a wizard unearthed

[cry_me_a]

Alli did not take her older sister's departure well. Jess bolted right for the door as soon as she turned eighteen, and Alli misses her and wants her to come back. She wrote, for a while, then even that petered out. It doesn't feel like home without her sister, in Alli's opinion. She's bitter and sulky at her mother for weeks (okay, months) and her mother just wrings her hands helplessly and gives her space. Jess was always the one who knew how to calm her down.

But now Alli is older. It's been a whole three years since Jess left and Alli is fine. Really. She's just going through boxes of Jess' old stuff again to see if she can use any of it. There's got to be a jacket that will fit her in here somewhere, it's starting to get cold out.

She's going through a box that's part clothes, part books and part mostly-unrecognizable hair care products when one of the book titles catches her eye. So You Want To Be a Wizard? That sounds awfully fantastic for Jess' usual style, and it doesn't even have a half naked couple on the cover. Curious what convinced her sister to branch out, Alli opens up the book.

Two hours later, she's still there reading it, and she's torn between skepticism and cackling with glee. She hears her mother calling her down for dinner, so she quickly reads the section at the beginning marked Wizard's Oath, tucks the book into her nightstand and goes downstairs to grab food.

What's she got to lose?

Comments

[intricate_engineer]

"Would your mom notice if I went and grabbed it?"

[cry_me_a]

"Nah. There's a second door from the kitchen into the hall, you don't even need to go past her."

[intricate_engineer]

"Ok, cool."
Glen goes to grab it.
A few second later she returns lugging the microwave with it's cord trailing behind her.

[cry_me_a]

"You know, when I found the book I totally pictured weird shit happening to me? But I gotta say, intelligent microwaves was not actually on the list."

[intricate_engineer]

Glen drops the microwave onto the table and stretches.
"That thing is heavy. I have no idea if this will work, but wouldn't it be so cool if it did?"

[cry_me_a]

"Insanely cool! Unless it goes Skynet. Then it would still be cool but I would be dead." She grabs an oak leaf from her pile. "Okay, found all my shit, let's do this."

[intricate_engineer]

"Well then I won't give it an internet connection!"
<Hi microwave.>
<I'm a microwave!>

[cry_me_a]

<You are totally a microwave,> Alli agrees, amused. "Good luck, Glen."

And she starts working on the spell. There's a lot of sketching of Speech characters, and her handwriting isn't great even in English; she has to focus. When she's finally done she puts maple leaves in their corners of the diagram and then waits for Glen to have a moment free from her microwave. A sanity check on her handwriting seems like a good idea, before she starts reading things.

[intricate_engineer]

"It isn't working. It just keeps saying <I'm a microwave>. Are you having any better luck?"

[cry_me_a]

"Well, in its defense, it's definitely a microwave." Alli gestures at the floor. "I wrote way too much shit on the floor and put the things where things are supposed to go. Can you look it over? I'd rather not find out it's wrong halfway through reading it."

[intricate_engineer]

"Sure."
Glen leans down to look at it.
"Everything looks right to me, but I'm not an expert either."