Isabelle 'Izzy' Shaw (izzyshaw) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-11-21 09:24:00 |
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Entry tags: | james hutchins, ~izzy shaw |
Who: Izzy and James
What: Changes
Where: Curiosities
When: Present
For the first weekend since she bought the house this spring Izzy actually had time on her hands. The place had needed a complete overhaul, but between her own know how and that of male family members she’d managed to get it in tip top shape over the last several months. She’d gone home for Samhain to participate in the rites with her mom and her old coven, then the following weekend she and Sarah had spent most of that Saturday and into Sunday laying down magical protections over the property and the house proper. Izzy hadn’t really seen the need, but her mother insisted, saying that with ‘Sin City’ being right next door an extra dose of caution couldn’t hurt anything.
So when she got up on Saturday with nothing to do she decided it was past time she stopped in at Curiosities and said hello to Sam and maybe see what James was up to these days. Outside of the occasional email they hadn’t really conversed much in the last year or two, and she honestly couldn’t remember if she’d let him know she was finally moving to the area. She’d stop by, chat with the old charmer for a while and leave a business card for him to hand over to his son the next time he came by.
The “old charmer”, Sam Hutchins, had reduced his hours in the shop to fifteen or twenty per week, overlapping with more substantial shifts pulled by James or Celeste. On the day that Izzy chose to pay a call, Sam was recharging his batteries with an easy hike at Lone Mountain Park, on the northeast border of the city. His son was alone in the shop. James spent the first part of the day packaging orders for Shimmer to take on the road or drop in the mail. When he hit a lull, he knelt behind the register and retrieved a box from underneath the counter. A fine coat of dust covered the lid. The last time he’d worked on this spell was July, the day that Celeste wandered in looking for a book about the apocalypse. She pocketed one of the materials he needed, a long leather cord, and James hadn’t picked it up since. There was no time like the present.
The dark-haired magic user set the box on the counter and opened the lid. There was a worn book of diagrams and sigils, a pair of palm-sized stones, and a packet of prepared incense. James dug in another container of supplies and found a ball of twine and a spool of ribbon, either of which would do the trick. He added them to the pile, opened the book, and began to read, resting his elbows on the counter. The toe of one boot tucked into the rungs of a stool that stood behind him. As people walked past the open curtains of the store windows, he didn’t pay them much mind. The bell above the door would alert him to any customers.
The temperature had dropped enough in the past week that it was possible to turn off the air conditioning and wear a flannel indoors. James picked up a cup of coffee and took a sip while Robert Plant wailed his way through a cover of In My Time of Dying.
For a southern California girl it had been a downright chilly morning and Izzy’d broken out the leather jacket for a little extra warmth while still keeping a bit of style. If whatever caused the extra mojo down south had happened somewhere where there were actual cold winters with plenty of snow instead of near Vegas, well, she probably wouldn’t have been enthusiastic enough to move there.
The sound of Zeppelin playing in the background as she stepped through the door to Curiosities had her raising an eyebrow. While not her favorite band, she had a thorough exposure to all the old stuff growing up and recognized Robert Plant’s voice almost instantly. Since when had Sam started playing geezer rock in the store? Then she realized which Hutchins was behind the counter and both eyebrows went up.
“Here’s a sight I wasn’t expecting.” She walked the rest of the way into the store and couldn’t help the grin stretching out her lips. “I figured you’d be up to your armpits in an engine or something, not minding the store for your dad.”
James looked up, spotting a short blonde that was familiar to him, even if he hadn’t laid actual eyes on her in a couple of years. He passed the stone he’d been holding between his palms and stood up straight, breaking into a smile and readying himself for the usual trash talk, this time in the flesh instead of by email. “Izzy Shaw. Finally showing your face in the desert after talking a big game for five years.” Without the weight of his hand, the pages of the book underneath him sprang to life and lost his place. He looked her over; other than the wardrobe, Izzy looked more or less the same as the last time he saw her. “That your old man’s jacket or you finally shopping in the grown-up section?”
