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Lorna had had a rather emotional last few days to say the least. So the young woman decided, after her first class of the day, to simply.. not go to her last class in the afternoon. Instead, she skipped, and took great pains to avoid the campus and simply enjoy the brisk fall day. A smile on her face as she walked along the strip, peeking into shop after shop without actually purchasing anything, it wasn't like she could afford it anyways.
Her brown hair bobbed up and down in a high ponytail as she ducked into the electronics shop, a few tv's and radios shifting stations as she walked by them. She wore a long skirt of plaid skept around her calves, with simple brown soled mary-janes on her toes, and a black turtle neck. And to top it all off, her Frost Institute jacket was tucked under her arm—in the sunlight and crush of people it was just too warm for it.
A sales clerk was excitedly demonstrating a button push phone and Lorna curiously approached, her brows held high as she watched the man explain about the future of technology to a group of excited shoppers.
*
Emotions are… part of Wanda's life. It must be a cursed inheritance in the female side of the line, but then, she's a witch. The young woman in a claret coat strides through the city with a purpose found in avoiding the crowds, ignoring what rambling conversation they hold. She has no interest in their petty cares. Narcissism? Pragmatism, especially when she has to discriminate between fears and real statements.
It isn't need for a television that brings her into the shop. Another reason she isn't paying the least attention to anyone else; she's looking in a spectrum they cannot see, and that spectrum includes the ephemeral, the tainted, the cursed, the elemental. Power bleeds into her sight, and that power gives her a painful sense of purpose. The brunette Transian witch slows slightly, her hand in her pocket forming the beginning mudras to focus her thoughts into a tangible form. In this case, it's a shield spell; one does not enter Mordor unprepared. And this place very much may be the sort of place that counts as Mordor.
"Excuse me." The words are too soft for anyone to really pay any attention to. Oh well. She pushes past them anyways, moving deeper into the shop. Someone either intends to stop her with that "Hey, ma'am!" or wants to get punched for calling a woman who barely looks 21 'ma'am.'
*
Lorna's focus was on the sales clerk, who demonstrated how the new phone could save lives—how much faster it was to use the button press for 911 for instance. When, Wanda enters the crowd with a soft 'excuse me' that draws the young mutant's attention away from the phone. Her brows furrowed, as it takes her a moment to place where she'd seen the young woman before it clicks.
And with that, almost like a switch had been thrown, a crackling voice speaks from the button press phone. A phone that hadn't even been plugged in. An eerie, mad sounding voice, speaking what sounds like nonsense to Lorna. Suddenly, all the TV's, and radios are no longer playing whatever it was they'd been set on. Rather a high pitched static plays, a squeal that sends the people in the shop bending over in pain and clasping their ears. Shouts and muttered curses from staff follow as they rush to unplug devices that continue their rampant noise despite being unplugged.
Lorna's own hands clasp over her ears, wincing in pain at the high pitched noise as people push and struggle to flee the shop in droves.
*
The device in question with its many buttons would be unimportant to the young woman in question. If she wants attention, she'll get it through another method. Technology is fallible. Magic, a little less so. Though the excited oohs and ahhs from the largely masculine crowd lingers in the back of her awareness, something rises up to capture her attention.
For a moment, she turns her head to the other brunette, or rather, directly over her head.
"Tu si, iskra…" Words slide off over the end of the audible spectrum. Her fingertips touch her palm, pinky extended, and she rotates her wrist three-quarters of a circle, and her thumb sweeps up over her folded middle finger to the second knuckle. It's that moment when the nonsensical babbling erupts. So much sound, so many intrusions.
God, it hurts the head. Not the eyes, though, and hers gleam darkly red for a moment at their pupils, revealing her to be something other. The sound drives her back and she bumps against Lorna again, as the receiver decides to rear up like some kind of snake. Well, confronted with a serpent, you really don't have a choice. You step on it.
There will certainly be complaints when Wanda scrambles forward, deafened to her own thoughts, and jumps up to the counter. Stamping will ensue, eventually. Probably.
*
The sales clerk had fled by the time Wanda had struck out to handle the floating, rearing telephone. Truly it was a terrifying sight, had any of the customers remained. The manager was valiantly trying to beat back the chords of the various electronics he'd unplugged, but it was a vain effort and in short order he too was fleeing.
If Lorna had been sensible she'd have fled too, but as Wanda backed into her, she had tumbled over onto the floor. She scraped her chin and jarred her teeth with the impact as she stared up at the scarlet clad woman that jumped onto the counter and smashed the hissing, spitting snake like telephone that was clearly /not/ acting like a telephone should.
Even then, several whipping chords of moving electronics lurched toward her, and Lorna shrieked, backpedaling on her hands and knees until she knocked into a a fierce looking radio that lurked over her. A blast of sound hit her, on full, and she clapped her hands over her ears; her eyes watering.
Lorna's powers had never been particularly focused, showing up when she was scared, angry.. or in pain. And now was no exception. She reached for what she knew was there, and pushed with a hand at the violent radio, hoping to send it flying back. Which it did.
The problem being that she did too, landing smack into an enraged TV that made quick work of wrapping her in the electrical chord.
*
At least they are not likely to understand her hissing, Latin-influenced words. Her native tongue is something halfway between Latin and Russian, awash in harsh syllables. She might just be cursing the phone in the most colourful of terms, or telling it in a croon to be quiet, but those languages always sound harsh.
