Circe did not think of herself as a Sorceress.  That was a traditional term, fuzzy and pretentious and rather generous for most mystics these days, who were about as close to historical Sorcerers as the average vampire-lit fan was to a real blood-drinker.  Archaeologist would be better, perhaps, though that implied a level of interest in the physical that Circe didn't share.  Her obsession was the information, relics and inscriptions were just means to that end.  In the end, as she didn't willingly participate in so-called "mystical society", she didn't really need a label.

In recent years, she'd been leaving her home less and less often.  Since she'd unearthed the proper techniques for specifying rigorous Conjuration terms in writing, it wasn't often necessary.  It was surprising how many mystics used Vanishing as a means of disposal, and if the terms were very well-defined, one could receive a steady stream of genuinely useful things.

Her ambitions were steadily growing, however.

Traditional archaeology had become somewhat obsolete for her purposes since she'd begun dealing directly with demons.  Most of them were thousands of years old, often had perfect memories and could be cajoled into providing services that made things much easier.  As long as she took the proper precautions in her terms, it wasn't even that dangerous.  They were intelligent, devious even, but few were creative.  The real trick was in learning what sort of offer was tempting enough to get one to respond to such restrictive Conjurations, and every demon was subtly different.

Taob enjoyed mortal peril in humans, which was fairly common as demon preferences went. The key, since demons were so old and had seen so much, was in being creative about it.  Give them something new, relatively speaking.  Also, for practical reasons, to make the peril manageable...Circe had only minor compunctions about killing people, but it was much easier to re-use the same one as long as possible than constantly finding replacements.  She had hit upon a method that, for this demon, had so far been quite reliable.

She'd obtained the glass cases and the accessories via mail-order.  All of the mice but one had been obtained through a standing open Conjuration.  The python and the last mouse were Transfigured humans.  She'd tried natural snakes at first, but they could be fussy and sporadic about feeding, so she'd needed to find an alternative.  Circe still didn't fully grasp the Internet, but when it had value, she embraced it.  Still, it had surprised her how easy it was to find people willing to become a snake for the expressed purpose of terrorizing and eating mice, one of which was a young woman.  People who, despite being unaware of how magic worked, were somehow readily willing to believe it was possible.  They even paid her quite well for the privilege.  Baffling, really.

The mouse, of course, couldn't be entirely willing, or the peril wouldn't be quite what Taob wanted.  But the girl she'd found was perfect.  Tough enough to pull through, needy enough to cooperate, but paranoid and damaged enough to act more instinctively than rationally.  It had been spur-of-the-moment, but Circe had decided to legitimately train her.  Seers were rare, and it'd be very useful to have one on hand.  Not too much training, of course.  Wouldn't do to have her leaving.

The demon appeared to be a woman, again.  Most mystics thought of demons as male, but they didn't really have genders, as they didn't procreate, and they could assume nearly any form they wished.  Typically their preference revolved around the reaction of humans...either to blend in completely unnoticed, or to excite extreme fear or lust...or for combat.  Once she'd discovered Circe's own preferences, she'd mainly chosen female forms.  But Circe's interest in such things had long ago dried up from disuse and she was in no danger of succumbing to Taob's 'charms'...nor could the demon induce such feelings toward herself, or indeed towards another human, due to Circe's carefully-worded terms.

The demon wore a black dress with a flared collar.  An elaborate head-piece hid most of her hair, save a stray lock of red that trailed down one cheek artfully.  Circe sometimes wondered what Disney would think if they knew how much influence they'd had on the supernatural world, or what the demon would think if she realized how much less imposing it made her to crib from popular media.  The demon leaned forward eagerly, in a way that deliberately displayed her generous decolletage to best advantage, but even if this had affected Circe (which it did not), Taob wouldn't have noticed, so focused was she on the imminent drama.

