The front door of the coven house opened and closed softly, admitting a weary Kordelle with a thoughtful look on his face. He had only just hung up his jacket on the coat rack in the foyer when a teenaged boy's voice called out his name hopefully. "Yeah?" Kordelle answered, and all of a sudden Dude was there, talking and gesturing animatedly in what Kordelle subconsciously knew was Ancient Greek.
"Why didn't you tell me we could learn new languages at the drop of a hat?" Dude exclaimed, his opalescent eyes positively shining. "This is so amazing! How the hell is this possible?"
Kordelle smirked mirthfully at that and followed Dude back into the kitchen, where Allie was busy bottling up pungent potions with a funnel and ladle. "It's something all witches can do, Dude. How many languages did you know before you met me?"
"Uh... Four," Dude answered after taking a second to consider whether both sign languages should count as their own. They did, of course. "English, Spanish, ASL, and SSL."
"And how many people can say they know four languages by the time they're sixteen?" Kordelle asked knowingly.
"Prooobably other witches?" Dude guessed.
He gave the green-haired boy a congratulatory finger gun. "True. But don't try to learn more than one every couple of months, okay? Your brain might explode." He left the kitchen on that note to get away from the smells of Allie's brewing potions.
Dude, with a puzzled expression on his face, followed him from a few paces behind. "You mean that figuratively, right? Kordelle? Right?"
~
Day One: botany, herbology, and the basics of potion-making.
Allie was a good teacher, especially for a girl that had just barely reached teenagerhood. Dude, as eager a pupil as there ever was, asked all of his questions without hesitation, and what Allie couldn't answer confidently was researched until a conclusion could be reached. In a way, they were teaching each other little by little as young witches often do. Her otter familiar was also a very big help by fetching smaller items and turning pages when their hands were full. Since Dude had only just learned how to summon his familiar and it was still very weak and inexperienced, he didn't really go the extra mile to bring it out and use it.
However, there was one incident where he did call out his familiar. Allie's otter had been scampering around on the counter, weaving between and around vials of ingredients, when one of them was bumped into and sent toppling over the edge. Its glass container made a wobbly scraping sound as it was knocked over, and Dude instinctively reached for it even though he was clear on the other side of the kitchen. Allie yelped as a reflex, but the bottle didn't shatter on the ground. In fact, it didn't even touch the ground at all.
Dude's familiar, extending from his right shoulder and hovering an inch and a half off of the floor, gripped the bottle with all five fingers to keep it from slipping free. Allie released a pent-up breath in a loud "Phew!" and beamed at her firmly concentrating student. "Dude, that was amazing!"
"It was?" he asked. His familiar began to retract, bringing the fallen vial closer and closer until he could reach out and grab it with a flesh and blood hand. As soon as he held it safely, he let out a breath he didn't know he was holding back.
"Yeah!" she cheered. "Don't you remember yesterday? You were concentrating so hard just to summon it, and today you just, y'know-- whoosh! Bam!" Allie struck a confident pose with both hands balled into fists on her hips and her chin jutting out triumphantly. "Here it is, world!"
Dude grinned at her antics and crossed the kitchen to set the vial back where it had been standing. "I mean, I was practicing practically all night."
"Which just goes to show that I was right," Allie boasted, her chest puffed out to try and make herself look as big on the outside as she felt on the inside; although, for her diminutive, preteen stature, it would take a little more than posing.
"Right about what?" he asked.
"That it takes practice to get better," she reminded him. "The more you practice, then the better you'll be at everything you want to be good at."
The sound of a roiling boil filled the air at that point and spurred Allie into rushing over to the stove to check on their brewing potion. Dude hung back to stay out of her way for a few seconds, but then decided to slink over to stand by her side. He wanted a peek at the almost-final result of their afternoon's hard work. Inside the pot, the liquid that had begun as a murky, swampy brown looked so much more pleasant since the hue had shifted with the rise in temperature, turning it pastel yellow with flecks of green and gold scattered throughout. Its viscosity was like cheese sauce, but the scent billowing up with the clouds of steam was incredibly herbal and pleasantly smoky.
"Mmm~" Dude hummed as he drew in a whiff of the brew. "You were right about it turning into something way more appetizing, Allie."
"I know," she chirped gleefully. "And with this much, we'll be able to fill at least a dozen portions."
As he watched the bubbles exploding on the thick surface of the concoction, a thought crossed his mind. "So, you said this stuff is an edible cleanser, right? What exactly does that mean?"
