Upon returning to the holding cell, Kilik found Soul pacing as he had been before he left. Only this time, Soul was ranting mostly to himself about how completely ridiculous it was that his plan to break Patty from the illusion hadn't worked. The fact that any of them had a plan was news to him.
"Black Star said they got Tsubaki." Kilik gestured to the empty hall, of which they were the only occupants. "As for where they're keeping her, I have no idea." Maka looked down at Thunder.
"They have a lot of lights on in here," Maka said, "don't they?" With a large, shy smile Thunder hopped off her lap onto the ground. She kept her ears open to the warm buzz of artificial energy, until she pinpointed a place on the wall with the same amount of life as a small beehive. The wall was cool against her hand, but underneath was a thick bundle of cords that connected to the network of lights overhead. She turned to the others and gave a small nod, then tapped into the potential energy beneath her skin and fried every wire from the inside.
A scorch mark shot up and down the wall in opposite directions. There was a chorus of pops as one by one the lightbulbs buckled under the sudden burst of energy. Once it came in contact with the main fuse, Thunder clenched her fist. Power in the entire facility went out.
There was a bunch of red tape when it came to emergencies. More packets of papers with impossibly small columns to fill out to replicate the real time collection of information computers did. That is, until the computers came back online, and everything could be recorded yet again in the preferred format. The only problem was that the downtime protocol was not routinely practiced enough for employees to seamlessly transition to writing by flashlight.
Adults had a funny way of panicking. It was more like pointed complaining about how confusing it was to have the lights off and still be expected to do their jobs. Meanwhile, Fire was acutely aware that the creature they held captive preferred to move in darkness.
In one hand he nurtured a flame and tried to catch an unnaturally moving shadow along the walls. The cage they had been guarding was now empty. It must have noticed him noticing it's absence, for the room was far too quiet for a place something had just escaped. In fact, it felt like something was breathing right behind him.
As calmly as he could, he left the room, with one eye on the shadows that danced beside him on the wall. Death Scythes could handle kishen eggs by themselves no problem, the one in his area prided himself on it. However, he was sure it wouldn't lash out too aggressively at Patty after last time. He wasn't so sure it would show him the same courtesy. Every so often, he'd come across a demon that looked behind him and went pale with fear. He pretended not to notice.
Even without the security system online, Patty could feel this was no ordinary black out. The other officers were too calm about a potential escape from the holding cell and treated it with the same amount of urgency as if peas were being served in the cafeteria. This went beyond typical negligence and once again, Patty found herself the only person willing to do what it took to keep everything from falling apart. It was an uncanny string of bad luck.
The holding cell was empty. An occasional burst of sparks showered down from the ceiling, their light refracted off the bars that had been bent outward like a gaping maw. She cursed to herself and ran down the hall.
"Stop right there!" In the dark, it appeared she was merely pointing at Maka's back. So, she made a good metallic click to warn her the wide barrel of a pistol was aimed square at her shoulder. Something hissed back at her as Maka turned, her unblinking eyes reflected the dim light in a bright green hue. Slowly she raised her hands and turned. "Where are the others?"
"I don't know what you're talking about." Maka said in sing song. There was a prickling at the back of Patty's mind. That tone didn't usually come from this person: detached, unbothered, deceptive. The dark, and the hissing too, it was giving her deja vu. The girl's file had identified her as an informant of some kind, the bar had been a known front for years for the seedy underbelly of the city. The rest of it had been hard to read, in that even though Patty had seen it, none of the information seemed to stick. "Come on now, we're friends. You can trust me. We both want the same thing."
"And what would that be?" Patty let her weapon form crawl all the way up to her forearm. She desperately wanted a death canon, but couldn't muster the higher caliber weapon on her own. The best she could do was focus on forming her wavelength into something incredibly painful.
"To destroy this place." She flexed her fingers toward Patty ever so slightly. Any movement was enough cause for her to pull the trigger. A strobe of bright pink light zipped down the hall and met it's end inside a pearly black viper's mouth. There was just enough time to see the rosey tint on two elongated fangs, before the entire magical creature pulled back and erupted from the inside. Patty could have gone her whole life not knowing venom was odorless, and have been perfectly happy.
Witches were dangerous enough on a good day. The uncannily bad luck Patty was having did not inspire confidence, but she never backed down from a fight. She ducked to the side, rolled head over heel to get a closer aim, just for Maka to leap back against the wall. A stray bullet could prove fatal. So when Maka lunged toward her, Patty put away the barrel and grabbed two fistfuls of blond hair instead. She dropped all her weight to the ground to add momentum as she threw Maka against the cold, unfeeling ground.
