World Tree MUSH

     It's a bright and sunny day in Safe Haven!

Okay actually it's gloomy and overcast, with some on-and-off rain and drizzling that's left everything wet and the ground pockmarked with puddles, especially in the forest area and the pot holed urban sections. However, that hasn't stopped a particular demon prince from summoning a bright yellow raincoat and white-and-pink polka dotted umbrella to go out and about with his friendish acquaintance, the horned bunny Benedicta!

As the two of them make their way through one of the nicer suburbs, Damian hops and skips through the air (literally, as his feet never actually touch the ground), swinging his umbrella around. "You're gonna love her! Seriously, she's great. And she knows tons of stuff about magic, more than I ever bothered to pay attention to!" he excitedly babbles to Bene, passing by rows of nigh-identical homes built more for function than fashion, distinguished mostly by lawn decorations.

Benedicta frowns a bit upon feeling the rain, the feeling of cold wet fur was never pleasant for her. "Well, at least one of us in a good mood. I tried calling Sybil but got her voicemail. Something tells me I'm not getting a response anytime soon." She seemingly had hit a dead end, "Beacon Society doesn't seem to have much more information about Shield-Maiden either. So short of running into her again or meeting with the Cabal, I'm out of ideas."

 Her fur has mostly healed from being scorched but the Cabal's emblem is still visible on her arm. "I wonder if they were trying to kidnap and brainwash me like they did with Lizzy, I can't figure why else they would formlock me. How much does your friend know about transformation magic?" She can't help but to wonder.

Damian grins, spiralling through the drizzly air as Benedicta gives her thoughts on the situation. "Yeah, I still don't really know who any of those people are, not gonna lie. 'Some assholes' works fine though, right?" he says with a small chuckle and a wink as he turns into the driveway of a white house with neatly-trimmed bushes around its walls and a few small statues of snakes dotted around the lawn. Not just regular ones either, but ones with wings and multiple heads and the like; clearly someone has a liking for mythological serpents...

Upon knocking on the front door, it's answered surprisingly quickly by a tan-skinned teen boy with gray hair and black-rimmed glasses covering his clearly inhuman yellow eyes. "Hey, g- oh, it's just Damian. Hi, Damian. Got a new girlfriend?" the somewhat nerdy-looking boy unenthusiastically greets them, his very obviously snake-like tongue flicking through his lips every few seconds.

"Hey Quintin. Nah, just a friend. She's cute though, ain't she? Raven and I found her wandering around once, and- eh, I'll tell you about it later. Is your sister home?" Damian responds, twirling his now-closed umbrella upside down on one fingertip.

The other boy, Quintin as it turns out, rolls his eyes and nods, turning to holler towards the back of the house. "Hey, Sahara! Damian's here! He brought a friend!" Then, turning back to the two, he steps aside and remarks, "She's probably still studying. I asked if she wanted to join me and the guys in tonight's session, but she said she still doesn't see the appeal. I mean, jeez, what's /not/ to love about Mazes and Monsters?"

Damian glances at Benedicta, then bows and gestures for her to go in. "Ladies first~ Besides, I bet you're ready to get out of the rain." Inside, it's pretty much what one might expect of a suburban home- comfortably furnished, with small entryway that leads out into a living room with a couch, coffee table, potted plants, that sort of thing, and then some other rooms connected on the opposite walls. The coffee table, as it happens, has a tabletop game of some sort prepared on it, with a stack of game books next to it and a neatly-arranged set of various dice next to sheets of paper covered in text that's nigh-impossible to decipher.

"Sybil's the blonde who can make her copies of herself, Shield-Maiden is the knight girl but yeah no need to get formal." Benedicta nods in agreement. "Sybil and I have been rivals forever. She has part of my soul right now which makes things complicated." She explains as they enter the driveway. If Benedicta could blush she would do so right now but instead she pull down her hood a bit. "He already has a girlfriend, speaking of which what happened to Raven?" Her knowledge of magic would certainly be helpful right now.

 "Is that one of those tabletop games? I'm not really into that sort of thing myself, more into the outdoors...at least when it's not raining." She eagerly makes her way inside.

