Once upon a time, in a not-so-magical land known as Brooklyn, back in the ye olde 1940s, Lewanda Livingston was born, a quiet baby much sweeter than the entirety of her family even if they had been doused in heaps of sugar and dollops of cream.
As she grew up in her family of miscreants and sour-faced aunts and uncles manipulating their way through life, and with parents who ran a store of questionable morality selling exotic weapons to the denizens of New York with an equally questionable licence to do so, Lewanda didn't seem to notice the mean words and harsh surroundings she found herself in. She was born an optimist and unbreakable sweetheart. While others constantly wondered, aloud, if Lewanda had been adopted (and while that was probably the case since her parents, Claudette and Laramie — they were from France, you see, and didn't entirely understand American naming conventions when they named Lewanda — had difficulty conceiving), she never once speculated. Family was family.
For as much as Lewanda didn't fit in, one would expect her to have a hard time getting along with her family — and what a large family it was — but to every snap in her direction, she had a naively kind comeback. And so her family quickly learned — from parents to cousins to aunts and uncles thrice removed — that any order sent Lewanda's way would be taken with a passive smile and nod and politely acquiesced.
However, Lewanda shaped up to be a rather eccentric little individual — quiet, shy, and sheltered didn't match with her creative fashion sense, and her interests were weirder than the typical student. Thus, making friends was never easy; through her youngest years straight through high school, there was only one who stuck by her, only because she, too, was eccentric, albeit in different ways.
Lewanda grew up to become a moderately successful childrens' storybook writer and illustrator, hiding behind the colourful images her stories told as a way to paint the world in the way she saw it, as a happy place where every story has a happy ending.
When Lewanda was in her thirties, something happened that would shatter most optimists' souls.
Not only were her parents killed in an unexpected raid on their business (Long Living Exotic Weaponry), when Lewanda (also unexpected the heiress to their fortune; apparently, the weapons business was more lucrative than she expected) cleaned up the store, she learned a rather interesting secret about her mother and father and family in general: namely, why the weapons business was more lucrative than she expected. She was living in a family of magic users.
Long Living Exotic Weaponry, as it turned out, sold enchanted items —m agic daggers, mystic crossbows, cursed nunchaku, you name it, they imported and sold it. The sales records and crazy things she found in the back room of the family business explained it all. When she brought up this revelation to her extended family, they explained: why, yes, we're all witches and warlocks, hadn't you noticed? In fact, Lewanda hadn't noticed. She was too busy looking on the bright side while taking their orders with her head cast down to notice.
In light of this knowledge, and in mourning from the loss of her parents but now seeing them in a new light, Lewanda felt the first pang of less-than-optimistic feelings toward her family. It happened when read her mother and father's wills — not the part where their fortune was to be hers, but the part where certain items from Long Living Exotic Weaponry were to be given to select members of her family. The manipulating aunt. The hot-tempered uncle. The cousin on bail for extortion. This wouldn't have been an issue, had it not been for the exact nature of the items to be given; and had Lewanda been as naively trusting as she had been days before. Weapons deadlier than a sharp blade, they were too powerful to be placed in the grabby hands of people who might use them for more than an elaborate wall decoration. In light of knowing about magic and the remarkable, or horrible, things it could do, she done something that no one would ever expect her to do.
Lack of expectation doubles excellently for lack of suspicion.
The devastating fire at Long Living Exotic Weaponry destroyed thousands of dollars of bizarre merchandise from every corner of the world (and perhaps several dimensions). And as Lewanda Livingston stood watching the family business, which she had even worked at as a young child and had many wounds to show for it, she wondered where she would hide the deadly magical weapons bestowed upon her by her deadly magical parents, she wondered where to hide the remainder of the cache from her cousins and aunts and uncles thrice removed.
Weapons of that nature are not so easily vanquished in a fire, though she had been sure to use extra ammunition to make for a showy explosion for the News at Nine. Three in particular were flame-retardant.
