"I don't know why you're bothering," Edie says of the copper-and-verdigris design. "I mean, the rest of it is going to go green too eventually, right?"
"Maybe, maybe not," Emily says stubbornly. "I could coat it with clear paint or something to prevent oxidation."
"Fair enough," Edie says, and returns to perusing her book.
"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."
"I do not know what the walls are made of," she says of the maze, "but they looked like the sort of thing it might be a bad idea to touch."
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!"
"...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."
A number of large mirrors spring into being around her. She considers carefully where each one is coming from, then dismisses them, opens her eyes, points and says, "that way."
No one notices the intruders, of course. The corridors may be too narrow for wings, but there's more than enough room to slip past magically oblivious guards.
The maze is... ominous. The walls seem to be made of an opaque purple-black glass with an oily iridescent sheen that pulses unnervingly in one's peripheral vision.
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!"
A black stain spreads out over the wall from the point where her projectile hit it.
"Interlopers," he manages to snarl tiredly, and he swings his right hand, backhanding Edie into the opposite wall without actually touching her. The fact that that hand has a profoundly black gauntlet on it with blue stones like the threads in his cloak on the knuckles probably has something to do with it.
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.
Emily hauls Edie to her feet and away from the terrible wall, and activates the Si Vales Valeo mark. She hisses as the pain of whatever those walls did to her sister burns through her nerves for a moment, and then they are both okay--physically, Edie was on that thing for a bit--
The wall near him ripples from a hard silent impact, and his left eye violently implodes for no discernible reason, and a heartbeat later the reason is revealed to be a long black dagger, previously invisible but now very obviously stuck all the way through his head.
"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."
"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.
"Ironwill Shield IronwillShield IronwillShieldironwillshieldironwillshei
A boy somewhere between eight and twelve years old follows them across the room, having apparently been waiting beside the former doorway while they blasted their way in.
...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.
"...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."
"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.
Then the alarm shuts off and the walls of the maze turn from red back to purple.
"...I'm going to assume that's Star," says the girl who is apparently Star's twin. "Good thing, too, that alarm was getting really annoying."
Then the maze implodes, and the message is obliterated by the feedback from what seems like a full-body wall impact at ten times the strength of previous encounters.
"...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?"
"Oh, yeah, she'll be fine," says the fusion. "I mean, heal her if you're worried, if you haven't already, but she'll be totally fine."
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.
Another, brighter glow from the junk heap.
Then a new fusion appears, stepping back out of thin air. There are tiny white stars gleaming in her hair and on the darkest parts of her sky-coloured cloak; her boots and gloves shimmer with the red-purple-black of a dark and moody twilight; her dress is a sunset gradient of purple-pink-orange-gold.
"Need anything else before we go? And do you have an email address or something? We wouldn't mind keeping in touch."
She uses her teleport spell rather than cross the wide expanse of floor between the crowd and the junk heap. A few seconds later, she reappears and hands Edie a cellphone presumably sourced from the kidnappers' belongings. "Will that help?"
Dealing with the police is as tedious as it usually is, and they manage to get away with not naming the names of any people who haven't consented to it, but they manage. It's another couple of hours before they manage to escape and get home.