Tansy Undercrypt

Jackie needed a key ingredient to complete her spell; according to the grimoire, she could use a rhino’s horn or the thigh bone of a man set against his own people. Some seconds later, Senator Plunkett from South Carolina woke screaming with an excruciating pain in his leg. “Supply and demand,” Jackie said quietly to herself. “Rhinos are endangered.”

He made them miserable because it was fun. He froze their toes, stung their ears, and spent entire afternoons nipping at their noses. Until he reached the bus shelter for the 11A at 4:45pm, that is. Jack Frost careened away from the little plexiglass hut, disgusted, the wind howling his irritation. Damn witches! Two of them! The woman had deflected him with a warming wall and the man had literally kicked him in his (typically) unseen behind as he bounced off of it. “Maybe Gust is right,” he muttered angrily to himself. “I should head south and do something different with my life.”

The new oven had arrived yesterday; deep well, six burners. Hilda had buffed it to a gleaming finish and given the rest of the kitchen a scrubbing to get everything ready. That night, under the full moon, she worked on the outside of the house, gluing gingerbread and candies to the roof, walls, and sills; a time spell insured that she could complete the task in less than 4 hours and then sleep. She needed to be rested for this next part. The children would come. They always did.

Dillard (Duly) Constant marveled at how Salem was going to hell in a handbasket of its own design. The trials were a waste of public resources (not to mention a waste of good people’s time). “Mea culpa,” Duly murmured to himself, locking the door of the secret room behind him. He had completely misjudged these seemingly dour folks; their propensity towards hysteria unnerved him. He started a fire under the cauldron and began to assemble the parts of the spell. He would cast a pall over the town, cursing them for a wee bit – crops would fail, families would move away, etc. The land could rest and be rid of its human embarrassment for a time. Afterwards?  Who knew?  Perhaps his descendants could do something touristy.

With the others gone, the Wicked Witches of North and South formed an opium drug cartel and hired munchkin thugs from the Lollipop Guild to patrol the poppy fields and keep interlopers out. The mayor of the land was already on the payroll and Oz was out of the picture at long last, but Glinda was a problem. Glinda was always the damn problem.

Wysteria Yewberry made her way slowly along the dirt path to her cottage. She had given the boy all of the power she had left for his epic battle - not for his sake or even for the glory of victory, but in memory of the man she’d held most dear. He’d never noticed her (his affections had always belonged to Lily Potter), but that mattered little to her heart. She mused that this … unrequitedness … could be the very thing that bound the two of them together forever (if, in the end, it couldn’t be love).

“It’s just so hard, Mom,” the young girl sobbed, clutching her mother’s dark cape. “I hate being teased every day!”  “There, there, my dearest,” Maleficent cooed, stroking her hair. “Some day, you’ll be the wickedest witch in all the West and I’ll show you a couple of tricks to bring them around. In the meantime, always remember that green is beautiful!”