The door opened and Sam stepped inside. He flipped a switch and the warm glow of incandescent lights flickered on. Sam lay his service pistol on the work bench along one wall before looking around. It wasn’t a small room, but it certainly wasn’t large. Such was life in New York City apartments. No rooms were truly large even if you were well-to-do enough to have several rooms.

The room had a workbench, a stool, several shelves with tubs to sort items on them, a bookshelf neatly organized for reference, and tools hanging on the wall above the workbench. A fluorescent light hung above the workbench and Sam pulled a cord and it flicked on.

”What a day.” Sam said to himself as he pulled a key out of his pocket. He could feel a whisper of power inside. His magic, tethering it to a child. One who was now saved from her mutation.

Sam opened a drawer in his bench and pulled out a small box. He lay the key inside it and then returned it. He would keep it safe. Were someone nefarious to get their hands on the key they could unlock the child’s curse.

That done, Sam pulled out a box of ammunition and slid the plastic that held all the rounds together out of the cardboard. He had a suspicion that he might need more ammunition in the future. Anti-mutation ammunition.

The trick was having ensorcelled bullets was ensuring that a casual observer couldn’t tell they were any different from a normal bullet. This meant the first step was removing the bullets from their cartridge.

Sam took a bullet puller off the wall and lay the first round inside it. He then began striking it into his workbench until the bullet was removed from the casing. He dumped the bullet into a small container, the powder into a hopper on a reloader, and the empty casing into another hopper.

Round after round, box after box, Sam removed bullets. Each one only took a few seconds, but he spent an hour pulling boxes worth of bullets. The ammunition coming courtesy of the NYPD. It was duty ammo.

It was then that Sam took a short break. Give his arm and shoulder some time to recover. The next step would be the time consuming part that would require precision from the tired muscles.

He turned on Spotify with his phone and the bluetooth surround system began playing a station of piano centric music. Billy Joel. Sara Bareilles, Vanessa Carlton, John Legend, Elton John, and others. Now that the banging was over, Sam could listen to it and relax as he worked.

One by one Sam grabbed the bullets and set them nose down in a holder. This way he could work all around the bearing surface below the cannelure and on the base, On each he slowly engraved designs which he duplicated from his logbook he had open on the bench. Each page of the book of graph paper had intricate diagrams drawn out detailing spells.

Sam painstakingly lay a single spell in bullet after bullet. As he worked he could feel a trickle of energy flowing through him into the bullet as he worked. At no point was it a large amount of energy but over the minutes that each bullet took it built until it was primed for its trigger.