Magical Girl Home Base Quest

[7734]

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.

 

[7734]

Spoiler: Music

At the end of the day, you were just a kid with seven fingers and a hatred of the system of the world that stole your family from you. It didn't teach you much, and as you scrounged around in the knocked-together commissary that took up two rooms, you at least figured it would teach you the basics of cooking.

The three burned vegetarian hamburgers on a plate and one half-raw one didn't inspire you to believe that was true. Grabbing a loaf of Bimbo, you just groaned and went out to the 'seating area' with a stolen park bench in it with a park table next to it. Trissa was sitting there, looking if not despondent at your lodgings, then at least mildly annoyed the furniture was scavenged and the new paint on the walls came from a shaker can.

"Bon chance" you muttered, putting down the food and sighing. "I need to learn how to cook."

"Better than mine." Trissa said, sighing. "So, so much better than mine."

Your eye twitched. "Speaking of your things, when are you coughing up rent?" you asked pointedly. "I gotta make a grocery run tonight."

"I'll cough up rent when you get me a working toilet." Trissa replied.

"You'll get a toilet when I get cash to buy groceries." You replied. "Now either I get the c-note or you get a fresh supply of plastic bags."

Pulling out a fat wad of cash, Trissa called you a lying sack of Thracian shit and slapped five twenties down on the card table. Smiling, you scooped them up, held them up to the light, and returned the favor by calling her a horse-fucking daughter of a Mongol shit-sweeper.

"American dollars!" you yelled. "The fuck am I going to do with a hundred lira?"

"Bitch you get what I get!"

Staring at each other, you almost missed the rattle of a can full of brads you'd set up on the front door to serve as an alarm. Running out of the mess, you got to the front door and grinned. Customer! Score!

"Hello, welcome to the Lodge-" You said, coming around the corner before a wave of stench came screaming in off the two girls that walked in. Covered in mud and green ichor, it was like getting punched in the face by a particularly bloodthirsty Isuzu behind on it's heroic quota for the quarter.

"Hey." One of them said, trying not to get the goop in her mud. "We heard you had a shower?"

"Yeah." You said, trying not to puke. "It's in the back. Follow me."

"Got a lundry?" the other asked.

"I got buckets and a washboard."

"Good enough."

As you lead the two magical girls to the back yard, you could practically hear the squirting, horrifying trail of filth they'd tracked through your building. Oh, god, you were going to need to mop it all up, and you didn't even own a mop yet! Thankfully, you were serious about the showers, even if it only was open-air tarps and the hot water came from a tank that you needed to stoke a fire under.

"Fair warning, it takes some time to get the hot water going." You warned. "Gotta heat the tank up."

"I'd take a hose and a can of Cyklon at this rate." The first magical girl muttered. "At least that would let us deal with the damn alchemists."

"Alchemists?" you asked, before hooking the door closed to the shower and going over to shovel some paper waste into the firebox of your shitty water heater.

"Yeah, alchemists. They're doing some serious fuckery." The first magical girl explained. "Creating homonuculi, summoning demons, consorting with devils and witches, raising the dead, tomb raiding, being fucking Nazis… lots of shit."

"And then your present mess…" you trailed off.

"Might have tried to fight a poison type chimera with a hand grenade." The second said. "After I told you not to."

"Shut the fuck up, Trompdoy."

"Only when you stop treating explosives like the solution to every known problem in the world, Eowyn."

As the trash fire heated the water in the bottom up to about one-fifty, you went to the terrible salvaged piping system you'd rigged up. "Right, I'm switching on the heat now." You warned. "Tell me when it's good."

"Alright!"

Right, first step was to open the dump valve to start putting cool water in the heater tank. Second step was to turn the draw on for the heater tank. Third step was, while moving as fast as possible, turn on the pump for the heater tank quick enough so that the showering girls didn't notice. As the wheezy system started going, you grinned. Success! And all for a day of panicking and trial, error, and getting soaked and scalded!

"Can you turn the temperature up more?"

You winced. "No."

"Please?" the girls asked.

"It'll heat up more in a bit, I'm sorry." You explained, moving out to the front to cram in a brown paper bag of leaf litter into the firebox. "Anyway, about your laundry-"

Before you could finish that sentence, a mud-covered maid costume flew over the top and slapped you in the face, before a heavy denim jacket and skirt followed suit. Groaning, you just went inside to get some beach towels and your laundry setup. Pretty soon, you had three five gallon buckets and a bottle of Dawn. Pouring the soap liberally into one, you grabbed a ladle and started pulling from the shower's hot water tank. Soon, it was full enough to get started, and you flipped another bucket to use as your stool while a rubber plunger served as your agitator.

"Got any soap?" the girls asked, prompting you to kick the bottle of dish soap into the enclosure. Once the water was suffiently muddy, you dumped it out in the bushes, drew a fresh lot, and started work again. It took three soap cycles and two rinses to start to breathe some life back into the maid uniform, while the denim took even more to get the crap off of it. Stringing them across an old telephone line to dry, you sighed, before looking at the shower enclosure.

"Y'all done yet?" you asked. "Because I have to stay out here to shut it down."

"Five more minutes?" one- you think it was Eowyn?- asked. "Please?"

"I mean you want lunch?" you replied. "Because I was gonna make a second stab at making lunch."

"We'll take lunch." Both the girls said in unison. Chuckling, you went over to shut off the pump and hose line, before heading in. After your failed vegie burgers, you decided to go with something you did know- hobo soup. Taking a big old pot over the camp stove from in the commissary, you opened up a number ten can of baked beans and dumped the whole thing in, before digging around and grabbing a few cans of Vienna sausage and adding them in wholesale, as well as some tins of chilis to give it some flavor. A number 10 can of water to thin it down, and then a number four can to thicken it back up again, and boom! Hobo soup!

Going over to the sink you'd kludged together, you washed out some of the nice cans you'd taken the time to knock the sharp edges off of, and grab some plastic cutlery too. Nicked if off a Culvers, so it was good stuff. Sticking your head back out into the dining room, you hissed. Two mostly naked girls in your dining room!

"Hey!" you yelled. "Get some clothes on!"

"We don't have spares." The white-haired one, Eowyn, said. "And our stuff is still soaking wet."

You grumbled. Fine. At least they weren't dripping on your floor. "Soup's on in ten." You said, matter-of-fact.

"Great." The other one, with raven-dark hair and piercing blue eyes, said quietly. "Do you do anything other than cook and run a shower?"

"I've got two rooms for rent, and I make magic tools." You replied. "Even if one of 'em has a freeloader in it."

"You make tools?" Trompdoy asked, grinning. "Can you make transformation trinkets?"

"Or bombs?" Eowyn added.

"I can make all of it." You said, grinning.

Reaching behind her friend's back, Eowyn pulled out a giant, glowing lump of moonstone. Seriously, this thing was as big as her head.

"God, I love [Partner Inventory]." Eowyn muttered. "Anyway, how long would this get us rooms for?"

"A month." You said, salivating at the chance to work with that sort of light-touched material. That was so much material there…

"So, you up for it?" Trompdoy asked. "I'm warning you, we stick together."

You nodded. Trissa had long since eaten through her goodwill with you, and hadn't been quick to pay for food either. "The arrangements are mildly primitive." You warned.

"From the way your eyes are lighting up, you take payment in salvage." Trompdoy countered. "And for us, salvage is easier to come by than cash."

Decisions, decisions…

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

Take in Eowyn and Trompdoy?
[] Yes. They're paying up front, and that moonstone is valuable. (+6 Holy Stuff for 4 weeks rent)
[] No. You'd have to evict Trissa (Loose +2 Mundanes reoccurring rent, 50% chance of payment)

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
[] No, you want to improve your workshop instead.
/-/-/-/-/-/-
Notes

Spoiler: The Big Spreadsheet

Magical Girl Tools are built at a rate of one per turn, and for each level of quality you build require an additional resource to make. A Level 1 item only needs one type, Level 2 needs two types, continuing to Level 7, at which point you must have completed workshop upgrades to reach higher levels of craftsmanship. Alternatively, you can work on the Lodge. The resources picked for Tool Construction will be randomly determined by the GM, with an emphasis on stuff you have lots of.

Note money, food, and other goods avalible on the civil market are Mundanes. The player character can automatically liquidate one random resource per turn to aquire more Mundanes if they run out. Current operation of the Lodge requires 1 Mundane per turn.

Also, you guys got lucky on the Random Magical Girl generator. So, so lucky. Paired MGs are really good.

 

[7734]

Spoiler: Music

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)

Spoiler: The Spreadsheet

 

[7734]

Sitting down at your workbench was a relaxing experience. Nothing but you, arcane knoweldges trying to murder you, and the ever-present smell of cheap liquor that served as the eau d' vie of your projects, as sourced by Goodyear. God bless that man, wherever the hell he was. Either way, it was time to build a wand.

Technically speaking, a wand had four parts. The core, rod, focus, and binder. Alcohol, while physically solvent, was an excellent simulation of duct tape in more esoteric rituals like this. Pouring a fifth of Captain Morgan into a mixing bowl with some salt and flour quickly got you a heavy paste, which you shelved for now as you worked on the core and rod.

Physically, the rod was the 'meat' of a wand, and magically had to make a decent backbone as well. For this work, you had a fourteen-inch chunk of number 3 rebar, which you laid out on a clean sheet of butcher paper while you got to work doing the symbolism and arithmancy in the margins around it. The core of a wand needed to be something magically conductive, serving as- in a rough analogy- an antenna to a radio. For this wand, you were using cat5e cable as the core since as a signal medium, it had thaumaturgic transmission quality that might work well enough. After running through some arithmetic equations and determining a one-in-eight wrap would be sufficient, you grabbed a handful of the binder and got to work. Twist and pull, that was the name of it, twist and pull and soak. A slosh more of whiskey, that was the gimmick there, to keep it wet as you pulled and heaved.

Arcane mysticism wouldn't hide the effort you were putting into this, the energies pulled through your body into the working making the pliable cable fight like hell to stay to the rod. The more sophisticated your tools, the less difficult the work would be- but with only your bare hands and some long division, this would be a Syphisian task to render perfect. Perfect wasn't your goal, though, as the wires came together at the top and you slammed more binder onto them as you went for your gribblies bin. Fate guided your hands to the focus for this wand- a broken cross, ill-treated by time and tread into four pieces. Symbolism was a powerful tool, still, and as you took the rendition of Jesus aside, the rest of the pieces fell together in the orientation of their once-whole symbol. Nodding solemnly, you placed them at the tip of the rod, gently pressed into the binder as you tied the cables over them, and then placed the last part on top. More binder followed, and your next step was simple- the baking.

Fire could be used to create or destroy; and in your work it needed to be shielded. A burn barrel took up a non-zero part of your workshop, with a fuel pile next to it. Putting in a shield for the burn chamber, you set in the wand, and shoveled some pieces of broken furniture into the bottom portion. Moments later, a some paper and a match ignited it, and you flicked on the old vacuum motor that provided a draft to get real heat out of it.

Eight hours of tending the fire- and simultaneously monitoring the pull of power being imbued into your trash-can wand- later, you felt the flow abate and silenced the motor. With long tongs, you pulled the wand forth, and smiled.

The rebar had lost three inches of length, but the cables had burned away to a clear, glassy wrap in a winding helix to the top. What had begun life as a crucifix had been pulled into the Aether from whence God stored all gifts to life, but a memory remained in each cross of the rebar and glass being stained with a golden outline. Picking it up, a smile crossed your face. Truly, this was a wonderful item. Resting it on your bench, you smiled happily, walked out of your workshop's door, and promptly realized you'd just pulled ten straight hours of work and fell right the fuck over. Clunk.

"Medicine Boy?"

"What." You growled, grabbing the rotting wallpaper and trying to heave yourself up."

"You're nuked. Look at me, buddy."

Squinting, you looked up. It was… Calypso? Yeah, that was Calypso.

"I'm fine." You grumbled. "Help me up."

She chuckled, smiling. "Ok."

You weren't quite sure how she helped you to your room, but she did, and it wasn't long before you were asleep.



-/-/-/-/-/



The next day was Wednesday, alias Shower Day. While worse for wear from her constant harassment of the alchemists in the rail depot, Eowyn was still in good enough shape to help get Trompdoy out to the showers, and Calypso had crashed in your lobby on the grounds of you being physically unable to say no. While you didn't quite approve of putting the still-bandaged Trompdoy through the wash on a cheap metal folding chair, she was starting to smell a little. Not in the 'oh god, infections' sense, but rather the build-up of BO and dirt that happened when you were stuck in a single room with barely-adequate sanitation and a stack of newspapers to wipe with.

Once the first stage of the shower was done (and Eowyn slipped you a fifty to get real TP since newspaper wasn't getting the job done with Trompdoy's weakened hands) you yourself got rinsed off and ready to make lunch when you found your resident invalid sprawled on a coffee table in your lobby with her shirt off.

"What." You asked, in the sort of dead tone that indicated that there was shenanigans afoot, but you were too hung-over from the arcane work yesterday that you really couldn't tell which shenanigans were happening.

"Gotta change the dressing." Trompdoy said, prompting you to groan. Moving over and throwing a pillow on the ground, you sat in seiza next to her, pulling out your jackknife.

"Can you at least throw a towel on the top half?" you asked mildly. "Not like I don't appreciate the clear working area, but I figure you're cold.

"Not really." Trompdoy replied as you cut off the duct-tape with practiced hands. Aside from the usual tape rash, the area around each of the punctures was fairly smooth and clean, with none of the signs of redness that would normally be present.

"Calypso, can I trust you in my kitchen?" you asked carefully. "I need a pot of boiling water to sterilize my knife in."

"What are you doing?" Calypso replied, staring.

"I need to cut out the plugs and re-bind her stomach. The wounds can't heal right with a giant mass of superglue in there."

Once sanitation was provided, you put words to deeds. Clean bandages were provided courtesy of a run to Wal-Mart the day after the incident, and it wasn't long before your blood-soaked work was thrown out and clean, easier to handle bandages were in. That done, you went to get lunch- because after lunch would be the bidding war.

