Be the cursed shop owner you want to see in the world

Waking up next to a lovely lady was certainly the best way to start your day, Mina noted to herself as she stretched out in Abby's bed. After an afternoon spent "acquiring" replacements for her destroyed belongings, they had settled down for a quiet evening of brainstorming ideas over chinese food and video games. Mina didn't want to burn out on sex so soon. She did have plans for a radical shift in direction for her store's future she was setting in motion today, after all. A future filled with hot goth sluts, if she had anything to do with it.

Abby was just heading out for her jog by the time Mina swung out of bed. With the controller powered off she was free to move as she pleased, though the antennae remained stuck to her head despite their best efforts to remove it. Abby was planning on spinning it to her viewers as part of her 'brand'. Of course Mina was already planning on using it to mess with her during one of her streams, but she figured the poor girl could use at least one day off before resuming her role as Mina's helpless toy.

Mina wanted an early start today, so she would have more time to recover from her inevitable headache by the time customers began to show up. She had some serious cursing to do, after all. After a rushed breakfast, she changed into her 'uniform' of a black tank top and skirt combo, with a pastel pink heart spray painted on the torso. These were accompanied by elbow length black fingerless lace gloves, a tight black choker, black and pink thigh socks, and knee high platform boots studded with buckles and straps.

No careless drivers emerged from the early morning fog to prematurely end her trip to her store on this occasion. She felt a twinge of something akin to regret as she passed the ruins of the cairn, but otherwise the trip was uneventful. Gothic Glitz was a small storefront wedged between a book store and a rather decent italian bakery. It was pretty much how she left it; towering shelves lining the walls stuffed with t-shirts and accessories, mannequins and display stands arranged around the open sales floor to showcase the more ornate dresses and ensembles, a couple of short aisles dedicated to the variety of stompy goth boots she loved, and a small room offset from the main floor as her tailoring 'department'. Most of the stuff was her own design but mass produced in a factory that dealt with smaller fashion businesses like hers. A few of the more ornate outfits were hand made by herself, and whenever one of those custom numbers was sold she could breathe easy without having to worry about bills for a couple months. It was never super busy, as there wasn't a ton of goth fashion enthusiasts in town, though she usually had a sudden boom around Halloween for the obvious reason. She had a few faithful regulars from the local punk bar that were probably wondering about her long absence. But Mina predicted that business would be picking up rather soon.

Abby had been the one to point out the obvious fact that the mental threads might have some effect on literal threads. Mina had experimented with that a bit the night before with her sewing kit. By concentrating while holding a needle, she had been able to stitch spectral threads onto a scrap cloth in a simple spiral pattern. Merely holding it up in front of Abby's eyes had dropped her into a light trance, for as long as she held eye contact. It was a trade off, sparing her mental agony in exchange for physical labor, but with the added bonus that the magical effect would be permanent as long as the stitches held.

She had already figured out a couple of shortcuts. Enchanting a needle to have it sew by itself was easy. Cursing her home sewing machine had taken a bit more out of her but, being able to program patterns into it and have it stitch by itself meant she could churn out spell-cursed cloth like, well, a machine. With her multiple sewing machines at Gothic Glitz, it would be a veritable assembly line of cursed clothing with minimum physical effort on her part. All she had to do was take the base article of clothing, stitch a few curses into it, and that was that.

Of course the most important thing was getting customers in the store in the first place. Standing out on the sidewalk hypnotizing every passing person could be fun for a bit, but she had something much more simple and effective in mind. It took only a few minutes for her enchanted sewing machines to whip up a banner reading, "Grand Re-opening Sale! Come in Today for a Free Goth Makeover! " She could feel the hypnotic suggestion radiating from the fabric as she hung it up over the front door. It made her want to rush in and ask for a makeover herself, even though she was already goth. She could only imagine what it would do to someone more susceptible to her abilities.

With her sewing machines hard at work creating her cursed wares, she flipped over the sign on her front door to "Open", took a seat behind the counter, and waited for the first victim to drop in.