It has at least a bit of novelty, in the form of a new food stand. They have pizza by the slice. It smells excellent.

Delicious pizza sounds like a great way to improve this otherwise mediocre day!

It tastes as good as it smells!

Also, has she considered that she could tear her paper plate into shreds before throwing it in the trash?

She had not previously considered that, but it's a fun impulse so she does it.

The paper plate makes no attempt to avenge itself. Destroying things is fun! 

Destroying things is fun. Her paper-plate-related impulses are so right about that.

Well then maybe she should stomp on that ketchup packet somebody dropped! It would probably explode really satisfyingly.

It would and she gets halfway through raising her foot but then she thinks about how annoying that's going to be for somebody to clean up and she hesitates.

But the goosh, April, think of the goosh.

Hmm... no. No goosh. As disappointing as that is.

Outside the food court are a couple of planters with large ornamental ferns. The ferns look extremely shreddable. Have some vivid mental images of picking the little leaves off a fern, or pulling it between pinched fingers and stripping them all off at once, or twisting them off so they come off in satisfying little curls . . .

...well, maybe she can indulge in a little vandalism—

—something's weird about this. She pauses after picking a single leaf and glances around, looking for other destructible objects in her environment. Does she feel like this about all of them?

There's a soda can on the edge of the planter and she could knock it over. There's a big wall directory listing the stores on this floor and she could scrape the paint off it. There's a store with a display of boxes of chocolate and she could dump all the chocolates out of them. There's a window and she could smash it. There's an escalator and something interesting would probably happen if she tried to peel the rubber layer off the handrail.

Someone else walks out of the food court, pulling a loose thread out of his sleeve. He tips over the soda can, chuckles, and keeps walking.

That's...

This is not the sort of thing that happens. People don't sit down for lunch and get up again as budding hooligans. But it's happening to her and it's - maybe also happening to other people. More information may be required. (She absently steps on the soda can, crushing it very satsifyingly underfoot.) Who else is coming out of the food court? Where did they sit, what did they eat, and which of them are doing the thing?

The lunch rush is in full swing, so it's a perfect time for a stakeout!

A group of teenagers get Panda Express, inhale it while arguing the merits of MarioKart, and depart in peace.

A little old lady gets the pizza, eats it in front of the burrito stand, then takes an handful of napkins out of the burrito stand napkin dispenser and flings them everywhere.

A man with a briefcase gets a burrito, pockets the receipt, and walks off still eating it.

A middle school girl gets a burger and milkshake from Burger King; her friend gets the pizza and they meet in the middle to eat. Ten minutes later the girl who got the pizza grabs the salt shaker off the table, unscrews the lid, and spins around, slinging salt everywhere and cackling. "AUGH Katie what the hell--" says the other one, trying to restrain her.

A boy in a college sweatshirt gets two slices of pizza, eats them like a sandwich on the way out of the food court, and attempts the thing April was tempted to do to the escalator. The handrail starts peeling off in a long loop.

That does look satisfying—no, focus. The common factor here is the pizza. Are they drugging it?? What the hell??? Why is this happening, what do the pizza people gain from this—she brushes fragments of fern off her fingers—

The fern she's standing next to is looking a lot sparser than it was a minute ago. She looks down at the crushed soda can lying in its splat of soda like an inanimate murder victim complete with pool of blood. It seems to glare up at her accusingly.

Filled with spite and determination, she picks it up and carries it carefully to the trash, then grabs some napkins to clean up the spill. If somebody is trying to turn everyone into vandals with evil pizza(????) then she is going to do the exact opposite thing, so there.

The peeled-off portion of escalator handrail reaches the top where it feeds into the floor for the trip back down. There is a horrible noise and the escalator stops moving. A mall cop emerges from wherever mall cops come from and starts remonstrating with College Boy, who puts his backpack through a glass window and into the collection of kitchenware displayed behind it. Mall Cop does not approve.

Katie has torn her own necklace off and is now sitting in a pile of salt and beads, crying. Her friend is trying to comfort her but is too confused to do a good job of it.

...and what about the pizza people, how are they reacting to all this? Are they in on it or are they as confused as everybody else?

The people behind the counter are cheerfully hawking pizza like nothing out of the ordinary is happening. If anything they look like they're enjoying the show.

"Thanks I hate it," she mutters under her breath. "Ugh."

