"This house is clean."
- The lady from Poltergeist
The Persephones were disposing the trash they had collected after another busy day of tending Dracula's castle. Their skull-shaped vacuum cleaners could sweep up virtually anything that polluted the castle and keep it trapped in its magically woven dust bag. One of these smaller bags was writhing with mice, so a Persephone happily bashed it with her broom until it turned red and stopped moving. Then she tossed it into the basement incinerator.
Two slightly larger bags were twitching side by side. A Persephone picked up one by its string and beat it repeatedly against the other. When the crunching sounds stopped, both bags went into the fire.
Further down the line, sticking out from most of the other daily inventory, was a particularly large bag. It was lying on its side with its cloth forming a subtle hourglass shape.
"Mmmph! Fmmph!" The bag made muffled noises as it squirmed.
Several of the Persephones approached it in curiosity. They untied the string at the top, peeled the sack away, and gasped at the rare rubbish they found inside.
It was a young sorceress dressed in white and blue with long brown hair. She looked like she had been vacuumed up in the middle of an intense battle, and she wasn't very happy about it.
The Persephones started to chatter excitedly to each other.
"Ooh, what's this? It looks like a human."
"I swept it up in the library. I hate when mortals trample all over our nice clean floor."
"Look at this spell book! It must be one of those magic users!"
"Should we burn it with the other trash?"
"Maybe we should skin it and hang it up with the curtains."
"That would be too wasteful. We could always use more handmaids."
One of the Persephones snapped her fingers.
"Tin Man! We have another load for you!"
A motorized Tin Man wheeled out from the castle shadows. The machine's cylindrical head opened to reveal its roomy interior, which the Persephones quickly began to fill with buckets of water.
While the maids were busy preparing their portable washing machine, the dirty laundry managed to climb to her feet.
"That's it," she growled toward the Persephones. "I've had enough of you creeps!"
She raised her right arm and began to conjure the strongest spell she had against the forces of the undead.
A Persephone pulled a handful of baking soda from her apron and tossed it at Charlotte, engulfing her in a mysterious powdery cloud. It dissolved in a few seconds and left her more visible than before.
Charlotte was naked. Not even her spell tome remained.
She was still posed with her arm raised up, but her powers had been muted. She also didn't feel the draft right away. After an awkward moment, she looked down at herself, yelped in surprise, and struggled to cover anything she could.
The Persephones quickly overwhelmed her. They acted as if they were in a hurry preparing for one of the Dark Lord's parties as they shuffled Charlotte across the room and loaded her into the Tin Man. When her feet touched the bottom of the machine's interior, the water reached up to her waist. Two of the Persephones retrieved some lumber and started a small fire just between the Tin Man's wheels.
Charlotte, surprisingly, wasn't boiled alive. The low-level magical forces that were already going to work on her made the water feel quite nice.
The housekeepers crowded around the tub in a circle. One of them opened a pink flask labeled Spirit Bleach and emptied it into the water, bringing it to a thick froth like a bubble bath. They used their combined efforts to shift Charlotte around in the water, cleaning and rinsing every nook and cranny of her body. One Persephone scrubbed her long brown hair. One held her hands up while another scrubbed her armpits. Another diligently scrubbed down her back.
"H-hey! Cut that out!" Charlotte said as she glanced over her shoulder.
Her objections didn't last for long.
The maids hummed to themselves while they continued their chore. The bubbles in Charlotte's bathwater popped and released tiny sparkles that dissipated in the air. The evil energy of the Persephones was scouring away her human soul and turning her body into an empty sterilized vessel. Soon they didn't have to direct her on how to turn her body or move her legs. She did that instinctively on her own.
"Ah, now you look much more proper," one of the Persephones said ecstatically as she looked into Charlotte's blank eyes. "Ready for the heavy duty cleaning?"
Charlotte replied by slowly nodding her head in a zombie-like manner.
The Persephones held her by the shoulders and guided her to sit all the way down inside the Tin Man. They closed the lid and opened a much smaller hatch near the top of the machine. Some of the Perspehones tended the fire underneath the Tin Man while others poured boxes of bizarre arcane detergents through the small hatch. Charlotte calmly bathed inside, trapped in the belly of the automaton.
"Immortality soap. Ground up bones of an arch lich. Salt from the River Styx. Blood of a kung-fu demon. Are we forgetting anything?" one of the Persephones asked as she inspected all of the boxes.
"I'm not sure. I think that's everything," one of the more absentminded Persephone answered.
"Wait, she still needs a Persephone soul!" another maid exclaimed as she raised her finger. The rest nodded in agreement as they remembered the most important part of any wash cycle.
A Persephone ran to one of the shelves. It was lined with identical glass orbs that each contained a glowing blue flame. She picked up one of the spectral laundry balls and dropped it into the Tin Man's hatch, firmly sealing it inside with Charlotte.
The Persephone soul reacted with the other materials almost instantly.
Streaks of otherworldly light spilled through the Tin Man's lid. The Persephones smiled in harmony as Charlotte's hollow, metallic screams echoed from within her tub.
Jonathan had come face to face with Dracula. The king of darkness sat with an empty wine glass in his fingers as a crew of hardworking Persephones kept his throne room in order.
Jonathan noticed something strange about the Persephone who refilled Dracula's glass. She was dressed in the same uniform and had the same red eyes as the other demonic handmaids, but her long brown hair made her different from most of the rest. Jonathan saw past the frilly apron and the ridiculous bonnet and recognized her in an instant.
"Charlotte…?" he asked in bewilderment.
"Nice to see you, Jonathan. I'm glad you could be our guest," Charlotte said in a strangely cheerful way. The rest of the Persephones stopped what they were doing and gazed toward him.
Remorsefully, Jonathan raised the Vampire Killer and approached the throne. He was humanity's only hope for salvation. He had no other choice but to consider his missing partner his enemy.
Charlotte looked back at him with an insulted glare.
"So you want to make trouble for Master Dracula? We can't have that," She said as she postured herself in a martial arts stance. Concentrating her body's natural magic powers, her hands burst into fiery auras and her legs were reinforced with icy armor.
"We'll just have to wring you out."