"Sometimes a witch's magic can suffer from an external, uh, infection," Allie explained as she stirred. With the other hand, she reached past Dude and grabbed a pinch of dried herbs to sprinkle into the pot. "I mean, it's not exactly an infection. It's called The Haze."
"Sounds intimidating," he noted.
"Well, it can be," she admitted. "It's also pretty common, though-- like the cold. It can cause your magic to stop responding the way you want it to. You get it from overloading your conduit."
"That's a thing that can happen?" Dude gasped. "How?"
Allie didn't answer right away and instead instructed him to grab the pot by its handles and take it off of the stove. They hurried it over to the sink, inside of which a dozen or so two-ounce bottles were lined up and uncapped to admit the brew. As he held the pot just so, Allie scooped semi-precise amounts into the vials and quickly shoved the corks into the necks to seal everything in. By the time the last of their creation was packaged up and sealed, Dude could feel his arms tiring and had to plop the pot into the other side of the sink.
"Nice work," Allie said, beaming up at him. "Thanks for helping me, Dude."
"Thanks for teaching me," he replied with an equal amount of energy lighting up his smile and opal eyes. "Now what?"
"Well..." A tint of pink highlighted her cheekbones as she bashfully refused to look at his face. "I, uh, have this silly little ritual that I like to do when I'm done making a potion..."
"What is it?" he immediately asked, figuratively lighting up like a Christmas garland that had just been plugged in.
"It's just, uh... a little spell, or whatever," she admitted. "Promise you won't laugh?"
"Wouldn't dream of it," Dude swore with a hand over his heart. "Show me, show me, show me!"
"O-Okay," Allie said, a little taken aback by his eagerness. She turned toward the sink and put her hands out above it, palms down and fingers splayed out as wide as they could go. Allie's trepidation morphed into a soft serenity, and the words poured out of her mouth as easily as water tumbles over the edge of a waterfall.
"May your contents never spoil
Never dull, fade, or over-boil
May your host find happiness in all that they do
So sayeth the guarantee of an Allie brew."
A faint shimmer of light drifted down like dust particles to settle on the vials, where the glitter clung and glowed until the little rhyme was over. After that, they disappeared like figments of the imagination. Dude's hands were clasped in front of his face as he tried to hide his huge grin; that had been too adorable for words!
Allie peeked through one eye and glanced over her shoulder at him. "So, uh, yeah."
"Did you come up with that yourself?" he asked. "That was so cute! Does it really help your potions?"
"Yes, uhm-- thank you?-- and yeah," she answered while gripping her upper arm with her other hand in a pose that instinctively reminded Dude of Camry when she got anxious. "It helps their shelf life last longer... even though I edited the spell when I was younger..."
"I love it," he gushed honestly. "Should we put the potions away now?"
Allie nodded. "In a minute. Let's let them cool down more first. And hey! You should take a couple of them home with you, Dude. I mean, you helped so much."
"Oooh~ Really? Okay," he beamed. "Just in case I get The Haze, right?"
"Right."
~~
It was a good thing Ariadna's hearing loss was nearly complete without her aids. Otherwise, she would have to listen to her mother yelling into the phone, demanding that her son come home at once and explain himself for running off in the middle of the night. As worked up as Maria was, her brain wasn't forming sentences in English very effectively and she had switched to her native Spanish early on in the conversation.
On the other end, a scratchy-voiced Dude was trying to explain, also in Spanish, that he was perfectly fine and staying with a friend because he wanted some space for a couple of days. No matter what he said, though, it didn't seem like Maria was willing to be convinced at all.
"I know you're upset, hijo, but I won't have you running away from this!" she said in a moment of relative calm somewhere near the middle of the phone call. "We can talk about this, but not if you're not home. Where are you right now? Which friend are you staying with? Do I know them?"
"No, Mamá, you don't know him," Dude answered hesitantly, fully expecting her to disapprove of the fact. He was right, of course, and she demanded to at least know where he was staying so she could come and get him if necessary. "I-- I can't tell you that, Mamá--"
"What? Why not? Hijo, I will not have you missing school and dropping off the face of the Earth!" In the background, Ariadna breezed past her mother to grab a glass and fill it with tap water. She didn't need to be able to hear to know that things were getting heated and not looking all that good for Dude in his predicament. "You're better than that, hijo! I didn't raise you to be truant!"
