Occult Construction 101

By PaBurke

Summary: written for an old lj prompt, Bobby making the boxes that bound various supernatural artifacts. Of course, it's not as easy as using any old wood and glue.

Rating: teen

Spoilers: Season 3-ish, Wikipedia is awesome for such research

Word Count: 800

Salting and burning did not solve all problems.

Most, but not all.

Any Hunter that hadn't come across a problem that salting and burning didn't solve hadn't been around long enough. Eventually the idjit's dumb luck was going to fail and he'd either run to escape what whatever it was, die, or figger a solution.

Bobby preferred figuring it out. When a witch's talisman survived the salt-n-burning and did not stay inside a steel box packed with salt and welded shut, he gathered every possible book relating to the subject. First he did a box within a box, with Holy Water as an insulator in between the two. The talisman was packed with salt. It kept the talisman out of his way until the Holy Water leaked into the salt.

By the time the talisman appeared in his library on its own, Bobby had some ideas. The small oak chest didn't work at all. Then he realized that there were several different kinds of oaks. He knew that he needed to match the box made to restrain the talisman to the history of the one who made it. The witch was of Japanese ancestry.

So Bobby made a series of box-within-boxes as a temporary solution with a binding spell etched on the top and then learned Japanese.

The hard part was getting a hold of applicable books in Japanese. It was hard enough finding occult books written in English in an English speaking country, but to find an accurate book about the supernatural written in another language without flying to Japan? E-bay just didn't cut it.

As was too often the case, Bobby lucked out.

He saved the lives of some Japanese tourists that got lost on their way to visit Mount Rushmore. They happened to stay the night in a bed and breakfast that had been built by a racist cowboy at the turn of the century. Needless to say, the cowboy didn't care for the Asian borders and Bobby had just been there because there wasn't a cheap motel in the area. The Japanese family considered it honorable to help procure the books Bobby needed to put the talisman away once and for all. Every month or so, they would send Bobby a new book for his collection.

He read them all.

The ones that didn't directly apply to his current problem he read for the practice and just in case Japan started exporting more than freaky anime cartoons. To this day, the family was still sending a book every six months, though now they were written in Chinese and Korean. Bobby couldn't wait until he could impress Dean with his Chinese. He already knew French since Collin de Plancy had written Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, The Lesser Key of Solomon and Dictionnaire Infernal. Bobby was pretty sure that both of the Winchester boys knew French for the very same reason. It turned out that de Plancy's son, Victor, had written some of the Korean volumes describing demons. Victor's book was among the most useful in Bobby's library.

Finally, Bobby had a plan. And it was a good thing too, since that damn talisman showed up in his library, again.

He imported the plants and wood, mostly through the black market. He practiced wood burning the Japanese characters over and over. The bulk of the box was made from the Common Rue, grown in southwest Asia. He found out the hard way never to touch the wood without gloves. It blistered his skin. With a little research, he found out that part of the problem was the ambient temperature of the North Dakota summer. So he emptied out a refrigerator and stored the wood in there. Knowing that heat activated the natural oils, Bobby was sure to return the wood to the colder temperatures regularly. He had several boxes in various stages of completion. He finished the first one and had two more waiting in the fridge. If he ever ran across another talisman, he'd have somewhere to stash it immediately.

He slathered the talisman in the lotus seed paste and let it dry so that it was now a crumbly cement-like ball. Then he packed the wooden box in dried cherry blossoms. If it weren't for the fact that the thing was so doggone dangerous, a stranger would think that Bobby was packing it away to smell good for when some descendent stumbled across it.

He locked the box with a silver padlock, one that had a cimaruta painted on it. A cimarute, AKA a Witch's Charm, was an Italian charm against witchcraft. It was easy enough to get a local artist to paint it and if was a little bit of overkill, well, that damn witch's talisman was going no where.

Bobby considered that a job well done.

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