The door eased shut behind her with a pleasant ring of the bell, closing out the sounds of downtown Las Vegas.
“Ha ha. You totally should go on the comedy club circuit.” Izzy stuck her tongue out at him before her face settling into a smirk as she sauntered up to the counter. “I admit it: I was slacking off the whole time. Finish engineering school, get my PE license, find a job out here and everything, I totally could have done all that in half the time.” If she hadn’t slept, maybe. Not to mention going through her grandmother’s spellbooks and journals had taken some of her time as well.
“As for the jacket.” She gave a little twirl to show the outfit off. “My dad’s would go past my knees thank you.” Considering Big Mike was over a foot taller than her she wasn’t exaggerating by much if at all. “and he’s not a zipper’d pocket kind of guy anyway. His loss.”
“Speaking of old men, where’s yours? Playing baccarat on the strip?”
When Izzy began listing her accomplishments, James tossed the stone in the box and moved his hand like a flapping jaw. Some people were academics; others ran multiple small businesses. He stepped out from behind the counter, spread his arms, and did a slow turn of his own, as if showing off the frayed jeans and fitted flannel.
“C’mon. You know that guy’s never seen a deck of cards in his life,” he muttered. James went in for a hug. They’d been trading notes for so long it felt like a reunion. The pat on Izzy’s back signaled a slight divergence in topic as he pulled away. “Anyway, he’s a part timer now. I’ve owned fifty percent of this place since the nineties, but I took over at the end of the summer. Still up to my arm pits in auto parts, though.”
As he did a spin of his own she clapped and gave a wolf whistle in approval. “Very Nineties. It suits you.” He reminded her a lot of her family, both the nuclear one as well as the extended MC who’d all had a hand in raising her. Sure they were proud of her achievements, but they wouldn’t hesitate to give her shit or let her get too full of herself either. That was probably why it was so easy to trash talk with him.
She huffed in amusement at his assessment of his father, and patted him back when he went in for the hug. “There goes my plan to get store credit through a game of poker.”
Both eyebrows went up at his statement that he’d taken over the shop. “Is he ok? Or you decided you didn’t have enough to do running your shop down in that one stoplight town of yours? I started working for the water district earlier this year. Been busy up until Samhain fixing up a house in Boulder City when I wasn’t working or I’d have come by sooner.”
James had shaken his head at her comment on his shirt. Nineties. Leave it to Izzy to not acknowledge that what was old was new.
“You know I’m not there for the stoplights,” James said. “Which is good, since we don’t have any.” He backed away to give Izzy some standing room and took up his post by the counter, resting one elbow on it. He crossed one foot over the other. “Sam’s fine. It was just time. This was always the plan. His plan, more than mine, but some things came up that made me check my priorities. You know magic’s always been the only thing I cared about, but I couldn’t do it with him breathing down my neck… Not the way I wanted to anyway. So I talked him into an early retirement.”
The differences since he’d taken over were subtle if you didn’t come into the shop often or know what to look for: more wards and more powerful ones at that, more light streaming in, a potent combination of scents and a stronger charge in the air. James didn’t shy away from working spells in Curiosities, especially upstairs, and he knew Celeste did the same.
“What do you do for the water district?” James picked up his coffee.
"I'm on their renewable energy team. The district is required to have 50% of its energy needs come from renewables by 2030, and be carbon neutral by 2050. So I have a mix of office work and going out to get my hands dirty in the field. It's interesting, a little something different every day." It was far better than slaving away in a firm somewhere or trying to reduce a casino's energy footprint.
Now that she was paying attention she could see some of the subtle changes that had taken place, and feel the charge in the air. "So what are your plans now that you're the boss and can do what you want?"
The coffee traced a warm path down his throat. “Stop making people pass a litmus test when they walk in the door.” James knew his father had assessed every customer who wanted to buy something more substantial than a Wiccan altar piece. “Increase our online presence. We’re already doing deliveries. Expand on what’s upstairs. Use the space. It’s big enough to fit a circle, and there’s five of us I’d say were capable now, not counting Sam. Not that we’d always see eye to eye, but loyalties shift.”