     Damian nods at all the explanation of Sybil and Shield-Maiden and souls and- half a soul? What? "I didn't even know you /could/ split souls in half. Guess I should pay more attention in class when they talk about that stuff." he remarks, then his expression sinks into a deep frown as the subject of Raven comes up. "I... actually don't know. I haven't seen her in months. I tried looking for her, but it's like she just vanished from existence entirely. I don't even know where to begin-"

At that moment, however, he's suddenly hugged from behind by a remarkably tall woman of obviously African descent... who is also very much human in appearance, no sign of animal features anywhere to be seen. She makes up for it with her hair though, stretching down almost to the ground and pink in color, except for her bangs and the last foot or so at the bottom where it looks like it's been dipped in black ink. Her clothing is of similar coloring, made up of a dark purple jacket over a calf-length pink and black striped dress, in turn over a pair of dark purple leggings. The only sign of other colors is the set of gold rings around her neck and large, circular golden earrings.

"Damian! How's it going, dude? You never come to visit anymore!" she greets the jackal with a friendly noogie, then lets go of him and offers Benedicta a friendly handshake and a wide grin. "Heya, you're the friend I guess? My name's Sahara, what's yours?"

In the meantime, it seems that Quintin has decided there's nothing more to be said here, as he has gone to sit on the couch and fiddle with some of those papers, deep in thought. Still waiting for "the guys" it would seem.

"Damn, I hope she's okay. She's certainly someone the Cabal would be interested in." Benedicta looks around a bit concerned as she hears that Raven has suddenly vanished. "Then again, I'm sure she would be difficult to capture." Benedicta does her best to try and reassure Damian about Raven's disappearance. Sahara reminds Benedicta of Orania a bit but she's much younger.

 Her white furred hand shakes the offered one, "Benedicta, do you already know what's going on or do I need to explain it?" She's not sure how much Damian told her.

Damian nods to Benedicta, giving her an uneasy grin as he says, "Yeah, she's pretty strong. Honestly, knowing her, she probably went into hiding to protect me or something. She was always talking about her dad's side of the family being kinda... nasty to outsiders." he says, then reciprocates Sahara's hug with a gentle pat on the head and a teasing wink. "Hey baby, you know I can't stay away for long. Nobody can resist the charms of Safe Haven's biggest, baddest witch~"

Sahara, however, rolls her eyes and affectionately jabs her elbow into his ribs. "Yeah yeah, the sweet talker shtick. Get some new material, man." While the demon prince snickers to himself, tail wagging, Sahara places her hands on her hips and gives Benedicta a curious look. "He never said much about it other than something about a cute bunny. I thought he just needed help with a pet or something."

"Thankfully, no one's gone after my family. Even Sybil knows not to go there." That's one thing that Benedicta was thankful for, "I suppose I should give you the full story. I'm a magic girl. My rival stole my transformation artifact leaving me in this form. We managed to get the artifact but not before my rival split my soul apart. Sibyl also has part of my soul inside her as well. I have two different bodies as a result. One that's human and one that's a horned rabbit girl. This knight girl fried me with magic and now I can't switch back into my human body." She shows the Obsidian's Cabal's mark to Sahara. "I'm pretty sure it's the result of this. No one I know's quite sure how to remove it."

Damian has already gone off toward one of those side passages, which from here looks to lead into a hallway. "Hey! Don't touch anything down there!" Sahara calls after him, shaking her head as she starts to follow. "The kitchen and basement are that way. Knowing him, he isn't going for a snack." she remarks, leading Benedicta toward that hallway... and sure enough, at the end of it is a kitchen full of modern amenities as well as what appears to be a rather impressively stocked spice rack, but they end up head into a door in the hallway's wall instead. A set of stairs brings them down to the basement, which is currently dimly lit by purple candlelight, giving off a smoky atmosphere with a pleasant aroma of lavender.

"Hey! What took you guys so long?" Damian waves at the girls as he levitates above a large cauldron filled with an unidentifiable liquid that seems to change color depending on the angle one looks at it from. There are lumpy bits of... *stuff* in it, nothing recognizable, though occasionally something resembling an eye burbles to the top before popping like a bubble. The demon prince pokes at one of them and chuckles as it hisses upon popping. "Whatcha cookin' anyway, Sahara?"

