After a heartbeat or two, Black Star broke the silence.
"Can one of you Gals get me a ginger ale?"
"I'll tell you where you can shove that ginger ale..." Liz muttered as she turned on her heel (literally, and quite an expensive one) and made for the kitchen. She discovered after a bit of rummaging, that there was no tummy-soothing seltzer anywhere in the kitchen, and she didn't feel like wasting any more energy braving the jungles that had become to the manor to find any elsewhere. So she settled with coffee. But as she was allowing the final drops of coffee to drip into the pot, she thought she heard something strange. She listened hard, and sure enough she could hear it again: a faint thumping from somewhere far away. Were there voices too? If what they said was true, and curiosity really did kill the cat, then Elizabeth Thompson was one very dead cat.
After a thorough inspection of the kitchen, Liz made her way down the hallway leading to the laundry room, and if she had been in any more of a hurry she surely would have passed it. But there it was, the source of the thumping sound, and the voices were now almost as clear as day. And of all places, it was coming from the closet.
"Help! Somebody get us the hell out of here!"
"Maka, no one can hear us." another voice replied. Liz gasped. Maka?
"Oh god, we're gonna die in here! No one will ever find us, until years from now, and..." Maka continued, but Liz had tuned out. She had identified the other person as Tsubaki, and (while she didn't know how they got in there) she had to get them out.
"You guys? It's Liz, I'm going to get you out!" She called. The voices changed from panicky and desperate, to relieved, immediately.
"Oh, Liz," Tsubaki cried. "I'm so glad you're here! I thought I was going to be stuck in here forever with..." Her voice sounded pointed, and Liz laughed nervously.
"Well, maybe it's better you stay in there, because I don't think you'll believe what's happened out here!" There was chuckling on the other side of the closet door.
"Based on what we heard last night," Maka began, calmed down. "I think we have a pretty good idea." Liz smiled.
"Okay, stand back, I'm going to get you out!" She decided. There was shuffling on the other side of the door, and then:
"Ok, go!"
Liz crouched very quietly and pulled a bobby pin out of her hair, which she inserted into the lock, fiddled with for a moment, before there was a click, and she placed it back into her hair. The door swung open. Inside, huddled in the corned, ears covered, sat Tsubaki Nakatsukasa and Maka Albarn. They both looked up, and blinked in the sudden flood of light.
"Hey!" They chimed together, then Maka continued. "I though you were going to bust down the door or something! Why'd you shout 'stand back'?"
The question went unanswered however, because unfortunately this light was all that was needed to highlight the two girls, terribly vandalized in front of her.
Maka's hair looked as though someone had grabbed both pony-tails and snipped them off with dull scissors, because it hung ragged and short up by her ears. Upon closer inspection, someone had written some very... colorful words and pictures all over her head, neck, and shoulders, and one of her eyes brows was missing. As bad as this seemed, Tsubaki was impossiblely worse.
To start, her hair had also been changed in length, but not quite so drastically, although the same could not be said for the color. It was hot pink, with streaks of blond, and blue tips. She looked like she had been elbowed in the face on accident, or something along those lines, because a minor black eye was forming on her face, and her lip was swollen as well. Liz would have laughed (in surprise if nothing else), but the anger inside her bubbled up first. She swooped in, snatched her two friends, and towed them by the wrists back the way she had come until they were back in the living room with Black Star and Patti.
She was seething, almost unable to control herself. Because of Black Star, and the other unconscious idiot on the couch, the Mansion was thrashed, full of people she didn't know, her Meister was upstairs in a symmetry coma, and her two best friends had been superficially disfigured and thrown into a closet. She jabbed a finger at the only culprit awake, and hissed at him.
"Listen here Black Star, you stupid little ninja: it's your fault that things are the way they are, so listen up, and listen good. You are going to clean this place from top to bottom, because you effed it up so badly! But-" She paused to calm down. "-being the nice person that I am, I will help you. Kid might even help for a bit, if he's feeling better tomorrow. I wish we had more assistance, this is a humongous job..."
"Oh, we'll help!" Liz turned to find Patti, Tsubaki, and Maka smiling, despite the two latters' haggard appearances. "Soul can help too, and my dad knows this great cleaning service we used to use for a while after Mom left! I could call them, I'm sure he still has the number!" Maka grinned.
"Really?"
"Of course! And you can come stay with me tonight if you need to! Oh, but what about Kid...?" She mused to herself.
"That's okay, really" Liz shook her hands. "He's up in my room for now, which is pretty big, so I'm sure me and Patti will fit in there just fine! Thanks again, and sorry about the..." She motioned to them, moving her hands to encompass their entire look. They both laughed a little, but shot daggers at Black Star.
After a while, when everyone had left, and they had the chance to rest for a bit, they began to set up a temporary sleeping arrangement on the floor of her bedroom. Liz mulled over what was to come, wishing that they could just sleep for a century after what they'd been through. Her and Patti chatted quietly for a while, joking about the highlights and low points of the mission they had just returned from, until one of them fell asleep. The last thing Liz remembered hearing before drifting off was the sound of Patti's contented babbling.