"Mamá, it's more important than you think--" he tried, but was cut off with more of the same exclamations. Finally, having had enough of this, he rolled his eyes and whispered a short and fast spell into the phone's receiver, which transferred directly to Maria's ear and quieted her shouting. Her eyelids drooped sleepily, and while the phone didn't leave her ear, her grip on it slackened noticeably. "I need you to listen to me. Are you listening?"
Maria weakly hummed an affirmative.
"Good. Dude is completely fine. He had permission from the school to miss classes on Friday because of a school field trip. This field trip is lasting for a week, but he will call you every so often to check in. You do not have anything to worry about. Do you understand what I am saying to you?"
She hummed again, her eyes glazed over with a strange dullness.
"Good. Now, I'm going to hang up the phone, and you are going to return to life as normal. Three, two, one."
Click.
Maria blinked rapidly, her grip on the phone returning to its natural strength as she heard the rhythmic beeping that denoted an ended call. For some reason, she couldn't quite remember what had ended their conversation, but Dude had mentioned something about a field trip and having permission...
Ariadna stepped into her mother's view and signed her name questioningly along with "Are you okay?" Maria stared back at her daughter for a few seconds too long before nodding. It seemed as if she had to snap out of a second stupor before she found her tongue-- well, her hands.
"I'm fine," she signed. "Dude is on a trip for five days. He will be back after that."
"I never heard anything about a trip," Ari commented, one eyebrow lifted higher than the other.
Maria shrugged. "He has the school's permission. I guess this means it's just you and me for now. What should we have for dinner?"
~~
"I just-- I give up. Camry, go get your camera. We're returning it to the store."
"What?" Camry exclaimed, launching to her feet and balling her hands into fists at her sides. "But, Mom--!"
"Don't argue with me, missy," Sadie Dowell snapped back, clearly irritated beyond any willingness to discuss the matter. "This is your punishment for ditching etiquette class today. As it stands, you and Saoirse are going to be at a remedial class all day Sunday."
In response to the injustice-fueled rage bubbling up inside of her, Camry could vaguely sense her ghostly core threatening to start boiling deep down, like the core of the planet. If she hadn't already had a few months' worth of practice under her belt, there would have undoubtedly been smoke curling up from her bone-white knuckles. "But you don't understand! We were worried about Dude, Mom!"
"Worried about him?" Sadie repeated skeptically, her arms crossed over her chest. "What in the world could you possibly have to worry about Dude?"
"He... He was ignoring Saoirse and me, so we met up with him at the mall," Camry answered, slowly simmering down as that earlier weight of impending loneliness extinguished her inner fire. "We wanted to talk with him, that's all."
"You could have talked to him any time other than during etiquette class," her mother pointed out, obviously not entirely buying the story. "Honestly, Camry-- my cotillion was so much fun. I don't understand why you're digging your heels in like this."
Never let it be said that Camirelle Lidiare Dowell is not as stubborn as she is anxious. "Maybe because it sucks to be bossed around by someone who's hated your guts since day one," she shot back. "Mrs. Bosch has it out for me, Mom!"
Sadie scoffed at the idea. "Come on, Camry, don't be so dramatic. It's etiquette, not boot camp. Now, go get your camera. We're done discussing this."
Officially dismissed, Camry stomped up to her room and grit her teeth harder when her mother tacked on a quip of "And no stomping, young lady! You're sixteen, not six!" It took every ounce of willpower in her not to slam her bedroom door shut and then blast it to bits with a well-aimed fireball. Oh, if only her parents knew what she could do and what she really was...
Nevertheless, her tight grip on her bedcovers left behind charred handprints and the smell of burning cloth that lingered on the air for at least an hour. Camry yanked the blankets off of her bed and flung them onto the floor, but just the thick fabrics fighting her wasn't enough of an outlet for her anger. Half of her mind was made up to just throw the window open and jump out into the cooling evening breeze-- to just run in a long patrol around town and blow off her steam in whatever way presented itself along the way. Seconds before she was about to let the twin hoops of orange-tinted light take her human half away and replace it with her undead side, the doorknob of her room turned and stopped her heart dead in her chest for a handful of seconds. The door opened a few inches so Sadie could peer inside and assess the room.
"Can I come in?" Even in the middle (or tail end) of an argument, at least her parents still respected her privacy.
