Young Homeless Practitioner in desperate need for cash.
♦ Topic: Young Homeless Practitioner in desperate need for cash.
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Hey! Last time I was here I was offering some services in exchange for cash and luck. I’m completely broke now, and have nothing to offer. I saw in my previous thread some people saying they would support getting someone like me out of a tough situation, and now I’m seeking that help.
Any financial contribution is incredibly helpful, no support is too small. I only need enough money to feed myself for the week, but any extra going towards a warm bed and shower would be also appreciated.
Please DM me for any questions, I’d like to keep the comments on this post focused on my financial updates.
DM to ~Lah
You seem to be very familiar with my sort of situation, or at least sympathetic to what I’ve been going through. If you really do want to collaborate, or even just offer some advice, I’ll be checking my phone regularly so just reply to my message.
Student Homelessness
Nolan sat among the ferns, head tilted forward, letting the gentle buzz of the hair clippers run over his head.
“Tilt this way.” Bitey said, pushing the side of his head gently.
He held the gathered silver hairs in his hands, picking up the ones that fell to the forest floor. He wasn’t sure what he would do with it yet, but keeping every scrap of his Self was important for parts of his practice. The cool spring breeze sent shivers through his scalp.
“Okay, I’m done.” Bitey said, turning off the electric shaver.
He put the clumps of hair into the front zipper pocket of his backpack and pulled out his phone.
He hadn’t gotten any responses to his request for cash, but it had only been up for the duration of the haircut, and he had already seen how successful asking for financial support on OMO went before. Even twenty bucks would be life changing right now though.
He needed money for food. Bitey sustained herself on stolen snacks and squirrels, but her stomach was really growling since the fight with the goblins. With what little money he had, he would buy a bulk string of ready to eat sausages. Just in case someone would recognise his silver hair, he had it shaved.
He was ready to go.
It was hard to leave Bitey alone in the woods, when she was still recovering her strength on an empty stomach, but he was the one that didn’t stick out in a market.
The way the forest sunk into the city was one of the few things he really liked about Victoria. The moment he stepped out onto the pavement, the treetops still cast shadow across him. He followed the road to a local grocery, and swallowed a big gulp of air as he entered.
He was still a little dirty, though no longer having greasy hair stuck to his head helped. He kept his distance from the other shoppers and moved directly to the deli.
His phone buzzed as he looked through the selection of cured meats. He had gotten some direct responses thanks to his thread. One from someone who was looking to employ his abilities as a Luck Mage; not very likely considering his current fealty. The other was from someone he hadn’t seen on the forum before. She was straightforward, offering money with no strings attached. He sent her a link to his paybud account and breathed a deep sigh.
With the tension of affording dinner gone, he collected six pounds of dirt cheap sausages, and carried them to the front of the store. As he walked through the aisle, he saw a woman’s head poking above the grocery shelves. He did a double take. She had to be at least eight feet tall, if not more!
An Other? In the middle of the store? In the middle of the day? He kept his head down and sped up his sausage carrying shuffle. He didn’t need any extra attention on him, and the tall lady was certainly going to grab attention.
The checkout line was slow, and Nolan checked his phone.
First was a response from ~Lah. An Other who he had messaged directly earlier today in search of advice. She suggested he be wary of those who offered him too much seeking nothing in exchange, and offered to assist in matters after a big event she had coming in a week. Seems he wasn’t the only one that would be busy on the twenty seventh.
He had a response from SweetDaughterofDathe, the woman who had offered him money just minutes ago. Apparently she had sent him some money, and wanted to send a magic item that collected cash and coins automatically. He swapped over to his bank account.
He stopped breathing.
He had to count the zeros in his chequing account. Four zeros, not including any after the decimal. His eyes had glazed over the leading number.
He had sixty thousand dollars in his bank account. Why? How? He put away his phone and looked around. He could buy a lot with that money, but it seemed too good to be true. There had to be a catch coming. Could he get ahead of the catch? Spend the money before it was gone.
He had been through things far too similar to this before. He spent all his luck getting a few good spins in Roulette, and then had no luck left and lost it all paying for liabilities after a stupid accident he got in while biking.
He felt like a lightning rod in a hurricane. Hurricanes had lighting, right? All that air moving around making static electricity, they had to. He was the number one target for something bad to happen.
He swapped back and sent some immediate messages to both the Dathe lady and ~Lah, hoping to give the money back to the first, and get advice from the latter, but just as he pressed send, a hand tapped him on the shoulder.
He turned around, and saw the face of the supernaturally tall woman, now naturally tall. She had to be 6’6” now? Her long thin neck was off putting, and once again signaled that she was not entirely human. Around the base of her throat was a tight circlet, that made what little skin she had on her neck bulge around it. She wore a dress that didn’t fit her, because what could with her proportions? It stopped halfway down her shins, and let him see that she was walking barefoot, on bone thin feet.
