Rita was a plant which. This didn’t mean that she was a witch that was a plant; it meant that she did plant magic. Her full name was Rita Brooks and she first discovered her powers as a child when she made twigs and branches sprout from the nose of a boy who had teased her about her braces. Rita’s parents felt that they could never handle raising such a powerful child so they sent her to the same school for witches that Heckie Tenbury-Smith and Dora Mayberry had spent their childhood.
Rita loved school and when she didn’t experiment with potions or cover boring old statues with emerald-green mosses and beautiful flowers she hung out with her best friends: Megan and Elma. Elma was a woodnymph who could make birds do anything she wanted them to by singing her song and Megan was an inventor-witch who delighted in making magical devices like hot-water bottles that never ran cold and toothpaste that never hardened. Her latest invention was a bathtub that could take you to any place on earth in an instant as long as you said what location you wanted to go immediately before stepping inside.
When it was time for the students to discuss what they wanted to do with their powers Rita couldn’t help but mention the stone and animal witches who had turned cruel chicken farmers and neo Nazis into animals and stone, respectively. “Using magic to hurt bad people must be so much fun,” she said.
“But personally, I would prefer a method that was less… permanent. Rather, I’ll do something that could scar him or her for life, so she could learn a lesson or two.” Elma and Megan smiled back. There were plenty enough bad people in the world that deserved a little scare.
And soon enough the three friends set up shop in a little town called Woodville in Doncaster. At daytime it looked just like a normal flower-shop but at night the witches received several requests for revenge from around the world. The trio travelled using the bathtub to New Jersey where the adulterous ex of a young man had several trumpeter swans appear on her wedding day, soiling her dress with their excrement. A pastor in Italy who had whipped several children with his leather-belt was told by a thunderous voice from the sky to dance on the church roof in his underwear and so he did, causing his hundreds of people below to laugh until their backs bent in half. But one of the most memorable requests came from a teenage girl whose freckled cheeks were streaked with tears as she strode into the shop. Rose Caldwell was her name and in between sobs she told the three shopkeepers how she had been harassed almost daily on a website named Tumblr.
“he-he goes by thi-this username, but his real name is Jonah Murphy.” She handed them a piece of paper with the word “fuj0hater-89” scribbled on it. “He s-said that I’m a nasty ‘fujoshi’ and lying about me ever since I joked about how two boys from a cartoon looked so cute together. His followers have been calling me lots of nasty names ever since. Please help me!” She begged before blowing her nose into a napkin. Rita, Elm and Megan didn’t understand some of the words for the magical world had only recently come into familiar with social media but they did understand that a bad person had hurt a young woman for little to no reason. After finding out where this “fuj0hater” lived and his real name, “Jonah” after Rose showed them on her smartphone the trio immediately jumped into their bathtub and travelled to Sunnyhill drive, Georgia.
