Route 1: A start in Spellcraft

While exploring around mystic image boards, you one day come across a forum of supposed witches who, due to the increased publicity their world is getting, have bravely or foolishly decided to post about their magicks on a public forum, where everyone can see it. Either by ignorance, laziness, or simply staff no longer being available to police the website, a roughly made PDF of a spellbook made it out onto the site proper, with several people commenting on it.

You download a copy, checking it quickly with an antivirus program just to be sure you didn’t just download some malware, and open it up. Inside are chapters upon chapters of how to cast spells.

“Hey Carrie, take a look at this!” You turn your laptop towards her one Saturday morning.

Shes wearing red fuzzy pajama pants and a form hugging t-shirt as she looks up from her breakfast of Granola, Fruit, and Yogurt, peering closely at the screen. She makes a face and goes back to her food a moment later.

“Yeah I’ve heard the news, and I’m not surprised stuff like this is leaking. Honestly though, I know some of this is real, but it doesn’t seem like something to be messed with.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well….So this is a going to sound a bit cliche but, I have this relative on my mothers side of the family who’s a bit of a kook and has always been into mysticism.”

“I think every family has that one brothers, aunts, uncles, step mother whose hair stylist is a fortune teller.” You chuckle.

She rolls her eyes and scoops another spoonful of yogurt into her mouth before continuing. “Well this kook actually could do some weird stuff. Her name was Aunty Maud, and she was the family mystic. She was always getting into a row with some of the more ‘intellectually inclined’ members of my family. Like this one time at Christmas, she spent nearly a hour trying to convince my cousin, who was studying for a degree in theoretical physics that other planes of existence existed.” She bent over laughing and then coughing.

You move around the countertop and Pat her on the back until it stops.

“I think I just got Yogurt up my nose!” She says half crying and laughing. “You should have seen them! My aunt pulls out a bunch of crystals and tries to contact another plane of existence and my cousins pulls out a black board from nowhere(?) and starts writing math gibberish to prove or disprove my aunts claims. It went on for so long mom had to distract them with food to get them both to stop ‘acting like children arguing make believe rules in a preschool playroom’. Aunty Maud was always fun to be around!”

You give her a few moments to finish reminiscing about how her cousin routinely made a point to try and argue with the woman every chance he got about magic, even though he ended up switching his major in college because he only studied Theoretical Physics because it made him look smart.

“So what’s this have to do with not messing with magic?” You asked, scrolling through the electronic spell book. Everything was written in plain English, although the penmanship and spelling were atrocious.

“…OK wait here a second.”

She goes to the bedroom and you wait in the kitchen, puzzles at exactly what was going on. You move the laptop back to you and continue sifting around in it, making note of several interesting spells. A few minutes later, she comes back with a cookie tin and sets it down on the counter.

“When I was maybe 10, she showed me how to read crystals and gave me a set for my birthday. Mom didn’t want me playing with something weird like that, so she threw them out. However, somehow aunty managed to get them back and gave them to me when I was 16. She said they weren’t some weird trinket, and that they could be used to ‘receive’ information from spirits.”

Your girlfriend goes to the cabinets and grabs 3 bowls. She sets up one of those cheesy ‘Guess wheres the object under the bowl!’ games with a strawberry serving as the moving target.

“Move these around and don’t tell me where the strawberry is.” She turns her back to you.

Humoring her, you move some of the bowls around and pretend to move the strawberry around.

“Alright, which one is it under.”

She turns back around and looks at the bowls. Opening the cookie tin, from it she extracts a bundle of leather that when unrolled reveals a set of different colored crystals, all bearing markings of some sort.

She rolls them into the tin, taking note of each stone and looks back to you.

“None, you took it out from under the bowl.”

Grinning, you reach into your pocket and pull out the strawberry, swirling it around in her yogurt and granola. Before popping it in your mouth with.

She grins and shrugs before going back to her breakfast. “It’s a party trick Daniel! Nothing more. All this talk about magic on the news is interesting, but nothing more.”

“I disagree. This could be a fun little opportunity!” As you go diving through the pdf document, looking for something.

“What do you mean?”

“Sooo you know how you asked me if there was any dirty little unfulfilled sexy fantasies I had?”

“Yeah…” she said uncertain where you were going with this.

“Well…”

With great gusto and excitement, you turn the screen back around and show her the spell you have picked out.