((many thanks to Mallory for writing this with me!))

07/08/2018
The Lyceum

Draughts of fire-breath were perhaps the most volatile potions the witch had ever concocted, and soon after receiving a fresh supply of rare Arctic herbs from Kabuki Street's far northern associates, she had six freshly brewed vials laid carefully on a thick cloth on the counter, which shimmered with faint black runes meant to absorb and suppress fire. She had dressed with the intent to put out a mystical aura, with bangles and beaded bracelets and a heavily laden necklace that chimed musically as they shifted, many of her tattoos bared by her black crop top and the slits in her long crimson skirt...

But she didn't seem focused on her aura at all. Her eyes were rolled back, using her Sight to examine the magical potential contained within the vial, and how the subtle enchantments on the glass itself held it in. The warm orange glow of the liquid within was visible even from the front door, filtering through all of the cluttered shelves and the low, dusty light.

Saila had no rational explanation for how she'd ended up here. In fact, she had no solid handle on where here even was -- she'd turned a corner blindly in her haste to make an exit before she was seen, before there could be questions. She'd run like a wild thing, like a wolf, driven by pure instinct. When she'd run far enough, something like intuition brought her up short, her forward momentum halting on a dime as she caught the handle of a doorknob and let herself inside.

Her strange eyes were squeezed closed as she took a handful of seconds to breathe, to assess her situation. She didn't need to open them to know that there was magic here, a lot of magic here, and underneath its heady current was a signature she knew. Lashes still sealed tight, her face nonetheless turned towards Mallory. It took a moment or two more to separate the witch from the vials she was contemplating, to tell where one energy source ended and the other began. Blinking rapidly, several times in succession, eventually the scene came into focus more clearly.

She'd found... Mallory? Well. That was interesting.

She knew the witch primarily from her relationship with the gear head Eri, but of course she'd seen her around Panacea more than a dozen times, too. Perhaps that's what drove her forward, that premade association with a so-called Safe Place, combined with a certain amount of fearless curiosity. Steps carried her closer, one booted foot in front of the other, towards the counter. She didn't touch anything, but not for lack of wanting to -- long, ringed fingers were bundled into the pockets of her shorts for safe keeping. "....Uh. Hi."

Mallory turned to stare at Saila with ghastly white eyes... then her gaze leveled out, and she blinked green eyes slowly as she refocused. "Saila." She set the potion aside, carefully, next to the others, and took a few steps away from the counter. Her jewelry rattled when she moved. "Welcome to the Lyceum -- my shop." Her smile was friendly, but there was a stillness to it, a slight uncertainty to her expression and body language as she searched Saila's for signs of what had hurried her steps and quickened her breaths before she arrived here, of what seemed to worry her so much.

"...Are you alright?" she ventured slowly.

"Yeah, I just um...." Saila was alright. She was always alright. Confused, though. "I... um. I didn't expect to end up here is all..." She took a second, better look around at just what here even was, mulling the explanation Mallory had given her. "Wait, this is your place? You got one of your own?" Her expression lit up then, her bizarrely ill-paired eyes dancing with genuine enthusiasm at this news. "That's awesome! Congratulations. Has it been open long?"

The why of her arrival here was maybe falling into place. She took another cautious step closer.

For the middle of summer, the purple haired teen was strangely dressed. She wore black on black as ever, black shorts with black thigh - high socks that disappeared into black boots laced with fat, satiny purple ribbons. It was the top half that was strange, the way she'd covered herself entirely from the base of her chin all the way over her silver painted fingertips, draped in the thick, oversized folds of someone else's midnight black hoodie. It was an odd garment choice for the sweltering heat, but she didn't make any moves to relieve herself of her covering apparel. Not yet, anyway. "I--I'm sorry, did I interrupt you?"

Given Mallory's own history with self-esteem problems, being all covered up in bad summer heat was a very familiar red flag...

"Thanks," she said, as a shimmering red humanoid shape emerged from somewhere behind the pentagonal counter to carefully collect the vials and put them away. "It's only been open for -- three weeks, now? And you weren't interrupting anything. We're open. Is there... something I can help you with?"

It was almost the same tone as she last question she'd asked the teen, and it was hard not to notice when you were being scrutinized by a blood witch.

She'd noticed, but then Saila had spent a lot of her relatively short life being scrutinized. More than she knew, even. She was surprisingly un-self conscious under the appraisal, seeming to make space for it, to give the other woman time to make her assessments. Simultaneously weighing a decision of her own, her eyes tracked the movement of that red shape. Pulling one hand from her pockets, she drew a mostly obscured fingertip thoughtfully along the closest edge of the counter.

It was there Mallory might have seen it, the way a phosphorescent glow seemed to emanate from the sleeve of the hoodie, reflecting back in ethereal whispers of color against the counter.

Arriving at a decision, the teen May Queen squared her shoulders, lifting her hand to her throat. She dipped her fingers into the neck of the hoodie, reaching underneath the heavy, gently curled lengths of traffic stopping violet to unhook a clasp along the back of her neck. Pulling the milky green, teardrop shaped amulet from underneath the hoodie, she laid it carefully on the counter. "Do you think you can help me replenish this?"

Mallory stared at the phosphorescent glow of her finger dragging along the counter, then at the similarly colored amulet that -- even without her Sight, the whiff of smoke and ozone that she got off of it told her it was busted. The witch took a long moment to stare at the invisible threads wound around Saila, and the way so many were being pulled in towards her. She blew out a slow breath, then curled her tongue against her teeth as she considered...

"Saila... don't take this the wrong way, but... can you take three steps back?" The witch looked over her shoulder at a shelf of moldering old books, many of them enchanted, and added, "and a little to your left? And stay there."

