A collection of tootfic which was originally published on Mastodon.  Volume III is set in the same locale as Volume II, but focuses on CJ and her cats.

Kitty, Kitty

The cat circled around CJ as she was painting runes on the sidewalk.

“Careful, Kitty.”

The cat was big, black… sparkling?  Glittering as if it had been dusted in iridescence.  It looked up at CJ, looked at her runes, and deliberately placed a paw on the Ur she’d just painted.

“Kitty!”

CJ repaired the rune and, as she painted it, began the chant that would seal the spell here.

The cat looked at her again, meowed, and placed a paint-smeared paw firmly on the ground just after her Ur.

CJ stuttered in her chant; the cat meowed again. Power surged from its sparkles and from the pawprint to join CJ’s magic in the shield.

She finished the chant to meowing accompaniment, dug in her pocket, and found a jerky stick to share with the cat.

The shield protecting their air was stronger than she’d ever cast before, and its black-blue sheen glittered. “Keep that up, kitty, and there’s some tuna in it for you.”

The cat meowed.  CJ took that as agreement and moved on to her next spell-site.

Necro-Kitty

“Magic doesn’t raise the dead.”

CJ was forever surprised how many people Knew What Magic Did (and Didn’t) when, a year ago (7 months and 12 days ago), most people hadn’t known magic was real.

In this case, Paz DID know at least something about the subject and was not entirely wrong. Still.

CJ kept painting her a line of runes – two classical sets, her personal runes, and her cats’ runes – around their makeshift morgue.

“No,” she agreed. “Human spellcasting or potions have never definitively raised the dead.”  She rattled a box of kibble. The calico appeared a moment later, tail in the air. “This-” CJ poured out a measure of kibble “-is Necrokitcy.”  She added two more piles of kibble and, like magic, a large black cat and a fluffy grey one appeared.  “Sorcatty.  Encatment.”  

She finished another line of runes before she gave Paz her attention again.  “Human magic doesn’t raise the dead.” Necrokitcy delicately dipped a paw in grey paint. “These guys, however…”

In truth, it only worked if the targets were MOSTLY dead. But the theory, at least, was sound. As was the catosophy.

En (cat) ted

When communicating with cats, it was easy to get oneself heard, harder to get oneself listened to. 

Cats who could enchant things were proving to have exactly the same challenges.  

CJ laid out the four squirrel-meat piles at the corners of the building she wanted protected. It was in good shape, tall; the riots had bypassed it

“Okay, Encatment.” Tin of blue paint on the ground.  Paintbrush, the first runes lined. “Ready?”

The grey-and-white ball of fluff sniffed the meat, looked at CJ, and deliberately looked away. 

“Not hungry?” She sighed. “Or does it need sprinkles?”

An ear twitched in CJ’s direction. 

“All right, all right.” CJ sprinkled some home-baked cat treats over the carcass. “There you go.”

A few messy minutes later, Encatment started the first yowl of the spell chant and plunked down a cat-paw rune in exactly the right place.  CJ breathed a sigh of relief. 

Still easier than working with some human enchanters, she had to concede. 

Fishing

 The cats – the magical ones, at least – had leared how to fish in the river.

Before the catastrophe, that had been, at best, a (ha) fishy proposition, the river tainted with run-off of too many sorts. After the catastrophe, after the dam had broken, it was another sort of questionable, the run-off in the water magical or… whatever the dust had been… and the things in the river were now, well, different.

The cats brought back things to share, fish long enough that they dangled on the ground on both sides while the cat lifted its head to carry it, fish whose scales were mosaics telling stories, fish who tasted and smelled like beef when cooked. The humans told them they were good cats and shared in other things they’d cooked, too, and brushed their fur until it gleamed. It was a good arrangement, part of the broader agreement they had with the cats who could sing spells and sniff out strange dangers.

When the cats brought in a mermaid- two of them working together as the being was still alive, fighting, and longer than most humans were tall – then they had to do some negotiating with the cats. They had brought food, the cats seemed to say. Why were the humans… talking to it?

It took a great deal of work before CJ could convince the cats to talk to the mermaid, and even longer before the mermaid would talk to the cats. But then, eventually, they had an ally in the river, and the cats learned that the fish with arms – MOST of the fish with arms – were not for eating.

🐟

It helped that the mermaids could find tasty little morsels deep in the river that the cats could not.  

It helped that the humans – at least some of them – and the cats could cast charms to clean the runoff before it hit the river, to even start to clean the river itself of some of the weirder contaminants. 

CJ was finding herself spending a lot of time by the edge of the river. 

Cat Nap

 “-when I’m done with that, we’re going to go check out the river and see what we can do there.  I know there’s been side effects from that round of ashfall we got last week, and I want to be sure the stuff we’re pulling out of there is still edible. Maybe another filter-net if you can get Bek on it tonight?”

