Level Ups, Break Ups, and +2 to music comprehension rolls.
Chapter 1: An introduction
Part 3: Dance with me, or on the Importance of having some good magical objects to hand.
(Cupcake with fellow dance adventurer Lady Rubens)
CHARACTER BIO
Character: Cupcake
Race: Radical Faerie*
Gender: Fluid
Class: Level 5 Faggot
Sub-Class: Level 2 Reclaiming Witch
For full bio check out Chapter 1, Part 1
And for more back story Chapter 1, Part 2
MAGICAL OBJECTS TO HAND
THE BREATH OF MARY
Inhaling the Breath of Mary, changes everything. The Breath of Mary can make all things possible. The Breath Of Mary will leave you hungry, and relaxed and desiring.
+6 to appetitive.
- 5 to memory rolls
+ 3 to interpretive dance
- 8 to being on time
+ 9 to random
With all actions roll a d20, if a 4 or 20 comes up character gets temporary modifier “UNDERSTANDING” if a 3 comes up character has to make a Paranoia roll. If you fail character becomes Paranoid for a hawt minute and get -10 to social interactions. Roll one d20, a roll of 15 and below makes you paranoid. Use your constitution modifier as a bonus to your roll.
Part 3
We faeries gather when we find the time in the homes of our fellow faggots. We bring bounties of vegan food and cast off our human shells to emerge fully as the faeries we are. This time we are gathering in a Park Slope brown stone and it is delicious. There are bodies sprawled on the floor, conversations twirling around in the air, massages being given, hair being played with, and presently I’m standing between the sink and the cheese platter, swaying. Moving in a dance that consists of cleaving a section of cheese away from its rind, shoving it into my mouth and then sliding back towards the sink again as a shadow might. It’s an odd dance, but I am hoping it keeps people from noticing just how much time I have spent at the cheese board, and just how much of its destruction is down to my insatiable desire to eat all milky substances.
I’ve found myself in a pensive moment at this party, my gaze drawn out a window, while I sway as a birch tree does, listening to the songs my body wants to sing. It begins with a twitch of a finger, the spin of a wrist; I raise my arm up towards the track lighting, and spin. I’m dancing to music, that it appears, only I can hear.
Perhaps it is because I have chosen to draw in the vaporous kiss of Mary. These things happen when you spend an evening with this particular magical object to hand. Anything can happen, synapses can become crossed, insight can slide up to you, laughter can cripple you, The Breath of Mary is a medicine to some who choose to take it. Yet hearing Music only in my head is not what I had planned for this evening.
Just before I get ready to make a constitution roll save to stop myself from bad self-inflected party spell Paranoia, I take a moment to give into my pensive swaying and dancing and ask myself what it could me.
It dawns on me that gaining this plus 2 to music comprehension rolls, has allowed me to hear truth in music, when I actively listen. But the one source I’ve not yet considered trying to listen to are the songs my heart is singing.
ACCEPT MINI-QUEST HEART SONG? Says the giant floating quest log box that shimmers in front of my eyes. Sure gurl, why not.
I dance wander towards the window, I look up towards the night sky, I let the sounds of the party, of the laughs, and the reads fall away, and listen to the song of my heart. It’s a messy song. My heart is not much of a singer, and much like me it struggles to drag let alone carry a tune.
But I am a witch, level two now and its time to upgrade myself. I listen towards my heart, and still swaying, give those songs, which are not my heart, but cling to it, space to be truly heard. They are the songs of sadness, the songs of sorrow, of wanting, songs of improbable desires, and conflicting opinions. But those songs are not me, they are the unnecessary inventory items of the soul that I have been carrying around unwillingly.
I listen, I sway, I eat another piece of cheese, I reflect, I wonder what tomorrow will bring, I briefly remember I forgot to put the washing in the dryer, I burp, I sway, I eat more cheese, I try to let the song of my heart bubble up. I listen. I listen to those songs of sadness too, and in listening, I thank them, and then I banish them with an invocation of Rupaul’s “If you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else.” Sadness sashay away, Heart song, Shante you stay.
I listen to my heart sing, and am not surprised when it continues in the voice of Celine, channeling some titanic realness. It adapts it molds itself into new forms, it has the tragic beauty of a late Joan Crawford picture about it. It’s faggy and its beautiful and its mine. We make a duet my heart and I, a questing party of two locked in song. I sing back. I return to the cheddar block and liberate another hunk. Sing heart sing. Dance body dance. The funk lifts, gurl is working through her shit.
Sometimes you need the aid of a magical object when you are on a magical quest. It is always good to have magical objects to hand, for they allow us to extend the limits of what we would otherwise be capable of doing. They give us the talent to glimpse potential beyond our limitations. In choosing to see the objects around us as magical objects, bequeathing to them histories, and dreams and skills, we enable ourselves to change how we sit in the world. Witchcraft is the art of altering consciousness at will, and having tools for that journey can help us deepen that experience. (From The Breath of Mary to lucky underwear, to a Pentacle, gurls do you, find the objects you can work with.)
Magical objects are everywhere. In repurposing an object as a magical tool, how we can use it to change and alter our realities shifts. It allows us to take away some of the power of the magic of the hegemonic. It allows us to queer and make objects our own, make them unique, make them serve functions that their utility is not designed for, or elevate their functionality to a spiritual level.
In changing how we interact with the objects the make up our world, we can change our world. In altering our relations to the magical object of music for instance, we can change the way music flows through us and defines us. Magical objects form a key part of the questing narrative, for it is through our engagement with the world that our reality is defined, and magical objects remind us to challenge that reality, to challenge notions of self narration, and to be actualized in the present.
Or at least these are the thoughts traipsing through my head, as I dance in space near the sink, at a party, which is really more of a kiki, somewhere in Brooklyn on a Saturday Afternoon. So I dance, so I move, so I let my fingers guide my body, and allow myself to fall into the magic of undulations and extensions. I cast aside ossification, and move. I move to make space, to let new space come, to let in new growth. I move, for movement is life, and life is adaptation, and I revel in the moment of listening, without question to my heart sing.
N