“Excuse me, sir?” She said, her voice choked, clearly struggling to speak through the tight necklace that constricted her throat.
“Yeah?” He said. He kept his eyes angled down, he didn’t want to chance anything and looking into the eyes of an Other was potentially very dangerous.
“Do you have any money to spare?”
Shit. She knew. She knew and she was going to take it all, or else he would certainly suffer the consequences.
“Let me buy what I need first, and then I swear I’ll talk with you further.”
She stepped back from the checkout line, and Nolan placed the sausages onto the conveyor belt. He quickly added a few bottles of ice tea, and a triple pack of gum. He needed these things, especially if he was about to lose the rest of his cash.
“Did you find everything you were looking for sir?”
He gulped. It was so easy to fall into the routine and say a lie in times like this. He considered his words carefully.
“I was only looking for sausages when I came in.” That was a safe enough way to phrase it. Sure, he was imagining what he could have bought if he had the chance before the scary tall lady grabbed him, but he had promised he would only buy what he needed.
He tapped his card and took his paper bag of food out, immediately taking out three sticks of gum.
He saw the tall lady was standing at the far end of the parking lot, head obscured by the leaves of the old oak tree she stood under. Maybe stood in was a more accurate term, as the lowest branches reached past her collar.
He reached for his backpack, putting the paper bag in, and saw his mask sitting there. If she wasn’t being noticed despite being at least nine feet tall right now, he could probably get away with wearing a mask that didn’t even look much like the one that was plastered over news sites anymore.
It slid on easily, he reached to pull his hair out from under the elastic band, but only brushed up against his smooth scalp. Through the eyes of the mask, the light became darker, and the dark became clearer. How much of that was the black fabric he stared through versus the magic latent within an ancient artifact he poured his Self into, he couldn’t know.
The moment he was within earshot, he spoke.
“Let’s keep this brief. I’ll give you ten thousand dollars to leave me alone for the rest of the month.”
She chuckled, and as Magician’s Rabbit approached, he could see that she now wore a tight silk scarf around her foot long neck.
“Hmmm… you hardly know anything about me. Why do you want to be rid of me so soon?” Her voice was much clearer when she wasn’t being choked by a band of metal. Her voice coming melodically from high up in the branches likened her to a songbird in Nolan’s mind.
“I’d like to have as few Others lingering in my presence as is manageable.”
“And Practitioners?” She asked.
“Yeah, none of them, don’t worry. I’m doing my best to not even talk to them.”
Another melodic laugh. Her vocal range must be enormous with a throat that long.
“You mistake me for an Other, then? I dare say that I am more human than you are, little practitioner.”
“You’re a practitioner?”
She squatted down, her eyes locking directly into his, as she looked straight through his mask.
“If I have been awakened, it is by the power that flows through me. I am no practitioner, not like you are.”
She wasn’t Other or Practitioner, according to her words. What the hell was she then? Even Oni were Other.
“So that’s what you mean by being more Human than me. Someone else did this to you, right?”
Her face soured, and she laid a long hand on his shoulder, with fingers the length and width of chopsticks.
“I saw you look at me, and I saw the money you got, kid. You can see a lot from where I stand. You offering me ten kay is not nearly as enticing when I know you walk away with fifty.”
He gulped, swallowing his gum by mistake.
“I’ll make an offer. You swear to not spend another dime until you give me everything in your account, and *then* I’ll swear to leave you alone until the end of the month.”
“I swear.” he said it without even thinking, too scared to go with anything but gut instinct and verbal momentum. “I swear I won’t spend any of the money in my bank account until you receive everything in there right now.”
“Good. You can deposit it into this email address. I swear I’ll leave you alone until the end of the month.”
Magician’s Rabbit turned to leave.
“Also? If you don’t pay up before time’s up, you’re a dead man.”
He hadn’t even considered the option, but the threat still lingered in his back as he walked away, putting his mask back into the bag, and travelling uphill and into the woods.
The constant low growl lead him straight to Bitey, or more specifically her stomach.
“Eat up.” He tossed a sausage chain in her direction, and she tore into the casing and gored herself on cured meats.
Nolan slowly unwrapped a stick of gum and stuffed the wrapper back into his bag. He savoured the few seconds of flavour it gave, before becoming just something to keep his jaw busy as he checked in on his OMO messages again.
~Lah warned him to take care with his words, lest he invite the fate he fears. A little too late with the advice, though apparently he had gotten this message around the time he stepped out into the parking lot. The rest of her post was a little behind his current situation, and he sent a second DM explaining how screwed he was.
He had also gotten a message about a place called Sanctuary. Apparently young and down on their luck practitioners could enter this domain, and so long as a few rules were followed, chief being non-aggression, he would have a roof over his head and a bed to lie in.