"Ten thousand dollars." Trompdoy said flatly, staring at the wand with unabashed lust. You couldn't blame her, it was excellent work.

Calypso just grumbled, leaving the room.

Eowyn's bid started off with a star sapphire the size of both your fists, and she anted up with a set of bottles marked with some very fancy labeling, and two bars of luminescent silver. Finally, her last item on the table was a vial that thrummed with power in the back of your mind. "One artificial star sapphire, perfect for focus use, six thousand carats. Uncut, obviously. Two bottles of Dom Perignon, circa 1936. Probably not fakes, like… eighty percent chance they're real. If the bottles have serials on 'em, don't be surprised if they're duplicates, alchemists do that all the time. One bottle of Papal Holy Water, circa Pius XII."

"Wait for me!" Calypso yelled, coming back while dragging a literal duffel bag full of stuff. "My bid! Ninety-five neurodes, sixty-three completed neuroptics, forty mutagenic masses, five shelf-stable detonite injectors, six jars of the black bile, five of yellow bile, nine jars of distilled red humor of blood, and twelve jars of phlegm. Good phlegm too!"

Holding up your hands, you waved them off. Opening the bidding war right now had been a huge mistake, obviously. "I'll get back to you soon, calm down! I still need to… temper it! For another day or three!"

The three magical girls didn't stop glaring at each other for the rest of the day.


-/-/-/-/


Next morning, amidst your dreams of comfy beds and potpourri air fresheners, a rap-tap-tapping came from your chamber door.

"A FOOL IS THIS AND NOTHING MORE!" you yelled as you came up, one hand fluidly throwing a boot at the sound of the noise.

"Shut the hell up and open the door Medicine Boy, it's four in the morning and I don't have time for this shit." Goodyear said, somewhere between hungover and desperate. "You've got a spare room, right?"

Pulling on a pair of pants and your robe, you opened the door to see Goodyear in a singed coat and a pair of oversized aviators. "Yeah. You find a girl or something?"

"No." he groused, and I saw a second pair of legs behind him. "I found a boy."

"Ah, fuck." You griped, moving out past him to the commissary. "I owe you food for this."

"You don't owe me food for this, you owe me a place for this kid." Goodyear said, pulling him by the arm. "His name is Homer."

"My name is not homer you half-bread ingrate-" the kid said, before Goodyear kicked him in the ass.

"Your name is fucking Homer now unless you want every single god-damn witch who's plans you spoiled by tagging up that ritual circle to come barreling down on your head." Goodyear snapped. "Names, true names, have power. If you think losing your eyes was bad, those bitches will tear you down until you're nothing more than a brain in a jar that spends it's time screaming to lull the familiars to sleep."

"He's blind?" you asked, frowning. There wasn't light to see by, but once you got to the commissary you could fire up one of the electric lamps that served as illuminators. It wasn't long before you got there, and in the harsh light of the LED that you saw the truth of Goodyear's words. Acid burns coated the kid's forehead and cheeks, both eye sockets hidden by naught but a thin strip of cloth. You didn't need to guess what was behind it, but the black, green, and red strips of raw skin stained by some hellspawn acid that tracked the story for him.

"I did what I could." Goodyear muttered. "There's no good countermeasure to a Witch who's had enough time to set up vitriolic defenses. Even a water and earth team couldn't dig them out in time."

"You saved me." Homer said, trying to smile. "Even if you're an ass."

"Boy, you managed to disrupt every single keynote character and runic anchor that circle had established." Goodyear said, a hint of admiration in his voice. "That ritual site won't be back until Midwinter, at the very least, and it'll be Beltane before they can even think of using it again."

"So what is he, anyway?" You asked, going in the back to heat up the pot of beans and assorted vegetables that had been dinner.

"He's got a gut instinct for understanding rituals and magical methodology; possibly an instinctive grasp of arcane principles or general thaumaturgy." Goodyear said, stroking his chin. "Loosing his eyes might not even slow him down depending on how he expresses his craft."

"I still struggle to call you a credible source, but whatever." Homer grumbled. "You obviously have a good enough grasp of divinatory studies to have clairvoyance, if not proper precognition or postcognition. It would probably help if you didn't smoke a mountain of ganja to use it, though."

I stared at Goodyear. Goodyear stared at me.

"Anyway, so." He said, coughing. "Bad news time."

"God damnit." You grumbled. "Let me guess, new magical girl in the wings, horrible sob story, you have a spare room right?"

Now it was time for Goodyear to grumble at me. "Take the words out of my fucking mouth again I swear."

"I already have one clownshow in my commissary that won't shut up, don't want to make it two."

"Thanks." Both Homer and Goodyear said. The later continued his speech. "Anyway, new girl. Tentatively calling her Baldr's Bane, after how she came over to our dark side of life."

"Still think 'Mistletoe' is a perfectly fine epithet" Homer griped.

Another kick in the shins from Goodyear, and Homer shut up. Continuing, the magic hobo explained events a tad bit better. "Complete and total neophyte of a magical girl. We generally get about two a month, and I will bust my ass every time to get them here. No gear, no training, no hope- a poison to survival."

"Does Homer have anywhere safe to stay?" you asked, oblivious.

"Nope. He walks into a public building, and it'll get nuked within the hour." Goodyear said, sighing. "Mistletoe will probably be safe for a week, maybe two; or I can get Homer on a train to St. Louis. Covens don't talk to each other much, so he'll be safe enough there."

"And if I pick up Homer, he'll be a target." You muttered, sketching on the table.

"Yes, but I've got a good feeling about him." Goodyear said. "Even if he did out one of my better hat tricks for no reason."

"I'll take it under advisement." You said, sighing. "Can you hide him under a rock for a day or two?"

"I can do you three and then my guy to St. Louis is gone."

"I'll have Eowyn take you an answer by then."

Goodyear laughed. "Nah. I'll find you."

/-/-/-/-
VOTES

Wand Sale!
[] Trompdoy (20 Mundane)
[] Eowyn (6 Gubbins, 2 Demon Stuff, 6 Holy Stuff)
[] Calypso (18 Witchy Stuff)

Take on a new boarder
[] Take in Homer (Male, magical talents strong but unknown, blind)
[] Take in Mistletoe (Female, magical girl with no equipment, experience, or training, but full of hope and power)

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
[] No, you want to improve your workshop instead.

Spoiler: The Spreadsheet

 

[7734]

Spoiler: Music

After taking Homer in, you quickly discovered a problem: the Commissary was not set up to deal with more than four people eating there. The stoves were inadequate, the sump couldn't drain fast enough, and most importantly trying to cram everyone in there was an utter bitch. Therefore, you'd be expanding it posthaste. Also, when the girls used it as a War Room, it got loud.

"I still think we shouldn't fuck with her." Trissa opined, glaring at the map of the city covered in Monopoly pieces, sharpie marker lines, and pushpins. "That nest of alchemists is still a major danger, and they've nearly killed me twice now. I don't want to make it three times."

"The witch dies." Calypso shot back. "I don't care if I need to grab that new girl and duct-tape a sword into her hand, we're killing her."

"Can we wait, like, maybe one week?" Trompdoy groused. "Seriously, why the hell is everyone trying to go off half-cocked?"

"Because it's a witch, full stop?" Eowyn griped. "The sooner we kill it, the less time it has to get dug in. I might have stopped it from setting up a bounded field last night, but there's no way for me to know if I can pull that off again- and you're still recovering for quite a while yet."

"I've already got most of the injuries healed up." Trompdoy replied.

"So you're vulnerable still because we know it takes time to recover strength."

Slamming a pot of ham and pea porridge down on the table, you glared at all of them and just started dishing out dinner. The conversation died down, and Trompdoy drew a circle around the map and started chewing on a lump of ham.

"The real question is can we get more supplies if we wait a week." Calypso said, glaring. "If we could get more gear, then there wouldn't be an issue with getting overwhelmed by defensive Familiars in a week."

"I'll see what I can do." You said, sighing.

"You won't see what you can do, you're gonna make something we can use to burn this place out." Calypso replied, voice harsh. "I am down to fuckall for supplies, and unlike some of y'all, I don't have a way to make up for that."

The rest of the table stared at her. "I thought you were a skill-girl like the rest of us." Trissa finally said, blinking.

"I was literally an old homunculus before I oopsed into a soul!" Calypso yelled. "I left that dump with a lantern sword, a pistol, and a Molotov; and since then all of it's been broken! I literally have two hands and some orisons and that's it!"

"Show of hands, all in favor of waiting a week?" Trompdoy asked tiredly.

Every hand went up.

"Great, meeting adjourned, now everyone eat your damn porridge."

-/-/-/-/

Once you got Homer settled into his room, you didn't really see him for the next three days. When you did, you found him in the room across the hall, now fully remediated and full of scrap lumber and cinder block bookshelves.

"Homer, what the fuck?" you asked blithely, staring at the room.

"You like it?" he asked, grinning. At some point, he'd aquired a pair of shutter-shades and smashed the face off a Wal-Mart Special watch, and stolen a pair of your cheapo work gloves. "Because personally, I like it."

"I'm trying to figure out what it all does." You replied, stepping around the room. A large war-mask stared out at you from the door-wall, and the south face of the room had the window completely torn out and replaced with shutters. In the center of the room, a wire circle had been pounded into the sub-floor, with layers building up from it steadily, before capping off in a large plinth with a non-insignificant amount of your moonstone on it.

"It's a ritual circle and enscribatory plinth." Homer explained, stepping into it. "Basically, I speak a word, and it steals it from a written source somewhere in the room, and transcribes it to another piece of paper."

"So you made a magical Xerox machine, when I could just go to the public library and use theirs."

Homer grinned at you. "If you trust a mundane scanner to handle sixth-dimensional witch-runes or copy over self-destructing recipes, sure. More importantly, it lets me create copies of spellcraft and magery."

You glared at him. "And you know how much spellcraft and magery?"

"Watch and learn." He said, grinning. Taking out a sheet of copy paper, Homer put it on the moonstone and unloaded a box of destroyed books onto a shelf.

"Bortom Svea rikes gränser
Hörs ett kall från ovan jord
Följer kristendomens regler
Offensivens man, soldat i Jesu namn!"

Watching the ruined texts on the shelf start to dissolve into motes of dust, the sheet of copy paper started slowly growing, edges curling as runes started covering the sheet. Homer sure as fuck wasn't speaking English, and like hell those were books in… well it wasn't German, but it was related. Sorta like how housecats and tigers were related, if you squinted.

"In i striden genom ett kulregn, Herrens vilja ske
In i striden går han på led-
Tills han vitögat ser karolinen marscherar fram!
Lade sitt liv i Guds han för sin konung och fosterland
Tills han vitögat ser karolinen marscherar fram!"

The sheet of paper had now started pulling from the ream, and you could feel the same dictum of power that you used to develop a wand last week rip into the working below. Mystic shapes pushed and pulled through the air, auras of power coalescing themselves around the scroll until the pressure was unimaginable. Coreward the motes flew, until the age of the paper reversed itself, becoming pristine velum as the ink scattered and settled. Finishing his narration with an explosive scream, Homer slammed his hands down on the scroll and the shelf of disintegrating books exploded outwards in a flurry of dust and cardboard covers.

Coughing, you felt the energy disperse, before you walked up to the pedestal. "So. What the fuck."

"I made a scroll." He said, grinning. "In this instance… a field-breaker, general purpose. A superimposition of reality onto whatever workings that some dumbass creates."

"I presume this is useful?"

Homer rolled his head, and if he still had eyes they'd be so far back in his skull the pupil would meet his brain. "I literally got blinded by the Familiars explicitly because I made sure they'd need to have a full Witch to create a bounded field. Most Witch-crafts are underpinned by a suspension of an aspect of reality- the behavior of light, the presence of gravity, a system of elements, the dissolution of magnetism… tons of shit. Unless you're willing to pay through the nose, you need a bounded field. Traditionally, you break the anchors to break it, but it's not terribly advanced fieldcraft to be able to hide anchors in the field itself."

"fucking A." you muttered. "Well, we can hawk it to the girls at least."

Homer winced. "Noooot really."

You stared as hard as you could.

"Okay so what if I told you there was a non-zero chance this could kill them?"

The room was void of sound as your glare intensified.

"Alright so there's a lot of ways to make a magical girl," Homer said, pacing. "Which I figured out because holy shit, Trompdoy will not shut up and can hold a conversation across the hotel because magic. Anyway, lots of magical girls use bounded fields with themselves as the anchor. It's how a lot of their tricks work: bottomless pouches, costume changes, superlasers, whatever. There's a non-zero number of Skill type girls though who's skill relies on a field bounded into their bodies. Break that field, and I have no fucking idea what happens next."

"So, in short, you built a magical nuke and we have no way to use it."

"Yeah pretty much."

You sighed. "Great. You can cook, right?"

"Yeah."

"You're cooking for the rest of the week. I need a fucking nap."

-/-/-/-/

It was two days later that you were cleaning up the lobby and something tall, dark, and smirking walked in.

"Evening, Medicine Boy." Ouroboros said, smiling. "A little birdy told me you had a library here now."

"Yep." You said, sighing. This was your life now. Magical girls, bloodstains on your tile lobby floor, and people playing coy.

"Let me guess, you accidentally built something you can't use." She said, smiling. "Because your Scrivener is still learning the ropes and rushed it, and didn't actually do any spell design other than 'fuck everything around me' because spell design is hard."

"A pound of salt for my privacy." You grumbled.

"These days, it would be worth closer to a ton of salt." Ouroboros said, smiling at you before coming over to pat your head. "That's ok though. I'll buy it still."

"How much?" you asked. Moments later, you were holding five dusty old tomes, and a giant scroll.