Circe slowly donned a pair of gardening gloves.  The healing she and the girl had imprinted from Taob made that less important now, but it was part of the theatre of the thing.  She removed the lids from the cases and lifted the snake out, gently setting it into an empty plastic kiddie pool on the floor below.  She then began scooping out white mice, who scrambled around the small space trying to avoid her hands.  As she caught the rodents, she dumped them unceremoniously into the pool, and the snake immediately struck one, beginning to hastily swallow it, eager for more.

In short order, a handful of mice had been transferred into the pool.  Circe glanced at the demon, and the latter's rapt gaze confirmed that the girl was one of them...Circe couldn't easily tell them apart from appearance.

The show continued with little sound but the soft whisking of the snake's movement and the frantic scratches of the mice, desperately trying to get traction on the plastic.  It became clear, as it often did, which mouse was the girl, by its unusual behavior.  Previously, she'd tried climbing on top of another mouse to get closer to the pool's lip, but it still hadn't been tall enough.  Now one of the mice was clearly herding the others, or trying to, perhaps thinking she could form some sort of peromyscine pyramid.  The other mice were just mice, not a cheerleading squad, and the pool had no corners to force the mice into, so it was obviously hopeless...but then hope would defeat the point.

In the end, as she usually did, the girl retreated to a now-practiced strategy...she stayed near at least one other mouse until the snake approached, then kicked her companion towards the predator, scurrying away as it struck.  The demon always clapped delightedly at this maneuver, as if she was six years old and not six-thousand-plus.  Circe checked her watch.  Part of the arrangement was that these sessions would last five minutes.  If the time ran out, the girl would be safe.  If she was caught by the snake before then, Circe would do nothing to prevent her from being swallowed.  This ensured the show did not go on too long, lest the demon become bored, and that the danger would always feel genuine.

With three mice and ninety seconds remaining, however, the mouse-girl missed the maneuver.  The mouse she'd tried to sacrifice had made an unexpected leap, leaving the girl on her back and kicking at nothing, directly in the snake's path.  The python was only mildly slowed by the two mice he'd already swallowed, and it was on her in an instant, fangs deep in her abdomen.  The mouse's thin cry mixed with a low moan of pleasure from the demon in a way that Circe found profoundly disturbing, even for her.

But as Circe had noted, the girl was tough, and as the snake had taken her tail-first, she had some leverage.  She bit and clawed and kicked, heedless of how this drove the fangs deeper into her, and the snake began to thrash wildly.  Not being a natural snake, he didn't have enough practice to do much more damage this way, however.  Circe counted down the last seconds on her watch, then spoke four short syllables with careful inflection.

Space knotted uncomfortably, and when it finished a red-haired girl was lying where the mouse had been, the snake beside her, somehow contriving to look confused despite lacking the necessary musculature to actually form an expression.  The girl was wearing the close-fitting, full-body garment Circe had provided for her, only the white material was now torn, with rapidly spreading circles of red around the the large gaping wounds in her midsection, as if she'd been somehow stabbed twice with a bedpost.  The girl cried out and scrabbled out of the pool, crawling painfully to put distance between herself and the snake, then curled into a ball, arms wrapped protectively around herself.

"Satisfactory?" Circe asked, looking to the demon.

"Ohhhh, yes.  Quite," Taob purred.

"Jewel, rather than indulging in self-pity and a slow death from blood-loss, perhaps you could repair yourself while I clean up?" Circe suggested dryly, turning to retrieve a large cloth sack, and paying little attention to her injured Apprentice.  Before the girl could respond, however, the demon spoke.

"May I heal her?" she asked.  "Freely offered, not as part of our bargain."  Circe glanced back at her in surprise, but shrugged.

"Of course.  You are, naturally, much faster at it than we are."  She lifted the snake into the bag, paused a moment, then reached to the bottom of the bag and pulled, turning it inside out.  Of the snake, there was no sign.  Circe never restored her 'clients'...it wouldn't do to have anyone talking about what happened in her basement...but she did send them back to the woods she arranged to meet them at, to live out their days as best they could.  Beyond that generous gesture, she gave them no further consideration.

