Magical Girl Home Base Quest

Banging away in one of the side rooms, you glared at the pile of mold-ridden carpet you had to bag up and take to the mall later. Getting a room ready for habitation was hard, since even a half-assed remediation wasn't something to do casually. Strip out the carpet, then throw down a layer of Tyvek as a temporary buffer flooring first, then go in with shaker paint and coat the walls in a double of primer and a top-coat of whatever you could scavenge- today, a burnt orange that sort of looked pumpkin-y. Once that was done, you could put in the tarp walls for the 'bath' consisting of a well-apointed five gallon bucket, a plastic bag, and a box of baking powder mixed with sand as a deodorizer. In-room drinking water was provided by a large drink cooler you scrapped out of the flea market with full of water, and every morning you'd come through with your big old pushcart and swap empty jugs with freshly chlorinated ones that were safe to drink.

In terms of furniture, the room you were building would be pretty spartan. For a bed, you had tactically modified a few pallets and forty feet of rope into a matress, over which went some foam egg carton and a threadbare blanket. You also kicked in a folding chair and table, although none of it was terribly sturdy or clean. The doors didn't lock, most of the rooms still faintly smelled, and thanks to some vandals none of the rooms had a solid window.

You were almost disturbed how much Eowyn and Trompdoy loved them. Once the moonstone was located in your workshop and you'd gotten most of the clutter put away, you settled down into dinner with the girls. Tonight, much like the last four nights now, was pepperpot as you'd stumbled across half a pallet of Spam getting thrown out. Since the only way to make it reliably edible was shitloads of spices, you'd kept the pot going at a low simmer and added water and additional canned goods in your free time. By now it was mostly a porridge, with dried lentils having rehydrated and sucked all the moisture out of the dish with a rich, spicy aura.

"y'know," Trompdoy muttered, cracking a peppercorn between her teeth, "we could probably weaponize this with a little creativity."

Okay, what was supposed to be a spicy aura. Your cooking skills meant that most of it was fairly bland, unless some of the bottom of the pot got scraped off and added to the mix for flavor. Probably just needed to stir it more.

"I'm working on it." You grumbled.

"Well, you need to get working on some merch!" Eowyn said, waving a chunk of wonderbread around. "I'm gonna need a new wand soon, and my denims are getting beat up."

"Can't you buy new clothes?" you griped, taking another bite of pepperpot.

"Yeah, and then I'll blow 'em to high heaven when I get hit." Eowyn griped. "Actually, getting a magical imbuement to work with our auras is hard, and a t-shirt ain't likely to appreciate going through a sheetrock wall."

"I'd like a new illusion amulet too." Trompdoy mentioned helpfully. "And a few healing potions. Someone here never seems to take my advice about not starting fights with homunculi, and then who has to put her guts back where they go? Me."

"I could've walked it off." Eowyn grumbled.

"Woman you were born with at least a foot more intestine than you have at this present moment and I will find some bonesaw to pull you open and check."

"Not in my dining room please." You grumbled.

"Right." Trompdoy grumbled. "Anyway, there's been more homunculus activity around the rail spur on the south side of town. We're gonna check it out tonight, so I'm gonna crash now."

You nodded. "Goodnight, then."

-/-/-/

It was a quarter after three in the morning when you woke up to gunshots outside your lobby. Throwing on a pair of slippers and a clean-ish bathrobe, you ran for where three magical girls were standing, with a fourth draped over a plank they were using a stretcher. Under the blood and bile, you realized it was Trompdoy.

"What happened?" you yelled, re-tying the belt that kept you modest now.

"Had to bail Trissa out." Eowyn said, spitting fire angrily. "The fucking alchemists are setting up a base in the old rail depot, and the kid stumbled into it with both feet. We scrambled, but one of 'em had a machine gun set up and they must have found some old hazardous waste."

"Fucking radium bullets." Trompdoy muttered from her stretcher. "How do I look, doc?"

You weren't a doctor, but this was bad. Massive gut wounds, at least three pints of blood on your floor, and Trompdoy was as white as virgin snow. Her guts were hamburger at this point, probably, and you weren't certain you could help.

"Does she have any healing voodoo?" you asked, waving your hands. "Because I ain't got shit for this."

"Just keep all the blood and bits in her and it normally works out." One of the girls you didn't know said. "Provided you don't, say, cut us in half we can generally grow back without too much trouble."

"Great." You muttered. "Trissa, go down to my workshop. Get the superglue, duct tape, and some bedsheets. Anyone got a knife?"

The unknown girl nodded, pulling out a long dagger with a swastika and some other shit on the pommel. You squinted at it.

"Spoils of war." She said, grinning. "You asked for a knife!"

Sighing, you took it, and cursed. Shit, that was some major magic in this thing! "I said a knife, not a damn magic artifact!"

"It's magic?" everyone, including the bleeding Trompdoy, asked.

"Hell yeah it's magic! Fucking thing is cursed to heal wounds it's caused."

"Dibs." Eowyn called, before you glared at her.

"Loot division after we save your friend." You growled. Trissa was back with the supplies, though so you got to work. Carefully guiding your hands into the mess, you found it was not as bad as first thought- no shit-smell, just a fuckload of really big, really bloody holes. Good. You could fix holes. "Give me the sheet." You muttered. Cutting it up with the ritual knife, you started shoving them into the wounds, as deep as you could get them. Once all the obvious ones were full, you then started covering them with superglue.

"Fuckfuckfuckfuck that burns you son of a bitch!" Trompdoy tried to yell at you, too week to make much more than noise.

