Cooking with Fire
25th of August 2006 A.D.
Pursing your lips, you cross the room to take a second look into the corridor outside, then come back into the room, stomping on the floor repeatedly. "Wooden floorboards, here and in the corridor. Wooden doorframe. Wooden doors too." you say to yourself. Ash makes an unladylike grunt of realization, but Pauline and Abby both look visibly confused. "Enough power to give people full body burns through their clothes" you continue, addressing the group "is going to be enough power to set that entire corridor on fire, and..."
"You can give someone burns without setting them on fire," Helen, damned if you are calling someone who gives you the creeps as bad as her Mrs Becket, cuts off your lecture coldly. "Flesh is not wood."
"And the person who comes in here might be made of green boughs and mistletoe," you counter calmly. "You cannot just assume you will be dealing with the mostly human shaped, or just with the ignorant."
"And how pray might they know?" comes the sharp question.
"Helen!" Abby gasps. "There is no need to insinuate..."
"My apologies for being impolite." It's hard to read her near toneless delivery, but she sounds like she means it. "But there are more important things at stake when dealing with the safety of us all, when dealing with one who burns the nose to catch even a whiff of."
You let the silence hang a moment, the tick of the clock on the mantelpiece eerily loud. "Impurity is not the same thing as evil. It is not even the same thing as being wrong, I could quote scripture about the sorts of people Christ chose to have at his table, but I do not want to make this about faith like it's..."
a feather in my cap, you think but do not add aloud, sweaving away from what might seem to be false modesty at the last moment. Instead you decide to let Usum have his say. "There is a purity in hatred, in ruination and in spite of which I want nothing to do. I'm just Molly Carpenter trying to muddle along."
The answer seems to resonate with Pauline and even with Anna enough for the latter to unbend into a smile. "We understand this is difficult for you Molly, we do not choose the talents we have, or the talents that find us."
Helen just nods, somehow you do not think it was a lack of understanding that lead to the lack of trust.
Before things can get any more awkward Clippy goes off, for all the world like a normal phone, It's Lydia, her plan 'not to show off by arriving in a fancy car' had backfired when she had missed the L train and had to catch a cab across town.
"My friend will be here soon," you say stoutly swallowing a smile.
And so she is, looking faintly ruffled in a new white T-shirt and a plain black skirt that almost looks like the kind of thing St Agnes would have made you wear to class. Obviously 'local coven South Shore' isn't among the list of destinations she knows how to deal with and her father was not any great use either.
"Hi... is the dog...uh... there's a German Shepherd down by the curb, is it OK to feed him?"
"You shouldn't feed strange dogs," the words out of Helen's mouth are almost automatic, a weirdly familiar ring to them, but whatever you had heard is gone in an instant.
Lydia insists that she is good with dogs which gets her around to talking dogs breeds with Abby who has
strong opinions on the matter, specifically on the habit of modern breeders of promoting dogs with serious health issues as 'cute'. It's probably a good thing she is a seer and not a pyromancer or Country Acres Puppies might go up in smoke one of these days with all the files and none of the dogs inside.
Still the time soon comes to deal with the matter at hand, the ritual.
From your understanding ritual magic is hard enough normally, since it is using the props of a magician as the proverbial metaphysical leaver to move what would otherwise be beyond the caster. Harder still when you mean to place a curse on something since that is basically giving magic a designated way to backlash and screw with you...
Bluntly but not inaccurately put, Gracious Lady of the Vardant Dawn, Usum notes
But that is when the actual cauldron in the Order of the Cauldron comes out, it is a plain cast iron kettle you would not gve a second look if you passed it in a window somewhere or spotted it as a curio in the back of a shop, looking like nothing so much as the sort of pot Gargamel would make his smurf stew. Only as you look more closely you see a pair of letters what might be the last part of a date stamped into the metal SM.. 88.
"Salem Massachusetts 1688, that is when it was forged with with a purpose too," Anna explains. "Not that we can claim an unbroken line going back that far, the Great Depression did more to lose my family's touch of the Mysteries than the Witch Trials, by grandmother didn't know what it was, but I figured it out eventually. Thought I'd put it to better use than moldering in the dark, that can make magic turn sour and dark you know."
Anna goes on to explain that the cauldron creates a sort of anchor point that allows what would otherwise be conflicting energies to find their level allowing the 'spinner' in this case Helen to and off a lot more magic to the 'cutter', the person turning the stream of power into magic manifest.
Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble, the lines from Macbeth rise inescapably to the forefront of your mind as salt water and hearth ash, bull thistle and dandelion seeds are added to the pot each with a turn of the stirring paddle.
How much of your Essence do you attempt to invest in the task?
[] Just 1 Essence, you do not want to mingle too many sorts of eldritch power in this, old Cauldron or no
-[] Write in stunt
[] 1 Essence from you and 1 from Lydia, that way you can both contribute
-[] Write in stunt
[] 2 Essence from you and one fron Lydia, that is... proportional and if you time it right three is one of the numbers of great significance
-[] Write in stunt
[] Write in
OOC: The pot is in fact decently enchanted, 'subtly magical talisman' level of enchantment, but nothing crazy. 
