Serial Experiment

Everyone just stood transfixed for a moment, as if no one was quite sure what was happening. The goon by the door was staring at the newcomers, wondering what would happen next. He was still holding the small girl that had tried to run and had his sword halfway to her throat. He hadn’t really been sure where his boss had been going with his threats. He was pretty sure he wouldn’t actually have had to hurt the girl, but he understood the value of putting on a good show. He had also been wondering if the old woman would call his bluff and if his boss was unhinged enough to think it wasn’t a bluff and somewhere in there he had also been vaguely wondering if the stew was any good. Once these guys had crashed in he started to wonder what their deal was and if those masks were actually comfortable, and then he stopped wondering anything at all because he was suddenly preoccupied with getting kicked in the face by the one in the yellow hood and then was mostly distracted by being unconscious.

The hoods moved quickly throughout the room after that, kicking and punching. The men turned their swords against them, but it was no use. They just flipped and rolled out of the way, knocked the swords out of their hands, and then knocked them out. The yellow hooded one seemed to be the quickest, snaking her way around the thugs, sneaking up on them while they were preoccupied with the others. The man in the green hood was a powerhouse. One hit from that bruiser was enough to put a man on the floor every time. The red hooded fellow was trickier, moving slowly through the crowd, fighting with precision. The blue hood seemed to be mostly staying back though, and was quietly directing the kids out of the way of the fight.

“Enough!” the leader bellowed. He pulled a flintlock from behind his back and held it up to Agnes’ head, a move that brought everyone in the room to a complete stop. “No more of that, or the old lady has a really bad day.”

“Put it down,” a voice said, quietly. It was the woman in the blue hood, across the room. “You will not harm her.”

“Oh yeah?” the leader scoffed. “Thing is, I’ve got this gun in my hand pointed at her temple. There’s not a thing you can do to stop me, Blue. So call off your monkeys and head back out of that door before I decide to pull this trigger.”

“You were warned,” Blue sighed. She stretched out her hand, and it started to shimmer and glow with a faint light. She clenched it quickly into a fist, and the air around the pistol suddenly coalesced, encasing it and the leader’s hand in an oblong chunk of ice. He howled in pain and reeled backward, receiving a sharp elbow jab to the stomach from Agnes in the process.

“I have sent someone to fetch the Peace,” Blue stated calmly, looking around at the robbers who were all either knocked unconscious or groaning on the floor. The leader was crying in a corner. “They should be here momentarily.”

“Thank you,” Agnes sighed, “thank you so much. I don’t think he would have stopped until someone had been seriously hurt.”

“We’re just glad we could be here,” Green said.

“We need to leave,” Yellow said to the others, “now.”

They nodded, and as quickly as they had arrived, they were gone.