With a long-suffering sigh of someone who has clearly spent far too much time with the jackal in days past, the witch quickly swoops over to cover the cauldron with an iron lid, then claps twice to turn on the electric lights while simultaneously snuffing the candles with what is undoubtedly a spell... which just happens to have the same motions associated with it as turning on the ceiling lamps. "Something that isn't going as well as I'd hoped. But right now I think we need to help your friend out, dude. She's having some serious magical issues."

As it turns out, the rest of the room is rather neatly organized in a fashion similar to a personal library, with a couple desks dotting the walls and several bookcases with dozens of tomes of varying thickness arranged in alphabetical order along their shelves. It's not just magical ones either, but the more mundane like Algebra 1 and Social Studies as well. Clearly, she spends a lot of time down here. As she runs her fingers across them in search of something useful, she asks over her shoulder, "So, magical girl, huh? Like in those Japanese cartoons? My brother watches some of those, but they always seemed kinda silly. Didn't know people like that actually existed."

Benedicta follows the pair downstairs into the basement. She manages to relax a bit as she smells the lavender before her attention turns towards Damian, "I've never been here before. She jumps a bit at the sudden popping noise, "I'm not going to have to drink that am I? It looks like a unicorn threw up in it." She can't resist the urge to be a bit snarky seeing how she's been keeping in.

 "You're a witch and you doubt the that magic girls exist? Well, it's not like I asked to be one, but the options were to become one or have everyone I know die." She's quick to point out that her hand was forced.

Damian laughs at the thought of Benedicta having to drink the brew. "Hahahaha! Probably not, nah. Sahara's potions would probably just tear your soul apart even further... and I don't mean magically, I mean because they taste awful!" he grins and narrowly dodges a particularly heavy tome flung at his head, which stops just short of hitting the floor and floats neatly back into its place on the shelf.

"Just because I had you try it that /one time/, Damian..." Sahara heaves a sigh, not even bothering to look at her furry friend as she continues perusing the titles in her inventory. "Anyway, that's fair I guess. You don't make speeches about the power of love or whatever, do you? I don't think any of my books cover that stuff, so you'd be S.O.L."

Finally, however, she pulls one off the shelf with an "A-ha!" and brings it with her as she drags a desk toward the cauldron, since it's in the middle of the room and thus in easy access for everyone involved. Plunking the old, dusty thing down with a resounding THUNK and a cloud of ancient gray debris (plus a spider that crawls out from between the pages, shakes two of its legs angrily at her, and scurries off), she opens it and flips through for a bit before stopping at a page written in some language that is very clearly not English. "Here we go! Soul splitting, a spell from the sub-dominion soul magic, under the primary school of necromancy... Ooh, this one sounds tough."

"Nope, I want to protect people, animals and nature of course but I'm not really the speech giving type. You're saying the only way to do undo this is to put my soul back together? I'm not sure if that will even help since my other form doesn't react. She just stares at me lifelessly. I'm guessing I might have to beat my soul out of Sybil before that will work right?" Benedicta coughs a bit at the dust as she looks at the page not understand what it says.

Sahara just shrugs at Benedicta, while Damian goes off to find that spider for whatever nefarious purposes he has in mind. "I dunno. Honestly, I don't even know if that /is/ what we're dealing with. I'm just a student, not an expert on this stuff. But it makes sense to start with the obvious, right?" she says, then pores over the page again and flips to the next one, making sure she's read everything she needs to. "Hmm... Yeah, this is some pretty high-level stuff. I don't know if I even /can/ do it, man. One of the teachers at Z.P. might be able to, but... it looks like you're right about one thing at least. Gonna wanna get that half a soul back before we try gluing them back together."

Damian finally comes back up to the pair, the spider perched between his ears as he smiles wickedly at Benedicta. "Sounds good, yeah? Revenge! Smack Sybil into next week, get your soul back, put it together like a jigsaw puzzle and bam, we're home free! Sounds like fun to me~"

"That might not be enough to remove the seal, but I guess it would be help if I was full power before we try first. The problem is we have no idea where Shield-Maiden is at the moment. I mean if we can beat her we might be able to remove the seal but it'll be a problem if she teams up with Sybil or blasts me again. For all I know, I might turn into an actual rabbit if she does that..." Benedicta's a bit heistant about going after Sybil right now.

