Vanessa

Vanessa shivered, despite the warm, midday sun. That shop was easily the creepiest place she'd ever set foot in. That being said, a lot of the odds and ends sitting on display looked pretty cool, if not exactly functional.

Like this cool new wand she had! Well, cool new stick, was more like it. A pretty stick, certainly, a deep, reddish-brown wood covered in intricately curves and swirling patterns. But, now that she had it, it felt like little more than a fancy twig to put on another shelf somewhere. Magic? Hardly. But pretty!

Vanessa sighed, shrugged, and placed the wand into her purse. "Ah, well", she thought, "Guess that killed some time." She had entered the place bored, and left it slightly less so, so no harm done.

Walking further down the city streets, she found a coffee shop, grabbed a quick drink, and grabbed a seat outside, twiddling her new purchase between her fingers.

"Weird looking thing..." She muttered to herself. The wood was weirdly shiny, now that she looked at it again, not just that it had been polished. It seemed to glow ever so slightly, lighting up the dark interior of her bag; at first glance she thought she had gotten a text or something, but no, it was coming from the stick.

"Some sort of glow in the dark... Paint? Polish?" As Vanessa kept turning it over, she started to feel a strange tightness in her chest, pins and needles stretching down from under her ribs, up to her shoulder, and down through her arms to her fingers. She took in a sharp breath; not just due to this strange sensation, but to the fact that the wand was definitely glowing now, light coursing along the etched patterns along the wooden rod. She held the breath for a moment, then another, and then, as she exhaled...

A spiderweb thin, almost invisible beam of light went firing out of the wand's tip, towards a blond woman who was sitting a table over from Vanessa, and hit straight into the woman's coffee cup. The light settled o the cup for a split second, soaked in, before the cup disappeared entirely! Vanessa's eyes went wide in shock and wonderment; the woman across from her had her eyes go wide because instead taking of a sip of mocha, she had been doused in it, soaking into her white (now brown and slightly see through) blouse.

As the woman ran inside in search of napkins, Vanessa marveled over the object in her hand.

"You're definitely not just a neat looking stick, huh?" She whispered.