"Well, we've got here the entire Lesser Key of Solomon in the original languages, mostly Latin, German, and Hebrew because I'm old-fashioned like that; On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians, in the Ancient Greek; a copy of the Dead Sea Scrolls, in English sadly because I didn't have time to hop on over to Rome, and finally two Alchemical Notebooks because I've been frying bigger fish."

"Really." You said, looking at her.

"A magical girl grows in power with her experience, Medicine Boy." Ouroboros said, smiling slightly. "And I have experience dealing with threats older than this order of magi you now call Alchemists."

"Does it count as asking a woman her age when she dangles the question in front of you?" you asked rhetorically, "Since I would hate to start an incident, of course."

"It still counts." Another visitor said. Rose, right? Probably Rose. "Although some people should know better than to do that, right?"

"You take all the fun out of it." Ouroboros said, flopping down across the coffee table. Her dress showed more of her off than it covered at this point, the feathery portions layering themselves across everything but her pale leg and stockings. "I can't even tease the boy properly, he's so young."

"Oh the horror, ye who corrupt the youth." you said, sighing. "HOMER!"

Bumbling out of the library, Homer came into the front room, before you shoved Ouroboros' payment at him. "Nuke scroll, please."

"You're serious?" he said. "That could-"

"Boy." Ouroboros said, sighing. "Look at me."

"I still don't like it-" Homer started, before you moved out of the way. Striding off the coffee table, Ouroboros looked at him, one finger reaching to touch his chest, working it's way up to his chin as she towered over him, pulling him in closer to whisper in his ear.

"子供の頃夢に見てた
古の魔法のように...
光を呼び覚ます
願い"

Shaking out your ear, you didn't pretend to comprehend what Ouroboros had said, but you did rush up to catch Homer as she dropped him.

"She's good." He muttered. "really good. Ooof."

"You understood that?" you asked.

"Listen, there's understanding something, and understanding something." Homer muttered, trying to find his balance and failing. "Fuck, I need a smoke."

"Indeed." Ouroboros said, with a throaty chuckle as she accepted the scroll. Inspecting it, she continued going on. "Swedish? Bold choice, but it works for this. No obvious misandry in the circle, fairly well balanced implementation… oooh. I like your style, kid."

"Medicine, please." Homer begged you. "Don't let her get her hands on me again. I don't know if I can-"

"Give him my regards." Ouroboros said, smiling with a saccharine glint in her eyes. "With this, I'll be off."

As you finally got Homer to stop needing to cling to your arm, Ouroboros turned around in the doorway out, before blowing a kiss at Homer. The effect, even with his back turned, was rather like watching someone get hit by a car as he went down like a sack of bricks.

"REALLY?" you yelled out at her.

"Love you too, kid!" Ouroboros yelled. "Tschuss!"

/-/-/-/-/-

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
[] No, you want to improve your workshop instead.

Spoiler: The Spreadsheet

 

[7734]

Spoiler: Music

Cracking your fingers, you shut the door to your workshop happily and shoveled a pile of dollar-store cleaning products off your desk and into a bin. Another sheet of butcher paper, now, and you could start work on the trinket from Hell- literally, as you tabbed through Homer's cliff notes on the Lesser Key. Working with a string and grease pencil, you started duplicating the assorted demonology signs, before the butcher paper started deforming and warping. Slamming a rod of rebar into it, you laughed as the paper curled around the rod of iron, hissing faintly.

"'Tis a damn tough life, full of toil and strife, we crafter-men must go." you sang, pulling out a basin of holy water and a paintbrush. Flicking the water over it, the devilish insignia and knowledge spat and burned as the outside of the paper became hostile, mirroring their work into the rebar. "And we don't give a damn when the day is done, how hard the fires did blow."

As the paper finally gave up the ghost and turned into a thin, cinder-coated ash, you pulled on a pair of work-gloves and dusted the filth of the remains off the rod, now scarred with demonic symbols inversed in progress. Pulling out a brown paper bag, you scooped the ashes into it, before throwing the holding bag into a Tupperware container you'd painstakingly lined in tinfoil and pentagrams. That aught to hold it for… two weeks tops? Therabouts. The real bastard was having to burn the Tupperware afterwards, but it was a yard sale special you hadn't quite gotten all the mold out of yet, so no major loss. Either way, back to work.

The real trick to building a trinket, as far as you were concerned, was knowing how to take advantage of the mutability of magically sympathetic relationships. Cut a lock of your hair off, and it was still a lock of your hair, and ergo part of you. Demonic sigils weren't nearly so tied, but you still knew they were a part of the source material, and could be manipulated as such to produce a desirable effect.

Speaking of desirable effects, it proabably wouldn't hurt to balance things out a little and get some of that moonstone used up. Knocking a chunk off with your chisel, you went over to your 2x4 vice and clamped it down, before wetting it and getting the 800 grit. It wouldn't be a perfect cabochon, but you'd try to get it knocked down smooth at least. Something favored your efforts, fortunately, so it was only an hour before you could switch up to the 1000 grit, and then 1200 as you brought the top to a shine. Rouge and Tripoli polishes would come next if you had any, but in lieu of that you had shoe polish and Dawn dish soap.

"Will tomorrow ever come? Will I make it through the night?" you sang, smiling as the stone took shape and luster under your cloth. "Will there ever be a place for the broken in the light?"

When the stone was done, you felt happy with its end size of maybe sixty carats. Putting it on the table, you crossed yourself and said a quick Our Father as it sparkled a tad too brightly for the terrible light of the workshop. Going over to light the fire under your magical forge, you made sure it was caught well before you went over to your bins of material. It took a minute for you to find the clockwork, but it wasn't long before you did. You needed an escarpment, a gutted mechanical pocketwatch, and a flat coil spring. Said old pocketwatch had been shot up, but it wasn't like you were keeping it the same size anyway. Gutting it, you arranged the pieces carefully before replacing the escarpment and pulling out an angle grinder to knock the demon-rebar apart with. Once that was done, you dovetailed each piece together, and made a rough diamond frame, from which you suspended the internals in via silver wire and a liberal dose of alcohol. Finally, the moonstone was added by means of a piece of tinplate and a sliding pin: when completed, rather than snapping open like a standard pocketwatch, the face-shield would dip out like a snuff tin.

Smiling as it was all put together, you set it in the forge, before sealing it and lighting the fire higher. As you stoked it up, it almost felt like a punch to the gut as the pull of power flew into the furnace. Trying to wrangle the flow was like guiding a hawser with a single thread, so you tried to find a way to focus. Singing generally worked, and with this much of your good stuff on the line, now was not the time to get creative!

"Oh God of earth and altar, bow down and hear our cry.

Our earthly rulers falter, our people drift and die.

The walls of gold entomb us, the swords of scorn divide.

Take not thy thunder from us, but take away our pride."

How long had you been working at this? It couldn't have been too long, as the sun still came in through your window. The flow of power made your forge glow, the fire a mere bagatelle next to the weight of magic pushing it's way through the system in a heady thrum of the vis of life. Leaning on the wall, you considered your work, and whether or not it was done yet. No, you decided. This wasn't over yet.

"From all that terror teaches, from lies of tongue and pen,

From all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men.

From sale and profanation, of honour and the sword,

From sleep and from damnation, deliver us, good Lord."

The thought of food or drink had crossed your mind, now, sweet and tempting, as the glow of the workplace started dying. Homer had promised to make onion soup, and the girls should have brought something as they increasingly brought their favorites in for keepsafe in your refrigerator. A cold Coke right now, oh, you could sell a soul for it if you didn't know how literal that saying was. When you were done, then. When you were done.

"Tie in a living teather the prince and priest and thrall,

Bind all our lives together, smite and save us all;

In ire and exultation, aflame with faith and free.

Lift up a living nation, a single sword to Thee."

Panting, you felt the flow of energy finally cease. Letting the song end, you went over, pulling on thermal-proof leather gloves as you dug the trinket out. How misguiding a name, for such an item of power. The diamond had become clean-shaped and faceted well, bends of the rebar becoming tooling patterns as the sigil-work became an underlayer only visible in the ghost of a reflection. The moonstone was the same size as before, but now cut and polished professionally and set in a bezel of silver, blending into the work of the front and polish-circles. A hidden button served to open the face, and inside the clockwork had become masterfully gilded, the internals ticking with a warm finality. Three buttons hid at the top right of the frame, right where your thumb would rest once you kicked aside the cover.

A workmen's intuition told you this was the true worth of the trinket. The first was a straight spell focus. Anything a magical girl did, up to and including breathing, would be just better. The second, a shielding ability and second sense for danger. No weapon would surprise, nor blade strike true, nor trap detect her. Finally, and most critically, the third button would stop the time of the clock- and thus, the time of the world. Oh, the magical metaphysics would be hell to explain, and the energy cost would be measured in days of nothingness as the trinket prepared to rend the natural order asunder… but once a week? Eight seconds of liberation from the strictest interpretation of reality.

It was your best work.

You also felt like death warmed over. Grabbing a shaft of rebar to hold yourself up, you thunked across the hall and into bed like a zombie, not even bothering to shut the door before your snores carried to the rest of the hotel. If anyone asked questions, Homer would handle it.

-/-/-/-/

Two days and a leather strap to hold the watch on later, you were sitting in the commissary, looking across the table at a girl in a green skirt, gold blouse, and the stupidest fucking beret you'd ever seen.

"This is Mistletoe?" you asked, squinting at her.

"What, you expect me to bring you some shining and sparkling thing that just walked off the set of Pr*tty C*r*?" Calypso asked, snorting. "Dream on, Medicine Boy."

"Listen, I expected something more homeless, not…" you said, waving your arms around. "all this."

Mistletoe flinched a little as your hands got a tad too close to her face and food. You'd even washed them, c'mon.

"Believe me, it could be so much worse." Calypso grunted. "You owe me one, man. I even gave her first pick of the loot when we kicked over a minor Witch, and she nabbed the Costume Seed!"

"awhat." You grumbled.

"It's a magical preset doohickey that Witches make. Looks sorta like a cotton puff except gem-y, then you magic it, and boom! Costume!"

Considering Calypso was sitting there in a pair of Daisy Dukes and a men's tourist trap T-shirt that read "HAKUNA SOME VODKA" that had either cigarette or bullet holes in it, you could believe it.

"Anyway, welcome to Casa del Chicas Brujas." You said, holding out a hand to shake. "I'm Medicine Boy."

"I'm uh-" Mistletoe said, before Calypso cut her off.

"Remember, don't tell him your real name."

"But you said he was a friend!" she squeaked. "You don't tell friends fake names!"

"You do when they expect it." You said, smiling slightly. "It keeps us safer."

"Then call me… Sofia." Mistletoe said, sighing. "I'll know who you're talking about then, at least.

"Sofia, the Mistletoe." You mussed. "Perfectly acceptable."

"When do you think you'll have more rooms available?"

"Now, if you want." Homer yelled from the kitchen. You felt zero guilt in making him cook, since A, you were still burnt out from Monday, and B, he was actually pretty good at it. Not better than you, of course, but the girls liked it. The fact he couldn't use his Library while you used your Workshop probably didn't hurt.

"You built another room?" you asked.

"Yeah, and I also got Goodyear to pillage an Army Surplus Store on the south side of town that's been abandoned since for-fucking-ever." Homer said, laughing. "All the furniture is OD Green, but why the hell would I care?"

"Which one?"

"Room twelve."

"Awesome." You said, grinning. "Sofia, how do you feel about your ability to pay rent?"

"I'm… uh…" Sofia floundered.

"What she means to say is, she's not sure she can always make rent." Calypso said, frowning. "She's been with me in my squat since Trissa disappeared, but-"

"Trissa disappeared?" you asked.

"Yeah. Hasn't shown up for four days now. I'm getting worried." Calypso said, lips pursed. "If you've got literally anything better than Molotovs and a butter knife, I'll do whatever you want to get it."

"Anything?" you asked, grinning.

"Anything." Calypso said, sighing. "The Alchemists are stepping shit up, and we can't interdict them reliably anymore. With the Witches on the board too… it was only Sofia there being able to guarantee a kill on the leader that let us go in. I have fuck and all to attack with anymore."

Smiling, you pulled out the watch, and held it in front of her.

"This is a four story building." You said, dead serious. "If I give this to you, you're committed to scraping out the second and third floors of shit, and remediating it to where it's useable. It'll probably take you at least a month, nine to five, every day, per floor."

Calypso was literally drooling into her soup.

"Also, anything you have not nailed down at your lair." you added. "You can crash rent-free in one of the rooms once you get it cleared out, but you're still paying normal rates for the facilities."

"Done, done, done." Calypso said. "I'll bring the bag of witchy shit over tonight, and I'll start work on Sunday."

You raised an eyebrow. "Because?"

"Friday night we're going after the Alchemists. Goodyear managed to get us in contact with a team of mixed magical girls and mercs, and we kicked in enough to get them to run LZ security for the job."

You grinned ferally. "Then good hunting."

-/-/-/-/-/

It was three in the morning on Saturday that the girls got back in a shot-up old pickup. Hauling two stretchers out of the back and sliding them to a stop in your lobby, you hissed as you saw the patients. Trompdoy had gotten most of her clothes burned off the left side of her body and several hideous-looking burns, while an unknown and black-clad man was bleeding profusely. Bleeding first.

Ripping open a women's hygiene pad, you professionally shoved it as deep in the gunshot wound as you could. Trying to dig the bullet out was for fools and morons, since the damn thing wasn't gonna hurt him more unless it jiggled around or got infected. We'd burn that bridge when we got to it. Your next step was a patch of glue on top, and then a massive torsion wrap to keep the veins around it pulled tight. Terse orders got him as stable as could be, and it wasn't arterial bleeding so he'd probably pull through.

Trompdoy, the poor gal, was a more complicated job. Aside from a few patches of burned-on plastic clothing that you had to cut off while not taking too much skin off, there just wasn't much you could do about a quarter of her body being covered in second-degree blisters and a few deep third degree burns. God, those were going to suck ass to treat.

