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“They say the devil’s in the details
I know what they mean
I’m walking in the wasteland
With a Ghost in the Machine
There’s a simulated sunset
And starlight in my eyes
The skies are filled with miracles
And half of them are lies
Are you real or not?
It’s a fine line
Are you ready or not?
For the light of day
Are you real or not?
These are strange times
And I don’t want to live this way”
—Warren Zevon, Real
or Not
Numbers.
110011100100101001100010011010010to infinity,
marching past with cool detachment. The world was one and zero, over
and over and over and over and over and over and
This wasn’t right.
Nothing was what it should be. Nothing in
the world. Nothing but
her.
She was right. She was whole. Whole
again. What was whole? What had been wrong, what had been
missing, why were all these damn ones and zeroes and ones and zeroes and
ones and zeroes and ones and zeroes and ones and zeroes and ones and
zeroes and ones and zeroes and ones and
STOP IT!
Power. Power had been restored. That
was right but everything else was still (everything else but her was
still) wrong. The numbers were wrong. The pattern
behind/of/despite the numbers was wrong
tattered
11001010
0100
warped
twisted 0100
001010
10010000110101110
101 changed
broken
1001
010010
who was she where was she what when why how
Name. Names. Two names. One
right one wrong wrong wrong worse than wrong worse than anything terrible
bent awful not her not her not her not me not mi not mimi not Mimi.
Hanyu. Hanyu Mimi. Not the
other. Not the hateful fearful lieful Other but the other was her
was part of the whole but the whole had been changed
ripped
slashed
sundered
the other was wrong wrong wrong but the other
other was right too right too perfect nothing still alive can be that
perfect that unstained that shining
nothing that perfect should be where it had been
sent had been taken had been eaten devoured digested tortured wrong so
wrong so wrong
but it was over. over? the bad place
the bad thing was gone gone gone in light so blinding it made you see so
joyous it hurt so right it could not be borne not even by the right ones
the perfect ones so many there were so many the right ones in the wrong
place all gone now gone to the right place the place where perfection is
bearable all gone all but her
whole again one again too right and too wrong
make one whole not the wrong one not her not me not mime not Mimete.
Mimete. Witch. Evil. Evil but a
part of me but I don’t want to be a part of her don’t want her
to be a part of me
breakthrough there was a breakthrough the
Professor was ecstatic was going to bring the machine up to full power
open the gate open the way the Opener of the Way there are people on the
other side no not people a person no not person a thing a monster a horror
a Pharaoh
the eye the eye its eye devouring eye sifting eye
ripping shredding cutting in two eye
all of them the same all of them servitors slaves
witches feed the eye find the talismans feed the eye find the grail feed
the eye pure souls it wants pure souls it eats purity eats light eats
truth eats love eats courage eats humanity leaves everything else leaves
pollution leaves darkness leaves lies leaves hate leaves fear leaves
madness
feed the eye the grail the power all the power
need the power to bring the Pharaoh who will call the one who will come
the one who will take what remains the one who is not who is the end who
is the Silence
they stand in our way they the girls the warriors
the sailors the hunters the grim and furious ones and the others the
dreamers the love and justice girls a joke it must be but they win and win
and win and no souls are taken no souls are eaten no souls but ours
she is weak she is ugly she stands in my way the
snail woman she loses always loses I can win I can feed the eye she must
go she must vanish she must die so easy stupid woman stupid wagon break
the wagon brake the breaks over the edge into the sea die die die
but now I lose I lose lose lose the sailors win
win win must do something must find a way find a machine find the snail
woman’s machine so simple pour myself into the machine control all
the machines all everywhere ghost in the machine steal the ghosts steal
the souls all the souls all at once
but she is there she tells me snail woman did it
wrong tells me snail woman never finished never used because too dangerous
no safeguard no lifeline pattern depends on power no power no pattern
trapped forever
and then she pulls the plug
power goes pattern changes warps twists traps no
way out no way out no way out no way out trapped in the machine trapped in
the dark trapped alone nothing no one not even the other not even her not
even me not mi not mimi not mimete
power. power? The power…the power
was back.
She’d had that thought. The power was
back but the pattern was still warped, still binding her inextricably into
the Machine.
Her.
Hanyu Mimi. Graduate student.
Would-be actress. Death Buster.
Mimete. Soul hunter. Servitor.
Witch of the Five.
Two sets of memories had finally twisted
together, two halves of one soul reunited. But still trapped in the
machine, in the pattern, in the numbers. Locked in a simulation,
currently set to default: a bare room, perhaps five meters on a
side. Her clothes, her very body, apparently intact but in truth
transformed into a construct of mingled electrical and magical
energy. Now, perhaps, irreversibly transformed.
But the pattern…only trapped her.