He filed that one under ‘If things go wrong, but not wrong enough that I can’t skip town.’
He got a response from ~Lah just as Bitey was sucking down the last sausage he had thrown her. They hadn’t said much. Just that they had seen this stuff happen before, and that those who made it out were the ones with friends at their sides and a clear vision of what they wanted. Positive thinking type stuff.
Imagine the most positive outcome? He thought of his dreams. The clear sky, the full moon, an upheaval of the structures that oppressed. He wanted to send a reply immediately, but these surface ideas didn’t seem very positive, just neutral.
What would the most positive situation look like?
“Hey Bitey? Could you describe the most positive outcome that makes sense from our current situation?”
She was out cold, a food coma that would probably take until sundown to pass. Her sleeping face was adorable, her normally stretched smiling face now a soft blob with raven black hair spilling out of her hood.
What about this made him smile? What could he learn from this that would inform his most positive outcome?
He had an idea, but it didn’t feel like the kind of thing he wanted to write down quite yet. He could wait until the full moon passed, control his hopes.
Student Assembly
The councils of Victoria, Esquimalt, Saanich, and Oak Bay had gathered in Belfry Theater, an old church that had been converted into a community theatre a while ago. Through regular donations by each of the councils, they could reserve an evening in the location once a month, every eighteenth.
Standard attendance was made up largely of Emissaries to the council members, with the exception of Elizabeth van Bergen, who always attended in person. Tonight was not a standard night. Sitting in attendance were the leaders of every council group, and other important figures from outside the councils.
In the twelve o’ clock position was Robert Dunsmuir, the Lord of Victoria. He hadn’t been seen in person by anyone in this room for the past decade, and for some of the attendees this was their first time seeing the lord. He had a pale and withering figure, fitting for a man who had been dead for over a century now. His dark dealings with the greater spirits and judges of death kept him alive, though nobody knew the specifics of the arrangement.
To his left was Elizabeth van Bergen. Despite being ten years older than Mr. Dunsmuir, she looked not a day over twenty. As such her Victorian Era apparel looked more like reenactment garb than something she’d been wearing her whole life. She fanned herself constantly and kept a tight lipped smile. Probably to hide her blood stained teeth, though that was an open secret here.
I was next in the circle, rapidly writing everything that happened into my journal as I chronicled the entire event for later analysis and collection. A combination of magic pen and paper, as well as a system for noting posture and motion in shorthand, allowed me to keep up with the currently silent room, and still manage once talking would commence.
To my left was Mr Yamamoto, the old master of the Musclebound Dojo. His thin grey hair was pulled into a topknot, and he wore no shirt, exposing his grotesquely muscled body. He had his familiar standing beside him, an older female ogre with one eye directly below her horn. Apparently she would be running translation for him, and has sworn to not interfere otherwise.
In the four o’ clock position was Mr Singh, IT director of Fort Tectoria, a commune of technomancers and tech-aligned practitioners that elevated from the ashes of an Innocent tech workspace of the same name. He was doing much the same as me, though with a holographic keyboard and plenty of AI assistance. He had to remove or disable much of his accessories, due to the no physical recording rule of the meeting. Only notes and observations.
Next was Kasper Nilsen, leader of the Bloody Blade Historical European Martial Arts Dojo. He’s a Norwegian practitioner who moved to Saanich a few decades ago and set up an Innocent dojo in search of an apprentice. The apprentice was also in attendance, standing behind Mr Nilsen.
Johnson & Sons, Karmic Law practitioners and divorce attorneys, were sitting across from Dunsmuir. The trio of lawyers were certainly the least qualified to be in the room, and their posturing showed it. The entire Oak Bay council was under the thumb of Mr Dunsmuir, and the lowest of the low kept as far from him as possible, while staying directly in his sight.
Elder Landes, high shaman of the Holly Branch was as mysterious as ever, head surrounded by pipe smoke and large robes obscuring their entire figure. Little was known of the Shamans, who kept so distant. This was another practitioner who many in the room had never seen before now.
Alex McKinley was sopping wet as usual, as fitting for The Fishermen, a group of five Abyss hunters who specialized in capturing great boogeymen and monsters from the deepest and most waterlogged corners of the Abyss. He wore a toque and yellow overalls, with knee-high rubber boots, like he feared somebody would mistake him for anything but a fisherman.
Almost around the circle, and the next two could be grouped together. Mildred Botwright and Marcus Moore were the leaders of the Friggdotters Wicca and Theosophical Society respectively. The latter group was floundering in recent years, a single outpost of a larger movement of Practitioners that failed to take off. The Wicca at least had a new generation of witches to continue the practice.
Lastly and certainly not least was Sister Mary, of the Order of the Burning Bush. She was the most threatening presence in the room, an Evangelist with several great Cherubim at her response. If anyone in this room made an enemy of her Order, it would not be a question who would remain when the dust settled.