CJ paused halfway up the ladder to the roof. She felt like she had been going non-stop for weeks.  Years?  “And um, someone has to check out that, uh, Glinda over in the South Wedge?”

“CJ.”  Sen patted her calf.  “We’ve got it. Check the roof, then – then take a break.”

“After I check the river,” CJ offered.  “I promise.”  She headed upwards before Sen could argue, the cats swarming up before and after her. 

The roof of their rehabbed factory was covered in protection runes. They had to check it every week, every rainfall, any time the ash fell again. 

CJ stood in a clear space and looked around.  The sun was shining brightly.  

There was a blanket up here, where Paz liked to watch the stars. 

Sorcatty, the biggest of her three cats, put his paws on her chest and pushed.  Encatment twisted between her legs.  

She sat down with an awkward thump and laughed as Necrokitcy climbed onto her lap. 

“A cat-nap it is, then,” she agreed ruefully.  “Since it seems I have no choice.”

As she lay down, Encatment curled up next to her head and purred. 

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A collection of tootfic which was originally published on Mastodon.  Volume II begins the story of the Factory Settlement

Protec

Even before the Dust came, they had protection runes on the old factory. 

Then, it was because the cops & some factions looked poorly on unlicensed spell-work. 

Early-Dust, they painted protection over every inch of it: Red lines for a spell of clean air. Potions poured on brick to make it impervious. Orange lines of warmth, comfort. 

Inside, they added blankets and cots, cleaned & repaired windows, swept out years of grime.

Outside, CJ repeated the runes for safety & murmured ancient words-making the hideout a refuge for all.

That done, gas masks & gloves on, they moved towards the neighborhoods. Potions poured on roads to clean groundwater, runes of protection sprayed on intersections, spells of let us breathe cast down the yellow lines.

A cop stopped CJ. She panicked—’til he handed her fresh spraypaint & took up guard. “Protect,” he offered. “And serve.”

They made sure the police station was within their blue line, the spell that said life.

And still they worked outwards. 

Breathe Free

When the Dust started to fall, when it showed what it could do, when it first transformed someone and then transformed some/thing/, CJ closed her eyes and remembered.

She’d been two when the tear gas flew. Her mother hadn’t meant to bring her to a protest; the protest had come to their neighborhood and CJ had run out to join the shouting people.  Their shouts seemed to make sense.  Their complaints seemed fair.

Her mother’d had just minutes, pushing aside protesters and working with a giant poster marker on the faded pavement and sidewalk.  CJ had watched the runes form.  Edol, she’d said, over and over again, because that was her favorite rune, the one her mother had painted on her bedroom door as a work of art.  Edol. 

She was much older when she learned that one meant Shield. But the ones she remembered more now, the ones her mother had carefully taught her during a particularly bad flu season, Omil and Paru, those meant “breathe” and they meant “free.”  Together, together they cleaned the air. 

CJ pulled out her own poster markers and began writing, her eyes open but the memory still clear in her mind.  Shield. Protect. Clean Air.  The place she and her parents had lived – first that block and then the whole neighborhood – had never suffered from either tear gas nor the flu nor smog.  Clean air. 

“Edol,” she whispered. Breathe Free, her runes, writ large on every surface, shouted. 

Discovery

They had cleansed the courtyard of Dust with potions of clean-water and spells of breathe-safe and stay-calm and root-form, but damage had been done before they got there. The trees sometimes moved on their own, and creatures slunk through the bushes and decorative plantings.  

They’d cleared out the most malicious things, but a former lawyer now haunted the biggest tree as a dryad. ryad and some of the creatures that slipped here and there had once been more mundane things — rats and squirrels, pigeons and frogs. 

CJ sat in the middle, legs crossed, and listened. It would take a while, it always did, but if she was still and calm and rooted —

She smiled, almost too excited and almost too bouncy, but still, the gremlins clambered out of their burrow.  Five of them; the littlest came over to sniff her while the biggest headed for the nearest telephone pole. 

She fed them scraps of her sandwich and watched as three more emerged.  The gremlins might be a nuisance creature — there went the power again! — but she still loved them. 

Spring

The city wasn’t empty, even still, but some places definitely seemed it.

The others had helped with clearing away the rubble, the pavement, and the trash, but now Joy was alone on a lot that had once held a tailor’s shop. 

She’d started seedlings in March; now that the snow was finally gone and the sun seemed to have finally come back, Joy wanted to return the favor and bring life back to their land.  

She was safe here. They’d cleared all the unfriendly strange-beasts out of the area; there was a mostly-friendly goblin watching her from a perch on the nearest surviving building. She was safe here.

Joy dug a tiny hold, poured in a dose of a potion Paz’d made her for this, and set in a tomato seedling. She patted the dirt around the seedling, poured a second potion over it, and slid a collar made from half a soda bottle around it.

