After waking up and magicking your way through the morning you check your schedule. Whoever decided that world history should be taught at 8:30 in the morning was an idiot. It's bad enough trying to be interested in learning history when it's so very general and fast-paced but to have it early enough in the morning that everyone's bleary-eyed makes it that much worse.
Offsetting that is the neat fact that you're one apparition and a five minute walk from class. Honestly it takes you more time to attempt (and finally succeed) in transfiguring a teacup into a thermos for your tea that actually getting to class on time. You're still not sure it's a true thermos because you don't think you can transfigure a vacuum, but you're cheating by using a warming charm anyhow.
You stroll in to class a full five minutes before the start and find only a couple of girls who you've never made the acquaintance of sitting towards one side and a long-haired Latino-looking guy front and center. You exchange nods with the guy and sit down near the front and start pulling out your notebook. The rest of the class trickles in with Derek giving you a wave in passing before finding a seat.
The class itself isn't anything to write home about. There's very little discussion and little detail given that the class is supposed to cover more than two thousand years of history. Your note-taking is simple and concise and honestly you could probably regurgitate the basic gist of the lecture even if you might differ in some of the word choices.
Your next class isn't for almost an hour, so once everyone stampedes for the exits you take your time packing up and sip at your tea instead. A soft groan from your left draws your attention and you look over to see a bloodshot brown eye staring at your thermos. The girl had drug herself in at the last minute and laid slumped on the tiny armrest-sized desk the entire time. You figured she was asleep, but even if she had been, the noise of everyone leaving apparently awakened her.
"It's tea, not coffee." You comment mildly. You murmur legilimens under your breath and push a bit to try and establish a connection. You don't quite get a full connection, but a few feelings pass from her eye to yours and you get empathetic twinges of the hangover she's feeling right now. Passing the container to her, she pulls her straight dark hair out of her face, shakes a couple of painkillers out of a bottle and chugs most of your remaining drink. At least she has the good sense to look sheepish as she passes you your drink back.
"Sorry," she rasps. Her skin is pale and she squints when light reflects off of the whiteboard at the front of the class. "I guess trying to run to class made the hangover worse." She blinks a couple of times and meets your eyes, freezing for a moment before offering a pained smile. "I'm Sarah."
"James," you give her an amused smile back and stand. "I've always found that if I'm gonna drink that I block out most of the next morning for recovery. Running was probably a bad idea, yeah."
Sarah looks disgruntled at the comment but perks up a bit when you pick her backpack up and offer it to her. She's a little shaky standing up and you fear she would have tipped over if she had to do it herself.
"Have you eaten anything yet?"
"No?"
You sigh and gesture her towards the door. "Did you at least drink a bunch of water before you went to bed?" At her very soft head shake and wince you don't bother to hold back the sigh. "It's like you've never had a hangover before."
"I haven't?"
Oh, she's one of those up-talkers? That could be really annoying?
"You should get some food and a lot of water in you and then go back to sleep if you don't have any tests today." You have the time to get her to the cafeteria and maybe even cast a pain-relief spell on her surreptitiously, but do you really want to take the time?
[X][Sarah] Walk her to the cafeteria, make sure she eats, chat.
[X][Sarah] Walk her to the cafeteria, make sure she eats, try using healing magic on her.
[X][Sarah] Point her in the direction of the cafeteria, leave.
[X][Sarah] Walk her to her dorm instead of the cafeteria.
Spoiler: Result of Vote
Your next class isn't so much a class as a study session for Macro where there's a TA to take your work and answer questions. You walk in early to find that Derek is sitting and talking with a couple of students. He waves you over and immediately asks if you've heard what the Merchants were up to last night. When you say you haven't, he shows you a PHO post of multiple security cameras merged together.
"All eight locations were hit at the same time—that's crazy for the Merchants, they generally couldn't hit one thing correctly."
You hand his phone back. "And the stealth fields? I know she's a Tinker and all, but…"
"She's a vehicle tinker, or something like it," one of the guys, Vijay points out, "and she's made cloaked things before, but only one at a time. This is unprecedented."
"I think Skidmark was holding her back," Derek says bluntly. "He was arrested what, four days ago? And now instead of some crazy tinker-tank that'll end up blowing itself up there's at least ten stealthed truck things that worked perfectly. If that's what she's capable of, the Merchants are going to be pretty dangerous."
"I had gone to Lord's Market on Sunday and was walking back when I heard what sounded like a big diesel truck pass near me, but I didn't see anything," you say. "There wasn't any traffic on any of the streets I could see. Wonder if it was one of those stealth things."