"Eowyn." You said, glaring. "She's going to need fluids, lots of 'em. If you can, we need to get some Ringer's solution, about… fuck. At least four, less than six liters. Get more if you can, and some Silvicane too for later."

Eowyn shook her head at you, sighing. "Medicine Boy… how the fuck do you know this?"

"Dad was a veterinarian." you spat back. "Fucking get a move on it, or she'll go into more shock. Pharmacies should have it over the counter."

"Yes, Chief." She said, before diapering.

"Homer!" you yelled. Had to keep moving, keep treading water. "Water, and make a few weak batches of Gatorade, one tenth strength. It ain't the real deal, but it's good enough."

Looking Trompdoy in her pain-shocked eyes, you grit your teeth. This was going to be hell to work her through, but you'd do your best. That was all you had left, these days.

-/-/-/-/

Saturday morning came in like a hangover, probably from the cheep gin you'd used to try and chase away the memory of scrubbing out the third degree burns on Trompdoy's torso. Those were going to be hellishly deep scars. Sitting in the commissary with a look like death, you realized after three cups of coffee that across from you was the mercenary leader from last night.

"Hello, Medicine Boy." He said amicably. Bastard was seventeen at oldest, with a hint of a moustache and the sort of eminently punchable face you hated, complete with off-yellow skin typical of an Italian who didn't get enough sun. "Good work last night, no?"

"Fucking shitshow probably, I don't know." You growled. "Whataya want?"

"To leave a card, and thanks for putting Monroe back together." He said. "My name is Antonio Diovolo, leader of the Gray Skies group. If you're ever looking for work or need to hire some extra help, give us a call. Don't worry about the masquerade, either- everyone knows who we are."

You nodded, and glared at him. Taking his card, you held on to it for a minute, before he finally fucked off and left. Good. It was time for bitterness and coffee, before saving lives and carrying on with the rest of the day. What else was left to hit?

"Fuck." Muttered Eowyn as way of greating, nursing a cup of coffee and a plate of Costco hash browns. Truly, you spared no expense for the successful warriors of old.

"I already know it was a bad night." You groused, before wrapping your hand around the mug and cursing. You'd hit a bad spot, and burned your right… forefinger…

Damn phantom limb bullshit. You didn't even have that finger to burn anymore!

"Well, we burned the alchemists out root and branch, so outside Trompdoy getting blown to shit by a napalm trap, we did pretty good." Eowyn muttered. "So, option for you."

"Oh?"

"Trompdoy and I hauled in as our share of the loot four things. Some kind of cursed sword thing, which you can probably document and scrub up to sell; some grenades of assorted types; and most interestingly, this."

'This' turned out to be a little red stone thrumming with power, which your own machinations told you fuckall about as you stared at it with the sort of piercing gaze known to start drills and send people scattering.

"The fuck is it?" you asked, holding it up to the light. A sanguine light came out the other side, playing across your face and the table as your rotated the cabochon surface between your fingers, frowning slightly. "It's got a lot of power, but for what?"

"We have no idea." Eowyn said, shrugging. "Figure we can try and hawk it off to you, see if it'll cover rent."

"Throw in some cash for Trompdoy's medical expenses, and you could talk me into taking it."

"Great." Eowyn said, sighing. "Swing by my room when you've got the time. Also, do you mind if we replace your furniture?"

"No? I mean, why would I mind?"

"Because I found an IKEA catalog and I want a real fucking bed you cheapskate landlord."

You winced. Yeah. Might want to get on that some day. Not today, since you felt like sloshed shit, but some day.

/-/-/-/-/-
Votes

Eowyn & Trompdoy's Rent
[] Cursed Sword (Will result in a T3 Wand after spending a turn to Research)
[] 5x Alchemist Bombs (Will result in 5x T2 bombs after spending a turn to Research)
[] Strange Red Stone, 5x Mundanes (Will result in ???, which will have 25% odds per item of becoming ??? or a T5 Trinket and 50% odds of becoming 10x Demonic Stuff after spending a turn to Research)

Invite Mistletoe to your Hostel?
[] Yes (Gets Sophia the Mistletoe, a new Magical Girl. May not be able to make rent.)
[] No (No new girls added)

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
[] No, you want to improve your workshop instead.
[] No, you want to research an item instead.

Spoiler: The Spreadsheet

 

[7734]

(AN: This update contains graphic description of medical procedures in the second portion. Viewer discretion is advised)

Spoiler: Music

Sitting in your workshop, you held the cursed blade out at arm's length. Long, meant to take two hale hands to hold, and decorated with a golden hilt and rune carvings on the blade, you felt the power of the curses strike up and down the weapon. This was no mere mortal creation of your own typology, but rather some immortal tool that had been crafted in ages long past where Man had not walked first among the sentient races of the earth. The maeldictum were wrought deep into it's construction, harbringers of evil deeds and horrifying wroth etched into the fuller as deep as the core of the metal itself. A casual scan had horrified you, for each time the weapon was drawn, it was sworn to kill a man before being sheathed again. The fact Eowyn had handed it to you, gold-and-laquere sheath ready to accept the blade, had not been missed by your sense of the power for the weapon. Worse still were the great evil deeds buried deep in the soul of the creation. Kings- many kings- had died on this blade as betrayal forced the hand of those they loved. Goths and Huns had slain each other as they dueled over the fates this blade had warped as it tore through the stream of history.

Now, it sat on your workshop table, emminating evil. Thrice, you would need to break the curses of it before it could be issued. How? Fuck if you knew. Leaning back as you set it down, you heard a mutter coming from the hall behind your workshop.

"Are we really having Sevenfingers help move me in?"

Mistletoe, it had to be. Sofia was too loaded of a name for her now.

"Yes, we're having Medicine Boy help move you in." Calypso said, sighing. "Honestly, I don't know why you're so cold towards him."

"He's charging you an arm and a leg for your amulet! You need that- it's what saved your ass last night!"

Calypso sighed, slumping against the wall. "Sofia. He's running this dump, managing Homer's dumb ass, and still churning out equipment for us at a remarkable rate. More importantly, Medicine Boy isn't just a name, it's a fucking title. Trompdoy got shot to shit three weeks ago, and he managed to get her back online in time for the raid of that hideout! We need that!"

"I didn't have any problems-"

"Because you never had the time to get them!" Calypso yelled. "I've talked to Rose about it enough to know. You think you're doing fine. You're good. It's all going good. Then you take one hit too many, one bruise you can't explain, get locked down. Get ambushed going to school or at work- because they don't care. A swarm of ghouls tries to get you in public, or a vampire hits you from behind. Nobody can protect you anymore, so you try hiding. It doesn't work."

As touching as the conversation was, you had the Shit to Do list and it wasn't quite done yet. "Calypso!" you yelled, digging into a desk drawer quickly for a bottle of mineral oil.

It wasn't long before she was in your workshop, marveling at the gigantic, towering piles of assorted shit you'd been using as ingredients. Tossing her the bottle, you smirked.

"For your trinket, in case it sticks. Also, I need you to sort those neurodes you brought in."

Walking past her as you moved to leave, you leaned in close. "And thanks for taking care of Mistletoe."

"She doesn't like her room much." Calypso replied, leaning in close enough for her lips to brush your ear. "She hasn't cracked yet. If we're lucky, she never will."

Walking out past her, you moved through the corridor like you owned the place because you did own the place and promptly got to your lobby to see a pair of magical girls there sitting in seiza next to a small bottle of something and a well-contained barrel fire.

"Ey!" you yelled, moving forwards angrily. "Not in my fucking lobby!"

"Sorry!" the girls yelled, while you just got a good stout walking stick to hook around the barrel. While they showered you in apologies, you just made sure your building wouldn't burn down.

"Who are you, anyway?" you asked, squinting.

"I, uh, I'm Rose." One of them said. "We met a few weeks ago? I came because I heard about the raid and you might have an item handy for sale?"

"I'm Lappin." The other said, trying to smile and failing. "I just wanted lunch someplace safe."

You nodded. "Well, c'mon in then. It been getting bad out there?"

"More Witches in town, and there's a big one who set up in the forests north of the train line." Lappin said, shivering. "I'm not a city girl, and it's been really bad. I even took a strike team in, but we couldn't do anything."

Squinting, you looked at her. "The train yard's in Midtown, though. What forest north of it?"

"I have no idea." Lappin said, sighing. Leading her to the kitchen and serving up some porridge with bacon, you watched her intently. "All I know is we went into the Moody Woods, hit the Bounded Field of the Witch, and ran like hell. Headed south about three miles and hit the city, quarter mile after that was the trainyard. That's when I found Rose, and-"

"Damnit." You muttered. "Was the trainyard still full of Alchemists?"

"No. Saw signs of a fight, but no Alchemists."

Nodding again, you got your own lunch from the communal pot and everything was silence for a while. Sweet, blissful silence.

"GANGWAY THE HATCHES!" Homer yelled as an explosion rolled out of the Library. "SHE'S GONNA BLOW!"

Dashing out with a fuck on your lips, you watched as a blast of arcane energy threw Homer out of the Library and right on to you as a scroll sat on the plinth inside on fire. Not normal fire, no, this was fucking magical fire, and if your nose was right on the money this was ethereal fire too. Good shit, strong shit, but god damnit Homer!

Gently and firmly picking Homer up by the scruff of his neck, you kindly and politely threw him into a chair to think about what he'd done and get over any arcane energy induced migranes while you dealt with the ethereal fire he'd lit. Once the initial explosion had blasted the shit out of him and therefore done the magical equivalent of throwing a breaker, the scroll of A4 paper had died down to the sort of dull roar you were used to from your furnace.

Wait. You had magically enchanted forever burning paper, and a furnace that always ate heat like a motherfucker.

"Homer!" you yelled, grinning.

"No' now, boss, nearly got it." Homer muttered, punch-drunk from the fact he'd probably lit himself up like a Christmas tree from that stunt. "Soon we can cast Fireball. They'll nae be stoppen us nau."

"Homer, do you think you could do this to a brick?"

"Aye, ah can make tha' brick burn with the ligh' o a sun!" Homer said, grabbing a red solo cup of Flavor-Aide™ and raising it high above his head. "Just as soon as I visit me wee lassie, an' get to… an get too… er, wot came af'er that again?"

You shrugged, Homer shrugged, and the glass spilled and coated him in red goop. It was gonna be one of those days.



-/-/-/-/

Looking at you behind the service counter you'd set up in the lobby, Eowyn handed you a grocery bag full of silvicane, bandages, and clean shop rags.

"I got the stuff." she said, flatly. "Trompdoy's been feeling pretty bad, though. Not sleeping well, and she's starting to smell terrible. That burn wasn't that bad- she should have pulled some healing by now!"

Rifling through the pack, you nodded mildly and grabbed a milk jug of watered-down Gatorade. "The heal time of a burn scales with the affected surface area. A full quarter of her body is gonna eat up time, especially with my slapdash treatment."

Knocking on Trompdoy's door, you heard a muttered 'come in' prompting your entry. Sniffing the air, you sighed quietly. No smell of infection, thank God, but there was a thick reek of bodily odor and a slight smell of raw flesh. Much less good, that. Bundling in, you put the supplies down, before heading back out to get a few five gallon buckets. Filling one with warm water from the shower- prompting a sudden dip in temperature and some mild swearing from Mistletoe and Calypso inside- you went back to Trompdoy's room to get to work.

The first and most important thing to do was to get her clean. As much as you claimed to be a shitty medic, the fact was you spent enough time in the vet clinic so that you could work around most animals. As far as you were concerned, a mammal was a mammal as long as you weren't proscribing medicine. After that, you could start piling on the silver sulfide cream, and covering the burns with teflon-backed bandages so they didn't stick and rip up the new skin forming underneath when you changed them. The extra ten bucks a box would be worth it.

"Tompdoy," you said carefully to the young woman. "How are you doing?"

"T-t-terible." she muttered, spasming a little. "I itched it this morning, and now it's like I'm on fire again. My hands hurt more than they help."

Wincing at the smell, you nodded and pulled out a medical kit you'd been putting together. Tapping out two Benadryl, you handed them over with the jug of Gatorade and beckoned for her to drink.

"The pills should keep the itch down by targeting the histamine reaction." you recited by rote. "Take three after breakfast and one every ninety minutes after until you hit eight pills in a day; then only take them if it starts getting bad. You'll probably fly over the daily limit, but as long as you're not going through the bottle in a week it probably won't turn your liver into swiss cheese."

"Not three to start today?"

You shrugged. "If a lower dose will work, we'll take it. Now take off your shirt."

Eowyn and Trompdoy looked at you like you'd grown a second head. "What."

Holding up one of the shop rags, you sighed. "I can smell the BO from here, and I know a few tricks for washing a bad burn. Now, hoody off."

Eowyn held up a finger, opened her mouth, jiggled her hand around as she thought, and withdrew her objection silently as Trompdoy started to blush.

"I'm not wearing anything under this." she said, staring. "I'm not going to let you get a free look!"

"I'm not fishing for tits, I'm here to make sure you get better in a reasonable timeframe." you replied stiffly. "Besides, if I wanted to get an eyeful, I'd still run the shower instead of making, y'know, the blind guy do it."

"Um, er, well…" Trompdoy replied uncomfortably.

Sighing, you sat on an overturned and empty bucket, deliberately facing away from them. "I'm waiting here."

"I put this on the day after, and well, I can't get it off." Trompdoy said to your back. "If I try, my shoulder crinkles and it hurts, and then I lean forward and my back goes off and then I'm itching and crawling and trying not to yell for a few hours."

You nodded, before turning to face Trompdoy sitting back to you. "I'll have to cut it off, then."

"Okay."

Pulling out your pocketknife, you got to work. The shirt- because it was a shirt, even if it was made of super thick cotton like a hoody- would need to come off wholesale, and since it was Trompdoy's left side that got burned, you decided to work on the right. A little gentle sawing got the collar cut, and then it was fairly easy to work your way down to the bottom hem. A little more sawing, and you could start taking the shirt off.