Over and over, until the lot sparkled with potion and was dotted with green. 

The goblin sitting on the nearby building smiled broadly in approval

Pumpkin Spice

 The potions lab was the most well-ventilated room in their compound, and still, most days it smelled faintly unpleasant or slightly weird. Mona still went in there – to make sure Paz ate, to fish out a cat who wasn’t helping or a child doing the same, to ask if Paz needed anything or put in a request for a specific potion.

Today, the lab smelled like – like –

Mona breathed in deeply, no matter how unwise it might be here. “Cinnamon,” she murmured. “Ginger. Nutmeg.”

Paz swirled a dark, thick fluid in a beaker.

“Pumpkin Spice hot cocoa. Bonus: it keeps you warm for up to 12 hours. Second bonus: bats and black cats love you.”

Mona peered into the beaker. “Happy Halloween, Paz.”

“Just wait ’till you see what I’m planning for Thanksgiving.”

Discovery II

There was a woman painting tiny letters on the road. 

The past weeks had been insane: spores from the sky, people, animals, even plants acting weird. Sen, who had been hoping there was still something left at the store, was hurrying, a wet bandanna tied over her face. She stopped dead anyway.

The woman was masked, goggled, gloved, painting. They weren’t Roman letters.  Sen didn’t know what they were. 

“What-?” 

The woman held up a finger. Chanting softly – not English – the woman stood, stretched, stepped over the line of letters, stopped. 

Behind her, a flickering wall – the color of the paint, a shiny blue – rose upwards. 

“That’ll help the air.”  She bowed.  “I’m CJ.  What’re you doing this far west?”

Going for food, Sen didn’t say.  CJ had eyes that, improbably, matched the paint.

“I-Falling in love.”

With the mask, Sen couldn’t tell the woman’s expression, but her eyes squished up like a smile.

“Magic does that. Come on, I’ll get you someplace safe… and maybe show you a bit more.”

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A collection of tootfic which was originally published on Mastodon.  Volume I includes the Ti(tt)le series. 

Po(r)tion

“The trick is not just in the ingredients and in the order they are stirred in.”

Toa had been teaching seminars on potion-brewing – first in her garage, then in empty classrooms, then auditoriums, and now in a garage again – since the world was a very different place. 

“Intent, right?”

There was always one.  Usually one per twenty. 

“Intent and your mood? Your desires?”

“Portioning.”  Toa raised one eyebrow at the Mood and Desires student. “You must get everything in the right measurements, of course, the right times and the right methods of integration, but more than that, you must dose out these things in the proper form and quantity. With food or without? Morning or evening? One capful or three?”

“Sounds like science,” another student muttered. “I thought this was potions.”

“Scire. ‘To Know.'” Toa pinned each and every one of them with her gaze.  “If you think potions does not require knowledge, then I ask you to leave now, before you eat the wrong leaf and poison yourself in the middle of my class.”

Not at all to her surprise, nobody left. 

Wav(er)ing

“It’s not just waving your hands about and muttering words.”

Once a month, Toa sat in on her friend Wel’s Basics of Spellcraft session. Like Toa, Wel had started a long time ago and a lot smaller, and sometimes she had to squint to see the Wel she’d known (beard and tie-die and bare feet) in this imposing-looking man, patched shirt notwithstanding. 

“I know that a lot of the street magi you’ll have encountered make it look like that. But if you are here, I assume you are here to learn something, and what you should learn, first, is this:

“We begin with the Words, which have shape, form, and sound.  We add to them the Gestures and the Diagrams, which have shape in three dimensions.  And to those all, we add – not our will, this is important.

“This is important!” he repeated; a few of his students jumped.  “If you are going to cast a spell, you merely lay down the circuits for it to flow through. The unwavering Will of the Universe provides the rest.”

“And that,” he added with a grim smile (A smile Toa couldn’t help but echo), “is where the Threefold Law has its roots.  Heed well. And for homework, read the story of Jan Peck, pages 2-7 in your handout. Read it twice and write me two pages on the dangers of ill-considered spell usage.  Dismissed.”

End(ur)ing

 “Sometimes, all we can do is put up an umbrella and wait out the rain.”

Uma was, in theory, Wel’s student – but he had found over the last year of catastrophe and madness that he was learning more from her than she from him. 

“Sometimes we can find where the floodwaters are breaking the dike and plug it.”

She was drawing chalk symbols on the road while Wel held her umbrella – mostly symbols he’d taught her, some he’d never seen before. 

She pointed at a sideways-L-with-a-twist.  “Personal runes. Don’t know how they work for most people, but they work for me. This one means ‘Shelter’.”

Wel could think of three other ways to do what Uma was doing – PARTS of what she was doing. But right now, he was learning from her and not she from him; he stayed quiet.

