Thus she was back home in the states before she got to try to sate her excitement. She hadn't even unpacked before she locked herself in her room and opened the book, that's when it hit her how tough the language really was, this Old English was no joke and the handwriting didn't exactly help, so she called Mandy over and from her got that Amy was back from Salem as well.
Turned out that Salem was more of a tourist attraction than the place to find the real deal, they did have a few well dressed enthusiasts though, but that was about it.
The three of them thus started transcribing the book that very night. Bethany flipping the pages and Amy trying to help her make out the handwriting, while Mandy wrote it down on the computer. Even if they didn't get every word and thought the grammar was funky they had no trouble determining that this book contained some freaky shit.
Two days later Bethany had still not unpacked and the three of them had gathered in the school library, not that the school had started or anything, but they needed help translating some of the words and there were old English dictionaries here, not to be borrowed though, which sort of forced them to come here.
Together they managed to figure out that the beginning of the book was some kind of ritual, it looked interesting enough and a lot of the ingredients and items that would have been hard to come by back in the day were nothing hard to come by this day and age. So they figured why not try it out?
Thus when they found something required they made note of it and once they had translated the whole ritual and come to the conclusion that it was supposed it unlock their witches' powers they were eager to try it out. What if it would work?
Most of the things they could get at the supermarket and the trickier things the local New Age hippie could help them with.
That just left engraving various symbols on the items required, it turned out Mandy was the most artistic of them, but she refused to do all three of the wooden sticks required, since there was to be one for each participant and judging by the book and the one Mandy had started on they looked pretty much like wands, so she was probably right, a witch should make her own wand and so they did.
That left them with; Where to perform the ritual?
They would need to be able to set it up in privacy and from the looks of it, it might take a couple of hours to perform.
In the end they settled for Amy's walk in closet, it was larger than the other two's put together, so after removing and rearranging most of the stuff in it they had still not a lot of room, but enough they figured.
Mandy being the one with most skill with the brush painted the various symbols and circles on the floor while Beth handled the burning of various substances and Amy led the whole thing and did the somewhat quiet chanting so that they wouldn't be overheard.
Luckily Mandy had remembered to make sure all fire alarms on the floor were disabled before they started because it was quite smoky inside the closet by the time the ritual was over and the girls waited for something to happen.
The smoke didn't feel like fire smoke though, but it smelled and looked the part. Strangely it seemed to thicken and slowly concentrate to within the circles on the floor, then they all gasped as the outer circle started to shimmer slightly then the next and the next and then all the symbols started shimmering as well and then the smoke it self, that by now looked like a solid black arch, brightened until it shone in a dark blue light.
Looking down they saw that all the items they had placed out around the circles were gone except for their three wands, Amy managed to see the last of the hippie crystals melt away and flow like ink into the weave of circles and symbols and then their wands jerked and the engraved symbols they had carved into them shone for a few seconds before the wands went dull and still again. Now nothing seemed to change, the Arch inside the circles remained vaguely shimmering but nothing more. Mandy reached out and touched it, but her hand just went straight through, nothing seemed to happen.
Bethany picked up her wand and waved it at the portal with no more result, so she poked it with her wand and as the tip hit the blue surface the point of impact shone bright blue, like a summer sky.
“Take your wands girls.” She grinned and stepped towards the arch, and unlike Mandy's arm that had just gone through it, she seemed to go into it in a flash of light and be gone.
The two girls remaining watched nervously at each other and then at the dark blue shape in front of them. They took their wands in one hand and the other one's hand in the other, then with a nod they too walked into the arch and found themselves in a market stall selling cheap dresses of questionable quality. They saw Bethany waiting for them with a grin and behind them an, as far as they could tell, identical portal to the one they gone through in Amy's walk in closet, half inside the stall and half outside it, the tent fabric wall flopping through it without any noticeable impact.
Outside the stall they could see a busy makeshift street packed on both sides with stalls and over head a bright blue summer sky with the sun riding high. It seemed that they had jumped straight into a market, people appeared to be dressed oddly enough, but there wasn't really a general style, nor a common nationality as far as they could tell.
“What's that?” Amy wondered and pointed towards a man that looked like your normal helium balloon market vendor, but it would seem he wasn't selling balloons, but flying pigs of various sizes.
“I guess that explains what the ritual meant by 'opening the door to the realm of possibility'.” Bethany said with a huge grin on her face. “We did get our door, right?”
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