"Ah! Ow, ow ow oh god it hurts ow!" Trompdoy yelled as you worked the shirt off her, skin crinkling as you swore. Burns oozed, and a lot of the time layers of skin would flake up and off under the burn as things frantically tried to heal. Combine dead skin still attached to live skin at some point and bodily fluid serving as a binder, and you were literally tearing out layers of dead skin by pulling her shirt off.

"Shh, shh, it's ok." you muttered, working the sleeve off as gently as you could. There were only three major areas of third-degree burns, and your early scrub-out looked like they got everything, thank God. Trying to go in with steel wool to get dead flesh out before it potentially turned necrotic had already driven you into drinking your ritual alcohol once, and doing that again would be bad. "Let's get you washed up."

You'd call this a sponge bath, except there wasn't really a sponge. Putting a bucket for Trompdoy to sit on in a tarp basin that led to the room's drain, you started dampening up the shop rags, then coating them gently in soapy water and laying them on the burns. With the nerves so close to the surface, sensation could be strained at best, and sensitive at worse in areas it wasn't gone totally.

"Hothothothothothot" Trompdoy muttered, prompting you to splash more cool water into the rinse bucket. Once her burns were covered, with all of her left arm, side, and a good bit of the front and back of her torso done, you handed Eowyn another soapy rag.

"Well I'm not washing all of her." you stated flatly. "I'm a guy."

"Yeah, I know." she replied, shooting you a stinkeye. "Why do you think I insisted on being here while you did this?"

While Eowyn handled bathing the 3/4 of Trompdoy that wasn't hideously burned, you focused on the bits that were. Friction, of any sort, would be bad, but you did need a little mechanical action to get things moved around, Light pressure- almost nonexistent, just the weight of your hand- was enough, though, and soon enough you could slowly rinse the rags, and through them Trompdoy. One cup of lukewarm water at a time, you worked your way across her side, while your bare feet were covered in the filthy water that slowly worked its way towards the drain.

"So this next part's gonna be interesting." you said, grabbing a beach towel. Wrapping it around your quarter of Trompdoy, you started pat-drying her, while a few non-wet shop rags got used on the rest until you handed Eowyn the towel and worked a rag around the hand and armpit. Once that was done came the medication.

"Feeling better?" Eowyn asked, curious.

Trompdoy tried to smile, before she shivered a little. "Some. I don't smell now, at least."

"That's good." her partner said, while you just smeared the silvidine on a long bandage. Stepping up behind Trompdoy, you explained what you were doing carefully while you got the tape ready.

"So, what I'm going to do is put the burn cream on these bandage pads, and then we're gonna tape 'em down." you said, before gently squishing the affair on. You were starting right on top of her shoulder, and the next pad covered in white goo went closer to her neck, letting you tape the two together and the undamaged skin on the right of her collar. "We're gonna change these every day until you start getting better, and you're getting a bath every day."

"Every day?" Trompdoy asked as you started work on her front. "I thought we only got showers on Wednesday?"

"One, there's enough of y'all that I'm changing that to Tuesday-Thursday because I'm not putting up with BO in my dining room; and two, this is medical. I never skimp on medical."

"Even if it means telling me to rob a pharmacy." Eowyn added unflatteringly.

Trompdoy chuckled a little, making you overlap a bandage by an annoying amount. "I see."

"Yeah." you muttered, glad that the burn stopped above her hip in the front. If you got much lower, the tape arrangements would need to become delicate at best. Next would be the armpit, and wasn't that a job and a half to make work. It took four cuts in a bandage to make it flex well enough, but you could work on the arm after that. "Eowyn, can you handle the baths?"

"I think I can handle them, yeah." the Rider said, chuckling. "She'll owe me one, but it won't be too bad."

"Good, because I got shit to do." you muttered. "As much as I love you two and your consistency in paying rent, it's been nearly twenty minutes of bandage jigsaw here and my hands are getting tired."

"Aw, is the widdle medic getting tired?"

You resisted the urge to yawn, and taped another bandage into place. "First off, last night I had to go yell at Homer for trying to use the Library after curfew because his arcane draw kept waking me up. Second off, yes."

The girls chuckled at you, but you kept at it until the job was done and you could throw a blanket around Trompdoy. Now you could finally go take a damn nap in peace and quiet.

-/-/-/-/

It was Friday before you could finally really get to work on your workshop. The ever-burning materials that Homer had been making had finally gotten formulas laid out, so you could use them in controlled applications instead of just sticking them in old glass jelly jars and putting them in the lobby so you could save on electricity. As your repeat work on Trompdoy and the other girls had shown, though, you needed a way to get the girls enhanced medical care at the drop of the proverbial hat. This in turn meant magical curatives. Being neither pharmacist nor alchemist nor chemically inclined outside the power of our lord and savior nitrogen reactions, you needed to fall back on some hoodoo to get that done.

The end result, once you badgered Calypso into making a Harbor Freight run to get you an anvil, was going to be deferred while you rebuilt your furnace. Originally designed much like a pottery kiln, you came to the sudden and upright realization that you really couldn't actually do a lot with your setup. Sure, you could transmute a piece from it's thaumaturgical base ingredients into a finished project, but after that you were mildly limited. The most annoying part was you could only get one or two bags of cement at a time, since that was the number of girls you had handy and let's face it, most of them were under sixteen and hauling a hundred pound bag of concrete was no small job.

Your new setup was going to be much more efficient, though. With a pair of vacuum cleaner blowers serving as both an upstream pressure source and as a downstream vacuum source (after running the furnace exhaust through an intercooler vessel so you had hot water) cast into the system from the get-go, the new system had a much better forced draft array. Equally importantly, you also shelled out for some plaster-of-paris, which made great ghetto refractory cement so you could be sure the actual cast-in-place ferrocrete parts didn't suffer thermal decomposition.

Yes, it still counted as ferrocrete if you used chickenwire mesh as the reinforcing structure. Honestly, mundane construction made about as much sense as your magical works sometimes.

Once the furnace layer was done, the next step was to build your forge and new ovens. By drawing heat off the lower furnace by way of being directly over it, you could now simultaneously 'cook' a part for later use while building something else, as well as perform magically enhanced hot joinery in your construction. The exhaust and force draft system were different, naturally, but that was a plus in your book. With that all done, you decided to test the system.

To start it, you shoveled in the eternally burning project rejects, some assorted busted-up furnature from the cleanout, and shut the furnace door tight. Then came the pressure fan, whirring up and getting it to all ignite. Good! You could feel the arcane pull, and then you hit up the vacuum fan to really get her going. As the built in thermometer started ticking up higher, you smiled and opened the door to shove in more shit to burn. The new, heavy construction would take about thirty minutes to get up to operating temperatures, but could stay that way for hours. In the meantime, the forge.

This, you couldn't just burn shit in. You needed to use strong material here, since it would intermingle with your work. Thus, a bag of charcoal- not Kingsford, since the fuckers put coal dust in and that would add sulfur you'd need to cook out later- later and you had a lit forge. From there, you pulled out three pieces of rebar, a five pound hammer, and got to work.

The problem, you mused as the hammer strikes rung, was that the eternal flame enchantment as applied to bricks was a slow, low burn; it took one paving stone nearly an hour to boil a gallon of uncovered water. Great for cooking, not so great for crafting. You could work with that, though, since some testing told you that arcane fire tended to make arcane contamination. That, in turn, meant it could enrich materials passively, without your direct influence. Considering the hardest part of making potions or bombs was the enrichment stage?

Yeah, time to get to work building an enrichment stand. As you threw flux into the work, your grin went from ear to ear while your hands slowly started to ache. Controlling a hammer with three fingers was hard; controlling the work with four was harder. Opening a furnace chamber when you figured the first stage was done, you slotted the unfinished three-prong stand while you started wrapping two-liter bottles in tin foil and flux. You managed to fit six of them in the other oven bay- since you now had three, wonder of wonders- and finally pulled out the semifinished stand.

Your new arcane forge had a sense of humor as leaf-tree designs wrapped and twinned around the design, the imperfections of your forge-work melted away into a naturalistic aesthetic. Taking the three hockey-puck sized burners you'd had Homer build earlier and slotting them in, you placed the entire array over the failed heating tile and slotted it all back in to allow the parts to integrate. Meanwhile, pulling out your potion bottles, the plastic had cooked out to get you several… one?... ish liter bottles, which would fit perfectly in your rack once you were done with it.

It was also worth mentioning it no longer felt like you were trying to steer a U-haul truck down I-75 that hadn't been serviced since the Regan administration when doing arcane work, so big plus there! When the potion rack was done, you pulled it out and grinned. This. This was what success looked like, as you filled three bottles up with warm water and let them start percolating.

You now had… free time. That was an odd feeling. Heading to your little-used rec room, you heard a slight cough. Inside, Mistletoe was curled up in one of the beanbag chairs, curled up around a landline you'd hacked in some time ago. God only knew why you'd done it, but it existed and worked.

"Yeah." She muttered. "I just don't know, Chris. I mean, it's a dump, but it's a dump with good people. I keep getting lucky, you know?"

A wah-wah sound came out the other end you couldn't decipher.

"Calypso got out fine. I'm just worried, alright? I know you want in, but it's not worth it. The monkey's paw closes and you get trapped."

More wah-wah.

"No, I didn't! It's just- well, you know! Dad didn't take it well, alright? There was a fight."

Angry wah-wah noises as you slipped in. Mistletoe nearly dropped the phone, before she glared at you and sighed.

"When your dad's a homophobic asshole who thinks you're an abomination against God, yeah. I felt my power there, Chris. I could have put him down like a dog."

You tried not to wince, but you couldn't hide it.

"If he tried to hit me? I would have."

Now the muttering coming out the other end of the headset took on a darker tone.

"Yeah, I know. I love you too. Goodnight, babe."

There was a solid ten minutes as you looked at each other out of the corner of your eyes, before you finally broke the silence by getting a deck of cards. Shuffling it, you looked at Sofia, and sighed.

"So when I got in here initially, I was gonna talk about rent, but after overhearing the end of that I'd rather not." You said cleanly.

"Yeah, I know." Sofia replied, face pinched. "Can I pay weekly?"

You nodded, and she set a mess of bills on the floor before pushing them to you. A hundred bucks, a fat stack of yen, and a mess of pesos. Not too esoteric this time at least.

"You're good." You replied, nodding. Sorting it amnicably and sticking it in your pocket, you looked up as Sofia coughed.

"Do you care?" she asked.

"About the money? Nah." You said, shrugging. "Honestly I'm happy these are all of denominations still in print, and not like a mess of francs again."

"I mean about me being a lesbian."

Sighing, you put your head in a hand. "It's… I don't have an opinion on it? Is that the right way to say it? It doesn't affect me, and I have a dozen other fish to fry. As long as I can sleep at night and the other girls aren't saying you're making problems, I can't really complain."

"Thanks." Sofia muttered. "Well, it's as good as I'll get. If Chris comes-"

"Names!" you interrupted, snapping out. "God's wounds, do you want a Witch to learn that? Their hexes could kill her!"

Sofia recoiled a bit, and shuddered. "I mean… er… Ferra?"

"Better." You groused.

"Ferra's not in a good place." Sofia said, wincing. "Her family is divorcing, and both sides aren't well off. She needs to scram before the state takes her in."

"I'll talk to Homer, probably get him to spruce up a room." You said, sighing. "I need to make something next week, so that'll keep the Library out of commission, and we've still got some time before we need to improve the kitchen again… probably gonna need more help around here at some point… ugh."

"Math?"

"Worse." You groused. "Logistics."

You both shared a threadbare smile, before you grabbed a notebook and started sketching out tables. Things were going to get hectic soon.

/-/-/-/-/-
Votes

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
[] No, you want to improve your workshop instead.
[] No, you want to research an item instead.

Tool Effects:
Potion Stand I: Will automatically build 3x Tier I Bombs per action spent crafting or triple production of higher tier bombs.
Forge: Allows you to forge, increasing the number of other tools you can construct.
Arcane Furnace II: Allows you to work on up to three components to a project simultaneously. Upgrades Workshop Level by 1.

Spoiler: The Spreadsheet

 

[7734]

Spoiler: Music

Picking up the blade in your workshop, you carefully sounded it out with your power. Still hellishly cursed, still liable to try and kill anyone who came into your workshop, still legally able to be lain in sheathe if you needed to. Three curses, each worse than the last lain in it. First, to cause thrice works of great evil and doom among Man. Second, to cause death every time drawn, to the point of madness. Third, to kill the wielder.

No pressure here, none at all. Laying it out on a table, you pulled out the butcher paper, and started drawing. If you analyzed the sword like a wand, then the metal itself was the rod of the tool, while the three curses were core, focus, and binder. The first step, then, would be to unfasten the binder.

The issue was, what was the physical manifestation of the binding? The blade itself was the core, while the ever-sharp and blood-seeking edge was the focus, and the physical metal was the rod. Something that tied it all together- the handle, perhaps? It was worth a shot, and to start you wrapped the blade in a cloth and put it in your vice. You'd need heat to get the golden hilt off, which would in turn call for a tool. Just… urg. You had this furnace here, but this damn sword was throwing off the sort of rage and horror you weren't willing to possibly taint it by using this. A small barrel fire? No, that wouldn't work. Checking a clock, you noted it was nearly ten at night, so you tabled the project for tomorrow morning.

As you awoke, you remembered that the girls mostly did their work at night, where you couldn't see it. Why did you need to remember this?

"AHHH! Anyone, help! They've kidnaped-"

A sharp thud came from the lobby, and you just pulled on your pants sadly. Was this going to be a mess? Survey said yes, but the sound of gunshots going off outside as some cop raided a crack house a few blocks down meant it would be an easily disguised mess. When you reached the commotion, you had to stare at the audacity of it- a chained-up Alchemist in a battered wooly greatcoat that was completely out of season, unwashed green hair, and her nightclothes. A handful of socks served as a new gag, and a faint haze over her eyes showed Trompdoy's influence as the cackling Magical Girl let her mind wander.