Maka wasn't down for long, quick to propel her legs to throw Patty off balance. It was an intelligent strike, but lacked the necessary force to make Patty stumble more than a step or two. Patty leaned into the motion, swung her heel around and connected with Maka's sternum with a sharp crack. At the first sign of resistance, she opened fire right where she had just kicked.
"Stay down." Patty said in a low threatening tone. Again Maka got up, with a few well place attacks under her belt. She was quicker than Patty, but it didn't take much to redirect her strikes toward the empty air. Patty rammed her boot into Maka's gut.
There was no fear in Maka's eyes, even though she was the weaker of the two. Raw unfiltered strength was channeled into each increasingly violent kick as the edges of Patty's vision went white. What could she possibly have to gain by getting up again? There was nothing to win here, just a hammer and a nail.
Fire ran down the hall. He'd done very good at acting brave, right up until the kishen egg had tried to reach out to him. His sudden movement had triggered some sort of predator instinct, as the darkest shadows in the corridor smelled of blood.
A light peaked through the cracks of the door to the main lobby. The power may have been off in the building, but the bank lights were connected to the city at large. If he could just get to somewhere brighter, it might weaken the thing.
The lobby was oddly crowded. A visitor sat bleeding in one of the chairs, and fighting the urge to rest his eyes. Across from him were two boys his age, one of whom he recognized as his older cousin. His sister had been placing some starry band aids from her pocket all over Black Star's arm, with little success. They all looked up, just as Fire realized he brought an angry kishen egg right toward them.
Black Star meekly stuck one leg out to keep Kilik out of a full fighting stance. Even as a monstrous mess of hair and sinew, he'd recognize his partner anywhere. The fear she had invoked clearly distressed her, and the best he could do to calm her down was approach her with a shuffling gait.
"What is this, a mask or your hair?" He tried to get a finger under the braided looking formation where her tattoos usually were, only to be swatted away. It was physically difficult to joke around at the moment, but it seemed to have the desired effect. Kilik and Soul were less apprehensive than before. "Can you talk?" Tsubaki turned her head towards the others and then back to him. "Yeah, no, that's fair. What about the exit?" To that, she offered a ghoulish looking thumbs up. "Alright." He tried counting on his fingers, only to get stumped past the number of people in the room. "Who're we missing?" There was a rumble as something large and orange rocketed into the side of the building.
"I really hope that's them." Soul said.
Liz coughed as the dust settled and an artificial day shown into the now open corridors of the prison. She had anticipated rioting of some sort, or a bunch of angry guards to pour in like ants. Patty holding Maka at gun point was rather low on her list of expectations. Yet there she was, in a uniform Liz hadn't seen in over two years and a murderous rage.
"Patty!" Her voice cracked a little around the edges. She had a hunch her sister might have resented authority figures in geneeral, but the riot police the DWMA had sent after them had a distinctive set of strips on their arms. To see Patty in the same uniform was haunting to say the least. If Kid hadn't shown up when he did, they could have ended up in a place similar to this. Like back then, her voice wasn't quite reaching her sister. "Patty, stop!"
She counted on Blair to shield her as she braved the debris in less than terrain friendly attire. With both arms looped under her sister's armpits, she stood to her full height. Each wild flail of a boot sent a sharp pain up her shin, but at least now Maka was no longer pinned. Normally a few seconds of this was enough to pull her younger sister out of her head, but now there was magic at play and more than a few wary stares. Light spread across Patty's body as she fought to transform out of Liz's grasp to get free.
"Gee Maka, what did you do?" Blair slid down to the others with an elegant flair. There was a haze in Maka's eyes that lifted when she saw Blair looking for the most part like herself.
"I was trying to find a way to bring her with us, even if she wasn't y'know, fully with us." Maka spared a glance at the shadowy remains of her familiar. "I don't even know how I did that."
"You remembered it." Blair nudged the snake's skull with the toe of her boot. "You can't cast magic, spells barely even stick to you, but the book can tape into your memories and make it look like you're doing things you normally can't. An active imagination can be really dangerous in a place like this."
