Mina's house was small and cosy. Being a bit of a cottagecore nerd, she had a small garden with a variety of herbs, and inside her home were countless old, wooden bookshelves filled with all kinds of aesthetic looking old books and crystals, floral wreaths on the walls together with landscape paintings. She had a corner just to do tarot readings, and her most recent one was still lying on the table, using a deck Mina had ordered online from an artist she loved. With a quick glance, Emika could see one of the cards that featured a large Tower.
Mina greeted both of them with a hug. She was a small person and had tattoos all over her arms and sported a shaved undercut on the sides of her head with otherwise long, green coloured hair.
"Welcome! The others are already upstairs preparing lunch."
"Oh, nice! What are they making?" asked Eva as she untied her shoes and slipped into a pair of wooden clogs that Mina asked people to wear inside her home.
"Lasagna."
That being Eva's favourite food, she looked up happily and soon ran up the stairs to help. Mina grinned looking after her, then turned back to Emika, and her expression turned more serious. "Is everything okay with you? You look a bit pale."
"Say, Mina," responded Emika slowly, pointing at the tarot corner. "You know about magic, right?"
Mina pulled her eyebrows together, throwing a worried short glance at her tarot reading. "Honestly, I just do tarot for fun. It doesn't have anything to do with magic. Why do you ask?"
Emika slipped into the clogs, gripping her wrist with her other hand. "I feel like something weird is happening to me."
"Oh? What is it?"
Emika sighed. In all honesty, she didn't want to talk about it at all, but remembering Eva's words from the walk, she pointed to her wrist and said: "I feel like something is growing from inside of me. I cut it off, it grows back. Like… a plant. Is that something that can be explained by magic?"
"Well," thought Mina, "I must say, I have never heard of anything like that… But, when it comes to magic, many things can be done. Do you want me to get you an appointment with the local Cursebreaker?"
Emika wasn't sure what to say. "Cursebreaker?" she asked.
"Ah, well. They are human-aligned magic users who specialise in protecting people from all kinds of magical things."
"I see…" said Emika, then biting her lips. She paused for a moment, then said: "I'll think about it. Thank you. Let's go upstairs, too?"
There, they were greeted by their other three friends: Reiko, whose parents had immigrated here just like Emika's had; Sam, a white law student who had quite short hair and was usually very cheerful to the point where it became her running joke, as well as Taara, a silent and shy bass player who Mina had picked up in a rock bar a few months ago.
Throughout the next few hours, Emika grew increasingly tired as everyone else — except for Taara — was socialising a lot. As much as she needed her friends around her, for now she felt overstimulated, which probably was a result of the constant throbbing from her wrist.
They all talked for a while as they ate lunch, and then decided to play some board games. After her short conversation with Mina, Emika actually decided to look for a magical explanation for her affliction on her smartphone. Though, the main issue was not only her being pretty unaware of where to look for magical info; she also wasn't particularly good with technology in general. In the end, after some vain attempts, she just dumped a short explanation of what was happening to her into a conventional search engine, together with the key word "magic," and with that stumbled upon a 14 year old forum post about a guy complaining about some "growths" on his body. It was apparently a community where people shared magical events that happened to them…
She wasn't allowed to see his attached pictures unless she had an account, so she made one, only to find that these growths were actually live fish eyes, not plants. The sole answer in the thread told him they were "cute." At that point she gave up and just watched the others play their games.
Eventually, though, her friends would get to the part that Emika loved the most about their gatherings: All six of them would go and squeeze together on the couch that was just a bit too small for all of them, and watch a horror movie together. Skin contact really was the best for Emika's soul.
"By the way, I can't come over to sleep at your place tonight after all," said Mina as she let Emika huddle herself onto her shoulder. "I have a deadline coming up and will probably need to pull an all-nighter."
"Sure, no problem," said Emika, as she tried to withhold how sad she was to hear that. That meant she'd have to savour the closeness now even more.
The horror movie that they decided to watch was of no interest to her; it was about some monster hiding within renaissance paintings, and it would occasionally slip out to eat people's skin off.
"Oh wait," said Eva suddenly, right after the monster had had its biggest meal yet, "Do we have enough bread for tomorrow morning? We ate it all for dinner, right?"
"Yep. It's gone," said Reiko.
"Let me go get some more while the shop's still open. Don't worry, you can continue without me. I've seen that movie already, anyway."
"Alright, thank you very much, Eva," said Mina. "I forgot to get more groceries yesterday… My thesis has been hogging up all of my brain power lately…"
"Don't worry about it! See you in five."
With that, she jumped up and trampled down the stairs, and with it, she knocked Emika out of her daze.
Emika felt Mina's warm body, her slightly elevated up and down breathing, her quick beating heart. That girl usually got that excited by horror movies.
Lifting her head, Emika turned around and looked at the others, too. Sam put a potato chip in her mouth, then reciprocated Emika's gaze and smiled at her.
By now, Emika had almost completely forgotten her pain, just feeling dizzyingly happy, barely able to contain her desire to stay with these people forever.
It was in the moment that she thought that when, suddenly, Sam started coughing, as if she had choked on her snack, and a small line of blood made its way out of the corner of her mouth.
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