
Vanessa Prince smoothed her tight skirt over her thighs and tucked
one strand of errant black hair behind her ear. She took a
deep breath, pressing her large breasts against her low-cut
tank top, and spoke softly in a seven-fold voice. Her fingers
danced at her sides, contorting themselves into a myriad of
shapes with an almost inhuman flexibility. If anyone was
listening, they would have found it impossible to remember
what she said.

The spell would make the girl unnoticeable for any who cared
to look for her, a phenomenon which was otherwise uncommon for
the strikingly beautiful girl. Every witch had a knack, and
this was Vanessa's. Of course she was not satisfied to rely
on her own native talent for the spell. She had studied magic
from dozens of cultures for making things hard to find and
incorporated a bit from each into her own personal unnoticability
spell. She could do a better job if she had access to souls
stolen from a daemon's sack or a half pint of angel's blood,
but such things were hard to come by. Even so, nothing short
of an angel would be able to see her, and she doubted that even
one of the host would be able to see her easily.

Clad in her magic, she simply walked up the gate of Darwin's
and started to climb. If the prison's guardian spells detected
her, they would activate the hundreds of gargoyles perched around
the grounds which would rip her to shreds with their magic sapping
claws, but Vanessa was not worried. She just hauled herself up the
vertical bars, glad that she had worn her rubber soled boots. She
was briefly embarrassed at the way that the climb forced the hem of
her skirt up, but it wasn't like anyone was watching. She could not
wear more practical clothes because her mother would notice.
Vanessa's mother had an unfortunate habit of noticing anything which
hinted at the possibility that her youngest daughter was trying
to learn black magic again.

It wasn't as if the Prince's were a family of white witches, but
Heather Prince did feel rather strongly that her daughters should
wait to summon their first imp until after their 20th birthday.
When she had walked in on Vanessa in the middle of tricking
a lessor demon into 10 years of servitude shortly after her 13th
birthday she had not been pleased. Vanessa had been grounded for
three months after that. She had taken the opportunity to refine
her knack, and subsequently used it to keep her study of the
dark discrete. She almost never got caught, and when she did
she always had an excuse which left her looking guilty of something
much less dark than she had really been up to. Of course there would
be no excuse this time, so she had better not get caught.

She threw one booted foot up on the top of the gate between two
spikes, and pulled herself up into a ginger crouch. Squatting
over a row of spikes made her a tad nervous, but she steadied
herself and jumped down into the prison yard. She landed in
a crouch with a loud thump. The guard in the booth to her
right did not even look up from his Facebook feed. Unnoticability
was so much better than invisibility. It covered everything:
sight, sound and smell as well as more exotic senses.

After a pause to readjust her clothes, she walked down the path
to the main building. Darwin's Prison consisted of a single
Victorian mansion with perhaps a few more locks and bars than
was typical of the architectural style. Approaching the front
door she slipped a set of lock picks from her bra and selected
a pick and a tension wrench. She could open the locks with magic
easily, but the magical discharge might be enough to disrupt
her unnoticability. Vanessa was lucky that she had picked up a
few mundane tricks to flesh out her considerable magical
repertoire.

In terms of raw power Vanessa, was the strongest witch
in her family, but it had not always been that way. Prince's
tended to blossom into their power early, so she had resigned
herself to life as a hedge witch when she turned 15 wearing a
B-cup. Some witches had their power tied directly to some physical
attribute like their eyes or their gut. Women of the Prince clan had
power rooted in their beauty and figures, so Vanessa had been delighted
when it became clear that she was a late bloomer in both the traditional
and magical sense. As her curves swelled her magic grew. She became more
powerful than her sisters and mother almost overnight, drawing on the
power afford by her 32G cups and perfectly formed ass. The women in
her family tended to be on the shorter side, but being a late bloomer
had given her more time to add inches before her growth spurt put an
end to her growth. It meant that she stood 5'7" while her tallest sister
was only 5'4". The best part was that she was still growing, even if
it was only by a little.