Her family, as far as she knew, never suspected the sweet, unassuming Lewanda to hide the weapons in the very basement of the store that went down in flames — after, of course, refurbishing it and using insurance money and her new fortune. They searched regardless, and Lewanda nervously let them; but she could rest well, knowing her family didn't look in the fishtank, or the taxidermy pony, or the mannequin that had been used on display and salvaged from the fire, scorched but still holding its pose.
The store, no longer Long Living Exotic Weaponry, sat sparkling and new without a purpose while Lewanda tried to find her own purpose. Now living alone, and quite alone altogether, without her parents around, and after her sole best friend mysteriously disappeared, inspiration dwindled. She stopped writing childrens' books and cloistered herself off trying to figure out her purpose.
It came to her in pouring over the various magical and mystical texts she got her hands on; what began as the hesitant curiosity to learn about what her family was neck-deep in became a full-fledged fascination. Magic could not only be used for dark purposes, no, it could be wonderful! Weeks turned into months, months into a year, and all the while, Lewanda locked herself away in the big, empty living-space above the empty non-weapons store, learning, flourishing in the magic that, after all, came naturally. Of course, to the outside world, she was a sheltered eccentric. When her family came to realize that Lewanda was coming into her own, they made numerous attempts to lure her into performing magic with them — for them — aiding their trickery and schemes, but this was one thing Lewanda was determined to say "no" to.
To gain some distance from the family, whom she loved, but knew to be a dangerous influence, Lewanda packed up everything and journeyed to the most sparkling faraway place she could think of: Los Angeles, California. Where stories are made and painted glamorous.
Lewanda, sticking to what she knew, came to live in a place not unlike the defunct weapons store; with a business on the bottom, and a place to live above, she settled down and set to work on her newest idea. It was an invention that would give her purpose, as far as she was concerned, give the world the balance she found to be slightly more lacking than she originally had perceived before the death of her parents.
The invention was an artifact of her own creation, design, and spellwork which she named the Karmic Calculator, and because she deemed the improper use of the letter K in place of a C was poor karma, it would remain untouched by the cutesy labelling popular with advertisers. Its use was this: to determine the so-called "karma" level of the intended, based on the impressions left on their soul by past deeds, good and bad. Thus tallied, Lewanda would then select an appropriate plan of action for the level of the person whose karma had been tested, in the form of a curse.
And so when the business beneath her, a store specializing in the sale of bones and assorted animal and mineral oddities by the name of The Humerous Humerus went bankrupt, she took it over, and expanded the backroom as a place of magical business. Her reputation slowly grew.
Never a vindictive or even judgmental soul by any stretch of the imagination, Lewanda left it up to the Karmic Calculator to determine the fate of those with black marks on their soul, but never gave out a curse that would cause direct fatal harm. Over the years, her finesse was finessed. Crafting curses and hexes (the latter being temporary) ahead of time with great care, corresponding to the level of karmic doom, she learned how to squeeze them into ingestible potions and various magical concoctions, which she would then give to customers to coat such things as jewellery or hairbrushes, in a new toothpaste, a little something extra to drop in wine, or in the form of a blueberry muffin mysteriously appearing from the back of her unusual shop.
Enlivened by the success her new endeavour brought her, Lewanda once again took up writing and illustrating, using her knowledge of magic, and her newfound experience as the owner of a bone shop, as a basis for new stories; not only that, she branched out and began attending the publicity events, reading for childrens' storytime, that she had before rejected in shyness. Using magic tricks disguised as non-magical magic tricks as an icebreaker, she felt more confident and delighted on hearing the childrens' laughter.
In the year 2001, now in her fifties, the eccentric Lewanda Livingston, non-literal spinster and good-natured witch with a well-guarded secret and always a kind word, can be found selling cursed potions, blessed metacarpals and colourful childrens' stories at The Humorous Humerus.