"... I'll come out," Camry grumbled, giving her upturned bedsheets a grumpy kick that also served to cover the smoldering handprints. Sadie stepped back to let Camry out, and the daughter closed the door behind her to lean back on it. "What is it?"
"It sounded like you have something big on your mind about Dude," Sadie admitted. "I know it's not my job to pry into his life, but I was wanting to know that you two are okay. I know he means a lot to you, Cammie."
For fear of her mother reading her mind, Camry averted her gaze to the side and sighed. "He's... fine. He wasn't speaking to me or Saoirse for a couple of days, and earlier today he kinda--" Exploded into smoke, "--disappeared for a while. We panicked and got a hold of him, so we made plans to meet up at Delta Pin and figure out what was going on. It just turns out that he's got a cold or something, so he was keeping his distance... I guess."
Sadie let out a heavy breath and nodded. "Okay, that's good. I'm glad you two aren't fighting, or anything like that."
"No, we're cool," Camry assured her nonchalantly.
Hands on her hips, Sadie squared her shoulders. "And is there anything else you want to tell me?"
The way she spoke so pointedly sent another bolt of panic straight through Camry's chest. Oh no, how had she found out about the half-ghost thing? How long had she known? Did Mum tell her?
"I'm sorry about how I wasn't listening to what you were saying, Cammie. I'm not as angry anymore, and I want to hear why you think Mrs. Bosch has it out for you."
It was all she could do to try and look casually composed when she met her mother's eye. 'Oh, thank god, she wasn't talking about that.'
~
So whats your sentence
Saoirse smirked at Camry's obvious lack of proper punctuation and quickly typed out a reply. You're just lucky they didn't take my phone away
Def gonna have to postpone the Relle collab
My poor fans (TT^TT)
Awww! I was so looking forward to that!! Camry complained, mirroring her girlfriend's use of emoji in triplicate. Oh well. Any other damage?
Not too much, I guess. P much grounded until school's over for the year :/
SERIOUSLY???! That sucks!!
Saoirse sent a shrugging emoji before tapping out a full response. Yeah, but it's not like WE have to worry about that. ;)
This is true
I'm just glad we figured out what was up with Dude tbh
Same, Saoirse answered with a faint smile on her lips. Kinda silly to think he's a witch right??
It wasn't until after a short pause that the little dots appeared onscreen, signifying that Camry was finally replying. I mean... I still dunno
What do you mean?
It's just-- I dunno, Seersh. It's still weird to me, yknow? Like why would they say that about him if it isnt truck?
She didn't need to hear her girlfriend to know exactly how she would sound if they were actually talking face-to-face.
*true
Because they're lying to you??
Cmon Cam you can't trust them
Maybe they made it up to throw you off
I mean yeah I wouldn't put it past them to try something like that
But you didn't see the looks on their faces when they were talking about witches in the GZ
And they literally called a TRUCE to tell me about it like what???
I know its super sketchy but I don't think they were lying about that
Saoirse's frown deepened at that, but she refrained from replying with something to dismiss the other ghosts in their entirety. Camry did have a point in that no one else had really seen the looks on their faces or talked with them directly about this subject. Even so, this had to be some sort of setup!
~~
Late that evening, as Kordelle readied for bed, he wondered if Dude would continue with his cycle of staying up until all hours of the night to study magic. 'It's not a healthy habit, even for a witch with his kind of energy.'
Speak-- or, think of the devil. A knock on Kordelle's bedroom door prompted him to say, "C'mon in!" Dude poked his head in to take stock of the environment before coming in and closing the door behind him. "'Sup, mate? How was potion-making with Allie?"
"Awesome," Dude gushed, taking a seat on the floor where a space just large enough for a person's rear had been cleared among the minefield of books. "I really learned a lot! And some of those ingredients are so weird, y'know? Where the heck do you get something like 'powdered majesty of Parthenon?'"
"From the Parthenon," Kordelle answered with a slight smirk turning up one corner of his thin lips. "It's not easy to sift through the rubble for something worth enough for a potion. You have to find something that was majestic but was crushed or crumbled away. The memories and significance of what it used to be have a lot of value to a witch."
The look on Dude's face was not unlike the video of the cat that had the flower put on its head. "You're kidding me."
Kordelle's smile widened. "I'm really not, mate."
"Yoooo!" Dude crowed until a quick wave of Kordelle's hand caused his voice to taper off. "A-ha, oops. Sorry. Okay, but I wanted to ask you more about the whole language thing. Like, how is that even possible? Languages are important to the brain so I figured you'd be the best person to talk to."
