She smiles at him sunnily, then goes back into the house and drags out a table to put over him so he's harder for the neighbors to see. 

Well this is extremely undignified. He does his best to inch his body out while she goes back in the house, but he's not used to moving like this and he's bound rather well. He glares up at her, waiting for the manipulative annoying girl who should by all rights be his slave to take the gag off so he can fix this.

She does not do that. She goes inside and--their nonmagical technology is incredibly advanced, they've got indoor plumbing, right? 

They do! There's a small room near the kitchen with a tile floor, blue and white, with cream-colored walls. Inside is a porcelain washbasin with faucets, as well as another porcelain device, clearly meant to be sat on, half-full of water in one basin and full of water in another -- complete with some interesting levers and pipes and such. 

If that's not quite what she's looking for, she might find a similar, more expansive room upstairs. 

She wants one with a bathtub. 

Well, there's one of those upstairs! Next to the room with the large bed. Similar tile, similar walls, similar porcelain objects, but it also contains a pair of mottled glass sliding doors with metal rails running all the way down the length of the door. The doors open directly onto a light-blue bathtub, with a faucet. The faucet has a pullable thing on top of it, and above it is a large dial with a single lever, and above that is another wider faucet with many small holes. On the walls are metal racks, with large blue and white towels. 

Cool cool. 

She throws everything that could maybe potentially catch on fire out of the room, draws some flasks of oil and her flint and steel out of her bag of holding, puts that out of the room, then stands in the bathtub, closes the drain, pours the oil all over herself and sets herself on fire. 

It hurts like fuck, but she's had a long time to get used to pain. She lies down so when the fire cooks her brain she won't topple out of the tub and set the house on fire. 

She burns! Nothing else catches on fire or anything strange happens, and the oil burns and lets off smoke and she burns and lets off smoke, at least until whatever reason she has for being on fire is done. The smoke stains the ceiling a little bit otherwise floats as a thin cloud at the top of the small room. 

And then she runs the water enough to rinse off the soot and charred flesh and remains of the oil, and steps out of the tub, checks to make sure healing her brain fixed the compulsions he placed--nope, no wistfulness about having to thwart him, excellent--exits the bathroom, considers clothing options and decides to raid his closet, and heads off to investigate that. 

His bedroom consists of a single large bed, a small table near his bed with some devices on it, a large wooden chest of drawers, and a closet. The closet is rather shallow, and consists of a single long rack of shirts, all solid color button-downs. Reds and whites and blues and greens and even a purple. 

About a minute after she opens the bathroom door, something outside the room starts making a very high-pitched, modulated shrieking noise. It's rather loud and incessant and is very very difficult to ignore. 

...

She pinches her nose in exasperation and goes off to investigate the noise. 

The way it's making noise makes it a little bit difficult to figure out where it's coming from, but it isn't that hard to figure out. There's a small round white device set into the ceiling in the middle of the hallway. The noise it makes is really loud and obnoxious and almost a little painful. And there's no obvious indication as to why it's making noise. 

Will it stop if she smashes it. 

It may take a couple of hits to do so, as cracking the outer shell won't do anything, but the material it's made of isn't that sturdy and further hits will get to the actual working components inside. Various shards of metal and other substances rain down, and the device makes a tinny wailing noise and goes silent. 

Awesome. Fun. Lovely. 

She stalks back to the bedroom and investigates the drawers. 

One of the drawers contains socks, white and black, folded neatly together. 

The next contains boxers, soft delicate fabric in various colors, red and black and white feature prominently, but there's some green and blue ones in their as well. 

The next contains several pairs of folded black pants. 

The next few contain various other clothing items, more or less crammed together in them, some shorts and some less fancy shirts and some less fancy pants, as well as several sweaters. They're all wrinkled from being stuffed in a drawer like this for far too long. 

She puts on a pair of pants and the hooded sweater from the cram drawer, pulling the hood forward and down so it obscures as much of her face as possible and tucking her hands in the pocket in front. 

Then she goes back out to the backyard. 

James has not managed to wriggle free from the table. Or get any of the tape off of his mouth. Or get any of the tape off of him at all. And his phone is off and still inside and Maria could be bringing the police down on them at any moment, shit, and the fire alarm in his house went off and he has no idea why, shit, but at the very least the annoying manipulative magical girl should still obey him when she finally decides to take the tape off. And she has to decide to do that, she's clearly keeping him around for something. She's gagged him to keep him quiet, not because he can give orders, obviously, and she's going to ungag him and ask him questions and that will be her undoing. Still, that doesn't keep him from being incredibly worried. Fucking hell what a nightmare got dropped on him. But if he can enslave her, properly, it'll all be worth it. 

James glares at her when she returns, wearing his college sweatshirt for some reason, and wills her to take the gag off of his mouth, making sure to review exactly what he's decided to say to her. He's had plenty of time to think. 

She sits down next to him under the table. He may or may not be able to see what color her skin is, and he may or may not be paying enough attention to notice how much the sweatshirt isn't tented forwards. 

She takes the gag off. 

He's a bit too distracted with something much more important to notice anything like that. He has to give her orders as fast as possible, and it has to be perfect, and then everything will be fine. 

Holy shit that hurts. But it worked. James ignores and fights through the pain and follows through with his plan. "Stop," he orders her, a slow victorious smile spreading across his face. "Don't do anything unless I tell you to." Thank fuck, he did it. James takes a breath, steadying himself, feeling relieved, before getting read to give her her next set of orders. 

"Sorry, fixed that," she says cheerfully. "--No, wait. Not sorry." 

Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit. She clearly wants him for something but did she use her magic to get out from under his power? She must have. Why didn't she do it in the first place? How does she work? He's probably never going to know now. There's a small small sliver of hope that he can trick her. He hopes. If he can get her downstairs to show her the room everything will be fine. Or, maybe she'll just get what she needs from him and let him rebuild. That would be fine too. 

"Shit," he says out loud, scowling. "Fine. You got me. What do you want, then?" 

"I want to know exactly how your power works and how I can prevent you from hurting anyone else, ideally without killing you." 

"Alright, take me back downstairs to the basement and I'll show you." Unlikely to work but you never know. She probably wouldn't be foolish enough to go into the room but if he can get in the room, well. He can change himself to something useful. 

The "without killing" is both reassuring and slightly terrifying. She's considering killing him, but she would prefer not to. The fact that dying is suddenly on the table again is scary, but the fact that she doesn't want to... well, maybe he can get out of this ok. Shit. 

"Mmmmmmnope. Use your words, please."