@sebastianwest location: All-In-One notes: meetcutes and misunderstandings
The revelation that Micah had betrayed her to such an unfathomable degree had left her with knowledge she almost wished she didn’t have. She’d gone to his apartment the night after the debacle in the Otherworld and found the infernal black pills that had been responsible for numbing their magic to such a degree that he’d kept the form over the nights that were meant to be hers. For a few lingering moments Emma had considered taking them for herself, the pills would keep Micah asleep and for the first time in her life she’d be able to enjoy the light of day - she could live a full life. In some very base version of herself she could imagine why Micah might have done what he did, but that would never be her. It couldn’t. Still, there stood a more important question - someone had made these, and someone had put them into distribution somehow. Supernaturals incapable of using their magic left them defenseless, but who would do such a thing? Who would have the knowledge or the resources?
Drawn to one of a handful of resources she had on the supernatural, All-In-One was a shop that brimmed with the arcane. Were she a witch she might have sequestered herself in an archive somewhere, or if she had a place on the senate this was something she would have brought forward. For now, however, Emma was on her own. It had only been a few nights now since she’d escaped the Otherworld, she’d refrained from using her powers ever since, some part of her afraid that she might hurt someone - or herself - again. The feeling wasn’t one that she’d ever forget, raw magic coursing through her and the ability to change anything or anyone into whatever her mind conjured. For someone who’d spent so many years afraid or in hiding, it was its own sort of addiction, but she meant what she’d said to Edelie and Farenduil: Emma was done hiding.
“Is this seat taken?” Emma asked, she felt no magic from him, but a mortal in a magic shop wasn’t an unusual thing. Maybe he was a hobbyist, though he hardly looked the part. Handsome, with good taste, but she had other things on her mind at present as Emma took her seat and made attempt at making sense of the books in front of her. She pitied witches, there seemed to be a lot for them to go over to understand even the basics, Emma considered herself well read, she had to be for the sake of her own magic, but science, alchemy, and the art of transmutation came far easier to her than - vague incantations written in languages she’d never even seen before. “You don’t happen to work here, do you?”
