"Hey, what are you doing?" Jon's sister, Zoe, usually met up with her friend, Athena DeVries, in the library after school. But usually Athena waited for Zoe before sinking herself eyebrows-deep into some ancient tome. This afternoon, Zoe could barely see her friend behind the stack of books she'd set down at their usual table. And she could see a glowing aura.
"There's new magic in town, I can feel it." Athena had a notebook out with an amulet sitting on the open page. She was drawing a set of sigils around the amulet behind her stack of books, and barely took her attention away from her work to answer. "Just to be on the safe side, I need to increase my magical defenses. I'm going to enchant my amulet, imbue it with my own essence. That way it acts like a back-up copy. If any outside magic affects me, the essence in the amulet will restore me to my true form."
"You think someone's going to attack you with magic?"
"I don't know," Athena said as she finally lifted her pen from the paper. "But it's better safe than sorry." The girl's eyes widened slightly as she finally looked up at her friend.
"What?" Zoe asked.
"The magic. Whatever it is, it's close to you. I don't know how, but you're definitely within its immediate sphere of influence."
"So do I need an amulet, too?"
Athena gave a solemn nod, and stood up from her seat. "Mr. Giles might be able to find a proper vessel for you to imbue essence into," she invoked the name of the school's head librarian. "Let's see if he's in his office."
The two girls walked in the direction of the head librarian's office, and in a rare moment of absent-mindedness, didn't realize that they were leaving behind a completed set of sigils, with a slightly-glowing amulet at their center waiting to be imbued with a person's essence, surrounded by stacks of books but otherwise completely unguarded.
