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.