Introduction to Dollmaking - Sinister Stitching

    If Mojo had sat down at any point earlier that month to make her newly-assigned voodoo doll, then she likely would have had an extremely difficult time coming up with any one person to make a voodoo doll of  However, this wasn't just any other day for the corrupted unicorn.  No, this just happened to be the day she had completed her second Shadowmancy assignment in which she had to battle another student using nothing other than the shadow tendrils she had been working to control for the last few months now.  It was during that assignment that Mojo once again ran into Chaii, the zombie student who, for some reason, pegged her for a stripper.  She hadn't thought much of the encounter at first, of course, until they both found themselves at Bloody's dorm room door.

    It turned out that both students knew the she-demon very well, which began to upset the tiny girl.  She ha always taken Bloody to be a bit of a loner, not someone who socializes with students . . . like Chaii.  The idea that her best friend was spending vast amounts of quality time with someone other than her tormented and frustrated the girl.  Not only that, but it seemed that Bloody treated Chaii in a completely different manner than how she treated Mojo.

    Before the demon hybrid had departed, leaving Mojo and Chaii by themselves in the Blood Dormitory halls, she had shown the boy such sensitivity and compassion that Mojo almost couldn't believe what she was witnessing.  She had previously believed the older student to be grumpy and sarcastic to everyone.  That display had led Mojo to question much of the way that the two of them interacted.  Bloody was never so gentle and caring towards her, so what made him so special?

    To make matters worse, when the two actually engaged in battle, Chaii had managed to beat her.  Granted, she didn't normally give up so quickly when faced with a challenge like that, but during the heat of the battle, both students' tensions rose and they became carried away.  This led to Chaii managing to accidentally strike Mojo's face with his hand rather than a shadow tendril, and in the midst of doing so he'd managed to reveal Mojo's eyes.

    His expression was that of pure horror, and coupled with his gasp, it was enough to send the girl fleeing the moment he released her from his shadowy restraints.  For as much as she enjoyed causing dismay and striking terror into others, there was something deeply unpleasant, jarring even, about having others glimpse her eyes.  She loved fear, felt thrill when others felt terror or annoyance, but having someone, anyone, react so strongly to her appearance, well, it left her feeling shaken and insecure.  She couldn't help what happened to her after her corruption, or how she looked as a result of it.  It made her feel . . . bad, honestly.

    As soon as she had gotten back to her dorm room, she slammed the door shut and barred it, not wanting to see anyone else after the humiliation and horror of her face being glimpsed.  Of course, she wasn't truly alone.  Her pet shadow meerkat, Jazz, as well as her carnivorous shadow plant, Orc, were still in the room with her, confused and agitated by her strange mood as she paced and shook, stroking her hair and muttering odd things to herself in hysteria.

    Both creatures had taken to watching from a distance, not wishing to get involved when their master was so out of sorts.  Mojo had eventually begun to calm, of course, though she was still quite unhappy with what had transpired earlier.  In a moment of despair, she had gone to her study desk, still shaking and panting as she propped both hands upon the wooden surface.  Once there, she sniffed and looked over the papers and books strewn over the tabletop. At the top of the pile of random items was a bundle of materials needed for her Hexing assignment--an assortment of colored fabric, sterile sewing needles, spools of fine thread, stuffing, scissors, and of course a wide array of deadly and disastrous herbs and magical ingredients.

    As her gaze traveled over the array of materials, she was reminded that she had yet to actually complete her last assignment.  The problem was, of course, that she didn't feel as though she would be able to work on anything after . . . after. . .  She was taken from her angst-ridden reverie by a realization.  She hadn't previously had anyone in mind when she was tasked with creating a voodoo doll, but now. . .

    Her eyes narrowed as she looked over the collection of fabrics and sewing tools before her, and she lifted a square of white fabric along with a pair of scissors, levitating them through use of her magic, channeled through the crooked horn on her head.  She wasn't normally able to lift things with her magic--it was a difficult task--though when presented with moments of powerful clarity such as this, she was able to achieve certain magical feats.

    Pluck the fabric and scissors from the air, a crooked half-smile, half-sneer formed, her teeth bared.  "So," she finally said, in a low, airy voice.  "You think you can just walk in and steal my best friend, beat me in a duel, and then show off my eyes for the school to see?"  She put the scissors tot he cloth and closed the eyes, snipping through one edge of the square.  "Well, you've got another thing coming," she muttered venomously, more items being lifted off the desk by her magic, encased in a smoke-like aura as she began her grim work.


    Almost an hour had passed as the bitter student looked over the nearly-finished doll in her grasp.  All that was left to add was a bit of stuffing, various herbs, the final stitching, and of course a piece of Chaii's person.  At first, she was curious as to how she would go about taking something from him, that was until she realized that she probably absorbed some things from his being in their fight, trapping it in her shadows.

    Putting the voodoo doll down, she summoned up a few tendrils which then melded together to combine and form a shadowy orb.  Reaching inside of it, Mojo felt around the cool, dark void for something--anything--she could use without having to actually approach the student.  Almost giving up, her fingertips brushed against what felt like a hair or a fine thread.  Grasping the tiny object and pulling it out of the shadowy cloud revealed it to be just that--one of Chaii's hairs.  A wicked grin spread over Mojo's face.  "Heh," she breathed, taking the hair and inserting it into the doll's back.  "In you go~" she chuckled darkly.

    Now that she had a bit of Chaii in the plush figure, she had to choose which ingredients she would store inside of it as well.  Considering her options, she narrowed down her picks to a handful of some of the most potent samples she'd gotten away with taking from the class before in preparation:  a bit of black mustard seed to cause problems and disturbances for the victim, some Mullien to doom him, a few petals of Safflower to hex him, and a generous amount of sulfur, to encourage harm to befall upon him.  These were all dangerous ingredients when wielded by expert magic-users; however, Mojo herself was still a beginner, and the effects wouldn't be as great as she would have liked them to be, but at least she'd be able to have a bit of fun with the doll before the ingredients' power wore off.

    Quickly adding in some stuffing and additional mustard seeds, Mojo began to aggressively stitch the doll's back shut, imagining for a moment that she were actually plunging a needle into Chaii himself.  She gritted her teeth as she finished the sewing and roughly put the needle and thread down, turning the doll over to face her.  "There!  Now let's see you try to make fool out of me now!" she growled, shaking the doll once before holding it closer to her face.  "I hate you," she whispered.  "I hate you for everything you did.  I hate you for getting my friend to like you more than me.  You're awful . . . you're AWFUL!"