The cabal still had some time to kill before catching the show at Blood For Sex. That meant they had time to visit Granny Ethel at her herb shop in Salem. Since the police were still hunting them, DBD took the food truck out of town, while the group rolled up in Rachel's pickup.
Trinity Herbs faced Salem Common, just down the street from the Witch Museum. The gang parked a good distance away and walked right into the store.
One of the guerrilla gardeners from the Marblehead apartment break in was working the counter. He recognized the sentai-suited unspeakable servant, and shouted for the attendant up on the shelving ladder to go in back and get GE. Rachel's unspeakable servant immediately told her that he was burning. She sent him back outside and the burning stopped. The guy at the front desk told them that GE would be out in a minute, and offered them some tea from a samovar behind the desk. Rachel asked him why he broke into the apartment, he declined to answer. While the group waited, Reba perused the shelves for interesting items. They noticed that the store was conspicuously out of "mandrake root", and based on the sign had apparently been so for some time.
Granny Ethel emerged from the backroom, accompanied by Nadia, the Fulminaturge from the Karst Following Cavers - the local Colone's Secret Cadre cell trying to take over the pool rooms. Nadia kept her cool, and the Bao Down cabal kept theirs. Rachel offered help in future caving adventures, Nadia didn't say anything. She skirted around the group and left, then almost shot the unspeakable servant when it got too close to her, before fleeing. Granny Ethel congratulated the cabal on not flying off the handle and invited them through the employees only door.
The greenhouse beyond was much larger than the building exterior indicated, with witch windows high above admitting sunlight. There were lots of exotic plants, alchemical drawings, feeding schedules, and many, many pictures of the moon - including a few maps of the lunar surface. GE pushed aside a prehistoric fern and came out with a tea set. She served a much better blend than the guy out front, along with some shortbread biscuits. She picked a random biscuit out of the box and gave it to Reba. It gave them a surge of power, upgrading their ability to curse people so that it no longer required their full concentration.
Formalities out of the way, the cabal pelted Granny Ethel with questions. First, they wanted to know why she sent the guerrilla gardeners to harass Lindsey's sister in Marblehead. GE explained that she wasn't interested in harassing anyone, she needed to take the zahir - the blue drug stones sold by Bobby Smiles - out of circulation. The stones eventually transformed users into phasmata, ghost slaves controlled by the leader of the Brahman Occult Society, the ageless fatman Coffin.
Satisfied that everyone at the table disliked secret drug dealers enslaving people, Tal asked Granny Ethel for advice on another issue. They had upgraded their catapsi ability to extreme levels with Rachel's help, and now needed a way to extend that to the entire geographic area of Salem, in order to help establish the town as a safe haven by shutting down hostile magick users. Granny Ethel recommended finding a way to symbolically enclose or cover the city, using a magick item or ritual. An enchanted eruv, a big snowglobe, something that established a boundary around the whole town.
With that information in hand, Rachel asked if Granny Ethel could help quickly advance the phase of the moon. She wanted her crop of unspeakable servants ready sooner rather than later, and GE seemed like an expert in moon magick. Granny Ethel said she could do it for ten significant charges, then knocked the price down to nine since she worked in multiples of three. Thanks to the Mancymancy percentages she bought off Ardhanari, Rachel got a sig every time she observed a new type of magick - either a new adept school, a new avatar archetype, or a new ritual. So she already had a few charges in her pocket, and Granny Ethel added another by showing her a ritual that removed curses by crushing a starfish. That still left Rachel four charges short. She decided to ask the New Maks and Endemic Spice when they attended the show at the Blood For Sex that night. They had enough different adept schools and other types of magick to make up the difference. Granny Ethel suggested they ask Sin Woo Jin for help, he seemed like a nice man and he was clearly some kind of avatar. The cabal didn't like him, they explained to Granny Ethel that he went around taking advantage of people by offering them things they needed in their most desperate moments. GE asked how that was different from what Rachel did. Rachel explained that she did it over a different time horizon.
The discussion was interrupted by a little mandrake clacking a trowel on the ground to get Granny Ethel's attention. It signed something to her and she got up to follow it into another room. She warned the cabal NOT to follow her. They took this to heart and waited patiently for her to return. They realized that the little mandrake looked a lot like Jim the Gremlin, except Jim had a face and big ears.
A woman - the third guerrilla gardener from the apartment raid - came into the greenhouse carrying a big long box. Tal held the door for her, and Reba got the other one, which led into an observatory. The moon was visible and impossibly close to the windows, even though it was broad daylight outside. There was a big telescope, and lots of maps and diagrams. Wenna (the gardener) explained that this was where Granny Ethel and GP did moon stuff.
Wenna left. Granny Ethel came back, removing her ear protection. She explained that mandrakes were "born" with their full adult intelligence and consciousness, which explained why they came into the world screaming. The cabal mentioned that they knew someone with a little mandrake familiar. Granny Ethel acted surprised and vaguely curious, but it was clear that she knew whichever wizard Jim was bonded to.
The cabal introduced the topic of a Pirate Council for Salem, so they could run the place as a representative democracy rather than just a hydraulic dictatorship with Tal regulating access to magick. Granny Ethel was delighted that they'd ask her to sit on such an organization. She recommended they not invite the Brahman Occult Society, because they were assholes. She recommended they invite the New Maks and GP (which the group realized was Genesis Peru, the cliomancer they met at Nash Dino Tracks).
Rachel bartered with Granny Ethel for some extra memory, planning on giving it to Abe from the Milk and Honey truck. GE offered one of her mandrake's memories. They had perfect recall of every event they ever experienced, but that meant they remembered their own birth, something they could do without. Rachel bought enough storage space from a mandrake to take Abe up to a normal human capacity. He transferred ownership of the Veil of Hakim the Dyer to Granny Ethel as payment.
Finally group asked about the Pool Rooms. Granny Ethel knew that portals to the pool rooms opened in areas that had tiles, water, and significant background magickal energy. Locations that sat on ley lines, or places where many charges had been spent previously. Places like fast food locations in the burger wars. Once the barrier between worlds was weak, even a minor charge was enough to open the portal.
You had to be careful, though. The amount of magick spent determined how long the gate would stay open. If it closed while you were on the other side, you'd have to find another way out. If you had magickal navigation you could find another way out. If not, you wandered until you either found a random exit or ran out of water and died of dehydration.
With this wealth of information in hand, the Bao Down gang thanked Granny Ethel and left the store. They still had a couple hours to kill before the show.
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