He set down the cup, thinking about the possibility of calling every magic user in the room and for what purpose. Now that a seed was planted, James knew, it would take root. His gaze drifted somewhere over the cash register, getting that serious look before he tugged himself back to the room with Izzy.
"So you're just gonna sell to anyone who wants to buy?" Izzy's eyes went wide. She knew that probably wasn't what he was saying but couldn't imagine how he'd screen people online who he hadn't met and guaged personally. Her own family wasn't pure as the driven snow, but her mother and (emphatically) her grandmother had always been very firm on how magic could and couldn't be used. Big Mike respected that rule and (as far as she knew) had never tried to get Sarah to break it.
The idea of having a community of magic users where she wasn't thought of as Sarah's daughter or Mary Ellen's granddaughter first had a real appeal. Building a reputation on her own terms was one of the reasons she'd decided to come out here instead of sticking around southern California.
“That’s how stores work, Izzy.” James watched her face as he guided the cup in a slow circle on the counter. “We control what we sell and what we don’t, and how each item goes on the market, but the who doesn’t matter to me. Anything that walks out of this store is fair game as soon as it hits the street, anyway. We can’t control that.”
James wondered how Izzy thought she’d control the use of magic if she ever invented anything electrical that could run off it. Especially now that she was working for a local government entity that was actively looking for clean, renewable energy. Everybody had their line in the sand.
"I suppose that's true." Izzy allowed. She hadn't thought about it, but at the same time the idea of reselling a reference or object after she got it hadn’t ever crossed her mind.
"So there's five of us you said?" She wondered what the other three were like.
James nodded. “Celeste works here with me and Sam,” he said. “She’s off today. Gabe’s in the city somewhere. The third, I need to check before I give out their name. You know how it is. Not everyone’s advertising.” And not everyone was safe to share, but he might be able to check in with Noah and see what Fern was up to these days. He leaned across the counter and dropped his cup in the short trash can.
"That's fair." Izzy nodded, filing away the names for future reference. She most definitely wasn't advertising outside of the magical community. Maybe one day when she was more established in her regular career, but not yet. "I trust you to make the call on who to tell about me." He certainly had more experience.
She leaned against the other end of the counter. "So what else has been going on?" She grinned as a thought crossed her mind. "Sam pestering you for grandkids yet now that he's retired?"
James smirked at the idea. “No.” He couldn’t remember his father ever asking him about settling down, which might have been because his relationship with James’ mother topped out at three years and left him with a kid to raise on his own. “He probably assumed I’d be a bachelor like him. You should’ve seen him at his retreats. Bouncing from bedroll to bedroll.” He raised an eyebrow at imagery that didn’t even bother him anymore, he’d seen it so much. It was a different story when he was thirteen with a pair of foamy headphones on, hoping Sepultura would block out the noise and taking a walk when his batteries died.
"Really?" Izzy made a face at the idea, imagining her own parents being like that and not liking the mental picture that came to mind. "That must have been unpleasant in adolescence when you couldn't get away."
He shrugged and smiled to himself. It was one of those things you got used to and more or less rolled your eyes at. One thing he could say, at least it wasn’t repressive. “I’m with Celeste,” James said.
"Really?" Same word with a very different intonation this time around, accompanied with a bright smile. "Good for you. I'm sure she's great." She had no idea what Celeste was like but if she made him happy who was Izzy to judge?
James nodded. “Since the summer. She’s learning elemental magic. I think she’s got a gift for it. I dunno if it’s back in her family tree or she’s just got a way with it. Things seem drawn to her, but she grew up outside, so I guess it’s not surprising,” he said. “It’s a lot different than what I’m working with.”
He fished his phone out of his pocket and scrolled through the camera roll. James opened one of Celeste and showed Izzy. “Here. You might see her around.”
"Oh nice. That should be interesting when I meet her." Since James was the only person in Las Vegas she knew practiced magic and who knew she did as well she was certain she'd meet Celeste sooner or later. She peered down at the picture on the phone and nodded. "Oh she's very pretty." And looked close to the same age as her, which was a bonus. Here Izzy had been expecting someone in their thirties.
