To Be A Witch

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Author's Note: Round 1.2 must be a maximum of 2500 words and follow the following prompt:  At the age of 7, Lily was looking forward to witches school. But now, at 21, she has to find her place in the world, and that's a challenge no one prepared her for.


For as long as she could remember, Lily always knew she was a witch. At the age of seven she had informed her parents that she would not be attending the Clancy J. Adams Vocational Academy in the fall, and would instead be enrolling in witches school. This did not exactly go over well with her folks.

"Rubbish!" her father declared. "You come from a proud lineage of robot repair technicians. Your mother and I both repair robots, your grandparents on both sides repaired robots, and all of your great grandparents before that repaired robots. That's what we do in this family. We repair robots. And you, young lady, shall also repair robots."

"Well, I guess that doesn't sound so bad," Lily pondered. "Are they fun robots like R2D2 or the Terminator?"

"Absolutely not!" her father shouted. "We specialize in one kind of robot and only one kind of robot, and that's that's the kind of robot that builds girders."

"But that sounds boring," Lily whined.

Her parents both let out gasps and then her mother began to cry.

"Now look what you've gone and done," her father frowned. "The very foundation of this family comes from girder building robots, and you want to call them boring? I'm deeply sorry, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to send you to bed without your supper. And don't you even think about learning about any other kinds of robots. That's basically asking to be disowned by the family."

"And no more of this witch talk either," her mother said through sobs. "There's no such thing as witches, and there's certainly no such thing as witches school."

And so Lily had dutifully attended every single class on girder building robot repair at the Clancy J. Adams Vocational Academy for the next fourteen years, but she didn't learn a single thing. It wasn't for lack of trying. Truly, she wanted to make her parents proud, but her mind kept wandering to thoughts of magic and witchcraft, and the teacher's lectures would just blur out into monotonous bleats of sound with no meaning whatsoever.

In the little spare time that she had, Lily practiced her magic skills. She'd found an old leather bound book of spells in the occult section of the public library, which she checked out and had renewed one hundred and eighty-seven times. She had mastered the basics pretty quickly, but the more advanced spells could get quite technical, and without the proper tutelage, she just wasn't able to get a handle on them. She could summon brief flashes of light from her hands and make small objects float, but these amounted to mere parlor tricks, more or less.

The most useful spells she learned were the ones that allowed her to cheat on her schoolwork, so she was able at the age of twenty-one to graduate from robot repair school with honors, despite not having learned anything.

She did feel a little guilty when her dad burst into tears at her graduation ceremony and told her he'd never been more proud of anything in his life. On the other hand, he had sent her to bed without supper that one time when she was seven, so she didn't feel too terrible.

It all came literally crashing down around her on her first day on the job at the girder factory. Lily's father had pulled some strings and gotten her a position of high responsibility, working on the maintenance and repair of some of the biggest and most expensive robots in the field. Lily had no idea what the heck she was doing, and within the first ten minutes that she was left unsupervised, she somehow managed to topple over a massive thirty-foot-tall robot.

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