Helen Speaks

Another entry in my series using Sky Latshaw’s RPG, The Magical Year of the Teenage Witch.

Introduction to Olive:  https://helenspeaks.com/2025/04/07/olive-framleys-magical-year/

Olive Framley

Crag Cottage

Barkmouth

Dear Talia,

It’s been a trying couple of weeks. Daddy is furious about the whole Magical Reporter debacle and the fact that people are now asking him what he thinks he’s doing, sending his well-educated daughter to mess around with potions and spells, and I’ve had journalists and paparazzi following me all over the place. The people of Barkmouth are finding it quite tiring too. Thanks to my new business cards, I’d made a few of appointments to look at magical problems, but then a few cancelled after the Green Dragon incident. Which hardly seems fair, when you consider that I didn’t disappear and in fact solved the whole thing!

One local woman did stop me in the street to apologise – she just didn’t want a whole train of reporters knowing about her problems.

I hope you read the Derringer Grant piece about me, though. It wasn’t nearly kind enough – he was following us around in town and Lucy somehow managed to turn him and herself invisible and of course I ended up having to find them both and turn them back. I’d forgotten that the disillusionment spell requires honesty – I’d hoped to make him sweat a little but I couldn’t turn Lucy back without acknowledging he was there.

They’ve mostly gone from Crag Cottage now, but Hatty thought she saw someone – someone she said was both tall and very good at hiding. This doesn’t seem to make sense, but Hatty said she saw the person, and then they vanished.

I looked into some different runes on the usual internet forums, and there’s one that witches sometimes use when looking into nature – it’s a freezing rune that holds a living thing in place for a few minutes, and means that if it’s something relatively small (they said a small fox was about as large as you want to go) you can observe it or even mark it (humanely) for further study.

It’s funny that there are witches out there using their magic for science, Talia.

In any case, humans being bipedal means that the field of effect would probably be good enough to at least catch my mysterious visitor and get a look at them, and might even scare them off coming again. I made a rune with pebbles in the garden, then buried it under some leaves. If someone comes by, I may be able to catch them!

Yours sincerely,

Olive.

Question: If the world had magic, do you think people would still do science?

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