"You, you are... you are taking this entirely too seriously to be taking this so unseriously! If it was just!"

She flung her hang desperately at the screen.

"[i]That[/i] is nonsense! Desperate nonsense from mystics who are... worried about irrelevance in a world of skeptics. If you were 'manifesting positively' I wouldn't say anything but you, you are, you're..."

Words stumbled out of her mouth until she had no choice but to abandon them. She dived across the room and started flinging open drawers, instead. There had to be something in and among this junk that she could use as a valid counter force. Sufficiently unspoiled paper she could make a prayer slip out of, a piece of rebar, just please let the trash heap contain some sort of treasure!

"You are drunk!" she finds her words again in the most unhelpful of moments and the most unhelpful of ways, "Too drunk to be on one leg! Too drunk to be casting magic!"

She abandoned her search to go scrambling back across the room to the other side so she could dig through that side, instead. Something, anything. Anything iron. Why were smart people all so stupid? And why didn't she do a better job of cataloging this place when Machia had her playing maid? What bout of blissful ignorance made her believe this possibility wasn't a threat? Too late now, Madeleine.

"I cannot stress to you enough... this is going to work! But not... do you not understand? Normally when people write these symbols in this order they put a mirror in the middle so it repels all of the evil. You're gathering it into the middle of your apartment! Gathering without containing! What if you summon something I can't handle? As much as I (for some stupid reason) want to be impressed, every single mark you've put in here is keyed to pure poison and malevolence. You have to stop. The only thing this could possibly call forth is--"

But it is too late. Madeleine's hands are empty, and Machia's trigrams have caught fire. Something, somebody, some nameless but sufficiently potent spiritual medium has allowed the toe of her running shoe to come into contact with a candy wrapper. Now the room is burning, a perfect hexagram of heatless, smokeless flame, half black and half white. 

Madeleine dived and tackled Machia out of the center, and as a couple they tumbled comically across the floor. She pushed herself up on one knee, and stared with unblinking concentration.

"Be weak," she muttered, "I am begging you, please be something weak..."