“Well,” Mary said out loud, “it’s about time!”
She picked up the large wooden box containing the magic vials and a grin appeared on her face as she carried it inside. She kicked the door shut with her foot and turned towards the kitchen to set the box down on the dining table. She read the note attached, written in sloppy shorthand by a foreign hand, and pressed the button on top of the box excitedly. With a click and then a sudden snap the box sprang open revealing dozens of shelves and more importantly hundreds of potions in tiny glass vials.
God, she had waited so long for this moment. It had started out talking to her best friend’s father, an antiquities dealer, about a rare and mysterious find in China. Chinese archaeologists had uncovered a bizarre tomb in the subtropical forests of the southeast. Allegedly they had discovered the mummified remains of a tall bipedal lizard creature in the tomb, but the Chinese government had almost immediately seized the dig site and sent in the military to destroy it. The only thing that made it out of the tomb was the box of vials, stolen by one of the archaeologists as he fled certain death.
How Mary had acquired the box was a story itself. The archaeologist who stole the vials from the tomb was actually a friend of her friend’s father. He had turned over the vials for safe keeping with the stipulation they must go to scientific research and even attached the note. Mary had hired a professional thief to steal the box from her friend’s mansion, and now she had them sitting on her kitchen table. Mary was an amateur historian of the occult and paranormal, and had read about the vials before. They allowed anyone or anything to become something else, gain the powers of all life on Earth, and conquer the world. Armies had fought for them and entire cultures had wiped themselves out. Traces of these lost civilizations were occasionally found around the world.
The origin of the vials themselves was lost in time, but there was no doubt in Mary’s thoughts they were not science, but true magic. The vials were going to be harnessed and used to fuel Mary’s ascension to being the all-powerful goddess of humanity.
But first, she grinned, a test of their mystic capability was in order. Mary walked over to the phone and picked up the receiver. She dialed her best friend’s phone number and grinned. “Hi, Jess! It’s Mary! You doing anything today? No? Great! I’ve got a new outfit I want you to see! Come over and we’ll have lunch together! Sure! See you soon!”
And with a devilish smile Mary hung up the phone and began to prepare.