The demon nodded and slinked over to the girl, crouching next to her.  Jewel had by now painfully pulled herself up, leaning back against one of Circe's heavy items from the history of unpleasantness, and was holding a hand over one of the punctures, but she was very pale and seemed to be having trouble concentrating.

"Please, allow me," said the demon, gently pulling the girl's hand away and replacing it with her own.

"F...f-fuck you," the girl spat out, then groaned at the pain this produced.

"Perhaps another time.  I have already blessed you with beauty, it would be fitting to see you exercise it properly," the demon mused, running a fingernail down Jewel's cheek.  One of the wounds was already gone and her free hand shifted to the other.  "Have you ever pleasured a horse?  Or a rhinocerous?"  The girl looked disgusted, but turned her face aside and said nothing further.  Taob laughed and stood, as the girl's second wound was now gone as well.  She trailed her fingers over the new skin lightly as she rose, and laughed again at the girl's shudder.

"What is your wish this time?" the demon asked Circe, who had just finished replacing the lids after putting the two surviving mice back in their case.

"Two things," the woman answered immediately.  People who dealt with demons without knowing exactly what they wanted in advance were idiots.  "First, I wish knowledge of the reading and speaking of the language of the people known to themselves as 'Tuatil'."  The demon nodded.

"It will take a night and a day, as always.  And the other?"

"I have agreed to provide my Apprentice with her True Name, and she can progress no further without it."  Jewel, who had risen to her feet but otherwise remained passive and motionless, suddenly looked...not hopeful precisely, but much more intent.  "I wish the information itself, or the simplest means of its discovery."

"Ah.  Hmm."  Taob rubbed her chin, then raised a finger and nodded, smiling.  This was theatre as much as the gloves had been.  "It is not something I can bestow directly, but there is a lesser One I know who can, and who owes me a service."  Circe raised an eyebrow at this.

"They will submit in this service to the same restrictions you have, and require no payment from me or mine?"  The demon nodded.  "Answer verbally, if you would?" prompted Circe, sounding almost bored.

"Yes, to both," the demon said, her mouth twisted sourly.  This, too, was pretense.

"What must be done to contact this demon?"

"Ah.  Her nature is...unique.  We need do nothing but that which we already have done, and will have done."  Circe frowned, but at that moment a low gong echoed through the room from above, announcing, somewhat pretentiously, that someone had pressed the front door buzzer.  "Even so, she has arrived."  The woman regarded the demon carefully for a moment, then turned to her Apprentice.

"Jewel, wait here and keep our guest company."  Without waiting for a response, she walked up the stairs and through the door to the house proper, closing it behind her.  She went immediately to a small cabinet, placed her hand on the knob and spoke her True Name.  The knob turned and the door opened, revealing a mismatched collection of small trinkets.  Circe removed a silver bangle, etched with a five-pointed star inscribed in a circle, and almost illegibly-small other symbols scattered within and around it.

She walked to the front door and looked through the security lens.  The woman considered for a moment, then opened the door.  A young woman stood there, wavy brown hair framing her fair cheeks and spilling onto her shoulders.  Her effortless beauty was spoiled only slightly by her expression, which hinted at impatience without quite committing to it.  She wore dark blue leathers and was holding a helmet under one arm...a small motorcycle stood behind her at the curb, its gas tank decorated with some sort of bi-plane.  Her belt buckle was silver, shaped into an elaborately styled crown. 

"A guest of yours has obligated me to a service," she said, sounding resigned.  "May I come in?"  Circe tossed the bangle to her, making certain her own hand did not break the plane of the doorway.  The young woman caught it, and regarded it skeptically.  Circe shrugged, looking determined.  The rider sighed and removed the glove from her left wrist, then slipped the bangle on.  "Taob can ride the dust of Solomon's dust to perdition," she muttered.

