The bookstore does not have anything new or interesting and the board games store does not have anything new or interesting and the video games store does not have anything new or interesting either, and so we arrive at the food court, which at least is not expected to provide novelty or interest.
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 . . .
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.
"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.
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.
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.
A ringing voice calls out, <Say 'Lunar Guardian combat form!' It will help you defeat them!> The phrase sounds oddly familiar, as though it's the sort of thing people say all the time. Also, the voice isn't coming through April's ears. It's just showing up in her head, clear and confident.
She attempts to formulate the reply <fine I'll roll with it but if you're messing with me you get a pizza shovel to the face> and then, with teenage self-consciousness battling the strange feeling of familiarity to an overall result of conflicted embarrassment, says "Lunar Guardian combat form!"
Time slows down, or perhaps her mind speeds up, because she and everyone else in her line of sight are suddenly frozen mid-pizza brawl.
Points of silvery-white light spring up around her, multiplying into a cloud of glitter and then condensing onto her skin. Her hair pulls itself out of her face and something materializes on her forehead. Her clothes melt instantaneously into a white jumpsuit with high boots and shoulder-length gloves, gold accents and a blue skirt.
Stranger still are the new structures unfolding in her mind. She can see the effects of the pizza in herself, and on the man who's grabbing her arm, and she knows it is the work of an enemy, and that with a whisper or a shout of "Moonlight Clarity!" she can sweep it away like mist.
And once she's had a moment to process all of this, time goes back to normal.
Okay, she has officially abandoned all pretense of not being in open opposition to the pizza demons, so might as well own it. She hops up onto the counter with her pizza shovel and looks around for anyone who seems like they might be inclined to protest her interference - and, she supposes, for other pizza victims she might be able to help.
There's two more pizza stand employees coming at her. Katie has killed all the lights and moved on to dual-wielding the mustard squirt-bottle from the Burger King and the hot sauce squirt-bottle from the Panda Express all over the tables and her by now extremely angry friend. Also the mall cop has apparently dealt with College Boy and is on his way in.
Keeping the pizza shovel ready to hand in case of opposition, she starts booping people and muttering her incantation as rapidly as possible. Pizza stand employees first, then Katie, at least if the pizza stand employees are both actually mind-controlled and not secretly pizza conspirators who will need to be shoveled until they sit down...
All the pizza humans see the error of their ways as soon as they get Moonlight Clarity'd. They start mopping up the mess on the floor (somehow April's jumpsuit is completely spotless), and Katie starts apologizing profusely to her friend. The mall cop asks "What do you people all think you're doing?!"
The mall cop has enough people to question and/or check for injuries that he's not going to try to stop the person who's least covered in condiments from leaving.
A black cat trots up to her on the way out. <You're a Celestial Guardian! Not too different from being a superhero, I suppose, though the scope is larger. If you're looking for the other victim, he's this way.> The cat darts to a place where another corridor branches off from this one.
<I can look for the older woman, and there might have been more before I showed up. With the source disabled, it's likely to wear off soon, but if we find them sooner we can prevent some damage. Hmm . . . this way.> She takes off again, briskly but not so fast that April can't keep up. (She's wearing high heels, but somehow they're as easy to move in as sneakers.)
"—are you, like, okay? As a cat? Do you need like... food and a place to sleep...? Like I have to assume you've been getting by all right so far because here you are, but... anyway my place works if you have a way to, like, get there. Also how do I... stop... being all Lunar-Guardian-y, I don't super want to take the subway in this outfit."
"Good! That's good. Uh, mundane form...?"
And the transformation reverses and she's back in her normal clothes.
"I am maybe going to have to pretend I don't know you on the subway because I don't know if bringing cats on the subway is even allowed and if I talk to you out loud everyone will think I'm insane—oh, uh, does telepathying back at you even work, it kind of wasn't clear."
<I admit my parents will be kind of weirded out if I come home being followed by a cat and can't explain why. ...genre conventions are telling me I shouldn't explain why but genre conventions probably aren't my best source of information here? —also I forgot to actually tell you my name once we established you didn't know it. I'm April.>
<It depends a lot on what you want them to be. You can live a mostly normal life while fending off the inevitable attacks of Naya and her various evil minions, or you can go seek them out and foil their plans before they get close to you. Once we've explored the potential of your powers some more, there may be other things you want to do with them as well, depending on your ambitions and what you turn out to be good at. What would you say are your main goals in life?>
<I'm afraid I don't know much about her motivations, beyond that she's a fan of mind control and places very little value on terrestrial life. She was imprisoned in a pocket dimension to prevent her from attacking the world directly, but she continues to act through susceptible minds.>
Neither cats nor telepathy are particularly good at smiling, but a smile is conveyed nonetheless. <Neither am I. I don't know how to destroy her, yet, but with enough work and magical research it may prove possible. And you will be able to find other Guardians as well, one for each planet in this star system, who may also be able to help.>
Then Minerva will leap gracefully inside and assume the loaf position on April's bed like she lives here.
<I shall start at the beginning. When sapient, which is to say ensouled, life evolved on this planet, unknown thousands of years ago, this began a process which created the being known as the Earth Guardian, who by direct action and indirect magical influence created the other Celestial Guardians corresponding to Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and for reasons I cannot recall Pluto. Celestial Guardians are much harder to kill than humans, have the transformation ability you have already used, can travel anywhere in the solar system with no need for protective equipment, and can learn to create magical artifacts. Each one also has certain unique abilities; your Moonlight Clarity incantation falls into this category.>