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un-holly-chaos · 2 months

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Here it is!! (Under the cut)

I'm going to post the thing Here(on this blog), full chapters as soon as they're written folks! Until someone gives me a better idea or the book is finished xD

Chapter One

There is a point, Holly thinks, when you must accept that you are bad at everything, and that this is how your life will go. Every day you will wake up, and put a new attempt into the world, and watch with bright, hopeful eyes, as it falls apart in front of you. She has gotten very good at this, and is quite accustomed to the routine.

She put her amulet in the amulet-slot on the door of the massive, square marble building, in this otherwise empty-for-miles grassy field. The door didn’t respond, and it made her irritable. She had been walking through this ridiculously empty field for hours and hours and it had been loudly raining, and her magic umbrella kept disappearing and water would come splashing all over her head and be cold while doing so. And the door was ignoring her. She tried the amulet again, and instead of opening the door, her umbrella spell flickered again, and she got rained on some more. A gem fell out of her amulet when she removed it from the door. She held in the screams.

As she was putting the gem back into the amulet, the door was manually opened by the handle on the inside, and she was let in. The person who had been so kind as to operate the mechanics of this contraption for her, was Trudy. Trudy was decent at everything, and often let Holly in when the door ignored her.

“We need to put the handle on both sides of the door.” Holly announced. The lively bar room took no notice.Trudy shuffled awkwardly for a moment, then opened her mouth. “See, I told Baringer about that, like you asked,”

“And?” Holly glared at her.

“Well, yes. And he said we can’t put a handle on the outside of the door, because the raccoon would get in, and… you know. He just really doesn’t want a repeat of that incident.”

“Well then maybe Baringer should put up a raccoon ward like I suggested and we could have a double-sided door handle!”

“Yes, but that costs, and he has other priorities, and you’re glaring at me again, and honestly argue with him yourself next time? And I’m going to go finish my game now. Bye.” And Trudy waved and walked off to a table with people and cards, and sat there. Holly wanted to keep arguing, but she was tired, so instead she found her way to the bar. This took some doing, as it was crowded, and crowds made the bar restless, so they kept wheeling it around the room. She collapsed onto a stool, and the bartender approached her. “Randy,” she said, “I need a Dry Wine.” He didn’t say anything, but looked at her sodden robes, nodded, and stepped off to grab a bottle and glass. He returned, “We only have apple left.”

“I don’t care what flavor it is, I just want to not squelch in my boots anymore.”

He poured her a glass and set it on the bar. “So… Why don’t you just try an umbrella spell?”

“Randy,” she said patiently, “if one more person questions me tonight, I will summon every raccoon in this damn meadow, and I will caffeinate them.”

“Okay.” He said, and stood there. “So, I’m not asking, but don’t you normally struggle to summon things?”

“I struggle with all spells, now shut up and leave me alone.” She wished she could get a potion that would make the people around her tactful and perceptive. She drank the Dry Wine, which wooshed quite a lot of water out of her hair and clothes, and left her bedraggled, but dry. She sighed. Footsteps suddenly separated from the crowd, and stopped behind her. She ignored them, hoping they would go away. They sat down next to her, and belonged to her boss, Danrius.

“Hi Holly,” he said

“Danrius,” she begrudged

“Where’d you uh, put the burglar?”

”I couldn’t catch him.”

”Cool, cool. What do you mean you couldn't catch him? Cause like, call me cuckoo, but I did give you this assignment, of a non-magical burglar, and I teleported you there, to where he was, with my personal office portal, and you had your amulet and everything, and you just… didn’t catch him? I’m just making sure I understand this correctly…”

”Yes, Danrius, that’s- he got away from me.” She rubbed her face.

”Okaaaaayyy, how’d he do that? You’ve got the magic cage spell right? Did you try casting that on him?”