Both Vijay and Derek look interested, but Miss Najjar the TA calls everyone to attention. You turn in your report at the end of class and chat a bit more with both guys before finding a quiet spot to pop back to your apartment for lunch and a bit of magical study.
While you eat you hold your wand in your palm and use the Four-Point spell to point north. Using your wand as a compass isn't hugely useful at the moment but the idea behind making a simple spell to tell you information is something that you might be able to hack in the future. You switch over to practicing the Super-sensory Charm instead, using your Occlumency and increased cognition from the mind arts to slowly get used to the sheer amount of information bombarding you. It's not something you'd want to leave up for any major amount of time—you can smell the pigeon shit from the roof of the building next door and the open dumpster in the alleyway—but the enhanced vision and hearing may end up being useful.
Cleaning up and finishing the few questions you had for history, you get back in 'costume' then apparate over to the three-story warehouse that you finally decided on for a main base.
Instead of setting up wards immediately, you wander the area casting Homenum Revelio to make sure there aren't any hidden people that you didn't detect with your mind sense. Once you're sure it's clear you dig through the rubble piles nearby until you stumble upon a huge chunk of pink granite. It was probably an old surface plate from a machine shop, but it'll work excellently when divided into smaller chunks for wardstones. Maybe too well, really, you'll save this for permanent wards once you have a bit more experience. You levitate that back to your lair and come back to the same pile for some stone that looks like it was the facade of a building.
Back at the warehouse, you get some decent experience with Reparo to get the broken front door fixed. The large rolling metal doors on the back also need a shot of repair in order to roll smoothly. You close both sets and lock them with a Colloportus.
Taking your stone up to the second floor where there are some rooms, you pull out your reference materials and work on making some simple wardstones to get started. You don't know quite enough to put up Hogwarts-worthly wards quite yet, so simple will have to do. The combined rune schema for muggle-repelling, notice-me-not, and intruder-detection is laid out in the book, so it's easy enough to copy on to the stone, if a bit time consuming. With the notice-me-not included a vertical boundary needs to be established, so you end up carving eight copies and breaking open the roof access in order to place the top stones. The spellcasting and tying it to the wardstones is the first time that magic has actually felt like work to you, leaving you hungry and somewhat tired. The wards feel strong, though and you feel them in the back of your mind, just like you feel the wards on your apartment telling you that everything is undisturbed.
Wednesday's classes don't start until almost 10, so you sleep in a bit and check the news. No major gang violence, although a couple of postings on PHO mention some weird noises coming from the western parts of the Trainyard. Skidmark is supposedly still on the Rig and arraignment has been pushed back for some reason. Speculation is that he's in the middle of meth withdrawal and probably unresponsive.
After your morning math class you spend some time in your lair cleaning out old debris and practicing detection spells. You don't know if you could call them charms, it seemed to be more like divination, but some searching through the trunk had come up with some spells that could be tailored into searching for things—like 'guns' or 'cars' or 'marijuana'. Well, actually you ended up having to refer to a primer dealing with spell modification and hacking the Four-Point spell to point to the nearest concentration of a previously-cast spell. It wasn't great, but otherwise casting a spell to find 'a gun' went absolutely apeshit and returned way too many pings.
After that bit of magic practice you head back to campus for afternoon classes. You're pretty early to Parahuman Sociology (or 'cape 101' as everyone seems to call it) and have your pick of seats. You sit and cast the wide-band legilimency spell and watch people trickle in. Crystal—Laserdream—wanders in talking to a couple of people before noticing you and flashing embarrassment for a moment. She ends up taking a seat next to you and meticulously arranging her notebook and pen before turning to you.
"Uh, hey. I want to apologize for the other day, my cousin is…" she trails off with a twist of her cupid's bow lips.
You shrug. "It was just annoying really. Is she like that all the time?"
Crystal's shoulders relax a bit. "Yes."
"Get that a lot?" you ask.
"Yeah, sometimes it feels like I'm her moth-" she breaks off as her cousin floats into the room, her aura high enough to pull the attention of almost everyone. As soon as Victoria looks her way she makes a couple of hand gestures while blaring embarrassment and anger. Glory Girl reins in her aura and settles to the floor, looking away and flushing a bit. Crystal turns away from you and busies herself by taking her headband off and fixing her hair. When she turns back she looks mortified and starts to say something when Victoria arrives.
"Hey, sorry Crissy, I got distracted." Victoria says, pausing as she puts her stuff down and looks between the two of you. She shoots her cousin a raised eyebrow and a little smirk before turning to you. Her aura ratchets up a few notches and she float-hops forward almost putting herself between your desks. "Victoria Dallon, you can call me Vicky."
