74 Downing Street. Apartment 8b.
In the Chicago suburbs, along the side of the only river for miles, a complex of houses.
A white house, a peach house, a mint house, a blue. The pattern repeated itself, and by the 3rd mint house on the left side of the road, we have reached our protagonist. She is our protagonist because she is the most interesting person on this street, as long as you don't count anyone to her left or right. She thought she was, however, and that is all that is needed for a good story.
So it begins. Her name was Elizabeth, and she had been born a week late, on a Tuesday. It was a Tuesday today, in fact. On this momentous occasion, Elizabeth lay in a hammock placed in her closet, prescribing herself medications for illnesses she had not been diagnosed with. She used a folding chair and her mother's second best butter knife to cut and crush and convert.
She was a pioneer, you see, she would change the world and she knew it.
Self-medicating was simply a sacrifice that had to be made for the general well-being of her community. Not the physical one, of course, Mrs. Tibbett next door never did like her homemade tea cozies, the had.
So if she scrambled when the door to her room opened, it was only because magicians never reveal their secrets, and pioneers never make it known that they have any.