”Yeah, but it didn’t work and he ran, and the magic bolo spell broke on contact, and the running-through-mollasses spell just made a puddle on the ground, and then I had an asthma attack and my inhaler was empty. I filled it up at the pharmacy on my way back.” She stared dejectedly at the empty glass in front of her. There was a long pause, as this information trickled into Danrius’s brain.

”You had an asthma attack?”

”From running after him, yes.”

”Right, ok. See, this is the kind of thing I’m talking about; you don’t even think to cast a flying spell on yourself to save the trouble. Or like, use a floating disc, that’s a classic move. Look Holly, as much as I like you, I’m kind of having an issue, and if you can help me with it that’d be great, but there’s a point where I can’t put more money into an employee than I get out. You have, kind of, not brought in a single bounty this month, and there’s this guy who interviewed with me yesterday, who’s pretty powerful looking. He conjured a whole rainstorm, and it’s still going from yesterday, and as the guy who directs the hiring and maintaining of the wizards here-“

”The manager.”

”Right. As the manager, it’s my job to uh, keep people who can, y’know, consistently cast spells. It’s the main point in the job description on the application.”

”Yeah, but I can do that though, I cast spells all the time!”

”For sure, for sure. But the spell, working, is kind of the point, and if I recall correctly, last two times you brought someone in, you had one tied up in physical ropes, and the other in a pair of, how’d you put it, ‘borrowed?’ Handcuffs? And I just feel like those are pretty non-magical solutions to magical problems, and I’ve been ignoring it for a while, but there’s this guy, Theobold the Thunderous, and he shoots lightning out of his fingers.”

”Are you…? Dan look, if I get the job done, does it really need to be with magic? It just feels like semantics,”

”Somatics, Holly, and no, not really, but, he shoots lightning out of his fingers, and it’s still raining. Look, I’m not happy about this either, but I can’t afford another add-on to the payroll, so as much as it pains me to say ths, I’m gonna have to let you go. We’ve had good times working together, and I know you’ve been putting a lot of hours in, so I’ll give you a few days to say goodbye. As long as you turn in your room key tomorrow, cause I told Theobold he could be moved in by the weekend. Big thanks Holly, I appreciate it!” He stood, slapped her shoulder, and flashed his teeth professionally. Then before she could collect her words, he stepped back into the crowd and was gone.

In two hours, she would collapse face down on her bed. In fifteen hours she would be standing outside the front door, in the still-drizzling rain, trying to summon raccoons. For now she just waved Randy over and asked for a potion of inebriation while she still got free bar. It looked and tasted like rice-milk, and was fully indistinguishable from the real thing, except for its attribute of getting you quite high or drunk, depending on the day. There are more specific potions out there, but they’re more expensive, so naturally, they weren’t here. She fought around the large ice cubes for several minutes before thinking to take them out and depressedly watch them melt on a napkin. She got the next one without ice.

A good while later, she gave up trying to remember the speak-with-marsupial spell, and got up. A headrush became very noticable. It didn’t go away. She compromised, and simply willed herself in the direction of the elevators. Her body successfully took her that way, rather clumsily, but she arrived. It was a magic elevator. The kind with no walls, and a levitator platform. She stepped in, and looked up trepidatiously. The long tunnel swayed above her like a willowy tree trunk that she was somehow inside of. She felt like a bug. She put her amulet in the slot on the pedestal to make it go up. Nothing happened. She realized she forgot to actually do the spell, and tried again, with magic this time. The elevator pad slowly began to rise. She breathed a sigh of relief, and contemplated whether life would be easier beneath the bark of a tree. Her conclusion was interrupted when the pad stopped at the next floor. That was the problem with this elevator, it stopped at every floor, and you had to magic it into going again, every time. She never got it to work every time. The whole place was like that, what with doors with no handles, and elevators with no automation. Wizards were wholly pretentious, she decided. She put her amulet in again, with magic. Nothing happened. She blinked slowly, praying to the god of small mammals (raccoons were still on the mind) that this place would one day go down in wonderfully warm, dry flames. A person swam into her awareness by entering the elevator, and magicking it to go up with their own amulet. She went back to picturing herself as a bug. She wasn’t sure what kind of bug lived in trees, but if she imagined it in first person instead of third person it wouldn’t matter; except she got hung up on how many legs she would have as an unspecified tree bug.

