, sure. You didn't come up much anyway. Any particular reason?"

"We have approximately zero chance of maintaining a secret identity if we ever get seriously famous, so we're trying to put that off as long as possible."

"Fair enough. We don't really have secret identities as such--the whole reason we knew to find this place was that a friend of ours knew to run to us when she managed to escape--but I know it matters more to other people."

"...Okay, so the first thing is that my sister and I have a healing spell that tells you what happens to the person you cast it on passively, and we worked out a code involving biting our hands in various places, and I cast on your sister before she went to turn the thing off and gave her the basics of the code. She says 'objective complete' and then 'safe' twice and...then when the maze imploded she. Uh. Do you know what happens when you hit the walls?"

"Nothing good?" she guesses, not looking particularly alarmed. "If she sent 'safe' twice, that was her way of saying 'whatever heinously alarming thing I'm about to do, I have it totally under control and you don't need to worry'."

"I had guessed that, but I'm...not totally unconcerned, because what just happened was like hitting a wall but ten times worse. Maybe if I knew her better I'd be assured that she knew that was going to happen and wasn't just expecting one, but I don't."

"I mean, what happens when you hit a wall once?"

"It hurts. A lot. And it doesn't stop hurting when you're not touching the wall anymore."

"...If she'll be fine I think I won't. It's sympathetic healing."

The fusion laughs. "Then yeah, good call. One sec, now everything's settled—" and she incants something in a foreign language and steps into thin air. A moment later, there is a flare of brilliant silver light from the junk heap, and the feedback stops.

"We're trying to figure out how to get these people home, and sure. Emily?"

Emily, who still has her Mercurial Metal Manipulation spell active, repeats the pseudo-business card trick.

Many of the formerly kidnapped persons assert that they do. The fusion glances over this scene, then shrugs, waves, and teleports away to parts unknown.

The phone is passed around, then, and other arrangements are made for those who require them.

The kid who organized the breakout catches a ride with someone else. And then everyone is taken care of, and there's nothing left but junk, unconscious guards, and one dead villain.

Janine is still there!

"Hi, Janine. Everybody's out. The villain's dead. Met a new magical girl or three, and we think the organizer kid is probably going to activate when he's old enough."

"'Or three'?"

"There were fusions involved."

"Oh, I see. Well, I am glad everything turned out all right. Do you really think that boy will activate? He did seem very... very."

"Probably, yeah."

"That will be interesting."

"No doubt. We gave him our email, offered to show him the ropes when the time came."

"That is nice of you."

"Seemed like the best thing to do."

"...Do you guys, like, need me for anything at this point or can I go back to my sculpture?"

"You may sculpt," says Janine.

snort. "Go on."

"You laugh, but you'll be amazed when it's finished," she says with blatantly fake hauteur.

"Yes, I think I will do that now, thank you."

She detransforms and pulls her cell phone out of her jeans pocket.

Janine calls her mother. She omits all mention of kidnapping, but asks to be picked up from Emily and Edie's house.

And that is pretty much that, for the next little while.