Crystal is broadcasting a fiery death in her cousin's direction. Class is going to start in a moment, so if you have anything to say, best say it now.
[X][GG] "James Peverell, pleased to meet you." (Be polite)
[X][GG] "The name's James. Crystal and I were already talking" (Slightly less polite)
[X][GG] "I'm fully aware of who you are." (Be impolite)
[X][GG] Look at Crystal, "And you're sure you're related?"
[X][GG] Give Vicky the evil-eye and stay silent.
Spoiler: Result of Vote
Crystal literally drags Vicky off after class, the younger girl floating as her cousin pulls her along. You'd offer a jaunty wave but neither girl looks back so you shrug and find a nice sheltered spot to apparate to your warehouse. You've decided that's the safer option, since it has the muggle-repelling charm on it. You'll need to test and see if capes qualify as muggles or not at some point.
By Friday you've cleared the warehouse out and gotten to be a dab hand at cleaning and repairing. A number of the windows have been repaired outright, and you've gotten practice on summoning glass shards and transfiguring them into fixed panes. All of the second and third floor windows are fixed, with the first-floor fanlights over the doors being transfigured into matching stone. You're actually getting a bit better at Transfiguration in general, having taken some time while you were fixing things to practice small inanimate-to-inanimate transfigurations.
Derek has also invited you to a party just off campus later in the evening, apparently some frat or frat adjacent thing.
[X][Party] Attend the party.
[X][Party] Don't attend the party.
AN: I need practice at writing big sweeps of time. The lack of characters to interact with is kind of an issue as well. While I'm glad you chose college instead of high school, being at Winslow would have kept me from having to invent people whole cloth, and you probably would have fully mind-controlled at least one of the Trio by now.
So, you have acquired a lair—you'll get a small bonus for accomplishing it (vote below). There will be similar bonii when other firsts for the quest happen.
As you're flipping through the warding book a scrap of paper falls out with a wizarding ad stating "If you've been enjoying learning how to ward your home, try learning how to enchant items! Try Kwick-and-Dirty Enchanting for Fun and Profit!" To your amazement, summoning the book from the book compartment actually works. You do a bit of reading and manage to get the basics of the simple enchanting it describes down with a minimum of fuss. It really is the very basics—you're not going to be creating a vanishing cabinet, much less the Sorting Hat—but you should be able to make one-shot enchanted items as well as shield hats or rings or the like.
-=-=-
As you're getting ready for the party you go digging through the clothes section of your trunk. The skin-contact thing with your wand worked pretty well with some of the spells you used you'd like to find a second wand holster so you can switch arms your wand is in. You manage to find not only a holster with a cut-out that will grant skin contact to the entire length of the wand, but a box of wands that's dusty enough to come out of Ollivander's shop. You wave a couple of them around and manage sparks from all of them, but only get more than a twinkle or two from a short, reddish-brown wand that shoots a great gout of sparks and nestles securely in the new holster.
You meet up with Derek at his dorm and are quickly introduced to his roommate and some of the other people going including Thor, his RA. Thor lives up to his namesake as a burly reddish-blonde dude with long hair and a braided beard. He's a hell of lot more chill than his Edda counterpart though, offering you a beer to pregame a bit and explaining that the house the party's at is about three blocks off of campus, not frat-related but in an area that rents to frats.
Everyone heads out around ten or so, walking as a group and joined by some of Derek's cousins and Vijay. Erica wanders over and gives you a nod, her sunglasses missing for once and her hair in a very emo-looking swoop over one eye. You head off campus in what ends up being the opposite direction from your apartment and show up only to get waved in immediately by one of the guys standing out front.
Like you'd expect most parties the music is loud and people are everywhere on both floors and the backyard of the house. There is an actual DJ d-d-d-dropping the bass, a couple of kegs in the backyard with people doing stands, at least two games of beer pong and a fair number of drunk people dancing. You snag a beer instead of whatever's in the mystery punch and mingle a bit.
Erica isn't much for chatting, but Thor's pretty easy to talk to. He's a archeology major with a love of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy period and you feel like you've made a friend for life when you manage to remember the name of his favorite king—Penda. The two of you go on to convincingly beat Derek and yet another cousin of his at beer pong and gain two cheerleaders in Sarah and Susan. Thor gives you a fistbump and wanders off while you chat with the girls for a bit. They actually have a couple of other girls from their floor, and you're introduced as 'Mr. Magic Hands' to Soon-Yi, Savannah, Sierra, and Karen. You finish your beer and stare at all of them for a minute. "Are all of your names like some part of a joke I don't get? How do you all have names that start with S?"
