MOOP!

Through late middle and early high school, I played Runequest DM'd by family friend Paul for me and Veronica and his nieces.

Paul D.? If so, I'm envisioning him GM'ing a bunch of high schoolers, and that sounds really entertaining.

Our witch takes cuttings, and there we get our second, unintentional NPC, the terrifying magic-eating science experiment.

Oooh, this sounds delightful. "Unintentional" in the sense that the players moved things in this direction and JoshZed found that he had to start running it as an NPC?