Okay. Something wildly fucked up is going on here. She doesn't want to confront the pizza people directly because if they can give her random destructive urges they can probably do other things and she's not keen to find out what. However she also does not want to let them continue to get away with whatever they're up to. So.

She finishes throwing out her napkins, and she looks at the pizza stand and contemplates what her destructive urges have to say about it.

Well, she could always smash the plastic partition between her and the pizza; it's hard to go wrong with a good smash. Then there's all those pizzas to dump on the floor! And if she looks farther back there are bags of cheese and tomato sauce she can throw everywhere, and an oven that will burn most things she could put in it! There are not nearly enough things burning right now; she should fix that.

Those all sound like GREAT IDEAS!

The plastic partition was designed to stop sneezes, not rampaging teenagers; it's not hard to rip it off its mounting points. Turning the floor on both sides of the counter into a pizza swamp is also trivial. If she wants to get to the oven, she'll have to vault the counter, and the people cooking the pizza have had time to realize what's up. One of them has just put a pizza in to cook and is still holding the big flat shovel, now in a much more militant posture.

That oven can set things on FIRE! She's going for it. And hey, that pizza shovel looks like fun, she should take it away from him and thwack something with it!

Now she's wrestling a probably-evil cook for control of his pizza stick! Also Katie has apparently learned how to look on the bright side, i.e. she has stopped crying and started throwing random objects at the lamps over the counter, so the wrestling match is happening on a battleground of tomato sauce and glass shards.

Probably this is objectively concerning or something but right now somebody has filled April with the desire to destroy things and she is turning it back on them and this is TREMENDOUS FUN. Whee!

She loses her balance to the tomato sauce and a small amount of blood to the glass shards but in return she gains a pizza stick, and there are so many things to bash with it!

A ringing voice calls out, <Say 'Lunar Guardian combat form!' It will help you defeat them!> The phrase sounds oddly familiar, as though it's the sort of thing people say all the time. Also, the voice isn't coming through April's ears. It's just showing up in her head, clear and confident.

"—what, how, why, how—?!"

<It will transform you into the form that will let you use your powers. I know that doesn't make sense, but I'll explain everything once you've taken out these villains.>

She attempts to formulate the reply <fine I'll roll with it but if you're messing with me you get a pizza shovel to the face> and then, with teenage self-consciousness battling the strange feeling of familiarity to an overall result of conflicted embarrassment, says "Lunar Guardian combat form!"

Time slows down, or perhaps her mind speeds up, because she and everyone else in her line of sight are suddenly frozen mid-pizza brawl.

Points of silvery-white light spring up around her, multiplying into a cloud of glitter and then condensing onto her skin. Her hair pulls itself out of her face and something materializes on her forehead. Her clothes melt instantaneously into a white jumpsuit with high boots and shoulder-length gloves, gold accents and a blue skirt.

Stranger still are the new structures unfolding in her mind. She can see the effects of the pizza in herself, and on the man who's grabbing her arm, and she knows it is the work of an enemy, and that with a whisper or a shout of "Moonlight Clarity!" she can sweep it away like mist.

And once she's had a moment to process all of this, time goes back to normal.

Fine, "Moonlight Clarity" then. If she finds out who set the requirements for this magic system she is going to be sorely tempted to hit them with a pizza shovel.

Chaos and disorder suddenly stop feeling fun. Wow, this is a huge mess. The rightful owner of the pizza shovel seems to feel the same way; he stops trying to reclaim it and blinks like someone woken up mid-dream at three in the morning.

Okay, she has officially abandoned all pretense of not being in open opposition to the pizza demons, so might as well own it. She hops up onto the counter with her pizza shovel and looks around for anyone who seems like they might be inclined to protest her interference - and, she supposes, for other pizza victims she might be able to help.

There's two more pizza stand employees coming at her. Katie has killed all the lights and moved on to dual-wielding the mustard squirt-bottle from the Burger King and the hot sauce squirt-bottle from the Panda Express all over the tables and her by now extremely angry friend. Also the mall cop has apparently dealt with College Boy and is on his way in.

<Excellent work!> Says the voice in her head. <You can release the others if you touch them!>

Keeping the pizza shovel ready to hand in case of opposition, she starts booping people and muttering her incantation as rapidly as possible. Pizza stand employees first, then Katie, at least if the pizza stand employees are both actually mind-controlled and not secretly pizza conspirators who will need to be shoveled until they sit down...