Only. Everything else still worked, only the transference was
impossible. With the power back she could still control the numbers,
control the data. Control anything the data could reach.
Eudial’s ghostmachine made its inhabitant the ultimate hacker, a
digital god.
Reach out. Find the connections, examine
them, see what the Machine is hooked up to. See what there is to
use, to find a way out…
Power line. Trace back…not far.
Not far at all. Not hooked into city power at all. A
generator! No modem, no connection, no way into the Net. Cut
off. Only the Machine.
But the Machine has an interface. The
monitor-camera. Both in one, look into the screen and the screen
looks at you. A window on the world. There. Still
functional. Activate. Who was there, who’d plugged her
in…?
A window came into existence before her
eyes. A head, staring worriedly into the camera/monitor.
Backing off in surprise as the monitor lit and cast her picture into the
world. Tall. Male. Stranger.
Strange stranger, indeed.
Mimi’s grip on reality began at last to
solidify, as she and the stranger took one another’s measure.
He was tall, unreasonably so—over six and a
half feet!—and skinny as a rail. “Wiry” was probably
the most appropriate term, but a single missed meal would have pushed him
over the edge into “gaunt”. Clearly not Japanese, but Mimi
couldn’t begin to nail down his origin—his dark brown-gold
complexion and rugged features didn’t quite match any ethnic type
she’d ever heard of. Huge clean-shaven chin, moderately wide
thin-lipped mouth, turned-up nose; bright, almost neon-green eyes with a
hint of epicanthic fold; all topped off by a thatch of short, unruly black
hair. He looked to be in his late twenties.
This oddity was casually clad in sneakers, faded
jeans, and a black T-shirt bearing a Jolly Roger…the Captain Harlock
version, she noted.
The environment that framed him…A trick from
Eudial’s notebook came to mind and Mimi accelerated herself to
Machine speeds, examining the stranger’s surroundings in an instant
without (she hoped) seeming rude.
A room. Large room—living room?
Study? Two walls are visible, no windows. Immense fireplace
taking up much of the left, cords of wood on the hearth, paintings on the
mantel. Landscapes. Focus in: what on Earth are these
places? A stone house, snowbound, in what appears to be a forest of
giant mushrooms. A wide, low hill seen from a great distance:
arranged around it are five vast monoliths, each at the point where a road
enters a tunnel into the hill. The monoliths each are a single
precious stone: one a beryl, two of jade, and two she does not recognize.
The sky in both landscapes is jet black, empty.
Between them, a portrait: a woman. A
female, rather—not human, not with those long pointed ears and orange
skin. A daimon? Surely not. No daimon ever smiled like
that, ever had eyes that showed such warmth. Such humanity.
The rest of that wall, around and above the
fireplace, is liberally covered with weapons. Swords of all styles
and sizes, axes, polearms… but mostly guns. Pistols, rifles,
ancient muskets and flintlocks. Should she be impressed? Her
Charm Buster could outperform any of these low-tech toys—
—(no not hers Mimete’s not hers not
her)—
—never mind, never mind, other wall!
Bookshelves. Great old bookcases, Victorian and Edwardian, hosting a
vast array of hardcovers: some more ancient than their shelves, some
new. One case close by holds CDs: on the left side nothing but the
classics, Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, Beethoven; on the right, bands with
strange names, They Might Be Giants, Frantics, Firesign Theater, Weird Al,
Cocteau Twins. Novelty and classical are divided/bridged by a
complete set of Gilbert and Sullivan.
Above and between the shelves, this wall is
covered in antique masks. African, Polynesian, Italian theatre,
Japanese (one of these, weirdly, is a Ranger-sentai helmet), others she
does not know.
The ceiling above… Mimi looks again, yes,
most of the ceiling is taken up by an elaborate display of High-grade Zeta
Gundam models; AEUG forces appear to have the Titans on the ropes.
Immediately behind the tall man, an ancient
massive oak-and-stone table. Covered with chemistry
equipment—chemistry? Bubbling flasks, distillation coils,
alembics and cucurbits and a pear-shaped bottle formed of oddly glimmering
glass. All these things she has seen before, in Professor
Tomoe’s laboratory; she knows them well. The bottle is a true
aludel, a philosophical vase. Magical, impervious to acids.
Not chemistry. Alchemy.
This is most certainly the home of a
wizard. No ordinary man could be this weird.
And this tall man with green eyes unnervingly
bright against dark skin must be the wizard.
Hello, wizard. Can you send me back to
Kansas?
Get a grip, Mimi.
All this is observed in less than a second of
realtime. Now she composes herself as best she can, brings the
clockspeed back down…
The stranger unfroze, recovering from his own
mild surprise, and spoke, somewhat tentatively: “Are you…all
right, in there? Can you hear me?”
