You learned about magic when you were eight years old. It was a balmy afternoon, just after the Fourth of July, and you were with your cousins shooting off fireworks in the park. That wasn't the magic, though. Magic was in the eyes of a older girl, a teenager, who marveled at you as you lit a firework shell with one hand, before gracefully throwing it down a gas pipe mortar to send it soaring into the air. Coming out of the bushes, she smiled at you.
"Hello." She said, simply. "Can you see me?"
You, a wee lad, smiled. "Of course I can see you! Are you a-fixing to steal my fireworks or something?"
"No, no!" she said quickly. "I just was wondering if you could fix something for me?"
You shrugged. "Well, lemme see it."
Holding out a dark, cracked pendant to you, the girl sat down by your mortar tube. "It's nearly broken… I can't hold out for much longer."
As you took it, the pendant felt hot, damaged. When Cousin Miro got his dumb self bit by a mountain lion and the wound got infected, it felt just like this. Hissing, you glared at the baubble, before digging around for your reading glasses case. This had some strong hoodoo in it, for damn sure.
"What'chu do to this poor thing?" you asked, trying to see what-all had cracked it so badly. "Thing's hold itself together with a string an' some spit!"
"I made a mistake." She said, sighing. "I just thought… you seemed like an artesian…"
"I don't need to be no arty-thing to know this done been screwed." You muttered. "I tell you what, I'll do what I can to keep it from cracking. Cleaning it out's not gonna be easy, though. Feels infected."
"Infected?"
"Yeah, like when your arm gets all red and swollen 'cause you hit a chunk of rusty metal?" you said, waving a hand around while digging in your backpack for some Bondo and a paperclip. "Gotta find a way to scrape that out or all the help in the world won't sister this back together."
The girl nodded, and you got to work. Working the paperclip around the cracked glass in the center of the pendant, you carefully squirted the Bondo into the cracks and squished it up tight. No matter how you tried to arrange it, though, it kept trying to fall apart. Finally, biting out a curse, you started muttering under your breath. Great-Grandpa had taught you this, back when his dad had been involved in the War, and it was for remembering all the people who'd come before.
"In Flanders fields the poppies blow/ between the crosses, row on row," you muttered, the song helping calm you down as the damn gem finally, finally caught in the apoxy and you could tension the wire support. It was a good feeling.
"Did you-" the girl said, before you cut her off.
"I started doing the work." You grumbled, the last lines of the poem trailing off your lips. "Gonna need about a half hour to set while you figure out how to clean it up later."
"Kenaz!" you heard from the distance. "Why'd you stop shooting?"
Crap, it was your cousins! You had to keep them off you! "Missfire!" you yelled back. "I haven't cleared it yet!"
"Need the spare tube?"
"I'm good!"
The girl sighed, smiling. "Thanks."
"Just watch the rest of the fireworks I shoot today, and it'll be worth it." You replied. She nodded, and you went back to lighting up the sky. When she left, the cancer in her pendant was less, and you smiled. A good deed today had been done.
///
Of course, magic came at a price. Dad started drinking after you blew off three fingers in an accident. Mom's paranoia acted up until she stabbed Dad in the shower with a toilet knife. Your cousins had to go back to Japan. The car blew up, the state stepped in, and you took one look at the old bat they decided would be your 'temporary foster parent' and left.
You were thirteen, and it was two hungry weeks before you were desperate. Despite the insuitions of several fantastic creatures, you were not a girl who had been born in the wrong body, and even if you were, offers came with a price. The white one had been the worst, offering you a wish to become a magical girl. You knew, though, that everything had a cost. A wish would be pretty damn expensive. Still, you'd stumbled your way through the city, until one cold night you found yourself sharing a barrel fire with a hobo and a can of beans.
"How's it looking, kid?" he asked openly, your heads nearly touching as the rancid smoke poured over you.
"Pretty shit." You replied, shrugging. "Too many empty dumpsters."
He didn't ask if you hit up the soup kitchen. You'd run away from home, they'd report you, then the State would have you by the balls. Fuck that noise.
The hobo sighed, turning his head back and forth. "You ever seen shit in this world that don't work right, have you?"
Shrugging, you nodded. "Yeah."