Vanessa felt the last pin click into place at the end of her pick, and
slid the cylinder smoothly open. She slipped inside and was immediately
greeted by a grand foyer with a magnificent staircase leading both up and down.
She had a feeling that she would not find what she wanted by going up, so she
went down. She kept walking down for 20 stories, passing every door without
a second glance. When the stairs ran out she paused and closed her eyes. When
she opened them again they were green and reptilian. Fusing her own eyes with
those of a gorgon had been one of her stupider moments. If she had made a
mistake she would have turned herself to stone permanently, but she hadn't
and now she had mage-sight to rival a Watcher of the first order. Of course
she could also turn people to stone with a look, but she found that less useful.
She was more interested in the acquisition of power than the use of it, at least
for the moment.

A sharp gesture parted the enchantments on the trap door trying to hide in the
floor. She pulled it open and walked down the flight of stairs it reveled. At
the base of the stairs was a single prisoner in a straitjacket covered in
intricate runes. The prisoner was a pallid skeleton of a man who seemed to
be neither fully awake nor asleep. Vanessa half expected him to snap to full
awareness and pin her to the wall with his gaze, but of course he paid her
no more mind than the guard at the gate had. Her pulse beat in her throat.
She had willingly gambled her soul with a duke of the eighth circle without
feeling a drop of fear, yet the man before her made the hair on the back of
her neck stand on end. Salazar Sand was a name that struck fear in the hearts
of the angels themselves, and now Vanessa stood before him.

She slid a silver scalpel out of her pick set and made a single clean cut from
the top of Salazar's straitjacket to its hem. Dropping her cloak of
unnoticability she said, "Hi Dad."

He came out of his stupor slowly, as the enchantments which kept his magic and
mind twisted into knots started to unravel. "Hello Vanessa. I had not thought to
see you for another ten years at the very least."

"You know about me?" She said, surprised.

He smiled weakly, "Of course. I'm not completely powerless, even here,
even bound."

She rolled her lips between her teeth and worked her jaw back and forth,
"I have so many questions."

He nodded, then his eyes slid to her right hand which was slowly moving
from form to form. "And I see you plan to have your answers. Be careful,
daughter mine. If you mistime this, I will rip your soul from your body."
His voice did not change in the slightest as he made the threat.

Rather than reply, Vanessa just looked at him and continued to move her
fingers.

"To be honest I'm proud of you. To be summoning Tutors at your age is
no small thing, and it must mean that Heather didn't completely ruin
you. If you had come to free me I could have taught you so much. As
it is you will die-" He was cut off when Vanessa moved through the
final forms and thrust her hand through her father's face. A flood of
knowledge washed over her. She made no attempt to understand any of it
as it came in, instead she just soaked it up. She could digest later.
It went on longer than any Tutor drain she had ever experienced. Her father
knew a lot. She must have inherited her eidetic memory from him.

When it was over she stumbled away from her father's corpse, chest heaving.
Still reeling from the experience, she hastily cast her unnoticability
spell and walked back up the stairs before collapsing against the wall.
She sat there, just breathing, for half an hour. She did not even notice
when a guard found the open trap door and raised the alarm. She finally
felt strong enough to start the long trek back up to the ground floor,
avoiding guards rushing to and fro as she did so. They bumped into her
a few times, but her unnoticability spell made the experience slide off
their memories like water off a ducks back. After a moment of confusion
they would rush off to where ever they had been going.  She spent 20 minutes
resting in the lobby until she felt up to climbing the gate again. Most of
the commotion had died down by that time.

After leaving the prison, she walked for a mile and then called a cab.
The cabby lost his memory of that whole day, and found that his meter
showed no fares at all.

"Hey Honey! How was school?" Heather Prince asked her daughter.

"Oh it was alright. I got a B+ on that math test." Replied Vanessa,
before walking up to her room.

*There is something off about her* thought Heather. *I wonder if she has
been taking trips to the Seelie court, she looks a bit wobbly.* She knew
that Vanessa had always been drawn to the dark, and she could never shake
the worry that her daughter might be falling in with demons or fey.