All the pizza humans see the error of their ways as soon as they get Moonlight Clarity'd. They start mopping up the mess on the floor (somehow April's jumpsuit is completely spotless), and Katie starts apologizing profusely to her friend. The mall cop asks "What do you people all think you're doing?!"

<And now would be the time to get out of here. Don't worry, nobody will recognize you untransformed.>

"Well for starters I'm apparently a superhero," says April, ignoring the mysterious voice because she wants to find that college boy and boop him. She does leave the shovel with the pizza people, because it would seem unfair to just walk off with it.

The mall cop has enough people to question and/or check for injuries that he's not going to try to stop the person who's least covered in condiments from leaving. 

A black cat trots up to her on the way out. <You're a Celestial Guardian! Not too different from being a superhero, I suppose, though the scope is larger. If you're looking for the other victim, he's this way.> The cat darts to a place where another corridor branches off from this one.

"You're a cat," April observes, but she follows the cat regardless, because at this point why the fuck not.

<It's convenient for some things. And technically we're both reincarnated space aliens. Anyway, he's in here.> She points a paw at a door labeled "Security"; angry voices are coming from the other side.

Angry voices! Her favourite! Actually the opposite of that, but fuck it! Into the Security office she goes.

A different mall cop is trying to get College Boy to do any of 1) admit he's done something wrong, 2) pay a fine, or 3) stop trying to snap her pens in half and peel the plastic edging off her desk what the hell is wrong with you.

Boop "moonlightclarity" aaaand time to skedaddle immediately without answering any questions.

"Can you find any more I missed?" she asks the cat.

<I can look for the older woman, and there might have been more before I showed up. With the source disabled, it's likely to wear off soon, but if we find them sooner we can prevent some damage. Hmm . . . this way.> She takes off again, briskly but not so fast that April can't keep up. (She's wearing high heels, but somehow they're as easy to move in as sneakers.)

She goes that way. "Did I disable the source in, like, a significant sense beyond just trashing the pizza stand badly enough that they can't sell any more mind control pizza?"

<You removed the enemy's influence from his minions. All the pizza they make from now on will be safe. Assuming they keep making pizza, as opposed to having been mind-controlled into starting the place at all.>

"If trashing the pizza place turns out to have been totally useless I will maybe feel a little bad about that, but whatever, I didn't know I was a superhero at the time."

<You didn't know you could remove the mind control; stopping them from making any more pizza was a reasonable fallback. If we go somewhere with more privacy I can give you that full explanation I promised. My name is Minerva, by the way.>

"Nice to meet you. In an incredibly surreal kind of way. I'm assuming you know my name already because you know a lot of things. Sure, let's go talk; do you have somewhere in mind?"

<I don't actually know your human name, just that you're the Lunar Guardian. And unfortunately acquiring real estate is not one of the things being a cat is convenient for. If you'd prefer somewhere other than your house we could go to the library.>

"—are you, like, okay? As a cat? Do you need like... food and a place to sleep...? Like I have to assume you've been getting by all right so far because here you are, but... anyway my place works if you have a way to, like, get there. Also how do I... stop... being all Lunar-Guardian-y, I don't super want to take the subway in this outfit."

<I can hunt alright, but a place to stay out of the weather would be appreciated. To detransform you can just say "mundane form".>

"...does this system have a—what's it called, use-mention distinction—"

<Oh, yes, you won't change forms on accident if you don't mean it as an incantation.> Minerva seems to know these streets very well, judging from how she's walking towards the subway station a pace ahead of April with her head turned back over her shoulder.

"Good! That's good. Uh, mundane form...?"

And the transformation reverses and she's back in her normal clothes.

"I am maybe going to have to pretend I don't know you on the subway because I don't know if bringing cats on the subway is even allowed and if I talk to you out loud everyone will think I'm insane—oh, uh, does telepathying back at you even work, it kind of wasn't clear."