"Yeah I'm not gonna lie, I have no idea what that seal even is, dude." Sahara says with another shrug, eyeing the mark on Benedicta's arm. "But if we're going to a teacher for the soul fusing anyway, that's just one more thing we can ask them about. Heck, for all I know, breaking the seal with your soul in pieces might just kill you."

Damian winces at the thought of that. "Yeesh, I hope not. I like Benny too much to let that happen. But the only other thing I can think of is going to my dad about it, and..." he trails off, letting the implication speak for itself. "Yeah. Last resort, there."

"Oh great, so the littest dullahan did hex me with a death curse after all. The only people who likely know what it is want to capture me or worse..." Benedicta can't help but to sigh at her fate. "So in other words, I better get used to shaving my fur. Good thing I explained things to my parents when I was still human or this would be even more complicated. Your father?" She can't help but to wonder what Damian meant by that.

Sahara blinks, then waves her hand and gives Benedicta a reassuring smile. "No, no, it probably isn't that bad. I'm just being a pessimist, don't take it so hard, alright? Trust me, you're in great hands here in Safe Haven. We've got the best and brightest magical minds in the world here, so I'm sure we'll get it figured out in no time." She does wince when Damian's dad is brought up though.

Speaking of, the jackal raises an eyebrow and tilts his head, prompting the spider to scramble up to the tip of one of his ears. "Did I not tell you? My dad's the Big One. The king of all evil. The beast with seven heads and ten horns, who corrupts the nature of man by his word. All that dumb shit some guy two thousand years ago wrote because of some petty grudge." He rolls his eyes, then finally stops beating around the bush. "My dad is literally Satan, duh."

"Yeah, we're not going to down that path. I already made a deal with a morally challenged monkey that got me into this mess to begin with. Well, I doubt he's working for your dad at least since we're from different worlds but still...this is quite a mess." She sounds quite exhausted from dealing with all of this. "I'm pretty sure you must be rebelling against him or something since you certainly don't act like the son of the devil."

Damian nods in agreement. "Yeah, definitely not gonna do that. I wouldn't make any of my friends do that." he says, but then shrugs at the last part. "Eh, I'm a teenager, rebelling's what we do. I don't think I'd get away with half the stuff I do if it weren't for Mom though. Whenever he gets mad, she talks some sense into him."

"Or he's just got literally all the time in the world and is saving the rage-against-the-heavens stuff for later." Sahara cuts in, bookmarking the page about soul splitting magic and setting the book aside. "You're not gonna be a teen forever, dude. One day you're gonna grow up, get all frumpy and middle-aged, and realize you've got responsibilities, and a family business to run. Happens all the time to us mere mortals."

Damian simply makes a pfft sound and waves a casually dismissive hand at her. "Yeah, but you guys only live like, what, a hundred years? I've got waaaaay longer to just... see the world, make some friends, piss a bunch of people off, have fun my way. The youthful spirit never dies, babe."

"Well, I'm sure you likely already pissed Sybil off. Then again that doesn't take much. I don't plan on going on anywhere, hopefully you don't mind me crashing here tonight since it's a long trip back to Beacon Society. I feel much older than 18 sometimes, it's hard to believe I've been only doing this for two years." Then again Benedicta's been through quite a bit already.

Damian is about to offer for Benedicta to crash at his place... but thinks better of it. "Yeah, this is probably the better choice, honestly. Especially if we wanna keep you out of my dad's clutches... nice as he might be to guests. I'm pretty sure Raven was only 'off limits' because she was my girlfriend and the daughter of another version of him besides." he says with a shrug. "Anyway, it's up to you, Sahara."

Sahara doesn't waste any time in responding to the shrug with a shrug of her own. "I don't have a problem with it. My parents have never minded me having friends over. The worst you'll have to put up with is my bro and his friends trying to hook you on their dumb game."

"Hey, hey. Mazes and Monsters is a far out game, I hear." Damian says, snickering to himself, but his witchy friend just gives him a confused look. After a moment, he sighs. "Tough crowd, tough crowd. Alright, we'll crash here tonight then. Slumber party!"