Dolly Mixtures Musebox

Looking into the future was not a precise art, Ripper knew that, it often only showed a possibility of things to come and sometimes trying to avoid a specific vision was exactly how one drove oneself into it, but he would argue - were he to actually bother discussing this with anyone - that he didn't want to achieve or avoid any particular future, he only wanted to know if there was a possibility his attempts to avoid his supposed destiny would be successful.

The world, or more accurately his father, was pushing him heavily towards becoming a Watcher, it had been planned since before he could even remember, they'd pushed him into the best schools and encouraged him to study languages and history and mythology all with the express purpose of readying him for a life guiding a Slayer.

And then he'd rebelled.

And that was going great so far, it really was, but he suspected he was being humoured more than actually allowed to continue his rejection of everything his father stood for. As though he was being left alone to get this out of his system, only for his father to step in at a later date and drag him back to his future.

So he decided to try and figure that out for certain. Or slightly more certain, anyway.

The spell itself had been easy to set up, given his little gang's predilections he had almost everything he needed just lying around the flat (or close enough approximations), so when he had the place to himself it seemed the perfect opportunity.

He drew the sigils, lit the incense, spoke the incantation and... nothing.

The stream of smoke wafting up from the incense was supposed to coalesce into a kind of mirror and show him a vision of things to be, but instead it just seemed to be looping lazily around him, caught in whatever cross-current of air filtered into the room.

Then it began to thicken, and he suddenly realised that none of it had actually dissipated, it had just continued to curl around him and now it was curling even tighter and almost solidifying, pulling in tight around him and squeezing until -

he had just enough time to wonder if maybe he'd chosen the wrong substitutions when the room around him disappeared and there was a sudden release of pressure as the smoke almost exploded back into, well, smoke. Ordinary, non-corporeal smoke.

Only when it cleared, he was standing in a graveyard he didn't recognise on a warm summer's night, and not in his dingy flat in London.

Fighting against one's destiny was a tricky business; while Ripper knew he had a slightly easier time of it than, say, a slayer, since he didn't have any mystical forces compelling him to become a watcher, he also knew how difficult it could be to rebel against something that the whole world seemed to be pushing you into. He was doing pretty well so far, but he couldn't help but be curious about whether or not it would last.

Looking into the future was imprecise and not completely trustworthy, but it was also not guaranteed, so he still had a chance to avert it if he didn't like what he saw. Theoretically, the spell he had found ought to show him a glimpse of whatever future event he chose to look into. The spell had warned against trying to look into your own future, but Ripper had dismissed that as over-cautious nonsense.

It wasn't difficult to set up the spell, the hardest part had been finding a large enough bowl, it needed to be filled with water so he had something to watch the vision in, in the end he'd gone with a child's paddling pool. The cheerful dancing sea creatures on the sides didn't exactly scream occult mysticism but they would have to do.

Everything seemed to be going to plan until about halfway through the spell, he started to suspect he should have read a little more of the fine print right around the time the dizziness hit. His vision was going blurry and he was quite sure that wasn't meant to happen, but the spell had taken hold and he couldn't stop it now even if he wanted to.

He felt like he was pitching forward, the surface of the water rushing up to meet him, and then suddenly he was plunging through it, deeper than the plastic container had any right to be, bubbles streaming around him and obscuring his vision even further.

Then, just as quickly as it had started, it was over. His vision cleared, the dizziness dissipated and he was left, lying on his back in soaking wet clothes and staring up at an unfamiliar sky.

"What the bloody hell just happened?" he asked the world at large.