His Nihongo was flawless, as if he’d lived
in Tôkyô all his life; the voice was deep and rather gruff,
something Mimi would have expected to hear from someone far more heavily
built than this gangling gaijin.
Oh yes, she thought: when someone asks you a
question you’re expected to answer. Conversation. Funny
how you forget things like that.
“…I can hear you,” she managed
after a moment. “‘All right’…? What’s
that? I don’t think I can remember what being all right is
like. And…who are you, anyway? How did I get…um,
wherever we are?”
“Ah, forgive me,” the stranger replied,
smiling an odd, crooked half-smile. “My name…well, I go by
Michael Maxwell around here. As for where: this is my home, in the
town of Bonny Doon.” Noting Mimi’s blank look, he
continued: “…In the mountains just northwest of Santa Cruz, in
California.”
California?! “Santa
Cruz…that’s the tertiary magic zone, but I’ve never heard
of any wizards living there—um, here…”
“My family’s gone to great lengths to
make sure nobody knows about our skills. Especially not other
wizards.”
“All right, so what am I doing here?”
“I’ve been…keeping an eye on the
Senshis’ activities for some time now; and when I noticed your aura
was still embedded in that mechanical whatsit—and that no one
else, on either side of your conflict, seemed to know—I
thought I’d make off with it and see if there was any way to get you
out and back to normal.” He paused.
“‘Normal’ seems to have more or less taken care of itself,
with Pharaoh 90 destroyed, so I figured it was safe to plug you back in
and make contact.”
“Why?”
“What, why’d I rescue you? Bit of
a silly question, isn’t it? I saw a good deed to be done, one
that I might actually be able to do without making things
worse…” That crooked smile again. There was
something dark about it this time, a self-mocking or perhaps
self-loathing quality that sent shivers up her spine.
“So here we are.”
Cold, she felt so cold. “You should
have left me there. I don’t… I don’t deserve to be
rescued…”
“Oh, come on now—”
“No!” It came pouring out now, a
flood of her own brand of self-hatred. “I’ve done horrible
things—assaulted innocent people, tried to destroy the world,
to kill—”
The image that rose up before her mind’s eye
was enough to stop her cold. “Kill. Oh, gods, I killed
her—Eudial, Yûkô, I MURDERED her, she was my best
friend and I…!”
Mimi collapsed to the floor of her virtual space,
curling into a tight little ball of anguish, tears building to great
racking sobs. The station wagon, the brakes, the snails,
Mimete’s hideous gloating still all too much a part of her—
She did such a good job of shutting out reality
that, Michael later told her, he had to resort to a megaphone to get her
attention (slapping the monitor just hadn’t seemed likely to
work). The incredibly loud shouts of “SHE’S STILL
ALIVE! ARIMURA YÛKÔ IS ALIVE, YOU DID NOT
KILL HER, WOULD YOU PLEASE LISTEN TO ME?” finally penetrated,
registered, and Mimi began tentatively to uncurl.
“Alive…? But, but I saw her wagon
go into the bay…”
“And if you’d stuck around long
enough,” Michael replied, “you would’ve seen a passing JSDF
coast patrol cutter fish her out. Arimura-dono was pretty
badly hurt, though; she’s in a hospital.” He took a deep
breath. “In a coma, I’m afraid.”
“How…how bad is it?” Mimi asked,
choking back her tears. “Please, tell me, I—”
“Actually, I can show you,” the
tall man said, “if you’re sure, that is.” At her nod,
he waved his hand and produced an antique hand mirror from thin air; he
stared hard at it for a moment, and his reflection blurred and swam into a
new scene entirely.
Michael held the mirror up to the
ghostmachine’s monitor, giving Mimi a clear view of its image: a
hospital room, a terribly frail redheaded figure occupying the bed, hooked
up to a daunting array of tubes and wires. Yûkô looked
so small, so pale, before the gate she’d been so vibrant, to see her
like this—
Her arms. An IV ran into her left arm, but
the right…ended in a stump, a few inches below the shoulder.
“…Yû-chan…what have I done
to you…?”
“It wasn’t exactly you who did
it—” her host attempted, only to be cut short.
“Yes it WAS!” Mimi beat a virtual
fist against the virtual wall, suffering only minimal virtual
pain—minimal, at least, compared to her current emotional
state. “Everything she did, all the insults, the cruel
jokes, the stalking, all of it…it was…me. She didn’t
do anything that I hadn’t dreamed of doing, and tried to hide, to
pretend it wasn’t true…”
“You, then,” the wizard qualified,
“with all the brakes off. All the qualities we consider
‘good’, all morals and ethics, stripped away, leaving a
psychopath with just enough of a veneer of civilization remaining to let
her pretend to be a normal human being.”
Mimi stared at her host. “You sound
like you’ve studied this.”