Maka rubbed her shoulder, the magic may have been fake, but those kicks hadn't been. The pounding headache and nausea that followed seemed less related. Try as she might, she couldn't offer Patty proper privacy while Liz continued to try and deescalate the situation. She gave the discarded fangs a good long stare, their venom gleamed in the hall lights.
"I wouldn't trust that, even if it was your magic." Blair gave her a playful slap on the back. She righted her witchy hat and strode over to where Patty seemed about ready to bite the nearest thing to come near her face. Fire magic was more Blair's specialty, but a small amount of ice cold water was easy enough to summon just above Patty's head. It drenched her instantly. "Hey, can you look at me?"
Blair let out a low whistle. The things Patty had been doing to resist the book so well before was working against her now. Every bit of fight Patty had in her was getting channeled to perpetuate the spell. It was a vicious feedback loop, and Blair wasn't quite sure how to interrupt it. She looped one damp lock of hair under her nail and set it to the other side of Patty's face so her bangs laid symmetrically. There was a dim glimmer of recognition in her eyes.
"We're going to get out of here." Liz gently set Patty back down on her feet. "All of us, but we have to meet up with the others first."
There was a clatter of footsteps on concrete as everyone was drawn to the aftermath of the explosion. Everyone, including the demon guards, had been drawn to the light like moths to a flame. Once in the presence of several meisters and their weapons, the denizens seemed to notice the mood shift in the room. They held up their paperwork like white flags when faced with ten predatory grins.
Deep within the compound was a room Fire hadn't been allowed to go while Patty was at the reigns. The elevator down was rickety and protested under the weight of so many people. After coming so far, no one wanted to risk splitting into two groups. Robes were a more common uniform for the DWMA where he and Thunder had grown up. He was used to seeing Justin's underlings mill about the streets enacting performative acts of good will. They claimed to be open to help anyone in need, but he'd come to find that wasn't true.
When he braved the adoring crowds to tell Justin Law what was going on at home, he'd been told his parents had been possessed by madness with as much casualty as one would point out the color of the sky. The implication his parents' lusted for power had brought on their sickness hurt like a barb, and left Fire with no more answers than when he came. Frozen in shock, the crowds had closed in and hidden Justin from view. Seeing what Asura had done to the world only furthered his conviction the Death Scythes were wrong. There were things out there other than magic and power that wounded people's minds.
His father had walked miles off in an unknown direction, leaving his shoes behind. Fire liked to believe if he'd been found, grandma would have told him, but people liked to hide things when they thought it hurt too much. To the others, Thunder's dress was ordinary street clothes, but he recognized the disheveled sweater and the quiet demeanor.
The day he'd gone to the DWMA for help, Thunder had been alone with their mother. He'd come back from the library to find the apartment empty and shouts coming from the complex's pool. There was a crowd of officers around the fence. He'd seen their mother in her lemon yellow dress locked inside and Thunder standing between her and the pool. The crusty slip on the fridge had long been thrown away, but both of them could recite the caseworker's number by heart.
She'd been taken away in handcuffs, leaving Fire and Thunder to sit for hours in a sterile room until someone in their family was willing to pick up the phone. Their parents weren't weapons, they didn't have magic of their own, but thanks to their grandmother they found it did run deep in the family on her side. Fire had held onto the hope that one of them would be well enough to come back home, even as grandma got too old to chase them around the house, even when Kilik came to take them to the DWMA. He had assumed Thunder felt the same way, but he hadn't been there to see what exactly was said.
Wordlessly he held out his hand and she took it. When the double doors opened, and the older kids cleared out, they could see the vast curtain of bookmarks that marked the exit. He was the first to boldly step forward. When they first arrived, Patty had come face to face with the chapter's guardian, even if she herself wasn't willing to boast about it. Around him, he saw the wary faces bogged down by fatigue and something difficult for them to describe. In front of the exit, was a demon with red skin, riddle with bullet holes and staring vacantly up at the ceiling. The cap Patty had been wearing was made to fit it's horns.
"This place makes people sick." Fire said simply before turning back to the bookmarks. "Let's go."
It is hard for people to control how they feel about the things that happened to them, and the people around them. It was how they dealt with it that made the difference. This chapter had put quite a few of them into acting in ways they normally never would. He would be the first to say that being gutted inside out like this wasn't a reflection on their overall goodness, just what had hurt them. The first step to recovering from the spell, was to get away from the thing that had wormed it's way around them. There was no telling what lied ahead, but if this is how long it took for them to come together at their worst, he had a feeling things were going to be okay.