Pride swelled in the more experienced witch's chest, which he could hardly refrain from puffing out. "Well, you're not wrong. So, witches come from all over the world; we speak all kinds of languages and learn magic from a hundred thousand sources. Even so, with us having to stay in hiding for our own safety, we don't get to have all that much contact with other clans and covens. Most of what we learn nowadays is from the books that we take care of and pass down.
"But there's a problem with that: a lot of the books are in languages that are foreign, dead, or a combination of both. But we can't lose that knowledge, right?" Dude, a rapt listener, mutely shook his head. "Right. It would be awful, and sometimes even fatal. That's why witches, over thousands of years ago, developed an innate ability to learn a new language almost instantly. All it takes is a direct translation of a few simple words or phrases, and right away you've got the entire language down in your head like it was your first."
"And literally all witches can do that?" Dude gasped, leaning forward without even thinking about it. Endellion nodded, looking pleased with both himself and his 'student.'
"It's true. If you hadn't already learned Ancient Greek today, I would offer to teach you another one right now."
Dude shrugged his shoulders. "It was in one of the books I read last night. A translation note was at the bottom of a page, and then it was like BAM! I could read the book! I honestly thought I was going crazy, so I slept it off and kinda forgot about it. Then Allie explained it to me when I asked her if something was wrong with my brain-- I think that's when you came back from wherever you went earlier today."
"Oh, right," he remembered, hoping against hope that Dude wouldn't think to ask him where he had gone. After all, meeting up with Dude's friends behind his back while wearing an illusion in order to gather information would look pretty bad in most circumstances.
Thankfully, the matter was let go before it could have really been grabbed in the first place. "And... you were more or less kidding about the whole "brain exploding" thing from earlier, right?"
"III meeean..." Kordelle drawled, not meeting Dude's eyes directly. "It won't, like, actually explode with an impact or a real explosion. Buuut... you could, theoretically, suffer some brain damage from a mental overload. A language is hard enough for a human to learn, and even though we're witches, we're not all that much different from humans."
"Isn't that dangerous, though?" Dude asked, worry knitting his brows together. "We hear new things all the time nowadays-- our world is so connected with technology! What if we accidentally hear or read something before we've waited long enough to learn a new language?"
Kordelle waved a hand flippantly and reached over with it to adjust an empty picture frame sitting on his nightstand. "It's not as easy to learn a new one as you might think. You've got to read or hear a certain amount of directly translated words, which isn't exacty as common as you're probably thinking."
Now a little more reassured in his safety, Dude relaxed, allowing his shoulder and facial muscles to loosen. "Okay, that's a relief. Then, how many languages do you know?"
"Uhmmm..." Kordelle froze, Australian Boulder Opal eyes wide as he realized that he wasn't quite sure about the exact number. He stripped his socks off his feet and flung them behind him carelessly; they hit the wall his bed was pressed against and slid down between the wall and bedframe. Then he was counting on his fingers and toes, all the while muttering the names of languages under his breath. "English, Spanish, French, Tagalog, Mandarin, Ancient and Modern Greek, Hebrew, German, Catalan, Sioux, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, Russian..." The list lasted long enough for him to use all twenty of his fingers and toes before he reached a final total: "Twenty-two."
"You're kidding me," Dude whispered. Apparently, it was his phrase of the day, not that anyone could blame him for being so in awe all the time. The secret world of witches was a wonder to behold and one so few ever got to witness.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
*rubbing hands together* All according to keikaku
*Translator's note: keikaku means plan
*Dude is suddenly speaking fluent Japanese*
Ahaha no but seriously! What do you guys think of the story so far? A lot has happened in only a few chapters, but at the same time it also doesn't feel like too much has happened at all... I promise there will be some more action coming up soon, so stick around for it, okay?
And sorry for the slow updates, but summer is only two weeks away so I will be freed up for more writing soon! I can't wait~
ALSOOOO HERE IS A COMMISSION I RECEIVED FROM IKIMARU ON TUMBLRRR LOOOK IT'S CAMRY AND SAOIRSE ON A LAZY INDOORSY DAY AAAAAAAAAAAAH *whispers* i'm gonna make it into a bookmark omg
And while I have your attention, here are some little chibis drawn by the super awesome ackerchou, also on tumblr