"Hey, Medicine Boy! We got you a present!" Eowyn called out raucously. Walking up to her, she presented you with a leather belt, holster, and inside some plastic pistol you didn't recognize. "It came with a free Alchemist attached even!"

Your stare could pierce the heavens. "Why. Literally why."

"Well, we figured you'd appreciate a way to defend the motel…"

"I'm not talking about this-" you said, punctuating it with a wave of the gun belt, "-but rather her."

"You are breaking a curse designed to kill people, Medicine Boy." Trompdoy said, smirking. "We just brought you an emergency sword-sheathing component if something goes wrong."

You raised your nonexistent index finger, fluttered your hand around, and dropped it.

"Put her in the workshop and chain her to a chair or something." You finally sighed. "Presumably, she'll know something about making cursed items, and we can use her to help reverse-engineer this."

"Or kill her?"

Putting your head in your hands, you groaned. "Can we try not to kill people please? It's bad for business and I can't get rid of a corpse."

"Fair enough."

While you got to work making breakfast and Homer got told the Library was Off Limits due to delicate thaumaturgy happening, the Alchemist was transported to your workshop. As much as you dreaded going in, eventually you bit the bullet and opened the door.

Your first thought was that the girls were paranoid. The folding chair they'd used had been chained to a spare bag of concrete, the Alchemist's legs were hobbled, and her hands were locked up in front of her at the wrists and elbows. Worse, they'd thrice wrapped her neck in a chain and tied that to an eyebolt in a floor member for the next story up for when you inevitably needed a block and tackle. They hadn't even removed the gag! Pulling the mess of socks out, you stared at the Alchemist, daring her to open her mouth.

"So." You grumbled. "Have a name?"

It was a moment before she answered. "Scullery Apprentice."

"Really."

She tried to shrug. "I washed the glassware. My brother joined up, dragged me into it. I just did scutwork for them, the lessons never stuck. Sometimes tested a potion?"

You stared at her, practically smelling the falsehood coming off her. "Alright then." you said, grabbing a container of arcane water, and popping the top off. With your back turned to her, you poured in some vodka, a big squeeze of sweet almond extract, a pinch of cardomon, and for added measure you poured out a capful of bleach on to the table. Spinning it idly to mix the ingrediants, you felt an inkling of power whip around the bottle, before going inert at the incomplete mess in the bottle.

"Well then, drink this." You said, grinning maniacly. As the Alchemist smelled the bleach, her face paled a tad.

"Don't you need me alive?" she asked.

"Oh, this won't kill you." You said sweetly, uncorking the bottle and waving it under her nose. One thing not many people mentioned often? Arsenic smelled like sweet almonds, and you just so happened to have a can of rat poison on your desk.

"Are- are you nuts?" the girl yelled, trying to leap away from you on the chair. As she cleared the seat and got choked by the ceiling chain, you smirked. "That's got rat poison in it! You bastard, everyone knows to mask with bleach-"

Your smile was visible from orbit as you gave her the finger and slugged down half the mess. It tasted like shit, but all arcane potions did. "Want to retry your story?"

"…motherfucker." The Alchemist muttered. "Sweet almond?"

"If you didn't smell the bleach you'd have realized it sooner." You said, shrugging. "So I'm going to stick with the presumption you do in fact know what you're doing."

"In which case, fuck you, and yeah. I was part of Sustainment."

Laughing, you looked at the viced-up sword. "I don't suppose you have any hints on cursebreaking?"

"Boyo, I barely even know how we curse shit. Normally they just duplicate something from a master artifact, and presto there we go."

Nodding, you went over to your butcher paper and started scribbling. If it was a duplication, then copy errors would creep in. Going back over to the sword, you went back to thinking. If there were copy errors, they'd probably start cropping up first in minor systems and unrelated programs to the main design functionality.

Time to light the oven and the forge. Going over to the rebar, you quickly selected some short rods, and a few bracket plates to make a small, sword-sized cage. Wrapping it in tin foil liberally, you tossed it in Oven 1: this would become your safety liner for this job. Oven 2, meanwhile, would shortly be dedicated to cooking you a more esoteric gadget, as you got another chunk of the rebar stock and started making parallel loops of #4 wire. You needed a welder to make this really good, but some magical flux would work for the job. To work on this, you needed a sensor you could use while diagraming faults and errors- your diagnostic senses weren't fast enough. Likewise, you'd also need a diagram of elements to fuck around with to control your curse moderation and proliferation, but that could come in a minute. If everything came to plan, you'd stick the sword through the hoops, and oh! Indicator, right, something to indicate… eh, two strings of old-ass Christmas lights would work. Working them through, you blinked when the Alchemist started talking.

"I've never actually seen an Artificer work before." She said, shrugging. "It's intruiging, how you turn junk into tools."

"You ain't seen nothing yet, then." You grinned. Satisfied with your curse-ometer, you threw it in Oven 2 and got to work on the control array. A few planks, some chalked-out dials, and a hot chisel from your forge let you sear the sympathetic array into the boards, before you pinned in the dial needles and slung them in Oven 3.

Since these were diagnostic instruments, the arcane draw wasn't too bad, but when everything was done the rig looked about as shaky as it felt. The sensor held all lights blue for no item, green for no curse, orange for magic, and red for curse with the rest of the rainbow flickering around for reasons undetermined. The gauges on your not-quite-an-Ouija board barely synched up to the sensor, the sympathetic rune trying to code 'purple' as 'bottleneck' for some reason in determining magical flow, and it took nearly an hour to finish the oven cage.

"So walk me through this." The Alchemist said, sighing.

"It's simple." You said, rolling your hands. "I heat up the sword to get all the magic free-floating and disjointed, then I shove it in the sensor while I pick it apart."

"And how are you going to get at the magecraft inside it?"

"Probably an empathetic circle, and if that doesn't work I have detonite ampules and sulfuric acid."

"You mad bastard." The Alchemist said, grinning. "If this kills me, write 'Jocelyn' on my tombstone."

"Great." You grumbled. "Well, I'm gonna get lunch while this heats up."

"Can I get some water?"

"Sure."

Lunch was a quick affair, and true to your word you did bring back a jug of water. Once the sword was heated up through the oven protector, you then set up the cherry blocks in the sensor, and in went the sword. Right off the bat, it was screaming- evil, evil, evil; straight into the detectors. Once the hilt came off, though, and was put straight back in the oven shield to cook down, things started clearing up.

"Okay, so the board is diagnostic only." You muttered. "I'll have to change this manually. Hand me some chopsticks."

You should probably have been concerned that at some point Jocelyn had managed to ditch her hand and arm manacles, but the neck one held firm by dint of the fact you had rebuilt the lock.

"Chopsticks." She said, handing them over. Spitting on the ends, you reached in, feeling the heat of the sword as the curses resisted their undoing. The last curse had been undone, thankfully, but the madness was still in there going strong.

"I need toothpaste, a brush, and a beaker of arcane water."

A minute later the supplies were on the table next to you. Putting the toothpaste on the brush and swirling it in the charged water, you felt it pick up that slight metaphysical oomph you'd need, before sticking it in. If you did this right, you could polish the curse up, without working on the underlying magic.

"oh, fuck." You muttered as the ring went red, two went yellow, one went purple, and your chopstick got the shit blasted out of it. Moving back to the board, you worked the signal noise out, before you grinned.

"We get it?"

"We got the madness it looks like." You said, squinting. "Those evil deeds are in deep."

"Try a metal pick?"

"I need an insulator, not a conductor."

"A metal pick on a stick then."

"Then you lose the connectivity both ways, and it stops picking and starts probing!"

Joselyn blinked, and nodded. "Right, uh…"

"It needs to be sharp…"

Our thoughts hit the same point at the same time. "Glass!"

Rummaging through your drawers for a whiskey bottle, you chucked it in Oven 2 for a minute while you found a string and some vinegar. Once it was warm and in a pan, you put on some thermal gloves with the correct missing fingers and snapped the neck off cleanly, before subdividing the bottle in four. A few minutes of flintknapping later, and you had a workable knife that just needed a little handle duct tape.

Once that was done, you went back to work with a vigor, the glass sinking into the magical matrices of the sword as you pumped power into it. "steady, steady…"

"Readings are good…" Jocelyn muttered. "Still orange across the board… red on four."

"Red on four?" you groused. "I thought four was set?"

"I'm telling you what the board says. I think it's a conditional spool you knocked loose."

"Fuck this…" you muttered, getting a chopstick to poke ring four's spellwork with. As the tip of your probe entered, you gulped. That was a strong arcane pull.

"DUCK!" you yelled, as the sword exploded. As a piece creased your brow and Joselyn screamed, Homer came running in.

The next few minutes were blurry, but apparently the cursebreaking had worked, and blasted the intial enchantment a little too- thus the edges blowing out five fragments on your side and four on Joselyn's. With Homer and you doing first aid, nobody got too badly hurt, and the wand would take a little time in the shop on Friday to fix up for issue.

The real question was what to do with Joselyn, now the proud owner of at least three chunks of potentially cursed magical artifact buried in her thorax cavity. God, that would not be fun to deal with later- but today's work was done.



-/-/-/-/



"This is gonna be so good…" you muttered, salivating at the sight of the giant cardboard box in the lobby. You'd done a little bit of mail-order shopping out of Ye Olde IKEA catalog, and now the fruits of your labor were in front of you! A brand new armchair! It even had a pronounceable name: Muren. Now as you started unboxing and assembly, the girls around you stared.

"So it really is true." Trompdoy muttered from underneath a pair of blankets pinned together into a full cloak. "Men really are driven to have a recliner."

"It's almost hypnotizing." Eowyn added, smirking. "By the way, has anyone seen Calypso?"

"OH GOD THE SPIDERS!" you all heard from upstairs, followed by a thunk and the crystalline tones of magic.

"I'm sure she's fine, but maybe someone should check on her." Mistletoe said, sighing.

The three experienced magical girls looked at each other quickly, and yelled simultaneously the magic words. "Not it!"

Whatever. Your recliner was complete, and it didn't take long for you to curl up in it, sighing happily. This felt good. This felt really good. Reaching down to pet the cat on your lap, you sighed happily as Mistletoe screamed and the sound of a frying pan hitting a floor joist echoed out through the hotel. As the sounds of a Three Stooges routine went off upstairs, you started dozing lightly.

When you woke up, three magical girls were sitting around an electric kettle on foam knee pads trying and failing to sit in seiza next to one young woman wearing a kimono with a… uh, Japanese glaive… nagantina? Naginata? Something like that, anyway.

"When do you think Sevenfingers will get up?" one of them asked, before Rose looked at her and sighed. You could tell it was Rose, since she had both the titular flowers in her hair and the slightly annoyed sigh that one of her minions was saying a dumb.

"Probably after Elise shows up." Rose said, grumbling. "I go to the trouble to drag you guys here, and you know she's always late.

The cat on your chest meowed and batted at your nose, forcing you from 'kind of awake ish' to 'all stations go' as you got up out of your recliner and sighed.

"I'm Medicine Boy." You announced, looking at them. "Y'all need something?"

"Just a handshake." The one in the kimono said, smiling slightly. "You can call me Kaguya."

The cat meowed again, looking like it was going to pounce on her. Moving quickly, you grabbed it by the back of the neck just as it was about to go for her, and squinted. "No. Bad kitty." You explained, before taking Kaguya's hand. Those were delicate hands, yes, but the calluses in them felt earned and earned well.

"Eto… hanabi?" Kaguya muttered, before nodding to herself. "Thank you, Medicine Boy. I will treasure this."

Your eyes narrowed. "Something to do with your ability, I take?"

A slight smile was your reward, before she grinned. "Would you like a demonstration?"

"I wouldn't mind, no."

Walking out into the parking lot outside your lobby doors, Kaguya yawned lazily, before drawing her naginata and spinning it carefully. Two twirls, a low circle spin around herself, and then a pair of upward and downward slashes before she leaped forward into thin air and right out of the same next to you.

"Personal teleportation to a person? Quite impressive."

Kaguya smiled slightly. "I knew Rose from a mutual entanglement which is how I got to America; things over here seem to be much more hectic than at home."

"I can believe it." You nodded politely. "In any case, do you need my services?"

"At present moment, no." Kaguya replied calmly. "However, your title is well-deserved after I met Trompdoy, and there are few who are comfortable working on someone like us. Dr. Ono has a waiting list several months long, and as like as not I am one of the few in my area who can transport a critical case quickly."

You blinked appreciatively. "In which case, I'd offer you a room if any were free right now."

"I must decline. My apprentices, as wayward as they may be," and here a piercing glare met the rest of the girls gathered around the electric kettle, "have graciously arranged to provide reasonable housing until such time as my obligations here are fuffilled."

"Better than my hostel?" you asked, morbidly curious.

"No."

Well that answered that, and you nodded peacefully while the girls behind her tried not to run away screaming from Kaguya's aura.

"In any case, you have free reign of my lobby at present moment." You said kindly. "If you need anything, please, don't be afraid to ask."

"Got any gear yet?" one of the girls asked in badly accented English.

"Not yet." You said, smiling slightly. "I'm working on something big."

Some Japanese swearing met your ear, and Kaguya lazily handled it with a slap upside the head. While she was standing next to you. Truly, she was a senior magical girl, to be able to use that sort of spellcraft so casually!

Soon, the girls departed, and you pet your new cat carefully.

"Well, you won't cause me any trouble at all now, will you?"

"Mjau."

-/-/-/-/

Once you'd recovered from your short bout of Indiana Jones Artifact Reaserch, you got back to the shop and to work. The remains of the cursed shrapnel were sealed up as per normal, while the now-jagged sword had glass filling to cover up the problem areas and a new micarta handle made since the old one melted down into goop.