"Shit that no science can explain?"
You chuckled. "Think I held an infected heart in my hands once."
The hobo grinned, showing a smile with more holes than teeth. "Think you can do it again?"
"I ain't got shit to work with."
"I ain't asking you to work shit. Just come with me."
Following the hobo, you both ditched the barrel fire and started moving into the back of the city. Passing a Wal-Mart lot by the highway, the smell of old booze bottles and piss flew past your nose as you got to the culvert for the off-ramp. Banging on the edge, the hobo yelled.
"Trissa? Girl, you in there?"
"Go'way." A young female voice came, before a dismal spark came out of the tunnel. It was weak, futzy. "They'll kill me, now that I'm out of juju."
"Girl, I done told you there's a hell of a lot more to do before you jump the last rattler." The hobo said. "Now shut up and let me bring in the medicine kid in here."
"Medicine kid?" you muttered.
"You done never gave me a name." he replied. "I'm Goodyear, by the way."
Shaking his hand and sighing, you slipped into the culvert with your hands in front of you. The girl was dressed in ratty robes, holding a badly-mangled rod the length of your arm halfway between a wand and a staff. It seemed dull, broken down, missing chips and chunks and splinters, while at one point it was nearly broken in half.
"Can I see it?" you asked, holding up a hand. As she gave it to you, the stick buzzed in your hand. It was once great. Monsters had been slain, witches and demons sent back to the hells they belonged. Passed down for four generations of magical girl, it had died in service to stop the last blow of a great horror from beyond the knowledge of mortal ken.
"Can you fix it?" Trissa asked.
Feeling it carefully, you winced. "If you have twenty bucks and a week, sure. Otherwise, no."
"Fuck." She muttered. "I need something, anything to fight with. Tonight."
Feeling the shaft, you came to a decision The poor rod was nearly dead… but that wouldn't stop you from doing your best. "I can whip something up. Won't hold together for long, but it'll make it to next midnight."
"Do it."
Cracking your knuckles, you took the ruined weapon out to the parking log, and growled. You needed tools, damn it. Supplies. Something. Looking at Trissa, you groaned. "I need cash."
"I have ten dollars and three dimes."
"Gimme the dimes." You said seriously, laying them out in an equidistant triangle on the Wal-Mart parking lot. "Goodyear, I need a bottle of cheap booze, Elmers glue, a shaker-can of paint, and a cardboard box. Trissa, get me a few unbroken beer bottles from the ditch, and fill 'em up with water."
The magical girl and the hobo both sprung to action as you started thinking and whistling. This was going to be a fuck-fuck of a job all right, and not the good kind. Trissa got back fairly quickly, though, and you sighed. Time to get to work.
"Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me!" you sung, feeling the rod below you start to shiver. "What once was lost, was now am found, was blind, but now I see!"
Washing it down, you felt the hands of the past on it. Three pieces of wand, when you were done. Well enough. Finishing the wash, you slammed a beer bottle into the concrete, shattering the Corona label and sending glass everywhere as you sawed the rod apart at the damaged. Even as you cut your hands in the work, you knew the blood would make a powerful part of it. Still singing, you cleaned the work as best you could with glass tools as Goodyear came back with the booze. It was a 500 of cheapass Canadian whiskey, and it would work well enough as you cracked the cap off and poured it out in a circle. The paint made a triangle around it, and pouring the glue across the greatest piece of the rod allowed you to join it to a clean and empty bottle. Whiskey filled the rest of the beer container, and spit, glass shards, and paint sealed it as best you could.
The second greatest shard, you took the cardboard box and started shredding to it's component papers, painting and purifying with the booze all the while. Finger-crochet made it into a chain, and soon enough the rod-piece was ensconced in cardboard, paint, glass, and blood. It would need to dry, before it could pretend to work; and it would have two or three uses before the chain snapped and it was back to a hellish normal.
The last of the rod of power, you pulled apart into fiber strands, pushing into the whiskey bottle before you painted it white and glued dirt to the front in a large X. You were ten verses through Amazing Grace, with only three more to go when you finally finished.
"I'm done." You hissed, hands bloody and throat sore.
"It looks like shit." Trissa muttered.
