Circe, Circe, Circe. Or is it Wendy? You prefer Wendy, but you usually hear Circe when you know you're in trouble.
You're unlike all of the other Abners, aren't you? Sure, you do share their odd sense of morality and have their obnoxious, macabre sense of right and wrong, but where your parents and siblings have been clannish and preferred to keep to themselves, believing that the "normal" people of Salem were little more than sheep and entertainment, you have always seen something else in them. You didn't quite see them as equals to you or the Abners, but they were a little more interesting to you than they were to your family. You had no intention of becoming "normal" or anything like it, but, in the past few decades, you've become much more interested in normal life and society. Sure, the normal people only lived for a fraction of the time that an Abner lived, and they had to eat, sleep, and work all day, but, when you thought about it, weren't they just like you? Plus, as much as you enjoyed the macabre aspects of traditional Abner culture, the rest of the Salemites had a unique look on life. There was something... optimistic about them, even when they were faced with adversity? You liked something about that. It almost made people's little lives... cute. Not that they mattered, in the great scheme of things, of course.
You woke up one chill October morning and decided that it was finally time for you to make friends with a normal person. You didn't know who you would meet. You definitely didn't want to be friends with some random desk jockey. You wanted to find someone who would be more interesting than that. You wondered if you could find someone cool... like an artist, or a human musician, maybe. Or a writer. Not, like, a boring sports writer or anything like that. Something exciting.
You waited until your father had left for the old country in Europe before you decided to make your move. He was a traditionalist, of course, and strongly believed that Abners and normal people should only mix in order to intimidate the lessers. Your mother was not much different, and, in particular, seemed to enjoy frightening them. Your parents both went out on the town to make appearances from time to time, but also, once every few years, hosted grand, lavish parties for the elite of Salem to intimidate them into compliance. Last time, they imported authentic living statues from Transylvania and London Below and placed them around the property, pretending that they were sculptures from up and coming Salem artists to be auctioned off after dinner. Of course, once people began to gather round, your parents sealed the doors to the venue up and the statues sprang into action, scaring the guests half to death. Your parents had a good, long laugh about that. They secretly also donated to some of the charities around town, though they didn't make that known, for fear it would undermine their horrific, macabre reputation.
October third. 5 am. You knew your family would gather in the parlor in an hour or so, and, if you wanted to slip out of the house without fighting with your mother, you would need to go now. You got ready in the old, creaky bathroom, kissed your spider, Mrs. Webb, goodbye, and slipped out of the window to your room, which was up on the fourth floor of your family's mansion. You walked, carefully, over to the edge of the roof and jumped into the nearby tree, climbing down from there. You liked that old house. Full of cobwebs and even the occasional ghost would move in. You had no internet (your family was stuck in the early 1900s in terms of tech, for the most part), but you did like navigating webs with your spiders and sisters.
So far, so good. You didn't know how to drive, even though you just turned one-hundred years old (and looked not a day over 24 in normal people years), and would have to walk. You began to think about what kind of person you'd like to befriend today, and kept an eye out as residents of Salem began to wake up and go about their lives, jogging around town for exercise and getting ready for their jobs.
You eventually settle on a Salem resident that catches your eye. You begin to follow them around town, and wait until they've entered a building before approaching them. You know your behavior and appearance can unsettle people, so you don't like it when they can run from you. Plus, you like to have a little fun with how you approach people. It's never not amusing to watch people realize an Abner is approaching them as you silently creep up on them, or as they notice lights flicker when you enter a room.
You have something special lined up for today. You're going to cast a spell on yourself to make yourself invisible, and then you'll make yourself visible once you get close to your target. It will be good fun. Unbeknownst to you, however, you have accidentally prepared the Shrinking spell that you just learned recently instead of invisibility. That can't end well for you.
Anyway, you ended up following after...
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