<It works fine. You have to intend that I hear the words, but you don't need to say them out loud. As for being allowed on the subway, most people's reaction to something out of the ordinary is to do nothing.>

<In that case I apologize for threatening to hit you in the face with a pizza shovel.>

<You were under the influence of hostile magic and experiencing telepathy for the first time. Just don't actually attempt it.>

<I won't! Not unless something really fucked up happens!>

<I'm afraid a great many such things are likely to happen.> Minerva says, walking under the subway turnstile and waiting for April to traverse it. <Celestial Guardians are universally danger magnets. But I intend to ensure you're ready for everything.>

<"Universally danger magnets" is not the most heartening phrase I've ever heard, gotta say.>

<It really isn't, is it.> A couple people stare at Minerva, but as she predicted none of them are sufficiently bothered by her existence to try to pick her up about it.

<Watching people have no idea what to do with you, on the other hand, is hilarious.>

<No-one tries to argue with you when they think you don't understand language.>

<Is that as convenient as it looks?>

<Extremely. I do sometimes envy the ability to purchase things.>

<I can buy you stuff. If it's not too expensive. I'm not gonna get you a car.>

<Thank you. Never fear, I wouldn't know what to do with a car if I had one. I mostly just want books and food that hasn't been thrown away.>

She can't help giggling at the image of Minerva behind the wheel of a silver sedan.

As she disembarks to make a transfer, she says, <Those are both things I can do!>

<I appreciate that. Will I need to avoid your relatives' notice, at your house?>

<I admit my parents will be kind of weirded out if I come home being followed by a cat and can't explain why. ...genre conventions are telling me I shouldn't explain why but genre conventions probably aren't my best source of information here? —also I forgot to actually tell you my name once we established you didn't know it. I'm April.>

<Genre conventions are generally a poor source of guidance, yes. I'd be happy to explain things to your parents as well. It depends on whether you think they'd be supportive of your activities as a Celestial Guardian, or mostly try to get in the way.>

<Well, what are the activities of a Celestial Guardian?>

<It depends a lot on what you want them to be. You can live a mostly normal life while fending off the inevitable attacks of Naya and her various evil minions, or you can go seek them out and foil their plans before they get close to you. Once we've explored the potential of your powers some more, there may be other things you want to do with them as well, depending on your ambitions and what you turn out to be good at. What would you say are your main goals in life?>

<Man, I dunno, I'm not a very ambitious person. Who's Naya and why is she going around inevitably attacking things? And where is she getting evil minions?>

<I'm afraid I don't know much about her motivations, beyond that she's a fan of mind control and places very little value on terrestrial life. She was imprisoned in a pocket dimension to prevent her from attacking the world directly, but she continues to act through susceptible minds.>

<...well that sucks. Can we, like... stop... her? Nuke her pocket dimension or something? Nuking the pocket dimension is maybe overkill but I am not a fan of mind control.>

Neither cats nor telepathy are particularly good at smiling, but a smile is conveyed nonetheless. <Neither am I. I don't know how to destroy her, yet, but with enough work and magical research it may prove possible. And you will be able to find other Guardians as well, one for each planet in this star system, who may also be able to help.>

<...are they going to help or are some of them also mind control criminals? Or do you not know?>

<They are reincarnations of the Guardians I once knew. I don't remember everything, but if any of them were evil I'm sure I would have remembered that. 

<...fair. Okay.>

She contemplates all this for a few moments.

<...let's not introduce you to my parents just yet, but I think it's an option if hiding you from them gets really inconvenient.>

Minerva nods. The train approaches April's stop.

April leads Minerva to her house and sort of awkwardly stands in the street contemplating cat concealment.

<How good are you at climbing, can you sneak in my bedroom window if I go inside and open it?>

Minerva scopes out the drainpipes and window ledges and says, <Certainly,> then goes and lurks in a shadow and awaits window-opening.

Window access is forthcoming within about five minutes of April entering the house.

Then Minerva will leap gracefully inside and assume the loaf position on April's bed like she lives here.

<I shall start at the beginning. When sapient, which is to say ensouled, life evolved on this planet, unknown thousands of years ago, this began a process which created the being known as the Earth Guardian, who by direct action and indirect magical influence created the other Celestial Guardians corresponding to Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and for reasons I cannot recall Pluto. Celestial Guardians are much harder to kill than humans, have the transformation ability you have already used, can travel anywhere in the solar system with no need for protective equipment, and can learn to create magical artifacts. Each one also has certain unique abilities; your Moonlight Clarity incantation falls into this category.>

What a helpful exposition loaf.

"Where does the Lunar Guardian come into it, am I piggybacking on Earth somehow or an I my own celestial body or what?"