"Means it's working." You grunted. The superglue would seal up the wound, and while it wouldn't sterilize anything, that was what nominally expired antibiotics were for anyway. Another layer of ripped up sheet went around the messes as an additional layer of sealent, and as you tied that off the duct tape came in as you banded it over the spots where blood was starting to seep out between the plugs.

"You think she's good?" Trissa asked nervously.

"Hell no." Eowyn muttered. "She's lost too much blood, and we need to get her strength up before she carks it. You sure you got nothing, Medicine Boy?"

"I got a shitty idea." You replied. "Hold my superglue."

Putting the knife in Trompdoy's hand, you wrapped your left hand around hers and pulled up your right sleeve with your teeth. "This knife heals sympathetically, so if I try and draw blood with it…"

"You're fucking nuts." The other girl said in amazement as you slowly ran the ritual dagger over the veins of your wrist.

"Across the street to the hospital, down the street to the morgue." You replied, the knife seeming to draw in the blood it loosed, a pale glow coming over Trompdoy's cheeks. "Another two should do it."

"You fucking dumbass." Trompdoy muttered.

"It's what I do best."

Two more knife-strokes and your vision was going gray at the edges, but you managed to glue your wrist shut and bandaged it in tape without too much issue. Going over to the wreck of an armchair in the corner, you flopped down into it.

"I'm gonna need some water." You muttered. "Also, someone owes me breakfast tomorrow."

"You're gonna get it in spades, good buddy." Eowyn said, coming over to you. "You saved my partner. Thank you."

"Just buy my shit later, ok?" you asked, groggy. Laughing, the magical girl bent down to fix your robe, and kissed you on the forehead.

"Of course."

-/-/-/-/



When you woke up to the smell of pancakes, you were in awe of the spread in front of you. Someone had pulled up a card table from your workshop, and covered it in IHOP catering, with pacakes and omlets and coffee for days. Working your way forward, you grabbed a fork in your left hand and started digging in with a gusto.

"Glad to see you're up, Medicine Boy!" the new girl from last night said. "I'm Calypso, the Betrayer."

"Charmed." You muttered around a mouthful of eggs. Swallowing, you squinted at her. "The Betrayer?"

She shrugged. "I used to be a homunculus, found out the alchemists who made me were Nazis, ran away. Ran into a Witch, she used me as a familiar, ran away from her too after I shot her in the back of the head."

You winced. "That seems kind of fatal."

"For a Witch? I give it fifty-fifty odds something like that kills 'em, and I flipped a tails that time. After that I signed on with the forces of light after I figured out I had a soul."

You squinted. "That is so far out of my wheelhouse I can't pretend to know how it works."

"Yeah well normally, being a soulless abomination, either a Familiar or a Homunculus would be filled with profound sorrow upon entering holy grounds, fall over, and die. Since I got into the chapel before keeling over in despair and did not die, empirical testing reveals I do in fact have a soul."

You shrugged. Metaphysics could wait until after breakfast.

"Also I crashed in your spare room."

"You want it?" you asked.

"Nah, I got a good squat I share with Trissa now." She replied.

"Well, good." You replied, grabbing another omlet.

"Anyway, Trompdoy looks like she'll pull through," Calypso said, smiling. "And you're looking good. Got anything for sale right now?"

"Nah." You grumbled.

"Pitty. I need a new wand something fierce." She muttered. "Well, tell the girls to give me a call when you do, I've got some great stuff I nicked last week. See ya!"

And with that, Calypso breezed out of the doors, and you flopped back into your chair to continue eating. Once that was done, you got back to your room, threw some work clothes on, and found your mop. The lobby looked like shit from last night, and with your low supply of blood you weren't doing any heavy lifting today.

Amusingly enough, two new Magical Girls came in around lunchtime, which was really more 'second breakfast' since cold pancakes would be tastier than the pepperpot again. In exchange for a messy collection of cash and some odd coins, you let 'em at the breakfast food and some pepperpot, happy to discover new friends and potential customers.

"Nice to see someone who understands we don't always have dollars." One of 'em said, smiling at you. "I'm Rose the Entangling."

"And I'm Ouroboros." The other said. "Do you take euros?"

"I take everything at this rate." You grumbled. "Preferably material goods."

"I have bullets if you want then." Rose said. "Only Tokarevs though."

You considered, and nodded. "Sure."

"Nothing for sale yet?" Ouroboros said sadly.

"Yeah. Still getting set up." You complained.

"Oh." She replied. "That's a shame. Can I make a suggestion, though?"

You shrugged.

"I'm thinking something between a jobs board and a threat meter?" she said. "Some way of keeping track of targets. We're all going to be coming into and out of here, and it would be nice to have a way of not stepping on each other's toes."

"I'll think about it." You said, nodding. "Anything else?"

"Nah." Ouroboros said. "Have a good one!"

"You too." You muttered, before heading back to your lunch.

/-/-/-/-/-/-
Votes

Develop the Threat Board System?
[] Yes (Unlocks room: Mission Control, requires 20 Magical Girl contacts, ???, and ??? for construction)
[] No (Unlocks room: Medical Center, requires 20 Magical Girl contacts, ???, and ??? for construction)

Build a Tool
[] Trinket
-[] Write in Level, between 1 and 3.
[] Wand
-[] Write in Level, between 1 and 1.
[] Bomb
-[] Write in Level, between 1 and 1.
[] No, you want to work on your building instead. (Locked due to Injuries)
[] No, you want to improve your workshop instead. (Locked due to Injuries)