Mari didn’t realise that the house being off the grid meant it’s completely undetectable from the outside world, she starts to wonder how she even found out about the witch who lived here in the first place.
She doesn’t have time to ponder that, however, as she’s realised that this only highlights a bigger problem, travelling into the city by public transport takes several hours, which really isn’t feasible for running errands. If delivery services don’t work then she’ll need to go everywhere herself, simple appointments and grocery trips are now going to take up most of her day, and more importantly it’ll make visiting Cassandra a lot harder as well.
Mari needs to come up with a solution fast, especially when it comes to getting food. She does a quick search and learns of a convenience store that’s a 20 min walk from here, which will be good for basic supplies and snack food, but she won’t be able to properly stock up there.
She considers what other options she has. All the money she’s saving from not paying bills could potentially go towards buying a car before too long, but that’s not going to be much help without a licence, and getting that would take a long time.
She could absolutely afford a rideshare to get around, but her address not existing is going to cause issues there. A bike might be cool, but most of the places she needs to go are too far away for that to be feasible. Mari holds her head in her hands, out of possible ideas. How the hell did the witch get around?
Wait, that’s it! How did she get around? She had no problem getting to Mari’s apartment when she was teaching her the enchantment, and there’s no way she was using that car she had when she was moving out, the parking situation at Mari’s old apartment was too much of a nightmare for that to be the case.
Mari is certain the witch must have been using magic to get around, and if that’s the case she’ll have to try and figure it out herself. She goes up to the study, where the book the witch gave her is sitting on a table. She opens it up and starts flipping through to see if she can find something useful.
It seems like there are a few ways for witches to get around, but most of them aren’t what Mari’s looking for right now. Astral projection is cool, but you can’t carry groceries like that, and flight seems too risky, not to mention extremely conspicuous.
She finds a page on how to open a portal, but as far as she can tell it’s only for travelling to some kind of demonic realm. She decides she doesn’t need to think about any of that for too long.
Eventually she comes across a page that seems to have what she’s looking for. It describes a spell that allows the user to “move through the shadows” and reach their destination instantly. There are some handwritten notes explaining that the shadows are just a metaphor, and it’s basically a teleportation spell.
This seems perfect! Mari studies the page in detail to understand exactly what is required to perform the spell. It seems like you have to have a grasp of your own energy, and envision it being sent to the desired location. It’ll take some practice, but Mari is shocked by how simple that sounds.
The book also mentions that it works best for short distance travel, but longer distances can be covered with practice, and travelling to places you’re familiar with, and can clearly envision, helps as well. Luckily, that applies to most of the places she needs to get to, especially the one she visits most often.
Mari spends the next couple of weeks practising getting around the house like this. The practice is once again mostly relegated to weekends due to work. Luckily she has an IT job she can do from home, so she doesn’t have to worry about travelling for that.
It’s quite disorienting at first, almost like she’s blinking and suddenly finding herself in a different location, but after getting used to it she’s able to instantly jump around a room without issues, and before long she can travel to different parts of the house.
After a certain point it comes to her naturally enough that she’s teleporting around the house instead of walking half of the time. It’s very convenient, especially for a place this large, but there have been a few occasions where she’s scared Martin half to death by suddenly appearing in the same room as him.
Mari’s now comfortable enough with the spell that she wants to try a longer distance jump, and she knows exactly where she wants to go for her first attempt. She waits for the weekend, and she mentally prepares herself for the trip.
She’s quite nervous as she’s not exactly sure what will happen if something goes wrong when travelling this large of a distance, but she closes her eyes and centres herself, focusing on where she wants to go before activating the spell.
She opens her eyes, and she’s exactly where she wanted to be! She’s quite winded, as the spell took a bit out of her, enchanted lungs doing what they can to keep her going. Mari’s just excited that she’s solved one of the bigger problems facing her right now, and hopefully she’ll get better at it with practice anyway.
Mari takes a moment to recover, before knocking on the door to Cassandra’s house.