“There.”  Standing, she moved both hands in increasing triangles while she chanted in Latin (and in gibberish). When she stepped back, the stench from the eastern city had faded. 

“Not quite an umbrella.” She looked quite pleased with herself. “But it will help us endure the storm.”

And when the world was ending, Wel knew, enduring was priority one.

Ru(i)ne(d)

“The worst thing about personal ruins—” Uma grinned at her audience “–is that I can’t tell you how to use them or what to use.”

They were meeting in an old subway station that had been warded (with traditional runes) until people still residing above had forgotten there had ever been a stop here. 

“If I say, ‘this is the rune for truth,’ that ruins it, because all you have attached to it is ‘Uma said it  means truth.’ It might not even work for me anymore. Magic is, after all, finicky.”

“So how do we learn them?” Tim was the impatient sort. Uma didn’t stop smiling.

“You don’t. You discover them.”  She gestured — calm down, calm down— and pulled their attention back to her. “So you diagram your spells like a sentence, and then if there’s something you want to do you don’t have a word for, say, move, hush, I know that’s [], then you reach for a shape out of your own life. I suggest nothing too complicated, because you want to be able to draw it over and over again in a hurry, so no portraits of your favorite pet marmot or complex emoji.  

“And then… then you take your sentence apart.  You have a word for self and a word for air and a word for push, and you know how the subject, the object, the verb go in normal spells.”

In the ruin of their world, Uma still found herself smiling at her students. “In short, you put together a sentence and then you put in your own version of ‘thingababob’ for the word you’re missing.”

Grim(oire)

Before the Mess, before the Dust, Bo’d known nothing about bookbinding. 

Then, Bo had been a dabbler in spells, knowing 3 new-age ones that got mostly psychosomatic results. Then, Bo’d been a decent programmer & a tolerable handball player & married.

Now, Bo gathered up newsprint used to wrap ceramics, cut leather from a coat that had too many bullet holes to be salvageable and too many memories to try, and carefully trimmed boards from the back of a ruined pressboard bookshelf.

Now, they snuck through checkpoints and slid under barriers, climbed over fences and were very good at the spell that could slow or stop bullets.  Now they made ink from walnuts or from berries, once — only once — from blood and often eeked out of the backs of broken pens. They cut quills from old tin cans and cat-litter bins. And everywhere they went, they wrote. 

Isah, they’d scribe in fading brown, for peace. Teru Isah bena, to calm someone. 

They scribed runes carefully and copied each one as many times as they had paper, and then, when they had enough, they bound everything together. 

luro, to seal, they wrote on both covers, Tela, to hide, and then they’d leave the completed grimoire with their current host and move on. 

At night, copying over all the pages, every time they could find more paper, they whispered Alet, to love, and let their tears thin the ink. 

Sel(f/v)edge

“Magic isn’t just something you can scavenge, like tin cans hidden under a shelf—”

“I prefer salvage, like selvage, holding yourself together at the edges.”

“Whatever you call it, you can’t just FIND Magic, okay?

“We found that potions set-up.”

“Yeah, we did. You couldn’t do anything with it, could you?  It’s not like science — you have to be the right person, you know.”

Magic existed; the End had told them that.

Magic was only for the right people; example had shown that.

Lis had read The Hobbit at 8 and Ogre, Ogre at 10; she didn’t need to be told about magic – and never believed it was only for SOME people. 

She stroked a thin gold ring that was nobody’s Precious and climbed to the top of a building, to the edge of the roof, to the edge of herself.

She closed her eyes and, gold ring on her pointing finger, drew a rune she’d seen wizards use, whispered a word she’d heard them shout, followed it with one she’d only read once (salvaged, like a tin can).

It had to work, because they needed it. It had to work, because magic was real and she wanted it more than anything.

It had to work, because if magic had taken everything, it had to give her this.

It had to work — and, at the edge of herself, Lis spread new wings and took to the sky, brown feathers flapping against the air.

Ban(e/ana)

“What IS that?”  Tao stared in horror at Yan’s bench. 

“This? 99 Bananas, all the ginger powder left in the store, & safflower, turmeric, and curry powder.”

“But WHY?”

“Because all the vodka was gone, there isn’t any fresh ginger root to be had without a hothouse, and ditto saffron.”

“You’re making sweet piss water.  WHY?”

Tao ought to know better; Tao did the spells for most of their group.  But she had to admit the arrangement looked pretty awful. 

“Because Cora’s heart is weak and Dan’s guts are rebelling & because our perimeter has been breached 4 times in the last month,” she retorted.

“That’s one hell of a potion.” Tao stared at the mess; she still couldn’t fault the urge 

“Three potions,” she allowed.  “But they share a base.”

And if her sweet piss water didn’t work, she was going to have to move on to the REALLY sketchy stuff. 

“Carry on, then. But, if you need someone to test your base…. maybe ask someone else?”

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