After you pulled the sword from the oven, you had to whisper to yourself in awe. The shrapnel gaps had been turned into a beautiful glass-coated flamberge pattern, while the new blue handle blended in perfectly. Picking it up, you felt it's power carefully, smiling. Forever preternaturally sharp, forever swung true, and most importantly, capable of interacting with the invisible and unknowable to block ethereal attacks and cut through certain types of spellcraft. That last one would be draining as hell, but to the right girl? It would be priceless.

You could decide who later though. Right now? Still tired, and your recliner still needed to be crashed in.

/-/-/-/-/-

The Joselyn Question
[] Keep her in a cleared-out room: she's not inherently a bad person, and the artifact shrapnel in her could lead to some interesting research possibilities.
[] Throw her out: her work here is done, and quite frankly a lot of the girls here have a professional interest in killing her. Their respect for you only goes so far.
[] Kill her: the only good Alchemist is a dead Alchemist.

Build a Tool
[] Trinket
-[] Write in Level, between 1 and 3.
[] Wand
-[] Write in Level, between 1 and 2.
[] Bomb
-[] Write in Level, between 1 and 1.
[] Costume
-[] Write in Level, between 1 and 1.
[] No, you want to work on your building instead
[] No, you want to improve your workshop instead.

Spoiler: The Spreadsheet

 

[7734]

Spoiler: Music

Finishing lunch with a smirk, you went back to the kitchen and grabbed a cup of coffee. It had been raining most of the week, so not many of the girls were moving around much, giving you freedom to start crafting. As you lit the hearth-flame of the furnace, you sighed and steepled your fingers. You learned a lot from the dissection of the cursed sword, and now the time to apply it was at hand.

The first, and most important thing you'd learned was that it was entirely possible to separate magical tasks into separate components of the wand's physical form, which would presumably work like a block and tackle. Instead of using a hundred feet of rope to pull straight up, subdividing by parts meant that you had two fifty-foot lengths undergoing half the respective load. Theoretically, this would extend the durability and the spell strength of the wand too, but right now you just wanted to get two effects in and working with each other.

Going to your parts bin, you started digging around until you grabbed a full detonite injector. A piece of advanced witch-work, it would serve well as the basis to this wand- once you grabbed a septum and popped the nose open to remove the detonite. Putting the globes of volatile green goo to the side in an old loaf pan, you started whistling as you collapsed the injector's tensioned arms down to their minimal position and started locking them shut. For all that calling them 'Witches' made them sound like magical beasts, many of them managed to work mechanical wonders like detonite injectors, so finely-wrought you were certain that not even a Swiss watchmaker could reliably duplicate the quality.

Once you were done working down the detonite injector, you tossed it in the oven to cook for a little bit while you racked out your potion stand. Three globs of detonite, three potion bottles, of course you were going to do some experimental potionry on the side! Pouring the detonite into the arcane water, you spiked the first one with some baking soda, the second with ammonia, and the last one with the tail end of your Crafting Whiskey. Chucking the empty fifth in your recycling bin, you set the bottles back in the stand, and threw a clump of parsley and lime (not the fruit, the chemical) in the top of the device before pouring a measure of salt into each fire. As bright orange flames shot out, you smirked and let that cook. Back to wand now!

Diving into your collection of holy stuff, you grabbed some of the moonstone for this project, before clamping it down and breaking out your carving chisel and a crayon. For this, you were feeling like a triskelion emblazoned on the breast of a dove, and the drawing came out well enough for your satisfaction. Carving it… well, there were some slips. It happened. Still, with the focus done, you pulled out the detonite injector that had been cooking, and dug into your stash of glass bottles. A set of three wine bottles would be glass donors for this as you treated them well before cutting off their necks and bottoms. Working carefully, you got the hot metal of the injector opened, before sliding in each glass segment to create a mostly-uninterupted core where there'd normally be the globs of detonite. Once that was done, you then needed to go into your Concoctions cabinet, and get a jar of the humors- in this case, black bile. About a liter of it was what you needed, so a little olive oil was used as a thinner, along with two nearly-expired eggs Homer had banished from the kitchen. Reeking faintly of depression and despair, you sighed and put it in the oven to render off some of the more frustrating effects. With that cared for, you could now make a stone-setting for the moonstone cap to the wand. This bit, the fun bit, you could dignify with some song.

"I dig my hole you build a wall

I dig my hole you build a wall

One day that wall is gonna fall"

Once you'd put together a cap-plate and a bezel, a touch of epoxy joined the two without too much ceremony, and from there the moonstone went in. After you taped it down to your anvil, out came the wooden peg and mallet as you got to work on hammering the bezel shut. Repeating the first verse again, you un-taped it, and tossed it in the oven for some warm magical double-checking.

"Gon' build that city on a hill

Gon' build that city on a hill

Some day those tears are gonna spill"

The next step was sealing the joints between the glass segments in the core of the wand body. Going back over to your epoxy, you went over and dumped some powdered glass into it and started mixing it in so that post-cook it would theoretically form a homogeneous container. Hopefully. Probably. To be honest, you were still pretty damn fuzzy as to the arcane synergies of epoxy. While that all set up, you unclipped the bombs from there stand since they had finished percolating, and put them in the oven to finalize in potency. There was a niggling feeling in the back of your head that this was a really suboptimal way to finish charging them, but you had three oven bays and this project had yet to require more than two at a time.

"So build that wall and build it strong cause

We'll be there before too long"

It took about a minute for the epoxy to cure, at which point you pulled the reduced black bile out and dumped it in. Hissing as it hit the bottom of the container, you felt the potential of the various components war with themselves, until the ordering of the device sorted itself out from explosive-with-delivery-system fighting melancholy-brew-that-saps-will into delivery-of-despair that finally won out. Capping the fluid chamber with a bottle-bottom, you kept smearing on epoxy and let the set win out.

"Gon' build that wall up to the sky

Gon' build that wall up to the sky

Some day your bird is gonna fly"

Now came the capstone and focus. Heating up a band of coper wire you'd pulled from the walls, you gauged it ever so carefully before sliding it on top of the affair to serve as a constrictive fastening as it cooled. It wasn't long before you heard the tink and click of contracting metal, and you sighed. Time to finish the song.

"Gon' build that wall until it's done

Gon' build that wall until it's done

But now you've got nowhere to run

So build that wall and build it strong cause

We'll be there before too long"

By the time you were done, the fastening had cooled to the point it was lock-solid, and you could safely put the entire contraption into the oven. Taking a long drink of water, you clapped your hands together once before going to stoke the fire. This would be exhausting, you could tell already. Light-of-the-night-world was a strong concept, and marrying it to delivery-of-despair was a bold move that would need negotiating out. Conceptual ingredients weren't your strong suit, but you'd need to work on it anyway to keep delivering quality work.

"I've come here from nowhere

Across the unforgiving sea.

Drifting further and further

It's all becoming clear to me.

But violent winds are upon us, and I can't sleep

Internal temperatures rising

And all the voices won't recede."

Light and despair were hard concepts to compel to work together, you mused. Despair-to-the-dark would require inverting light; Hope-for-those-without required inverting the despair. Finally, you bit the bullet and prepared for an ugly compromise, by shifting light from the purest moonglow to the piercing ray, while moving despair from a gentle melancholy to a crippling depression. It was easier to get two strong assets to combine together like artificial time and clockwork, so the force of the ray would provide the depressive results. With one last tweak, you barely managed to work in the concept of an aura, a small harkening back to the subtler tones, and then the first stage was done.

"I've finally found what I've been looking for.

A place where I can be without remorse;

Because I am a stranger who has found

An even stranger war

I've finally found what I've been looking for.

Here I come."

The second stage was harder. The detonite injector was willing to accept the ray, but the more gentle dispersion was a much harder sell to make. Still, you worked it in carefully and credibly, fusing the dispersal completely as the main effect solidified. Ray-of-oppression would be a good main effect, you thought, the paralyzing hopelessness and mournful results scarring the mind and piercing the soul. The secondary, though, was softer; aura-of-hope. It was no banner to rally around, but even in the worst of times, there would be something keeping the girls together.

"La chaleur me dérange

Mais c'est le grincement du bateau qui ma réverèe"

Going over to the oven, you hauled it open and reached in to withdraw the wand. Sleek and dark in the center, full of churning liquid and power; with three golden rods holding the cap of light on. The moonstone had vanished, sadly, consumed and eaten entire into the wand, but as you picked it up there was still a triskelion on the cap of the weapon. Hand wrapped around the braided machinery of the grip, you felt a lightening of your heart. It wasn't amazing, in your mind, but you knew with this that there was still a touch of heaven's light that ran through it.

-/-/-/

The next day in the commissary, you smiled and looked at the assembled girls. The room was packed, with your four taking up one table, with Rose, Lappin, that cat, and a girl in a red leather motorcycle jacket. Your mind, still buzzing with arcane residue, recognized it as a magical costume. Limited utility, yes, but whoever had made it was damn good- it would last for fucking years.

"Good news, people!" you yelled. "I got shit to sell!"

Eight sets of eyes turned to you, and one nose in lieu of eyes from Homer behind the counter.

"Behold, new wand!" you yelled, grinning as you held it out. "Anyone got an opening bid?"

Trompdoy and Eowyn both shrugged. "We can do you… uh… not that much." Eowyn said, sighing. "Around six pallets of Alchemist supplies? There's been not a lot of activity lately, and we found more signs of that coven of witches, so this last week's been mostly detective work."

Calypso glared at you. "I'm already in debt, so no. Fuck off."

Mistletoe wiped the drool out of her mouth. "Umm… I have some scrap I picked up out of a summoning circle, and a few artifact-things? Nothing great, but it exists?"

You nodded. Not a great payoff, but as the cat sped out of the room you looked at the strangers. "And you guys?"

"Twenty ounces of 24-karat gold." The girl in red said. "Also, I'm Tanner. Nice to meet'cha."

Rose winced. "Bidding's too rich for my taste. Call me in when something cheaper comes up."

"Thirteen Familiar Chimera corpses, two pints of dragon's blood, six non-Euclidian skulls, twenty pounds of enchanted cinnabar," Lappin said with a waver. "and my services for two weeks. For anything."

"Anything?" you asked, eyes lighting up.

"Anything." She said, shivering a little. "Absolutely anything."

"Great!" you said, smiling. "You can do the morning collections and water distribution. If I sell to you, we can go over your routines later, and you'll start on Sunday."

The three strangers let their mouths fall open. Looking at them, Calypso sighed in the most deadpan voice possible.

"You get used to it."

Behind you, a magical girl barged through your lobby, turned at the junction, and came screaming up behind you in an ill-fitting school uniform covered with stains and a size too small. "Sorry I'm late!" she yelled, before tripping on the shitty hall carpet and faceplanting into the ground at your feet. "I'm Elise."

Picking her almost skeletal form upright and taking her inside, you plopped her at the table and clicked your fingers twice, than three times- food, now, please.

"I heard from my cat you were selling a wand. I have a '67 Camero I can offer in trade, and a shipping container full to the brim of Warsaw Pact military equipment."

The girls stared at her, and Elise stared back. "What? You guys act surprised."

"Where the fuck did you get that! When did you get that?" Tanner asked, almost yelling.

"Ukraine, in '89, and I'm not obligated to tell you anything else." Elise said, smirking. "God, I miss working with Henrietta."

You nodded. "I still need to do some cleaning and polish, so I'll be back in a bit. Sales decisions will be finalized by the weekend."


-/-/-/-/

It had taken a surprisingly small amount of work to make a secured room for Joselyn to stay in, where she was nominally connected to a ring you yourself bolted into a floor stud, with a foot manacle zip-tied to an eight gauge chain. Now, you were coming up with the bolt cutters, and more importantly an employment offer. Entering the room, you found Joselyn sitting on the ground, idly braiding her hair.

"Heya, sparky." She said, sighing. "Make up your mind yet?"

"I've been thinking about it." You said honestly. "As it stands, I don't want to kill you, but I can't let you go."

"Yeah yeah, recruitment at gunpoint works so much better when you have a gun." Joselyn said, sighing. "Really, I thought you would be better at this than the other guys."

"I considered being polite about it."

Joselyn looks at you like you were an idiot drenched in stupid sauce. "I was an Alchemist. Card-carrying, baby-eating, nightmare-inducing Alchemist. You're still in here talking to me? How hard you ring your bell, Sevenfingers?"

You glared at her. "That is not my name."

"Might as well be, mister half-handshake! What, you think a moment of boredom is enough to get me to slip? I helped you because it was funny, and I figured, oh, what the hell, might as well take you down with me!"

The glare intensified. "And you don't want to make up for that? You don't want to try and get better?"

Laughing, Joselyn rolled back. "I have no soul left for you to save, dumbass. Look."

Taking off her pants, or at least as far as she could with the manacle, Joselyn showed you the front of her leg. A long scar slithered up her thigh, covered with ugly stitching and black tissue.

"Exsanguination cut." She explained easily, a dark smile on her face. "They need to suck as much of your blood out as they can before they start replacing bits. Catch your soul up in a ruby, and rack it away for later. If they replace enough bits, well, you've seen Calypso."

"What about Calypso." You asked darkly.

"Oh, you know your literature. Mary Shelly was a real treat, when she gave out the idea for a man made of spare parts and powered by lighting. Technically, a dead end since there's not enough standardization in humans to make it work without masterful interreference, but, well, the old Master of this area was an idiot."

Your eye twitched again. "And what, they'll come rescue you now?"

"Pfft, no." Joselyn said, grinning. "I've got another few days before I get the pangs, a week or two before I kick it after that from represent withdrawl. This isn't a new lease on life, just a chance to die later."

At that, you walked out of the room, and back downstairs. The level of evil, malicious foresight, and institutional knowledge horrified you to your core. Back in your room, you dug around for a package of cigarettes, the brown wrapping paper comfortable in your hands as you searched for a lighter. Growling, you gave up, moving to your workshop to light off a taper in the oven. That done and coffin nail lit, you went out to the lobby pacing. This could be an elaborate ruse, but you weren't so sure. Something was up. Another puff, and you went outside to look at the outside of the building.