"It'll work." You replied, picking up the beer-ended mace. "Napalm rod, now. Not horribly powerful, but it'll put flames where you need them, and won't burn you. Friends, I don't know."
"And the rest?"
"Protection amulet. No curse or hex can touch you until it breaks, but claws and teeth certainly will. I was trying for the reverse, but it wasn't happening. The bottle is a bomb. Light the fuse with the mace, and it'll blast out fire that'll heal you and hurt them. Save it for an emergency, it only works once."
"Got it." Trissa said. "You can crash in my culvert."
You really didn't remember much after that. Probably because of the blood loss.
///
When you woke up again, the culvert was bare of mysterious hobos named after blimps, and Trissa was staring at you in wonder. "It worked." She muttered. "It really worked."
"Great, well." You muttered. "Got any food?"
"Medicine Boy, I got me nearly a thousand dollars in payout from the hunt last night, and you saved my ass! Of course I'll cover breakfast!"
Ten minutes later we were in a McDonalds, you had a plate of America's perfered form of national suicide in front of me, and Trissa was looking like you were now a cross between her favorite teddy bear and something they'd probably try and teach you about in a few years involving babies. Christ, it was too early for this shit.
"As nice as breakfast is," you muttered past the pancakes and sausage you were stuffing yourself on "I need a permanent income stream. And a house."
"You say that like I was going to drag you along like a personal toy!"
You stared the most venomous stare you could, and Trissa wilted.
"Okay, okay. You need a set of digs, I get it. If you hold still, then I can still come to you for gear. We can do this." Trissa said. "Any opinion on previous tennents of a building?"
"Not really." You said, before getting to work finishing breakfast.
Ten minutes later, you regretted that horribly as Trissa showed you an abandoned motel building. It smelled like shit, has trees growing in the parking lot cracks, and you were honestly not sure why it hadn't been bulldozed as blight years ago.
"So we killed the shit out of the witches coven here last night, and there hasn't been a poltiergiest infection in the last… three years? Thereabouts." She said, gibbering in happiness. "Totally abandoned, and most of the infrastructure is still intact! Just have to turn some valves and flick some breakers, and the parts of the building that are still in good repair will come right to life!"
Sighing, you nodded, and set to work.
///
A week of hard work, and lots of tinned food later, and you had the old shitshow of a motel ready for business. There was the canteen, your shop off the front desk (you'd need a new place for it once you had wares), your room, and most importantly, your workshop.
Please don't mind the lack of progress there. Either way, it's time to get this ball rolling!
/-/-/-
Votes
WHO ARE YOU?
[]: Just a kid, who's mad at the world that took his parents away from him for no good reason.
[]: An artesian, always seeking to make better, create the one true work of art, the magnum opus from whence you could say "it is done" and be satisfied in life.
[]: Someone who knows this is your city, right or wrong. If right, to celebrate; if wrong, then to set right. Now.
WHAT IS YOUR FOCUS?
[] Wands. Magical Girls need firepower, and you can deliver in spades. Allows you to build T3 Wands
[] Trinkets. Transforming and accessing mana is hard for Magical Girls, but you can make the tools to fix that. Allows T3 Trinkets
[] Costumes. Magical Girls need to look bitching, and perception is power. Allows you to make T3 Costumes
[] Bombs. When you absolutely, positively, need a get out of hell free card. Allows you to build T3 Bombs
WHAT IS YOUR BEST FACILITY?
[] The Commissary. You cook, and you cook well. This in turn brings in more transient Magical Girls, and keeps them safer. Increases Magical Girl visitor count by +1 per level, and adds +1 to health of all Magical Girls in area.
[] Lodging. Let's face it, a lot of Magical Girls are homeless. A roof over their head, even one that leaks and has rattling pipes, is a good roof to them. You start with 2 rooms available for lodging Magical Girls in.
[] Merchandise. You're a good tool-maker, and your equipment lasts longer before it breaks down. All products you sell last for an additional 72 hours per Tier of item, and Bombs are automatically doubled.
[] Shop. Magical Girls end up gathering hundreds, thousands, and millions of pieces of magical junk. Adds 1/3 of the Magical Girl's purchase power as a random resource on purchase of items.
