The spell goes as planned.

After what felt like a dozen rollercoaster rides condensed into two seconds, Helen was aware that she was in the staff room at the leisure centre and sitting at her desk. She went to move but her body wouldn't listen to her.

'I guess I need to put the drone to sleep before I retake control,' Helen thought. The 'drone' spell, as Helen thought of it, was the new spell she had learnt before leaving for work. It created a temporary soul that could inhabit bodies when their actual soul had been put to sleep or removed. The 'drone' soul would behave based on what it picked up from its host body's memories. Helen's rendezvous with Adam at the café was partially for fun, but also so Helen could see how the drone would work.

Helen sensed the temporary soul's presence in her body and sent it to sleep as the spellbook had instructed. Immediately she felt herself regain control of her body much to her delight. Next, she focused on combining the drone's memories with her own. The two hours or so that the drone had controlled her body flashed within her mind's eye. Nothing of any note happened and all her duties were performed as they should have been. Satisfied with this, Helen carried on with the remainder of her shift.

________________________________________

As Helen pulled her car into the driveway she realised that she could barely remember the drive home. She had spent the entire journey fantasising about how she was going to use the book's powers next. Her first experience using the drone spell had convinced her that she could leave it to look after her body whilst she had fun elsewhere. After parking and leaving the car, Helen had to stop herself from dashing inside to go to her spellbook. She didn't want the neighbours to wonder what she was up to. Once inside the house, Helen had no such fears.

Helen dashed through her 'after-work' ritual as quickly as she could to give herself as much time alone with the book before Adam got home. Giddy with excitement, Helen opened the spellbook. Deciphering the spells was almost like a puzzle. There appeared to be more spells than she could count and most of them were impossible to make sense of. But as Helen managed to decode each spell, learning the next one always seemed easier.

After refinding the astral projection spell, Helen turned to the next page. "Guillotine spell," the witch in training read, her pulse quickening as she realised she could make out the words. Reading on, Helen gleaned that the spell allowed the user to remove someone's head without killing them. If she removed the heads of two people she could reattach them to the opposite body.

"That could be interesting," Helen said to herself, already imagining what she could do with this new spell. Reading on a little further, she discovered a modified version of the spell that would swap the user's head with their targets without the need to pull the heads off manually. There was even a way to make the target, and the rest of the world, think they had always had their new body beneath their head. Helen went to read further but was disrupted by the sound of the doorbell.

Quickly memorising the latter spell, Helen went to the bedroom window to see if whoever was at the door had a body worth stealing.