"Represent withdrawal" sounded fishy no way you sliced it. Either there was something in her system being repressed, or there was a symptom being controlled. More importantly, there very well could be something else in there that she wasn't telling you because she didn't want you to know, or because she didn't know. Walking around the lot, you stopped. There was a woman outside, looking at you.

"Hello." You said casually, still puffing your smoke.

"Hello, Armorer of Light." The woman said, smiling. "Care to parley?"

You blinked. "Excuse me?"

"You are the Armorer of Light, yes?" the woman asked. Taking a closer look, her dark dress and elbow-length opera gloves started to tickle the back of your brain, before realizing that this bombshell of a woman was trying to talk to you about negotiations.

"I would assume." You said carefully. "I run the hostel, and I do create magical weapons."

"Excellent." The woman said, smiling. "My name is Anna Eriksdotir, and I was chosen as the negotiator for our coven. We wish to evacuate the area in peace, and are willing to barter with you for that right."

"The assumption that I control the girls is a laughable one." You countermanded. "They hunt where they are wont, sleep when they wish, and pay me in the spoils of war."

"A simple shut-down of a week in your services would make it plain that there is a large amount of power you bear." Anna replied. "We depart in five weeks, and if you wish to deliver news as to you and yours' opinions on the matter, you need only step to neutral ground and say my name thrice. I will hear, and arrive as quick as I may."

"Very well then." You said nodding. "Until then."

"Until then, Armorer of Light."

/-/-/-/-/-
Votes

Build a Tool
[] Trinket
-[] Write in Level, between 1 and 3.
[] Wand
-[] Write in Level, between 1 and 2.
[] Bomb
-[] Write in Level, between 1 and 1.
[] Costume
-[] Write in Level, between 1 and 1.
[] No, you want to work on your building instead
[] No, you want to improve your workshop instead.
[] No, you want to research an item instead. (no items to research)

Wand (T2 sale)
[] Tanner the Red (22 Mundane)
[] Lappin the Rabbit (23 Witchy, 2 weeks staff work) (Occupies 1 furnished room at no rent)
[] Trompdoy & Eowyn (4 Gubbins, 12 Spooky, 2 Demonic)
[] Mistletoe (6 Witchy, 10x Minor Artifacts for Reaserch)
[] Elise (16x Gubbins, 1x Major Item)

Autosell Minor Items in the future?
[] Yes
[] No

Spoiler: The Spreadsheet

AN: As Item Creation starts producing more secondary items as part of your workshop gaining efficiency, there are two ways I can handle this. Option one, auto-generated items are automatically sold to highest bidders offscreen. Option two, auto-generated items are not sold automatically, and are held in stockpile for voting on in future rounds unless a State of Emergency occurs and you need to get every MG out in the field with more gear than a stick and a prayer. Since this is a systematic change to the format of this quest, I'm making it a voting item at present since it implied items getting sold every round and therefore a major change to the voting system that will reduce player agency in certain day-to-day plot elements and events.

 

[7734]

Spoiler

After spending two months and change running this madcap hostel for wayward magical girls, you'd gotten used to being woken up in the middle of the night. Really, eight hours of uninterrupted sleep was a rarity now.

"Medicine boy, we got us a fucking problem!"

Such as this fine Monday night, circa three in the morning. Getting up and slipping on a pair of sweatpants and your slippers, you moved over to your front door. Standing in front of it, Calypso grimaced faintly, holding her trinket as it faintly released steam. You could smell the energy wafting off it as she pushed it's power, distorting time in order to buy a few more minutes.

"What are we looking at." You asked brusquely, slinging on a bathrobe.

"Joselyn started vomiting blood and pissing herself, and the piss smells rancid." Calypso explained, tightlipped. "Last time I saw this, the homunculus in question needed four liters of blood transfusion and a new liver booster unit."

"I have duct tape and a bag full of bullshit." you replied, going into your workshop to grab a satchel full of assorted potion ingredients and two shaker cans of paint. "Let's see what we can do."

Heading up the stairs, you hissed. The smell was emanating out past Joselyn's door, and as you opened it up the poor girl let out a sound like she was dying- possibly because she was.

"Go get Homer up, we need hot water as soon as possible." You muttered, pulling out the paint can and spraypainting a pentagram around the puke-filled toilet bucket.

"I am not giving that bitch a bath." Calypso grumbled.

"Neither am I, but we need to get her at least moderately clean before I try and do a chakra realignment."

"A whatsit."

"We need to unfuck her chi."

Calypso stared at you like you'd grown a second head. "You shitting me, Medicine Boy? You've got essences of blood and black bile, just recharge her humors and it'll patch her back up."

You glared at her. "And then in two more days I'll need to dump more blood and bile into her because this is a systematic problem, not a one time thing! Get fucking Homer and some hot water, before I have to tap you as a blood bank!"

"Christ, okay, yeesh." Calypso muttered, before leaving.

With the peanut gallery gone, you got to work cutting off Joselyn's clothes. Aside from the subtle surgical scars and faint covering of sweat and slime, there was nothing outwardly wrong with her. This would take some deeper analysis, so you started painting a circle around her and lighting sticks of incense at the cardinal points of the compass. Muttering out a Hail Mary, you added a second circle and started adding trigrams to it. Everything you'd seen was evidence of a fundamental imbalance, which meant digging in to find it. These rough and ready field diagnostics wouldn't tell you much, but it would be a start.

A moan and shift in posture threw out an arm towards Lake, and you groaned. Liver problem. Right, fuck. Going into your satchel, you dug around for a chakra guide. Manipura would be your best guess at what to whale on, before you grabbed a bag of lead fishing weights. Setting them on Joselyn's solar plexus, you watched her breathing hitch before she rolled over to puke again. A faint sniff told you that blood was both caustic beyond that of normal bile, and more importantly smelled of decay. Once you checked her throat was clear, you rolled Jocelyn back over and replaced the pressure on her Manipura chakra.

If you were to restore or boost power of the liver, you'd need to find something to supliment it at some point. Herbal medicine wasn't your strong suit, but a bottle of arcane water might be enough to get some energy into her system? Worth a shot. As you slowly fed her the reagent, her leg started twitching, and you felt something start to hew back towards normal.

"I got Homer and some water." Calypso yelled from the door. "Is it safe to come in?"

"About as safe as it's gonna get, yeah." You called back. "Just splash her down while I think about how I'm gonna fix this. Her blood's kinda acidic, and I'm probably going to need to infuse some humors after all."

"Told you she needed some black bile." Calypso muttered.

"I'm actually thinking phlegm and yellow bile." You replied, stroking your brow. "You don't fix a liver problem with black bile."

"Eh, what do I know? Not like I had to live with the sons of bitches who invented this."

"You'd be surprised." You muttered. "After all, who said they were trying to heal their creations?"

Calyspo shut up, and you made sure Joselyn was clean. Once that was done, you went over to the waste bucket, and glared. That was some fucking toxic waste right there, and if you didn't pitch it posthaste it would probably eat through the bucket, floor, and room below.

"Right, mission planning." You declared. "Calypso, get Sofia up and have her sit watch. I'm gonna get that yellow bile. Homer, hit the books; we need to get her liver fixed before it starts a cascading failure. We need to fix this."

"I can't see why you're dumping so much work into her." Calypso said, glaring at you. "She's just a fucking Alchemist. Let her die."

"Everyone deserves a second chance, Calypso." You replied. "If you can have one, why not her?"

"Because I never had a first one."

-/-/-/

The next morning, you woke up, got to the kitchen to turn the warmers on, synthesized some yellow bile, and had breakfast. Rose, Lapin, and Kaguya were sitting in the commissary, while Eowyn and Trompdoy were looking morose at Reheat of Porridge. With Homer hitting the books all night, you'd had to skimp on breakfast prep, and this week was going to be the first dip in food quality in quite a while.

"Right, so." You said, gesturing to them all once you were done eating. "Gather 'round, I got shit to sell."

Your paired magical girls just looked at you, sighed, and and tossed you a purse full of buffalo dollar coins. "Rent?" you asked.

"Yeah, rent. That's two hundred Buffalo Dollar coins, which are pretty much the closest thing to a recognized magical currency right now." Eowyn said, sighing. "Sorry about missing last week, by the way."

"Late rent is no skin off my nose." You said back, shrugging. "Not sticking around for the bidding?"

"I don't trust that cursed sword none, and after you picked up Misteltoe's bid, it's like what we offer matters." Trompdoy said without heat. "When you want us to have something, ask."

"How about some potions?" you asked. "I've got three healing-ish ones ready to go."

"Sure." Trompdoy said, trying not to move her scarred arm too much. "We found another giant-ass moonstone; does that sound good?"

"Done." You replied. "Drop it off in my room later, and I'll get you the potions."

As those two left, Rose looked hopefully at you. "A formerly cursed sword?"

"Yes, a now-not-cursed sword."

"I'll trade you five of my special rosebushes, and six hundred gallons of Agent Orange for it." Rose said confidentially.

Everyone in the room stared at her. "How the fuck did you find six hundred gallons of Agent Orange." You asked, mildly horrified.

"Found it in an old tanker car I was gonna turn into a shelter." Rose said unashamedly. "In other news, I might also start boarding here because my last place got burned down."

"Right well we'll talk about that later." You sighed. "Other bids?"

"One million yen, and one small favor." Kaguya said, smiling faintly. "An… IOU is the correct expression?.. from one such as myself is quite valuable, although not a tradeable commodity."

"Same as last time." Lapin said, sadly. "Not much time to do stuff with all the training going on."

"And you act like you're not stronger for it?" Kaguya asked, attentions changing like a whip. "Such a deficient rabbit like you needed some hard work to learn her trade. Even a pale imitation of myself should shine brighter."

"Yes, Sensei." Lappin said, dejected.

Sighing, you went back to your workshop. You had to plan shit out.

-/-/-/

After you figured out that a daily infusion of yellow bile kept Joselyn stable enough, it was Thursday by the time you finally decided it was time to step up your medical game. The longer you were here, the more weird shit crossed your desk, which meant spending time figuring out how it all interacted. Your gut was strong, but it wasn't strong enough to reliably plan for complex item interactions. You needed a test chamber, a place to perform hermitic experiments safely. Cracking your knuckles, you grabbed your china crayons, and headed over across the hallway.

As above, so below. That was the maxim every Hermetic lived with, and it applied across the fabric of the world. While you were no initiate to that cult of mystery, even their public information was valuable and rang true to your own work in mystical artistry. The Alchemists took this one step further with the creation of their Homunculi, a simplified human that they could work on as a microscopic test they could abort. You would, unfortunately, need to dip into that same playbook in order to solve this problem of their causing- to restore function to Joselyn, you'd need to create a duplicate of her malproper organs and experiment in the curative means of solving her problem.

That would come later, though, as you went back to your workshop to get some paper to test the spells you had come up with. Floor circle and Ceiling circle checked out reasonably well, and you only needed to correct two symbols, but East Wall Circle had to have half a dozen mirrored variants compared to West Wall Circle, and your Sun Circle around the boarded up window to the south was inconsistent as hell.

By the time you were finished, it was dinner time, and after that was sleep.

-/-/-/-/

It took four days to fully finish the laboratory, and after that was moving Rose in. Since some of her garden plants could help you synthesize humors, she currently paid rent in those plant products at a rate of one bushel of synthesis ingredients per week, which roughly worked out to one and one-fifth liters of assorted humors a week.

Equally importantly, Joselyn's condition had stabilized and improved slightly, prompting you to head up to her room. Her complexion had steadily been worsening, by now a jaudinced yellow, and her hair was flat and brittle. Sunken eyes with a thin film on them stared at you, and the beach recliner that someone had brought her served as an impersonal chaise lounge for this meeting.

"Well, I see you didn't listen." She rasped, looking at you. "I can barely walk to the toilet, now. You've got maybe four more days before the bone fever starts."

"I can tell things are degrading, yes." You said calmly. "I think I can fix you, though, with some time investment and some more permanent modifications. It shouldn't need to be surgical, since most of the problems root from poor bodily restructuring and that can be solved thaumaturgically."

Joselyn sat, and her face went through a number of transformations. "One condition."

"Yes?"

"If this goes wrong, you get that gun, you put it up to my head, and you blow my fucking brains out." Joselyn said. "My fall will not go before your pride."

"Are you sure?"

"My headstone will read: here lies Joselyn Krazowstanskislaw, death her most peaceful repose. You will put it on a hill, and underneath it my body will sit in a lead lined coffin so whatever damnfool digger finds it next doesn't open it up and have my offgas kill him."

Finally, you nodded. It was time to go down to the laboratory, and get to work.

/-/-/-/-
Votes

Josylen's Condition
This is a project that will take all week, and will replace the normal Crafting action due to the scale of the operation.
[]: [HEAL] With no effort or fund spared. It was your decision to save her life and keep her here, and you will see it through. (cost: 15 Witchy, 4 Demonic, 4 Holy, 1 Gubbin)
[]: [HEAL] To the best extent your limited resources may, you'll fix this damn problem. (cost: 10 Witchy, 2 Demonic, 2 Holy, 2 Mundane)
[]: [HEAL] You're no proper miracle-worker, but you've done some right proper bullshit before. You can stop this. (cost: 5 Witchy, 1 Demonic, 1 Holy)
[]: [HEAL] Theoretically, this will be textbook, and you're not going to wing it with something this delicate. (cost: 2 Witchy, 6 Mundane)

Wand Sale (T3)
[] [SALE] Lappin the Rabbit (23 Witchy, 2 weeks staff work) (Occupies 1 furnished room at no rent)
[] [SALE] Kaguya the Lunar Rabbit (20 Mundane, 1 IOU)
[] [SALE] Rose the Entangling (5x Witchy, 35x Demonic, 35x Spooky) (warning: some danger in transportation of payment)

Spoiler: The Spreadsheet

Minor Items Sold
3x T1 bombs: Eowyn & Trompdoy @6 Holy total

AN: Yes, this vote is to determine how much power you want to invest into Joselyn. Choose wisely.