"<Wretched thing! Don't you dare hiss at me, iskra»," snaps the Witch, and she slams her booth into the cord of the handset just to keep it from beating about her leg too harshly. The animated phone is a bit limited in terms of reach and strength. It might try winding around her and tugging, but the noisy beeping rage is getting it nowhere.
A second set, heavier, gets into the act by flying up and jumping along the ground, leaping up to hit the top of the case. It tries…. it fails, because it's heavy, and basically everything in the displays start rattling around in an attempt to make a break for it. Something will break.
Bad sign. The girl reaches her hand out and closes around absolutely nothing. At least that anyone can see; she's pantomiming strangling a rope. Except there is something of her sight, a bleak green spirit snapping and wailing with a mouth full of anemone feelers wanting something to latch onto. Like a head.
Sparks rain down onto the ground as she throttles the thing, mostly coming from the body of the phone. Then it bursts, the front plate coming off. There's one less possession. Sadly, there are a lot of these things, a school of them.
The phone of a rotary style smacks her hard in the calf. Hey, it's up high!
Hey, she kicked it at Lorna's wild power orbit.
"Ow!"
*
Lorna didn't see what Wanda was doing, had no concept of exactly /what/ was going on around her as she struggled to free her legs from the tv's electrical chord. And was promptly, smacked in the face by another one.
"Ouch! Stop it!" She snarled, throwing her hands up to protect her face while /pushing/, with everything she could draw on.
Which turned out to be a whole lot more than she'd ever quite down before. The lights flickered on and off as she drew on them quite by accident above. The TV's, radios and other appliances around her were suddenly crunched back toward the wall, leaving indents in the sheet wall and sending plumes of dust flying upwards.
Even though they still twitched and flickered with latent power, the ability for a tv to do anything, much less a radio, when crushed was severely limited.
Lorna struggled free of the chord, breathing hard as she pushed herself up to stand, her coat long since forgotten as she rubbed at her eyes with shaking hands and twisted around. Her gaze falling on Wanda combating the phones. Then as Wanda kicked a particularly angry rotary phone her way she threw her hands up defensively, like she was flinching and the phone went flying into the ceiling above her head.
Her eyes widened and she stared, mouth agape as she looked at the hole in the ceiling that she'd made. "Woah.."
*
Weaponizing technology creates a rather loud and violent impact all around. Standing so high above everyone else, if indeed anyone beyond the manager is cowering for cover, they are in a good position to watch her duck back from one of the heavy radios go jumping off its shelf and joining its pulverized kin. This is hardly anyone's idea of fun, especially being attacked by a radio that could possibly stand on its own when the ground pieces start following suit.
The witch hasn't time to decide whether this is an assault or not; she whips her arms out in front of her to deflect something much bigger, being the throttling of two suddenly freed spirits who turn on what can see them. How comical, she's hiding from nothing standing atop a shattering glass case when the alarm clocks and various electronics inside get free from the front. A spider web of cracks form underneath her boots, and she should drop and get nasty cuts but for those boots.
Should. Doesn't: she floats in place after the first inch drop, and tinkling glass hangs suspended under her feet where the faint incarnadine mist forms into a solid barrier that holds her above the surface of a collapsing shelf.
The game is up, especially when it comes with misbehaving spirits. Her hands fall away, and she eyes that hole in the ceiling. "Can you hold it up? They will be angry, soon."
Soon? Her head turns to the back room where all those jumbled pieces waiting to be purchased, and those being repaired, are trying to stampede out. The stock room will never be the same.
*
A blink, wide green eyes centering on Wanda as she /floats/ above the shattered glass that had stolen Lorna's focus. Her hands held out stretched before her awkwardly in comparison to the woman that appears so self assured and in control of herself. The young mutant looks well in over her head and at the mention of 'holding it up' she winces.
"I don't know? I don't.. I've /never/ done this before!" And it the lights flicker out over head it's not entirely without cause, she was drawing harder and harder on the electricity in the shop. She'd felt her father do it before, but had never managed to do so on her own. It was overwhelming.
"What's going on!?" She was freaking out, which really, was likely the only reason that her powers managed to stay up, pressing back on the metal of the electronics in the room and keeping them pinned to the walls and floor, or ceiling, away from her.
*
Wanda floats inside the broken glass of the metal frame, the counter still reasonably intact. Her leather pants need dusting and her boots a lot of polishing after this, but their state is far less concerning than the unpredictable menagerie of big bad electronics trying to make a run for the boonies. Self-assured may be a bit too kind a description for her, but certainly she is not screaming in fear or hiding in the corner with her hands over her head, whispering, 'No such thing as ghosts' over and over.
On the other hand, one of those intrepid plugs tries to snake up after her and she arbitrarily steps out of the case, floating back. It's unable to pull itself from the wall without knocking over a stool and two cardboard boxes. More are thrashing around behind the two young women as Lorna is keeping them further at bay.
"Bad machines," she hisses, her usually soft voice terse and blunt. Concentration carves out the sorceress' features, revealing immaculately high cheekbones and similarly delicate bone structure, a common inheritance. What? Thank Dadneto. "You cannot see them like fish swimming around?"
It might help not to look like a psychotic ballerina practicing her role with no partner. Reluctantly Wanda glances at the troubled brunette, and then draws a circle with her hands, forging a lens in the air. It's like looking through a porthole, except instead of a tropical island and warm azure sea, there are swarms of faint green and orange spirits floating around like gobs of toilet paper or plastic bags in the clear ocean. They're converging inside the physical items that Lorna's powers prevent from passing a barrier of electricity and metal.
Fingers pinch and Wanda's lens snaps out of sight. "They can move but the items cannot. I have to banish them."
*