Savannah, an 'honest-to-gawd' southern belle with blonde ringlets and blue eyes gives you a look that you'd believe was guileless if you hadn't taken the time to cast Legilimency. "What kind of name is 'Magic', Mister Hands?"
Everyone gets a good chuckle and most of the girls wander off to talk to people they know or get drinks. Susan stops you and pulls you aside. "Hey, I've told the girls not to get too wasted, but no matter what, none of them are doing anything with Derek or his cousins."
Now that sounded interesting. "He's been alright to me. What's his damage?"
"He's a wannabe pickup artist who likes putting girls down and calling them all kinds of names. He's pretty nasty about it too, and he's the better of them." She leans into your shoulder to keep from yelling everything over the techno. "His male cousins are worse. The girls are normally bitchy and married or engaged even as freshmen and always downplay any complaints. All of them cultivate in-groups around themselves and talk shit about anyone they don't like. They do good parties, but they're not good people."
You tell her you'll keep your eye out and she heads off to find some of her other friends. It's not so crowded that you can't find a quiet spot and try and Legilimence one of Derek's group. You manage to meet eyes with Nick, one of the many cousins and a junior for a moment and nurse a new beer as you touch his mind as lightly as you can. His attention is caught by a pretty Indian girl and his main thought process is trying to figure out how best to sleep with her. His fantasies are a bit violent, complete with slapping her and cumming on her face but he could just be an asshole. You can't probe to see if he gets erections while listening to Hitler speeches without him probably noticing so you drop the connection and wander outside again.
Maybe ten minutes later you're listening to Thor passionately explain why his nickname should actually be Thunor when somebody yells that the Merchants have broken in to the chemistry buildings back on campus. Everyone dives for phones and pulls up their news website of choice. Someone on PHO posting from a dorm nearby says the Merchants have actually hit both the Chemistry and Physics departments, which seems odd before someone mentions that BBU has a nuclear research reactor on campus. Still, you're off-campus, and research reactors aren't nukes. People are discussing if parts of campus will be blocked off after the Merchants leave when sirens start overpowering the music. Heads swivel as not just police sirens sound, but the slightly off tones of PRT vehicles. As it becomes obvious that something's coming your way gunshots are audible as well. You had managed to plant yourself near the fence and can see through the slats as something—maybe two invisible somethings—bounce off cars farther down the street and muzzle flashes pepper the night. There's a whoosh as a streak flies from farther down the street and strikes nothingness which explodes. The next few moments are chaos as more gunfire pops off and smoke billows as something slams in to a house halfway down the block. Some PRT vans and Armsmaster roar past presumably chasing the other invisible vehicle while more come to a stop and begin exchanging gunfire with the still-unseen Merchants.
While the house isn't directly in the crossfire, you need to worry about stray shots as well as possible invasion by Merchants looking for hostages. You can faintly hear a yell from inside the house that someone's been shot and everyone's looking panicky. Do you step in?
AN: It was gonna be Uber and Leet or the Merchants, I flipped a coin. I will be busy for the first half of the day tomorrow; don't feel the need to rush voting. If you have questions I'll answer as I can. Keep in mind that you don't know much about the area, because you've never been in this neighborhood before.
I'll write a blurb on what you got with the Kwik-Enchant book sometime tomorrow.
This vote will decide what you're gonna do; if you do anything that ends up with you in battle or needs additional voting (like putting on a costume and caping) that'll happen before we continue.
You had time to test enchant one item before the party. What was it?
[X][Enchant] A shield hat
[X][Enchant] Shield necklace/ring/bracelet
[X][Enchant] A Stupefy ball
[X][Enchant] A bouncy flashbang ball
Skills learned/increased: Transfiguration+, Mind Arts+, Charms+, Runes+, Basic spell modification(new), Divination(new).
Spells learned: Homenum Revelio, Four-Point spell (point me), Supersensory Charm, various searching divinations.
You clamp down on any nerves or anxiety that might threaten to creep in with a flex of mental willpower and immediately reach out with your mind sense for the girls. More people are crowding towards the fence to get an eye on what's going on so you let yourself be pushed away and cast a look over the backyard. With only the light by the back door the shadows are deep this far back in the yard. You get a feeling that a mind your familiar with is farther back and you move that way, looking in the clumps of people that have formed and are nervously milling around. The short form of Susan is getting jostled by people not even paying attention to her and you take three long strides before curling an arm around her shoulders. She jolts and looks up at you from behind her glasses, eyes a little wide and panicky.