"Oh come now," Circe chided, "my terms are fair.  Still, no love lost between you, I take it?" She stood aside to allow the other woman to enter, but pointedly did not welcome her.

"Whatever," she replied, in a world-weary tone appropriate to her apparent age.  It strongly reminded Circe of her Apprentice...this did not seem like an ancient demon.  However, the rider removed her other glove and stuck both into the helmet, then set it on a small table in the foyer...as she did so, it vanished, and her riding leathers were simultaneously replaced with an elegant Victorian dress in blue with black details.  The crown buckle was now an actual crown, jewels and all, but still hanging at her waist from a silver chain, and her hair had become elaborately curled.

"Dressing to impress?" asked the older woman, more carefully.  The newcomer shrugged.

"It's my nature.  I am beautiful...whatever that means in the context I find myself."  She paused, then added, pointedly, "You and your house are old."  Circe coughed, and her lips thinned.

"Fascinating.  My basement should be an interesting experiment in that regard," she commented as she led the way to the basement door.  "After you," she said, holding the door open.  The young woman stepped carefully down, pushing in her voluminous skirts to fit through the doorway.  Circe followed and closed the door behind them.  By the time they reached the bottom of the stairs, the dress had become a simple shift, half-transparent and clinging with sweat, her hair hanging plumb straight down her back to her waist.  The crown remained as it had been with the dress, but suspended instead from a belt of ragged twine.

"Gremory," said Taob warmly.  "I'm so pleased you could make it!  And such a fetching 'innocent victim' you make...you simply must take a turn on the rack before you go."  Jewel took this opportunity to skitter away from the demon, who until that moment had draped an arm over her shoulder.

"Drown in scorpion urine," suggested Gremory.  Circe and Jewel blinked at this, but the villainously-dressed demon only smiled.

"Now, now, manners...we are guests here," she said.  "Besides, you'll like this."  Circe cleared her throat, trying to regain control of the situation.

"The service I require is-"

"Yeah, I know.  This her?" interrupted the brunette, pointing at Jewel.  The older woman nodded, trying unsuccessfully not to look irritated about being interrupted.  Gremory crossed the room in a bold stride that clashed with her outfit and took one of the girl's hands.  "Don't mind goat-toad, she's like that with..."  The demon trailed off, and slowly turned to her associate.  "Ah."

"And all becomes clear!  As it so often does with you, my lovely grimoire..." Taob chuckles, rubbing her hands together in a way which ought to be threatening, but to everyone present but herself and the mice, seems too much like copyright violation to register as much else.

"What does she mean?" asked Circe, looking mildly concerned even so.

"Your Apprentice has...quite a history," said Gremory.  The older woman considered this, but frowned suspiciously.

"The Name," Circe insisted.  "I won't be diverted."

"As you wish.  Her True Name," she said deliberately and clearly, "is Viola Juliet Bryce."  Circe nodded in satisfaction.  The girl, for a tenuous moment, looked happy. Complete.  But her eyes began to widen, her face falling through shock into horror.

"No...no...I can't be her, I can't, she did that, not me, I didn't want that to happen, I didn't do it, I didn't, I didn't, I DIDN'T!"  Viola, as despite her protests, she now remembered herself to be, fell to the floor, pulling at her hair and clawing at the exposed skin of her stomach as if to re-open the wounds she'd so recently had.

"What did you do?!" demanded Circe, grabbing Gremory's wrist.  "You can't harm us!"

"I provided the service requested, as per the terms to which we are bound.  She could not remember her name because she had disassociated due to a past trauma.  A fairly shitty one," she added, glancing at Taob, who was leaning over a racking table, her shoulders shaking with loud laughter.  "Much more importantly for you, however" she continued, "there's a small hole in your terms, but you shouldn't feel too bad about it, since apparently Taob planned all this quite carefully, starting at least a decade ago."  Without hesitation, Circe began to shout in Sumerian.  However, Gremory had by now seen all of her own part in this and, having no desire to be on the receiving end of the woman's incantation, did not hesitate either, lunging forward to lightly touch the ring finger of Circe's left hand.