It was the furthest Saila could get from anything sensitive without leaving the shop.

"Not my secret," she answered immediately, as if that explained anything at all. Shaking her head, the purple haired girl smiled and tried again. "Which is to say that no, I will never tell anyone about this room."

Watching the other woman approach, her eyes followed the other's progress intently. Her eyes were strange. Even among those with heterochromia, there was usually some seepage of colors between the two. Not so for Saila, her eyes were two distinct eyes as jarringly dissimilar from one another as could be. Almost like they belonged in two different faces, or like they had two different purposes. Her gaze flicked to the swinging amulet and back.

"It's.... hm. I've come a long, long way since I first started figuring out how to manage it," she replied after giving it a moment's thought. "I guess the right answer is 'yes', but I have learned to shut it down like....ninety percent of the time. "

"And can you do that right now?" The Frankenstein-like nature of Saila's eyes was not lost on the witch, but like the many hows and whys of her powers, she was filing that away for another time.

Again, she took a second to formulate her answer. Saila wasn't stupid and -- despite constant accusations to the contrary-- not particularly slow, either, but she'd learned to be careful with her words, to feel them out for veracity and intent before she spoke them. "I can do it, yeah. But without the amulet, it's a lot harder. It's...." Her brows furrowed, fingers flaring at her sides in a little pinwheel of motion that sent light dancing over the floor. A softer, quieter night club. "It's a focus point for me, I guess? He made it with my blood, gives me an anchor to hold on to when I start to get overwhelmed. It also...I guess it prevents me from metabolizing what I absorb so quickly? S'why it can cover my...whatever this is." The tip of her head indicated the considerable artwork on display.

"And the artwork represents the... magic you've absorbed?" The witch lifted her chin, scrutinizing what she could see of it, and then she began removing trinkets. One by one, she dropped them into the palm of her left hand, and each of them sank quickly into a little well of blood there. Everything except for Saila's amulet.

To this, the teen nodded readily. "I didn't have any to begin with. A lot of them showed up at first, every day, seems like there were five or six more. Then I started learning how to control it, and... now it only happens when there's an extremely powerful transfer between me and... something." There was one piece in particular, currently clearly visible, that wasn't a spell or word at all. In bright, livid red there was the outline of a necklace at her neck, its chain woven into her skin, the silhouette of a small bird nestled in the hollow of her throat. It was like the burn out image that danced behind your eyes after a flashbulb went off in your face, a negative space impression of an object that might once have been there. It was the newest, and brightest, of the images on her skin. "Like the last time it happened was ....last summer, I think."

Mallory nodded slowly, and her head dipped in thought at everything Saila had told her, and what the implications were. "My magic is mostly... done by rote. It's bound by rules, it can be slow and meticulous work, and it can be... very, very dangerous."

Since the necklace was still swinging, she merely pulled it up into her right hand. "I can recharge this, right now -- it'll take me about an hour... but it's a band-aid. You need something that doesn't need recharging... ideally, something that you can be weaned off of. But that will also take instruction. We'll have to be careful. The way magic behaves around you... if you absorbed something of mine, you could twist and mold flesh or conjure something terrible -- so if this is something you want to do, we must take precautions and I must have complete control... but, the offer stands," she said, opening her hand to Saila.

No, not as a handshake. Getting that close to her right now would be a very bad idea. But still, an open offer.

She was aware, of course, of the things that Mallory had been doing. That really interesting trick of putting things into her own hand hadn't gone unnoticed, not by a long shot, but it didn't seem like the right time to ask a million questions about it either. "Yeah," she agreed with a subtle dip of her softly pointed chin in a nod. "It was only ever meant to be a band-aid. I used to be in lessons...." Saila trailed off, listening intently to the offer as it was made.

Complete control. Saila considered it, though something in the words that were spoken itched along the back of her skull. She swallowed. It wasn't fear that made her hesitate -- for better or worse (usually considerably for the worse), the teen was incapable of fear. "Okay," she said finally. "But nothing like this comes free, so... " Somewhere, someone would doubtlessly be proud of her for learning that lesson. "What do you want in exchange?"

“Magical consultation and enchanting like this isn’t cheap,” she admitted, making a bit of a face at that as she moved away to one of the three chests, searching for ritual components. The necklace still needed to be recharged. “Even this? Just the initial consultation and recharging the necklace? About one hundred silver. And it’d be twelve silver for each hour of lessons... and quite a **** lot to commission a custom enchantment that I’d have to research. Maybe a thousand. That’s if we do money.”

Doing some rapid mental tallying, Saila's expression remained unchanged: curious, but otherwise neutral. If it was more money than she had, she didn't give any indication one way or the other. "And if we don't?" A wry smile touched her lips as she thought of the favor she owed to her previous teacher.

Mallory thinned her lips. “I don’t want to put you in a bad position. Fiends, fae... I’ve had to strike those kinds of bargains, and that’s not what I want to do to you. But,” she added, as she extracted a large jar of crimson salt, “trouble has a way of finding me... I find myself needing trouble to fight it... and you look like you can be a lot of trouble,” she said, looking over her shoulder with her eyebrows raised at Saila.

“No offense. From one to another.”

Her smile spread. Trouble was a good word for what she could be, based on everything she'd learned -- and unlearned-- so far. "Fair. But what you're asking is not... undaunting. Then again, neither is what I want." She weighed it a second or two longer. "Tell you what. I'll pay you in silver for your time today, and the necklace of course," her slight weight shifted from one booted foot to the other. "And lemme think about the rest?"

“Deal,” Mallory agreed readily. “Now... let’s work on getting you back out into the world,” and hissed a breath as she slipped a knife across her palm and the necklace clattered to the floor, now soaked in her blood...