"Do you know where the other girls are?" you ask, leaning down to block out the noise.
She frowns, "The kitchen? They wanted water and left me out here."
Shifting your grip down to her hand, you jerk your head towards the door. She laces her fingers in yours and slips behind you to follow in your wake. Someone's standing on the small concrete patio craning their head to look over the fence and you shoulder them aiside and draw Susan after you.
Inside you can see a crowd of people pressing in and talking about some guy who's been shot, a confusing babble of voices telling people to put pressure on things or bring ice packs. Instead of trying to join the crush you weave past a couple off gawkers and make it in to the kitchen, still sheltering the smaller girl behind you. There aren't as many people in here and your eye is drawn to Savannah's pale blonde hair at the other end. As soon as she sees you she waves you over with a wad of paper towels in her hand. "Have you seen Susan?" she demands shrilly.
The named girl comes out from behind your coat and tries to hug the southern belle, but she holds her off. "Soon-Yi's done been shot, I got blood on me! We got her in the garage, ain't no-one in there yet."
Susan freezes at the mention of blood but you tell Savannah to show you the way and prod the brunette down the hallway. The garage is packed full of boxes, six girls, and you. You take a moment to stick a quick notice-me-not on the door—you'd use a muggle-repeller, but you're not sure how far the effect would leak, you could end up causing problems with the girls trying to leave via the garage door.
The girls have Soon-Yi sitting on a ratty couch and are hovering around her while she presses a huge wad of blood-soaked paper towels onto her right arm. You gently move Karen and Sierra aside and kneel next to the Korean girl who seems unresponsive when you call her name. You assume it's shock, her eyes are open and she's breathing, but her pupils have shrunk down to pinpricks and she's staring off into the distance. Reaching out gently, you turn her eyes to meet yours and try to silently cast Legilimency. It fails, as does your second attempt. You allow a bit of urgency to creep into your thoughts and push the next time you cast.
You connect and push into her mind. You still don't have sufficient skill to get a perfect reading of what she's thinking, but there's a repeating theme of 'samchone Jaehyun can't find out'. A bit more prodding and you figure out that's her uncle, who happens to do bookkeeping for the Ruby Dreams casino—Lung's casino. Fuck, what is this, does everyone in this fucking town know someone gang related?
Pulling back from her worried loop, you give her the mental equivalent of a smack on the nose to get her attention. "Soon-Yi!"
Finally her eyes focus on you and she blinks rapidly. "Magic Han-James! You have to get me out of here, if my uncle finds out what happens I'll get pulled out of school!"
"Whoa, slow. Can I look at your arm?"
She shifts her right arm a bit, wincing and sucking air in through her teeth. Gently lifting the sleeve of her shirt you swallow as the metallic smell of blood hits you. The entrance wound isn't huge, but there's a bloody divot as thick around as your thumb slowly oozing blood down her bicep. You softly cast the diagnostic spell and disguise it by checking for an exit wound. The spell returns the information that she's lost a bit of blood, but not a major amount and there is a foreign body in her arm, all what you expected. It doesn't seem to have hit any major veins or arteries, there's muscle damage but she seems to have escaped a broken bone as well.
The gunfire that has been present in the background draws your attention as an explosion sounds and something—shrapnel?—rattles against the garage door. Your eyes sweep the garage again and you notice a side door leading out hidden behind some boxes.
You have all the spell knowledge needed to fix Soon-Yi up—gently summon the bullet out of her arm and heal it—or you could immobilize her arm with Ferula and get her back to campus first. The magic would be pretty obvious though, or you could use the entrancing enchantments you know to distract everyone while you fix her up. You could bunker down and throw up a shield and hope no more stray gunfire comes your way. None of the girls look like they're going to be any help. It's time to make a plan.
AN:
Alright, you've got the girls, now time to make a plan
Plan vote time. In order to try and impose a modicum of control on this, feel free to propose plans until late afternoon/evening tomorrow EST. I'll go through the plans as I have time during the day and give advice on any issues that might crop up (like if you don't actually have knowledge of the spells you're trying to cast). At that point I'll copy the various plans into a post and voting on them will occur at that point.
Please look at the character sheet, especially the spells known. While this isn't an exhaustive list of known spells, please note that you do not know the Obliviate spell. You do know some of the theory, but you totally don't know how to erase memories.
To reiterate:
Do take this time to discuss or propose plans to get yourself and your girls to safety.
Don't actually vote on the plans yet.
As an example plan (don't take this one completely seriously, people)