"Since we're trading pictures..." She pulled out her phone from her back pocket and scrolled through the pictures, presenting a tiny black kitten staring straight at the camera. "I have a fur baby. I found him at a substation a few weeks back, poor thing. Don't know what happened to his momma or siblings, but he was half starved when we stumbled across him and he's lucky he didn't get run over by a forklift."
“That’s a load of imagery,” he muttered. James leaned forward to look at the picture of the cat. “Cute. Had to be black.” He smiled and walked around the counter. “You name him Salem or Binx?”
While he was back there, he sat on his stool and went into his text messages to pull up a new, blank message. He typed his name and waited, his thumb poised over the screen. “By the way… Now that you’re here, we’re graduating to phone numbers.” He gestured with his open hand for her to recite the digits.
"Of course he did." Izzy agreed, beaming at the 'cute'. He was perfect to her eyes, but she was biased. "And please, do you really think I'm so traditional that I'd go with 'Salem' or 'Binx'?" A roll of her eyes and smile accompanied with a shake of her head was her response to that. "I thought about calling him 'Felix', but then I'd have to explain why he isn't named after Felix the cat. 'Ozzy' is what I decided to go with after watching him for a while. He's fearless."
She rattled off her phone number without hesitation. "Use your best judgement who you share my name and digits with, I trust you."
“So no bathroom stalls,” he mumbled. James typed in her number and sent the text so she’d have his, too. “Got it.” He stuck the phone back in his jeans and let his hands rest on his lap. Izzy had a way of wildly swinging between thinking he was ancient at thirty-seven and yet young enough to need a reminder about phone safety. “There’s a group of us who keep each other in the loop on things. Think about it and let me know if you want in. I’ll text you if I get the magic users together for a circle.”
"I mean with other practitioners." She tried not to glare at him, and a silent 'idiot' was implied at the end of the sentence. Here she'd been trying to pay him a compliment and he made a joke like that! Millennial humor. Seriously.
"There's enough going on that there's a need to keep each other in the loop? Sure, if you trust them that's good enough for me."
“Oh yeah,” he said, deciding to keep it broad for the time being. “You said you’ve been here almost a year, now?” James’ head cocked to the side. “Huh. Those house repairs must’ve been all-consuming.” He took the edge off the comment with a smile, but it was a surprise to hear that Izzy Shaw wasn’t in the know. Whatever kept her under a rock, it looked like she was coming out of it now. “It’ll be good to get you into the fold.”
"Since the spring,” Izzy clarified. "And it was practically an episode of 'Extreme Makeover.' Tore it back to studs and started from scratch, I don't think the old owners would recognize it. I've got a back patio area perfect for parties or a casting circle too, depending on the need and time of year. For being in the city it's as private as you're going to get and not buy a mansion."
It sounded like she'd been out of the loop. Considering she'd been busy getting her career established and living space rehabbed to meet the new decade, that was just something she'd have to live with. She cocked her head back at him and shrugged. "Well it'll be good to be brought into the fold."
“Remember you said that.” James heard the bell over the door jingle as a cluster of customers floated in. From the looks of things, probably three teenagers who happened onto a YA fictional title about magic and couldn’t wait to get started. “I gotta get this. Check out the journal,” he murmured to Izzy as he got off the stool and prepared to steer the customers toward some beginner guides. Under one girl’s arm, he could see a brand new, colorful journal with embossed letters: ‘My Book of Shadows.’
For every serious user who headed for the second floor, there were twenty of these.
“We can’t all grow up learning it at our parents’ knees,” Izzy murmured back with a smile. She could only imagine what might have happened if she’d stumbled across real magic in her adolescent years without her family’s guidance. Anything could have happened, good or bad. “Want some help or you got this?”
“I got it. This might come as a surprise,” James said, backing towards the group, “but I like teaching people magic.” He winked at Izzy. “I’ll see you around.” As much as they went back and forth between taking verbal swipes and trading constructive ideas with each other, he was glad to see her make her way to the shop.