Magical Girl Home Base Quest

Slugging down a thermos of cold water, you stared at your furnace intently. Chugging and burning along happily, it stared back at you, eyes wide and unblinking.

"Can you sing me a song, Papa?" it asked, a spec of blue-white fire dancing around the ports and openings in the firebox. "I've been getting so lonely in here!"

Honestly you weren't really sure if this was heat exhaustion talking since it had been warming up again recently, exhaustion, or if you'd just finally flown around the fucking bend and gone crazy. All three of them were options, really, since you hadn't really optimized things in the hospitality side of things very well and that 2200-0600 sleep cycle you planned for didn't really work when shit kept you going through the middle of the night. Your personal carafe now had an inch of sludge in the bottom, and Chris had flat-out banned you from the kitchen on pain of no more coffee if you kept drinking too much.

"Song, papa?"

Right, urg, stay focused. You came in here to build a wand. Going over to your new Wand Bench, you started fiddling around aimlessly, sketching on your butcher paper with one hand and drinking water with the other. You had piles of liquid reagents on hand right now, didn't you? Work out something like that? Lots of witch-shit and demonic items…

That's it! Running over to the supply cabinet, you pulled out a pair of demonic swords, their evil whispers nothing in your mind next to the cackle of the furnace and thunderous drumbeat of magic. Getting out the tin foil, you made it into scabbards for the blades, caulking the seams shut with flour paste and salt, before filling them with some old Blended Humors. Slotting in the blades and rubber-banding the tops shut, you chucked them into the first oven bay.

"omnomnomnomnomnom" went the furnace, and you chuckled.

"Good boy." You muttered, before getting a pair of trays out. For the main wand, you'd be using some nice, plain wooden reagents to make a spell-shearing totem, which you'd then work into the sword-guard, and then the leftovers from that, plus some… bile? Yeah this needed some bile. Put that together, and you'd get a decent spell-penetrating charm. Carving the ash and hawthorn together, you quickly got that done, before affixing them both in an oak scrap you trimmed down real quick with your ripsaw. A little cotton string held it together, while you plated that and put it in oven bay two.

"Have you ever felt a void numbing your soul

And lit a candle just to watch it burn?

A flame dances but outside of its stage

Shadows creep



Every day I fight to stay in the light

I endure the darkness 'cause it shows me the stars

And I vow to keep on spreading the light

'til the day I die"

You weren't sure when you started singing, but you knew it felt right. Pulling the two formerly demonic swords out of the oven, you took some of your precious stocks of silver wire, and started affixing the totem and the charm. Binding them on tightly, you held each sword up, smiling. The spell-shearing totem would make sure magic worked through this wand would ignore nearly any defense, and the lesser wand would be almost as good. Bundling them back together, you put them back in to cook, and resumed singing.

"Being a hero is a choice

I believe it with all that I am

A spotless heart's not a gift

But a conquest that's worth striving for



Every day I fight to stay in the light

I endure the darkness 'cause it shows me the stars

And I vow to keep on spreading the light

'til the day I die"

Pulling the two completed wands from the ovens, you checked the potion rack. Jocelyne had been in again, and once more there were three potions sitting there cooling from their long cook-times with obscure German labels on them. Such was life. Tucking them in a belt pouch, you waltzed on down to the mess hall, looking around at the girls. Blinking, you tried to remember their names, before seeing Eowyn sitting there.

"Oi!" you yelled, catching her attention as you threw her the wand. Catching it, she pulled the first inch of the blade out of it's sheath, the demonic gladius having been turned into a shashka. Blinking and pulling the whole sword free, the totemic wolf in the hilt sung in her hand.

"How much?" she asked, grinning.

"I'll call it even if nobody dies on the next run." You shot back. Grabbing the lesser wand, you tossed it to one of the younger residents. "Here. Don't die."

"I'll try!"

"Great." You said, nodding. "I'm gonna go crash."

Dumping the bombs down by the cash bin, you looked at Chris and she sighed. "Yes, I'll take care of them."

"Thanks." You replied, walking out the door. About three steps after that, you were hit by a wave of nausea, and fell down. Before you lost your… breakfast? Lunch? Fuzzy time induced eating? You gulped.

"Ah shit not again."

Then you were puking, and after that you blacked out.

/-/-/-/-

Your name was once something rather reasonable. Then you joined a small-time gang, then you did some graffiti, tagged some buildings, saw some shit go down, and you tagged a Witch's ritual site.

Now your name was Homer, you were blind as a bat, and your boss was in his bed, running a 102.4 F fever, and your sorta-girlfriend slash magical girl was arguing with his sorta-girlfriend slash demonic spider about the correct course of treatment while you were there to keep the two from trying to kill each other. This was surprisingly hard, considering that one of them could stop time, while the other one could spit lines of thread that carried a magical imbuement to cause effects to what they hit.

"Can we all calm down for, I don't know, five minutes?" you asked rhetorically, before idly feeling a pulse of Aether from Jocelyne's position as she got ready to throw another thread. "Or am I supposed to throw myself heroically on Medicine Boy's bier before one of you two lights this entire place on fire?"

The building charge dissipated, and you wiped your forehead. You were almost pushed to break out your secret- or not so secret- weapon.

"Calypso." You warned, the fact she was standing behind you with one hand extended and spell wrapped around a knife no barrier to your mage-sense. You might not see the world anymore, but your domain was the puffs of magic— and there, you were inviolate. Unfortunately, reason was not Calypso's strongest suit, and you didn't feel her put the weapon down. Fine.

Flicking your sleeve, a wax pad hit your palm, a thin taper of paper after it painted a riot of color of symbols. Snapping it backwards, it caught Calypso right in the gut, the magic in it activating to eat away the spells she had. Hissing, the older magical girl pried it off, but the point was made. You were not putting up with this today. "You know that stings like a bitch, right?" she asked, glaring at the sealing tag on the floor.

