Witch Quest 1: Attack of the Internet Sex Witches

"So..." Danny Jane said.  "What's wrong with the computer room?"  To her investigative eye there seemed nothing unusual about the computer lab.  The lights were out, painstakingly-retrofitted old-school screen savers danced across unused computers' screens, and judging from the crunching noises (for she dared not step in) the floors were still covered in a thick layer of snack food remnants and soda cans.

"What's wrong," said Gabriel "My Real Name Is John But Inexplicably My Last Name Is In Fact" Laserstudent, "is that we've just spent three hours tidying up after some mysterious force swept through here."  He hung out at a nearby computer within sight of the open door.  The light seemed to die the instant it passed the threshold, for even open into a lit hallway no light shone onto the pale, mole-man-like denizens or their moist, computerized mole-man hole.

"What kind of mysterious force?" said Danny.  "A can of Febreeze?  Delicate sensibilities?  Non-computer-screen lights?"

"No," sighed Gabjohn.  "When we unlocked the room today, the computers and desks were all gathered in a circle, the floor was clean, and the lights were on, and we'll be TANJed if anyone came in last night.  We triple-lock the doors to keep freshmen from downloading porno from the school's faculty-only porno server using bandwidth that could be going to Dean Boyd's Onyxia raid.  There's only one kind of person who could've gotten through these doors--"

"--lemmie guess, a witch?"  Danny cocked her witch hat in the traditional witchy display of lack-of-surprise.

"--pretty much, yeah," Gabjohn said.  "And frankly speaking that's a Witch Sci major kind of mystery.  Comp Sci guys like us are, uh."

"In the dark?" said Danny.

"Pretty much... yeah."

"Funderful.  I'm not setting foot in this place, you know this."

"Can you help us from out there?"  He was careful with this question, unsure if she'd take it badly.

"Of course I can," Danny said.  "I'm a damn witch.  I could help you from the Earth's core or from flipping Alpha Centauri if I had the right tools.  The question is what tools we need to solve this?  You can't just shoot magic at something to make it solved.  Unless you wanna blow something up, shooting magic solves that pretty quickly.  Anyway."  She nudged her toe (safely shod in boot) at the outermost detritus in the layer of garbage and shuddered.  "First things first.  What else was wrong with the room?"

Gabjohn scrached his neckbeard in contemplation.  "That's a good question.  I think that was about it.  We ran spyware checks and everything else we could think of.  The only thing weird was that each computer had one more website in its history than when we locked up, some stream of gibberish that went to a four-oh-four."

"Hm.  Go on."

"The computers turned on at 3:00 am and stayed on until we barged in at 8.  There was a tiny amount of outbound traffic, just a few bytes up every few seconds.  You'd have to be paying serious attention to notice any of it."

"Anything else?"

"Not really, no."  Gabjohn drummed his fingers against his computer's space bar.  "What can you tell me?"

"I have no flipping clue.  Hold on a second."  Danny dug out her cell phone and made a call.

* * *

Thora Chlorpormazine bounded up the hallway.  "Hello, everyone!" she said.  She hefted a large plastic bag.  "I brought sandwiches from the Devil's Barrio!"  The Devil's Barrio was a family-owned German food place that used to be a Hot Topic knockoff gothesque clothing-and-attitude dispenser.  They hadn't bothered to change the name or decor, and they made some damn fine leberwurst sandwiches.

"Thanks," Danny said.  "What do you make of the internet mystery thing?"  She took a sandwich Thora offered and set about eating it, as a normal person who didn't know what went into leberwurst would.

"As far as I can tell," Thora said, taking a sandwich for herself, "I think what you've got are a variety of witch.  A very specific variety of which who I won't name for fear of attracting the wrong kind of attention."  She tossed the bag of sandwiches into the darkness of the computer room.  It never hit ground, and its bounty was distributed amongst the night-dwelling nerds in mouth-watered silence.  "The nerdy kind."

"So noted," Danny said.  "What's your prescription for pain?"

"Simple.  First I have to venture into the lab--"

"You're insane."

"--and then I have to bewitch one of the computer screens."  She took another bite of leberwurst, savoring the taste of the sandwich and the swiftly-falling expression on Danny Jane.  "And that's where you come in, because my dainty hippie feet aren't meant for such terrible terrain."

"Hippie feet are dainty?" said Danny Jane.

"Mine are."

You're no hippie, thought DJ, who knew Thora didn't know any mind reading spells.  She ate her sandwich in silence and waited on Thora, who liked to spend quality time with her meals.  Every languid chew was another moment before she had to go along with whatever hideous plan Thora had in mind.  Alas, no sandwich lasts forever, and when Thora gulped down the last bite, she opened her eyes at last and said, "Here's what I want you to do."

