Something Something Witches (Part 1)

While hanging around an area for the express purpose of watching teenage girls seems morally reprehensible. That was because it is and always will be excluding a very limited number of situations. Victor just so happened to run into one of them: they were in way over their heads and would not realize it until the guillotine was already falling. They needed someone there to stop the blade.

Now while he usually wasn't one to help others without anything in it for him, this gave him the opportunity to work on a project he had been meaning to get to, the collection of various faults for Black Gold. Black Gold was a collection of a series of essences that he referred to as faults or flaws. They in general work on a principle that any imperfection restricts the flow of magical energy.

An extremely common version of this is earth essence in metal that weakens nearly all properties of the essence. Conceptual Weaving allowed him to extract a very special essence instead of standard earth essence in this situation, metal insulating essence. This essence provides great defense against all things metal. When you gather the faults of everything you get the perfect defense against anything and everything. Now that goal was a long way away in both quantity of Black Gold and collection of essences, but you know what they say about journeys and steps.

This vacation was the first time since the start of his journey that he was staying in one place and had very little to do. The previous world required him to gather food and water and this one was full of hunting for adventure and materials. All he had to do was to keep an eye on the budding coven, which he could easily do with the pigeon golems he sent to observe the girls that were connected to magic screens he constructed using light essence.

The next several weeks consisted of seeing the sights, collecting any faults he was missing, and keeping tabs on the children. The cracks were starting to show in the illusions of control they had about their respective situations. Each had gotten so wrapped up in their own situations, they grew apart from one another and lost one of the most important things one needed when going down a bad path, an outsider's perspective.

Cassandra was starting to see the effects of the Champion's Medal, a name he learned from skimming their magic cheat sheet. What the girls did not realize about the talisman was that it was unusually cheap to produce. This reduction in price stemmed from where it got those extra physical and mental attributes. They stemmed not from the production materials, but from the user's surroundings.

This had two very major side effects: the first is that it's dark magic due to its negative effects on others which when used without care darkens the soul and brings out the worst in the user. The second stems from an intentional property of the medal, it also takes in the "competitor's" aggression to literally suck the motivation of them and give it to the user to push them onward. These two effects compound off each other making Cassandra a landmine just waiting for someone to set her off.

So focused was she on her own glory, she ignored her friends' struggles.

The person who had the misfortune of proverbially stepping on said mine was the star field hockey player on Cassandra's rival team, Missy. You see Missy had enough aggression and vitality to stave off the effects of Cassandra's medal for most of the game. She had spent said time showing Cassandra up. This culminated in Missy tackling her. Cassandra proceeded to get up and attempt to cave the young woman's skull in. The only reason she failed was that both teams saw what was about to happen and held her back in time. With time Cassandra cooled off and realized what she had almost done. After her realization, her face turned ghost white, and she ran off the field. When she got home after her impromptu jog she dug through her stuff and found the business card she had been given all those weeks ago.

When she dialed the number, Victor who was keeping an eye on the situation picked up right away and told her to meet him in the lobby of his hotel to talk about the situation.

Sapphire had a seed of darkness implanted in her soul. These were quite common when beginners worked with curses as they did not learn that while emotions strengthen curses, they also infect those very emotions. This problem is easily solved by even the most basic of purification rituals that most are taught to perform on themselves and their workspace after working with magic to prevent earlier work from contaminating later projects and prevent long term buildup of effects. This is especially true for dark magic as it's particularly contaminating.

They also can also be resolved naturally when they're as small as hers by the natural release of emotions. Unfortunately, the young woman learned early on in life that anger and/or tears won't help her and will only make her situation worse. As a result, she naturally bottles up her emotions, which is unhealthy in the best of circumstances, but is especially troubling when a seed of darkness is placed in the bottle.

The seed fed on all those years of anger, fear, hatred, and sadness. It blossomed within her and started to skew her perceptions of reality. It turned everything darker in her eyes. Accidents turned into deliberate malevolence nearly causing a fight when a classmate accidently spilled their juice on her shoes. Her friends' preoccupation with their own situations morphed into betrayal, leading her to ignore their own troubles. Where once she saw the world as full of potential allies and the possibility for help, she now saw it as cold, dark, and callous which lead to further isolation. Most critical was that all those emotions turned to venom in her soul just waiting for the chance to be injected into another's veins.

That venom slowly led her down a path she would never have otherwise ventured. It started with seeing her father flinch when she passed him in the hallway at home. When she saw that she could almost swear she could hear her world view shatter. She truly looked at her father for the first time in what seemed like her entire life and was disgusted and contemptuous of both him and her former self. He was an unshaven, unwashed, unkempt, and a small man in every meaning of the term. She could not believe she was ever afraid of the man.

This led to insults and intimidation. What used to be her chores turned into his. What used to be her having to carefully watch every step in her own home turned into him having to. What had once been her being torn down at every opportunity turned into his debasement.

This reached a boiling point the night of the big game. Sapphire had decided to skip her friend's triumph as she no longer saw her as that. What set her off was the fact that her father spilled a glass of water at the dinner table. Unluckily for everyone involved there was no one there to hold her back from him unlike with her classmate. What started as a slap turned into beating him the ground which led to her taking out all her rage in the form of repeatedly kicking the man while he was down. When she looked down at him cowering while having blood from a cut on his forehead run down his face, she finally realized what she had done, what she had become. In that moment the seed of darkness that bloomed previously withered away leaving in its place a confused and scared little girl.

She immediately ran to the bathroom and started vomiting in the toilet. After she cleaned herself up as best as she could, she ran to pick up her phone and looked at the picture she happened to take of that FBI agent's business card. He told her the location of his hotel and asked her to meet him in the lobby.