For a moment, Circe stopped.  Not because of some fancy manipulation of Time (other, of course, than those passive traces which naturally sift through Gremory's mind whether she likes it or not, which she doesn't), but because she wasn't sure what just happened.

"Oh my God," says Circe.  "I almost...I almost tried to..."  She ran to Taob and fell to her knees, clutching one of the demon's hands in her own.  "Please forgive me, my beloved Taob, whose name dances in my heart like a diamond's sparkle."  Taob smiled, and there was nothing childlike in it.  Viola, having made little progress in tunneling to her own spine, was occupying herself by pulling tufts of her own hair out, still ranting.  Gremory, in turn, fidgeted with her crown, feeling dissatisfied with herself.

"Oh, I suppose, not-so-clever Circe.  But it's a good thing you're not as clever as you think, isn't it, that you never thought you'd have two demons here at once who can awaken love?  Your dreadful Terms might've caused such problems!  Maybe you should just do away with them, for safety's sake?"  Taob batted her eyelashes ridiculously.

"Oh, of course!  I hereby rescind all terms and limitations of your visit here, so mote it be."  Instantly, Taob's hand flashed out, lifting Circe by her neck without apparent effort, until her shoes dangled a foot above the floor.

"Such a careful little witch, so sure of herself, so many years untouched...should I give you your last touch now?" mused the demon idly.  Circe couldn't speak, not that it mattered as the question had not been directed at her, but nevertheless largely with her eyes and the occasional gurgle she tried to express that it would be purely bliss to expire in the crushing heat of her true love's embrace.

"Screaming and burning and screaming and burning and burning and no screams, no one, nobody, nothing, gone, gone..." commented the girl, to no one in particular.  Gremory tuned out Taob's theatrics and crouched down by Viola, frowning at her.  She realized she was still wearing the bangle with the God-forsaken Seal...well, no, technically the opposite of that...and stripped it off, tossing it carelessly aside.

"Viola?  Listen.  As a child, you made a mistake, which you seem...uh...well aware of now.  As mistakes go, it was, sure, a pretty bad one.  But all your suffering, that's a worse mistake, okay?  You can choose to let it go and still be yourself."

"No, Viola's bad, Viola is bad, can't be her, can't, can't..."  Gremory sighed.  She held Viola's head between her hands and forced her to make eye contact.

"Do you want to hide again?"

"Yes, hide, run, hide far away..."

"Then repeat what I say.  Don't think about it, just say it, okay?  It's not about you, it's just a game like at school, a rhyme...except I guess it might not rhyme."  Gremory thought maybe she could help the girl build something stronger than she had the first time, as a horrified child.  Something that could let her build strength until she was strong enough to cast aside the chains of guilt that destroyed so many humans in the merciless crucible that was Earth.  She wasn't even sure why she wanted to...there was probably no point.  But maybe it'd help wash the sour taste out of her mouth from Taob managing to tangle her in yet another vaudevillian drama.

"Okay?" whispered the girl.  Her face was already half-vacant, which made her look innocent, only enhancing the beauty Taob had no doubt foisted upon her.  But she was breaking fast...they'd better be quick about this or she'd lose herself entirely again.  Gremory glanced briefly over at Taob and Circe, now standing on her own again.  The former seemed quite busy stroking the latter's cheek tenderly, whispering sweet nothings into her ear, inaudible from this distance but which seemed aimed at coaxing her into her own iron maiden.

"I, Viola Juliet Bryce, by my own True Name..." intoned Gremory.

"I...Viola...Juliet Bryce...by my own True Name..." repeated Viola, in a halting sing-song voice.