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." You replied, letting a little bit of Clark Gable into your voice as you picked up the seal and pried off the used paper. Crackling with power, you just rolled it up around your finger, before sticking it back in your vest pocket for later. You'd roll cigarettes with it or something, who knew. "Right now we need to figure out how to keep this place running without the boss. There's water and sewage to move, laundry and baths to run, food to cook, and someone has to find out where the cash store is."

"I thought you had it." Both Calypso and Jocelyne said in synchronized surprise.

"No, I have the demonic coin store." You replied, sighing.

"Homer…" Medicine Boy muttered. "Remember… don't let the cat out…"

You nodded. "Of course, boss. I won't let the cat out."

"Good." He grumbled, reaching around on the table for a glass of water, before pouring it on his face in an attempt to drink it. "Good water."

"Right, just, fuck. Arg." You grumbled. "I'll do the water stuff; Calypso, you can do the sewage collection. Jocelyne, you're doing accounting on everything, and I mean everything. Since I can't read anything that's not in the Library and I don't even know if the boss kept book, that's on you."

"And are you going to be doing anything else?" Calypso asked pointedly. "The girls need more than just overworked nukes, and I know Medicine Boy already used one of them!"

"I'm going to be making more sealing tags, and I've been thinking about a project." You said, rolling your fingers. "We've got enough demonic… stuff… that I'm pretty sure I can write a pathfinder system or a destruction weapon. There's also that concentration centrifuge system, the condenser tower… lot of things."

"As long as you can keep everything else moving on the right direction." Jocelyne muttered. "This place is a rat's nest of emissions and draws- and it doesn't help that Rose's plants are all indipendant actors and that the girls camped out beyond the boundary line are careless."

"The boundary line?" you asked.

"The first threshold." Jocelyne replied. "Walk and talk with me, Homer."

"You try and jump on my shoulder I'll throw you into the soup."

"So noted." The little spider said, her felt feet clicking unnaturally as she climbed the wall to dance on the ceiling above you. "People leave a boundary at places where they make a transition. The first is at the steps to their land; the second at their home, and the third at their sanctuary. Since Medicine Boy hasn't left here in… near two months I think… the first boundary is comparatively tough as hell. A magical girl without reason or permission would find it very uncomfortable to cross; and entering the building itself may actually be impossible for some of them unless they meet the conditions."

"Conditions." You ask, glaring into the void that is all your eyes can see. "What sort of conditions?"

"Mostly bringing goods for trade or seeking to buy a meal." Jocelyne said, still walking along the ceiling. "The girls don't really have thresholds over their rooms right now since they're cramped in so tight, but if anything did happen here I'm pretty sure Medicine Boy and I would survive, even if I wished for otherwise."

Getting to the library, you breathed in deeply, and stepped in. Now, you knew. As information poured into your mind's eye, texts and treatises hemmed and hawed at the edge and focus of your concentration. "That would be horrific, yes." You replied, moving over to the lectern to clear it off with a sweep of your arm. As scrolls and scraps of seals shot off into the void, it was a mere moment's work to redirect their falls into the shelves and boxes scattered all around. "Considering your strung-out soul, I doubt the demons would have much to do to take it for their own; while as for Medicine Boy himself… one shudders at what it would cost him to repel the hordes."

"Indeed." Jocelyne said, tapping over to your lectern before dropping a piton on the ceiling to come down with. "May I see what you're drafting?"

"No." you grumbled. "You may not."

And with that, you got to work.

/-/-/-/-

It was a rough week. One of the girls- Ruth- died fairly early on during one of the milk run jobs, putting a pallor over everything until Thursday, and leaving you exhausted after the cremation on Wensday. Morale recovered when Thursday's raid had positive results, however, and Mission Control estimated there was one more binding token to go before it was time to hit Caim and send him back to Hell. Two weeks until the final operation.

You'd say the end was in sight, but that would be a touch too on the nose for some of the girls.

That didn't stop you from taking advantage of Medicine Boy's spate of sickness, though. Tearing him out of the workshop took an Act of God some days, and if he was in, you weren't.

That's what the first design you came up with was to fix- an Arcane Condenser. By nullifying and controlling loose magic, you'd be able to up the flow of the area, and even set it up so you could use multiple workshops at the same time. It would be expensive as hell to build, cost you hours on hours of work, but the power increase it would lend could be unimaginable.

The second option was less ambitious, but still an increase in power for the hostel: an Area of Purification. Health and wellness was hard to keep up in the still-blighted squalor of the hotel, and the complaints about how you were collectively handling sewage had been legendary when Calypso lost her temper in the mess hall one day. Equally importantly, this would work for spiritual purification as well, meaning that some of the more deliberating wounds that the girls had suffered and scarred over could possibly worked on- including, a part of your mind insisted, Jocelyne's.

Finally, there was the most boring, and also practical of your designs; a magical paternoster. Your original plan to build an elevator didn't have enough moving parts- and it hurt your soul to say that- so the paternoster was a compromise to keep magical flow constrained and moving. Still ludicrously expensive and liable to take forever to do, mind, but an option.

And now it was Saturday, and you had to decide what to get started on. Oh joy.

-/-/-/-/-/

VOTES

[] Build a Room
-[] Magical Condenser: Allows multiple workshops to run in parallel.
-[] Area of Purification: Increase item yields, grants health benefits.
-[] Magical Paternoster: Allows full utility for upper floors.
[] No, you want to craft a Scroll
-[] More Sealing Tags (4x T1 bombs)
-[] More Magical Bombs (1x T4 bomb)


AN: Sometimes, you find plot. Sometimes, plot finds you.