Three sensations. Three mysteries. 

The first and by far the most coherent is the weight of the spindle in her hand. She has no memory of reaching for it, no concept of what kind of effort it might have taken. Forensic data implying her path through the now-fallen wreckage. The storm has passed. The motion through it can no longer be imagined. 

But it is a certainty that she is holding the spindle. And that the artifact is intact and undamaged. Mayzie is looking at her. Not with stars in her eyes, not with gratitude. Not even with concern. Raw intensity. That's what Eclair Espoir identifies in her fellow Avel. She must have been quite rude, in that case. They had wrapped up in one another, she recalls [i]that[/i] quite clearly, would she really have been so crass as to rotate Mayzie and kick off of her as the beginning of a parkour sequence?

And yet, she must have. Because she is holding the spindle. In that moment, in those eyes, had she seen the promise of a dream worth anything? Had she perceived something too valuable to lose, though but a moment earlier it had been worthless junk designated for dusting and deletion. The hierarchy had been shattered. Typically easy calculus had been flipped on its head. 

She'd... wanted to see. What was possible. How absurd.

The second sensation, only slightly less conspicuous, was the pain arcing along the path of her back. This type of thing is not a rarity; her methodology subscribes to the notion of "minimum viable effort" which by its nature left zero room for error. Errors were of course unfortunately common: as with detective work, as with combat, or combat-adjacent action sequences. 

She'd simply misidentified the puzzle of the Stacks. That was all this meant. 'Unless' had unfurled far sooner than she'd anticipated, and Injimo had responded to encouragement Eclair hadn't even thought to look for. Oversight, but a positive outcome. Though, it's an unusual injury? As these things go? The... what name did she just hear? Three... part... mmmn, damn it. Perhaps the Triple Cross Edge? This is an irrelevant detail, named attacks are a dead end of creativity to begin with. But all the same, her head is buzzing. She wishes she could write it down. 

Regardless! It was a broad-spectrum attack with the potential to inflict a lot of area damage. If Eclair had sought to encounter that with unshaped Light, which felt like the sort of thing she would try (why is it so hard to piece this together??? why is her mind nothing but this strange buzzing?), then the damage should have been spread across her body in random places. Not to mention...

No, that is impossible. Mayzie is untouched. The spindle is likewise perfect. The odds of these two things coinciding with... but no, could she, could Mayzie have applied another of her heretofore unanticipated talents? Did she? Did she hate, er, was she mad at...? 

?????

But.

Assess the damage, Eclair. Her dress, shredded from her shoulder blades to beneath her waist. Her Aurora armor, likewise cracked and crumbling away from her flesh. Her skin, torn and burning. But not bubbling. Not poisoned. Not cold-burned either. Something else, something from the environment, something that... across her back? Only there? She would have pivoted. Attempted to dodge? Failed? But the two most precious things in this accursed subspace trash pile are both pristine. Untouched. 

Then, are these facts... linked? 

The... third sensation. 

A tingle, and a sense of lingering warmth across her lips. 

Eclair may live her life with a face half buried in a notebook, but one does not spend so much her of life living in a mansion tended by maids without learning to recognize the flavor of a kiss. 

But she, haha, this is the strange part. She can taste it on more than just her lips. Her tongue has the strange heaviness of having to carry two people's worth of tastes, and even as she brushes it across them, her [i]teeth[/i] are stained with it as well? It must have been... rather forceful. Which returns the subject to Mayzie. Watching with untraceable intensity. 

Oh, Eclair. To have forced yourself so upon a childhood friend? Shameful and disgusting. Is that why? Is that why she cannot remember it? Is it guilt that makes her feel as though she's been struck by the very lightning for which she was named? 

Numb, she hands the artifact to another cat. She turns her gaze to the pile of fallen treasures now smouldering around everyone. Her own treasury is both smaller and vaster in its way, but there is one perfected jewel among its depths that she makes a habit of never reaching for, except in the most desperate of circumstances. 

She pulls that blade here and now. A slash of her wrist, the familiar burst of opal light. The heartbroom rests heavy in her hands. She looks again at Mayzie, and heat steals the color of her cheeks. 

"I... have... no right to call myself a maid. Not anymore. But I... even so, I..."

She turns, and begins to sweep. The Heartbroom is the purest and most concentrated weapon in the treasury of her heart, and its power is thus: that what it sweeps, if it should be a mess, will burn harmlessly into dust, easily swept. All treasure is made instead to shine, and all innocent infrastructure to glitter. Indeed, this blade cuts only that which is unnecessary. 

She sweeps it now against the ruin of the Stacks. Anything to cease this endless contemplation of her failure. Sure [i]Mayzie[/i] could not have kissed [i]her![/i]

...Could she?