Doctor Mercurial hadn’t been able to sit there holding Jackie’s head for long. Even with Esteban neutralized, there were a couple of things she needed to do to prevent further damage to her property.

The first order of business had been conjuring up a 40 foot tarp and securing it to the front of her mansion, keeping her foyer from getting soaked and her basement from flooding. Then came a quick survey of the exposed basement rooms, a wave of her hand directing water to drains where needed.

Now she sat in a storage room, on a segment of a Mismade box, attending to the last matter to be somewhat urgent. Legs crossed, leaning forward on her knees, she watched impatiently as her Water Torture Escape tank filled.

Though Ella said she hadn’t been badly hurt, all sorts of worried thoughts raced through the magician’s head. Was it safe for a headless body to be in the ocean during a storm? She could be battered against rocks. Sharks were a possibility. Would sharks be near the shore during a storm? It seemed like they might want to avoid it. She’d never before had cause to check.

There was nothing for it. Mercurial tried to focus on the positive. She still wanted to relax, and there was a tank of warm water in front of her, albeit a confining one. Her leotard would be fine for swimming.

She checked the nearby props, looking for the easiest way to take off her own head. Not that props which did that were in short supply. Settling on a head-removing version of a Sword Box, she grabbed a pair of small swords and knelt under the narrow table the prop went with, poking her head up into the box’s open underside.

It took a little work to find the slots for the swords from the inside. Once she did, she slowly slid them in. For a second or so, there was the light scraping of metal against wood. Then, everything cut out. There was no sound, no light, even smells were brought to her attention by their sudden absence.

Once the swords were securely in place, she crept carefully back to the box on which she’d been sitting, navigating by her mental map of her surroundings, and slid it under the sword box.

Moving around without a head was always an odd feeling. You never knew how much you relied on the balance function of your inner ear until you didn’t have one. Without it she felt much like a robot only barely able to perceive its environment, ready to fall over at any moment just because she’d picked up her foot without shifting her weight correctly. Fortunately, this was similarly true when one’s head was just detached, and she’d had a lot of practice with that.

She felt around the swords’ handles, prepared herself not to move her body with the coming fall, and pulled them. The world snapped back in around her, and she dropped the few inches to the Mismade box.

She pushed herself to where she’d have a good view of the water tank for what was about to happen, then hopped up, caught the rim, and climbed inside. With her body added, it was less than a minute before the tank was full.

Waving at the spout, she bid the water to stop, then closed the top. She lowered her arms, then dragged them upwards, commanding the curtains to rise from the floor, covering the tank on all sides. Then, she released it, and there were two headless bodies in the tank instead of one.

She lay a hand on Ella’s bare, freckled shoulder. The body in the maid dress tensed up and froze. No doubt, she still thought she was in the ocean, where a hand would be an alarming thing to suddenly feel. As the magician caressed along from one shoulder, behind her neck, to the other, and wrapped her arm around the other woman’s waist, she slowly relaxed.

Curious hands probed her surroundings, finding the glass walls of the tank. She then reached down behind her, and gave Mercurial’s thigh an appreciative squeeze.

Skimpy as that dress was, it was still bulky and in the way. Mercurial began to help her out of it.