My pen stops for a moment, the introductory page completed. In the few seconds it took for the ink to form the words, Mr Dunsmuir gathered the attention of everyone in the room.
“Our four councils have gathered, as the sole Lord present, I unilaterally declare the meeting begun. None may leave or enter until our discussion has concluded.”
Left unspoken were the many oaths each member had made earlier to protect the others, tailored to our individual practices such that we were not hampered more than necessary for the evening.
“We have gathered to discuss the events centred around the Full Flower Moon, on the twenty sixth of May, and the days immediately preceding and following. The Bookkeepers have divulged that our city will be one of ten targeted by The Long Shadow of Claw, an Oni Amalgamate of incredible power. I will now allow Henry Monroe to supply what the Bookkeepers have deemed vital information.”
I gulped. I was never very good at public speaking, that’s why I normally sent Hank to these meetings. I had to hold a strong face as I gave the grave news.
“After the events of the ninth, in which a mask was stolen from the Royal BC museum in the middle of the day, investigation into the origin of the mask was launched by our researchers. The mask was discovered in 1904 by Crown archeologists, and has never been claimed by any indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest.”
I flipped the notebook sitting in my lap forward a page, interrupting my careful note taking.
“The night after the burglary, the mask was worn by the practitioner Nolan Myra during the invasion of the home of Elmer Deluna. Deluna is notably a distant relative of our own Lord Dunsmuir, though it is unknown exactly why he was assaulted.”
I closed the notebook, partially I admit, for dramatic effect.
“That’s all we know for certain. However, we have made some startling connections between these actions and the upcoming emergence of The Long Shadow of Claw across the west coast. The mask that was stolen was labelled as a mask of the moon, and the connection between it and our mask-wearing moon-powered adversary cannot be overlooked.”
I saw that several people had already raised their hands to make their point, but I wasn’t quite finished.
“I know I have said multiple times that we do not know much of this practitioner, but there is one identity of theirs we have found quite recently. They have posted to the niche occult forum Occult Magic Online under the pseudonym Strixhaven Student. There he most concerningly asked about equality between Oni and Practitioners, and the emotional bonds between them.”
The faces surrounding me cringed, and I passed control back to Dunsmuir.
“Well said. The situation is clear. We have an Oni mage in our midst, Nolan Myra was briefly tutored by Winifried Baxter, an Incarnate Mage of Luck and Fortune, and it was assumed that he would not make any progress in the practice since the death of Mr Baxter this January. Those of you who have the greatest confidence in counter-practice against Oni and Luck magic may now speak.”
Mr Yamamoto spoke first, and as he spoke his familiar translated.
“Mr Yamamoto wishes to know, where the Oni Mage was last seen, or if he has any direct involvement in the Saanich peninsula.”
I cut in, “Since his appearance at the Deluna house, he has not been seen at all. A week of absence with both police and practitioners attempting to find him.”
“This sounds like a problem for you to handle then, Monroe. Your augury has not pieced together any information a glance at the news couldn’t?” Ms Botwright interrogated.
“Lord Dunsmuir has made it clear who is set to discuss this matter.” I responded, scrawling my pen across the paper.
“I believe me and my fellows can find and control this vile mage.” Elder Landes said, billowing smoke across the stage with every word.
“Does anyone else wish to claim the first attempt?” Robert Dunsmuir asked.
Silence, for exactly a second.
“Good. Motion to allow retaliatory measures against any action by Nolan Myra or anyone else in the mask associated with Long Shadow of Claw?”
100% approval vote by ayes.
“Motion to allow the Shamans of the Holly Branch access to the grounds of all present councils for practice for the purpose of finding and eliminating Nolan Myra or anyone else in the mask associated with Long Shadow of Claw?”
75% approval; nays from Sister Mary, Johnson, and Mr Yamamoto.
“Passes, nine to three. Mr Yamamoto?”
Mr Yamamoto was fuming. His words were fast and passionate, and I struggled to keep up with the translation while ignoring the foreign words.
“He is furious that, a unanimous decision by the Esquimalt Council, has been overruled.”
Clearly the translation was a summary. The point was clear though, as the sole representative and member of the Esquimalt Council, the Musclebound Dojo often wanted a greater say in matters of the entire city.
“What does he suggest?”
“He advises the shamans not attack any suspects in Esquimalt, and instead alert local practitioners to take action.”
“All in favour of this?”
91.666% approval; nay from Elder Landes
“Motion passes. With three approved votes, the meeting is adjourned. We will attend, or have an emissary attend, the next meeting on the eighteenth.”
The room quickly departed. I was still concerned. It seemed everyone else assumed that as long as the Nolan boy was gone, we would be safe. I wasn’t so certain.
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