I’ll resist the urge to double back to edit the previous two days’ work as a lead in to this third. I think we all know how that would go if I did. I will note that there are a few things I’d like to clean up back there that I’ll pretend are emended as I move forward.
“The trill of an incoming text startled her. It read: He warded your phone…”
Her anger at being left behind seethed and she tried to throw her phone into the road—to hear it crack into the pavement and splash glass and circuitry over the gravel—but she couldn’t make her hand let go of the thing. She made a couple more incomplete casts before dropping it roughly, but safely, into her lap.
“Well, shit,” she echoed.
Karen assumed that if Malachi warded her phone he’d probably hidden her too. There was no use flagging down an unlikely passing car for help, so she grabbed up her phone and searched for how to treat a sprained ankle. Between HEM—which sounded like marketing—and RICE (rest, ice, compression, elevation) she knew she could handle the latter.
Once she pulled herself up to the bench and out of the dirt, she brushed off her gritty palms and began the short incantation to cool her ankle. She’d both frozen and boiled glasses of water and been commended for her quickness, but she’d never practiced precise control of either. She didn’t want to turn her ankle to ice, so she aimed the spell at her slipper first to cool it slowly then carefully moved her focus over to her ankle. The chill immediately brought relief to her hot flesh and swelling joint. She chanted in a timer and left the ankle cool for a bit while she thought about how to apply compression.
[running out of time so I’ll just list a few things as notes for later:]
– looks for something non-magical for compression first because of Professor Carrol’s training about avoiding magic if you can
– cant find anything so she tweaks a ‘push’ spell into the shape of a C, but ultimately can’t keep it in place
– next she works on breaking the ward on her phone. She can’t but she does discover a timer there and has to decide between calling 911 and waiting for and explaining it all to a Highway Patrol officer or just waiting
-eventually she gets back home where she puts her decision to protect herself in to action
419 words on day 797