“Oh, yeah. Just normal things to have in your basement,” Bash said with a little laugh. As curious as he was, he would be touching nothing down there. He had enough to worry about that he didn’t need to add any extra curses to the list. A year ago he probably would have been poking around, blissfully unaware of how easy it was to get over his head when messing with powers he didn’t understand. While he still had a long way to go, Bash thought he’d learned to practice a bit of caution, if nothing else. “Where do you find that kind of stuff?” he asked as he followed Victor into the basement. “Do people just have cursed objects and not realize it? It seems like it would be hard to track down, especially if they don’t know what they’ve got.”
“That’s part of the fun,” Victor said with a little grin. “It’s a hunt, every time. But they can come from some crazy sources, you’d be surprised. There’s a whole underground supernatural black market. I prefer to sell to clients I know, so I know things are going into responsible hands, but I’ve bought from some shady characters.” He happened to deal in antiques and artifacts, objects of power, but Victor knew that even darker things were bought and sold on that market, things he would never get his hands dirty with. Victor stepped into his workroom and left the door open so Bash could follow him in if he chose. The room was lined with shelves and tall bureaus with many drawers. He rummaged around in a few of them, then laughed a bit as he found something, a thick brass ring. It wasn’t exactly what he was looking for, but still fun. He held it out to Sebastian. “Here, put this on.”
“One of my friends came across a real Ouija board last fall. She couldn’t get rid of it. Would take it back to the store and it’d just appear back at her house. I feel like you’d’ve loved that, if it weren’t for the demon,” Bash said as he took the ring from Victor and slid it on his finger. There was a moment of panic when his vision suddenly shifted, but then he realized what he was looking at. Bash held his hand out in front of him, then turned towards Victor. All he could see was heat signatures, his vision turned infrared. “Whoa,” he grinned. “This is cool. Like, I dunno what I’d do with it, but I can see why you keep it.” It felt like fun, non-malicious magic, something that seemed relatively rare compared to his own experiences with it. Every time he thought he was getting into something safe, it reared back and bit him. It made him wonder what the drawback to the ring was, if any. “Is it possible to make something like this? Or is it just something that happens?” It seemed like someone, somewhere had to have put the enchantment on the ring, but then it also seemed rare, so it couldn’t be something they would do in mass.
Victor chuckled a bit when Bash grinned. He was sure seeing in infrared with no equipment would be useful to somebody, but it was just a fun party trick to Victor. The right buyer would come along someday, he felt sure. “That one was made, but I’ve never come across anything else quite like it, so I think the magic is rare ... I got it fifth or sixth-hand, so I’m not positive of the origin.” He’d heard rumors there was some technologically-bent witch out there creating some incredible enchantments, but Victor didn’t know much more than that. He moved to another drawer and pulled it open to sort through the stuff in there. He’d changed his organization around a bit when he’d moved, and he couldn’t quite remember where he’d put what he was looking for. “There is all kinds of weird shit that ‘just happens,’ though ... What happened to the Ouija board?” he asked, glancing over at Sebastian. “If it’s still a problem, I’ll take it off your hands.”