She realized she wouldn’t notice when she arrived to her floor with her eyes closed, so she set aside her insectoid ponderings, and focused. She had no memory of how many floors she’d passed, so she checked the rune stone on the side of the pedestal. It had all the floor numbers in descending order, and each one would light up as the pad stopped there. There were only three left until hers. The person there with her got off of the elevator. She amuleted the pad, with magic.

It took her all of three excruciating minutes to get the pad going again, and then only a few tries at the next stop. She finally reached her floor, and climbed off the pad with great relief. When she felt steady again after what felt like an hour, but was definitely not more than a minute or two, she counted the doors down the long hall till she got to her room, and rediscovered the wonders of old, beat-up mattresses.

Fourteen hours later, here she was, standing in the drizzle attempting to summon raccoons, an hour late on her day’s schedule. It had taken her over an hour to pack, despite only having a duffel bag and her amulet. Said amulet steamed. She wasn’t typically a vengeful person, or very wrathful actually, but ever since she had set foot into that horrible, grand, elegant, fake-marble bounty-wizard-hub, she had been having problems with it. Everything was magic powered, but nothing was automated, so she got stuck everywhere, and hated it. She fiddled with the gem, trying to adjust the rubber band so she could try the summon again. The spells were always worse when the gem got loose, she figured it was something about keeping the etching connected like a sort of circuit. Raccoons were tree animals too, so she didn’t know why they were even here, but Baringer hated them, and they kept setting everything on fire whenever they got inside, thus the one-sided door handle.

She cast the spell again. Her amulet sparked, and after a moment the grass rustled. A small face, familiar with the allure of arson, and well acquainted with the improved flavor of stolen foods, appeared. It was only one raccoon, but it would have to do. She put amulet in door-slot, and focused her magic very poignantly. It opened. She ushered the little creature in, and closed the door behind it, walking away. The grey sky hung heavy, and the pale grass scratched against her robes, but she was an unemployed woman, and couldn’t muster anything resolute to think about it.

After a few hours the sun came out, and she felt a bit better. She wondered about the success of her raccoon, and was in a faintly good mood when she arrived at the nearest inn that night. She booked a room and slept uneventfully.

The next day she entered an actual city, and wandered about a bit. At one point she found an abandoned silk scarf on the sidewalk. It was red with nice geometric designs, so she tied it onto her belt. She bought a pastry from a gluten-free bakery, and felt optimistic about it. The pastry was dry, flavorless, and over-priced, but it was so rare she had pastries she could eat, that she didn’t mind. She decided she would refill her water bottle and find a new place to work. Who knows, maybe a flier would advertise a cool new job she’d be really good at, like taking care of lizards. She found a public drinking fountain, and gratefully filled up her water bottle. As she turned to face the city street, bustling with people and new opportunities, a damp newspaper found its way to her face, and stuck. She peeled it off, debating if it could be considered horror-enough to be the last straw. She decided to read it before she decided.

Half of it was smeared by being damp, but in the middle of the page was an advertisement looking for “Fresh Wizard College Graduates, Looking For Their First Job!” She’d graduated two years ago, and had lost three jobs since then, but she was qualified, and that was what they were really asking. “This is serendipity. This one’s gonna work, I’m gonna get this job, and not fail miserably!” she lied, to no one in particular. She felt confidence rushing through her, along with the paper pulp rubbing off on her fingers. She dutifully took the paper to the bin, and bought a new copy of the same one so she could read the address listed. It was 154th Kennings Ln, just off of Side St. She began her purposeful meander, in hopes of finding a directory board. Or one of those bus stops with the maps on them.

#Holly Kingsley #chapter one #wizard #writing #please be kind #i'm insecure and this is my fun hobby to not stress about #tyyy <3 #my novel attempts

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