Mari is emotional and exhausted after visiting Cassandra, and when she gets home she can do little more than wander up to her room and fall onto the bed. She stays there for a few hours, going through several phases of being too emotional to sleep, but also too tired to stay up.

  Eventually she regains consciousness enough to notice that Martin had joined her in lying on the bed at some point, but she notices something about him that presents an entirely new problem.

  Martin is completely covered in dust. If you didn’t know any better you would assume he had always been grey, if it weren’t for all the dusty paw prints that mark his trail. Mari realises that she’s been living in this house for a while now, and supposes it would make sense that dust would be beginning to build up, especially when she’s not using most of the rooms. It also doesn’t help that Martin is exactly the kind of cat who would choose the dustiest possible pces to hang out.

  Part of her was expecting the house to have some sort of spell to keep it clean, since there are already other enchantments in pce, but she’s been so focused on learning that teleportation spell over the past few weeks that she didn’t really notice the dust start to settle in.

  Worry starts to set in a bit, the house not keeping itself clean means that she’s going to have to figure out a way to do it herself. She’s not allergic to dust or anything, but her lungs are already weaker than most people and she doesn’t need a dirty house making it even worse. Even from a logistics standpoint she’s not sure what she can do, as just keeping the lobby and the rooms she’s actively using clean would take up most of her spare time, and she didn’t move into this house just to spend all her time cleaning it.

  This seems like another problem that requires a magical solution, so she grabs the witch’s book to see if she can find anything reted to cleaning. After flicking through the pages for a while she discovers that there is indeed a spell that is used for keeping an area clean and stopping dust from building up, so she starts reading through the steps to cast it. Mari is wondering why this wasn’t already in pce, as it seems like a retively simple spell, but the reason becomes crystal clear as soon as it’s cast, as she’s almost instantly worn out, and gasping for air.

  She takes a minute to recover before reading the notes at the bottom of the page. It turns out this isn’t a spell that you can set and forget, you need to keep using energy to maintain it for as long as you want the area to remain clean. On top of that, the amount of energy required is proportional to the size of the area, so using it on the entire house is completely out of the question. Mari figures she could probably use it on a single room after some practice, but it would still take a lot out of her, and even a very powerful witch would probably struggle to keep this entire pce clean while still having energy left for other things.

  The cleaning spell is a no go, and Mari starts to think back to the witch that used to live here. Maybe the dolls are a part of the solution? She never really gave them too much thought, but they seemed to be servants of some kind, and there were certainly enough of them to be able to keep the pce clean.

  Mari doesn’t like the idea of having people work for her like that, having servants is a little off putting, but she’s also apprehensive about the idea of being responsible for other people, especially a whole group. That being said, she needs to do something to keep this pce in good condition, so she decides to at least see what the book has to say about dolls so she can assess her options.

  There are actually a couple of sections of the book devoted to dolls, one for making them, and another for maintenance. Reading through that first section leads her to the discovery that there are two ways to make them, you can create one from scratch, or you can… convert a human? The thought of taking a human and turning them into a doll makes her very uncomfortable, so she leaves those pages alone, and goes to the part for making one from scratch.

  She finds a list of the ingredients needed to create a doll, but she runs into another snag as almost everything on this list sounds like nonsense to her. The one thing that’s familiar to her is porcein, which is listed as a common material for constructing the body, but even then she’s not sure where to find a “human sized sb” of the stuff. Assuming she was able to sort that part out, she’d have no idea where to start with building the core, which as far as she can tell is the brain, or maybe the heart, of the doll. She needs to create some sort of shell, and then fill it with materials, but everything listed for both of those components are completely unfamiliar to her. Some of them sound like they could be a strange kind of pnt that she hasn’t heard of, but nothing comes up when she searches them online. Some materials are much more abstract than that, Mari isn’t sure what “Unrelenting Remorse” is, but she doesn’t think she wants to put in someone to make them clean the house.

  She tries to search through the book to find information about these materials, but the only time that the same names pop up are in lists of things needed for other spells, nothing about what they actually are. She’s getting a little frustrated, but maybe this sort of thing is meant to be common knowledge for witches? You wouldn’t expect a recipe to expin to you what a tomato is, after all.

  It seems like dolls are also off the table, so Mari returns to looking through the book for solutions. After a few minutes she comes across a page on enchanting objects, and wonders if this could be the solution she’s searching for. It looks like you can send a small amount of energy into an object, and you can then focus that energy to have the object obey certain commands. The notes say it’s only good for simple commands unless you’re very experienced with the spell, but Mari figures this should work well enough considering the first thing she learnt was how to send energy into her own body.

  Mari gets out a feather duster and pces it in the lobby, before trying to send energy into it in the same way she maintains the enchantment on her lungs. The duster suddenly starts floating in the air, which she takes as a sign that she did the first step correctly, and now she just needs to get it to start cleaning the furniture. She’s able to make it move around without too much effort, and after a bit of practice she’s able to make it dust the top of a nearby table. She also figures out that while she can only give it simple commands, she can have a number of them lined up at once, such as dusting every surface of a cabinet one by one and then moving on to the next piece of furniture, so she should be able to leave it to do it’s thing.

  The other thing she realises is how empty the house still is, as most of the cabinets and tables are still bare. She’d like to properly decorate everything when she gets a chance, but she’s also not compining about how things are right now, as she’s not sure her simple commands would work if all this furniture had stuff on it, everything would probably get knocked to the ground.

  This is only a temporary solution, but it’s good enough for now. She’ll check in on how the dusting is going a bit ter, but once that’s done she should be able to enchant her broom to work on the floors, although getting it to go under and around objects might be tricky.

  This weekend has been exhausting for Mari, but she’s gd she was at least able to get something done. Normally she’d just want to sit down and rex after everything, but the idea of enchanting objects is bringing up a lot of possibilities in her head, as the book wasn’t specific on what the limitations were.

  She heads up to the study, wanting to test something. Her PC is a few years old now and starting to show its age a bit, so she’s very aware that she’s going to need to upgrade at some point in the future. She doesn’t really know what will happen, but maybe if she enchants the PC she can make it run better, and save all that money she’d be spending on parts. Normally Mari would be extremely apprehensive about messing with her PC, not only because of how expensive it is, but also because she needs it for her job, but the idea of seeing what she can do with her new magic is too tempting. She also figures she’s already saving so much from not paying rent or utilities that repcing it won’t be much of a problem if she ends up breaking it.

  Mari gathers some energy and sends it into the PC, trying to will it into running faster, when her web browser pops up, and is open on an unfamiliar page. No url is dispyed at the top of the window, but the page calls itself the “Witch Wide Web”, and cims to be the pce to go for all digitally inclined witches. Mari starts to scroll down the page, the CSS is very old fashioned, but it seems to be a web portal that contains a ton of resources reted to witchcraft. There are a lot of interesting links that she wants to check out, but the one that stands out to her the most is one that appears to be some kind of shop. Maybe she’ll be able to get those doll materials after all.