* * *

It had been over in twelve dreadful seconds, but those twelve seconds would haunt Danny Jane far beyond the grave.

* * *

She had at least shoved the worst of it aside by the time midnight rolled around.  At Thora's insistence she wanted DJ and Gabjohn at her side in the commons that night/absurdly early morning.  Thora had pulled the most comfortable chairs to a large round table on the third floor and bewitched the laptop to plug itself in wirelessly.  (Handy, that spell.)  DJ showed up right at midnight; Gabjohn trundled along at fifteen after with a pile of fearful-looking dollar store generic energy drinks and comestibles.

"So," Thora said, without any further introduction or greeting, "I've dropped a scrying spell on one of your computers.  If something weird goes down, we'll know."

"Last night everything weird happened at three," said Gabjohn, peeling open a bag of onion-flavored potato starch rings.  "So, why watch at midnight?"

"Because all kinds of weird stuff might have gone down specifically at three, or it might have gradually built up over time.  There's no way to tell without watching."  Her computer full-screened a video of... an empty computer laboratory, in theory, as all the lights were off and the spell gave no light of its own.  Thora uttered a spell, and suddenly the computer lab was clear as day, if monochrome and rather creepy.  Creepier, rather.

"And now we wait?" Danny said.

"Now we wait," confirmed Thora.

After an hour of waiting Danny contemplated hurling herself out a window.  After two the complete stillness of the room became something like the face of God.  After three something finally happened, something that nearly made up for the monotonous parade of battery-acid-like energy drinks and ostensibly flavored chip-like crunchy potato fragments.

The view switched rather suddenly from the back of the computer on the next row to a blur of black-and-white lines to the center of the room, the thick layer of miscellaneous crap cleared by a thunderous movement of desks.  The crap on the floor began to glow, lighting the room before vanishing, leaving behind a spotless carpet.

"What the hell is it?!" said Gabjohn around a mouthful of what one might charitably describe as food.

"Watch," Thora said.

The computers flicked on, one by one, and one by one loaded up an internet browser.  A fluttering sound filled the room as if an unseen flock of pigeons took off in fear--and a hand, an arm, thrust from one of the monitors, clad in a skintight getup with circuit-like lines seemingly applied with fluorescent paint.  In moments, a shapely woman pulled her way out of the computer.  She was clad, from the head down, in the skintight, vaguely TRON-looking getup.  She wore a large pair of vaguely futuristic-looking goggles... and a witch hat, done up in the same vaguely TRON-looking style.  She glided through the air and landed on high heels sewn into the costume.

Seconds later, a second TRONwitch joined her, just as implausibly built, just as witch-hat-wearingly witchy.

"I knew it," said Thora.  "Internet sex witches!"

A wave of testosterone emerged from Gabjohn, nearly as powerful as the smell of needed-a-shower and off-brand chips.  "My God," he said.

"This is why I didn't speak up earlier," said Thora.

"Men," pfft'd DJ.  "Hey... wait a minute.  Are these women gonna have sex?"

The Internet sex witches, one blond, the other also blond, caressed each other's faces, cooing softly.

"Holy hell, they really are," said DJ.

"Don't get your hopes up," said Thora.

One Internet sex witch reached up to her witch hat and pulled out a length of USB cable; so did the other.  Only now did DJ notice the USB ports on the sides of their hats.  Each Internet sex witch plugged into the other.  They made appreciative coos and sighs.  They began to levitate, and drift slightly apart from each other, and bob about the room as if they were globs in a lava lamp, tethered to each other.

"Yeah..." Thora said.  "Internet sex witches have Internet witch sex.  Jack in, jack on, float aimlessly while dressed stupidly."

The witches continued to bloop about.

"I've got an idea," DJ said.  She ushered Thora aside and Gabjohn pressed his crumb-caked face into the laptop's screen.

Thora nodded and snapped her fingers.

After a moment, one of the witches floated past the bewitched computer.  Once she caught a glimpse of the face on the other side of the suddenly two-way scryring spell, she screamed a disconcertingly coquettish shriek, inspiring her companion to do the same.  The two vanished, and the screen was focused again on empty space.

"That solved 'em!" said DJ, dusting off her hands.

Gabjohn kept staring at the monitor.

"I like the way you think," Thora said.  "Now why don't we work together more often?"

"Because you made me--"

"P'shaw, that wasn't so bad."

"How about you try it next time, huh?"

"Are the witch people coming back?" said Gabjohn.

"We got rid of them because you asked us to," Danny said.

Gabjohn made the most terrible sound of disappointment to ever bleat out of a human throat.