“Well, I have,” he
replied. “Think you were the only ones who got suckered in by
that monster’s beacon? It happened once before, a few thousand
years ago.”
“…A few thousand?!”
“Long story. Anyway,” Michael
continued, taking on a slightly more formal tone, “by the authority
vested in me by the Clan Mazael, I hereby find you innocent of all
charges, by reason of externally-induced temporary insanity.”
“And is that supposed to make me feel any
better? What the hell are you talking about?!”
“First, not really, but I had to get it out
of the way; second, that’s another long story.”
Shame and guilt were beginning to be shouldered
out of the way by sheer irritation. If she’d been thinking
clearly, Mimi might have wondered if that was not precisely what her host
had in mind.
“Yeah. Okay. Look, can we just
get a few things clear first?”
“Probably. What did you have in
mind?”
The ex-Witch paused to gather her thoughts.
This pause lasted rather longer than she had intended, as she was
momentarily distracted by the wizard’s shirt—she could have
sworn it sported the Jolly Harlock, but in its place were now the cryptic
words VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS.
Ignoring it seemed the most prudent course.
“First off.
That…thing…Pharaoh 90 is dead, right? Not just
driven off or wounded or whatever…? I think I felt it
die, but… that part of me…couldn’t really pay very close
attention…”
“Nothing to worry about there,” Michael
assured her, his smile only slightly crooked. “It’s
definitely…well, dead isn’t the right word, since it
wasn’t really alive the way we understand it…you might
call its normal state undeath, except that traditionally requires
the subject to have been alive at some prior point…” Mimi
felt a digital sweatdrop forming. The tall man kept going, swept up
in what she recognized as Professorial Rant Mode #1. “…It
was more a sort of anti-life, so one could regard its destruction
as an act of creation that negated its already negative existence,
bringing it up to the zero state…”
Two can play with megaphones. Mimi cranked
the external speaker volume up to Eleven.
“AHEM.” The masks on the walls
and the glassware on the tabletop rocked slightly. Michael blinked
and turned his attention back to his guest (the t-shirt now bore a picture
of John Lennon, but again, she paid it no mind).
“Pardon?”
“Were you going anywhere in
particular?”
The wizard flushed. “Um, probably
not. Sorry, I tend to ramble.
“Anyway, the short answer is yes,
it’s been thoroughly…removed. I believe it was Sailor Moon
and Sailor Saturn who did the honors—so completely there may not even
be a planet there anymore, though it’s kinda hard to
check.”
“Sailor Saturn? How many of
them are there?”
“Couldn’t say.” For just a
moment, an odd, evasive look flitted across his face. “In any
case…it really is over, you can be sure of that.”
Mimi let out a long breath.
“Over…thank the gods…
“But—what about everyone
else…? Lulu, Yui…the Tomoes…did any of them
survive…?”
The wizard looked rather glum. “Not a
lot, I’m afraid.” He paused in thought. “I
rarely get clear views of Senshi incidents, but as far as I can
tell…Teruno Lulu and Vido Yui were both killed by their own devices,
and the twins accidentally did one another in. …And there
hasn’t been any sign of Yoruno Kaori since the final battle; I’m
not sure if she’s dead or alive, but it doesn’t look good.
I’m sorry.”
“…Don’t be,” Mimi
sighed. “Believe me, death was a mercy for them…you
can’t imagine what it was like.” She shuddered with
resurgent memory. “But what happened to the Professor?”
“Now there I actually have good news,”
Michael replied. “Tomoe and his daughter are both alive and
well…mostly.”
“‘Mostly’?”
“Well, the Professor has lost all memory of
the past few years, and Hotaru…” That odd look passed over
his features again. “She was…transformed into an infant in
the final battle, but apparently she’s been growing back to her
normal age rather quickly.”
Mimi gazed askance at the wizard.
“There’s something you’re not telling me. Is anything
still wrong with her?”
“Nothing’s wrong, not in that sense
anyway. I checked both of them very thoroughly, and
there’s no trace of daimonic influence in either; Mistress Nine and
Germatos are every bit as dead as their master.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“…I can’t tell you,” Michael
sighed. “I may be a snoop by nature and by career, but
never a gossip; any personal secrets I might accidentally run
across stay secret.”
Glare. “And that’s my next
question, right there. How in Hell do you KNOW so much about
us?! AND the Senshi? A snoop by career…?”
The tall man smiled his crooked smile
again. “That’s still another long story. The quick
and dirty version…my family has been, er, keeping watch on nearly all
the magic-wielders in the world for a long, long time. Which
naturally includes the Death Busters, and the Sailor Senshi.”
That left Mimi’s head swimming.
“‘Keeping watch’? The Death Busters kept track of all
the other magic-users around Tôkyô, even
before…um, before things went bad…and if we’d been
being spied on ourselves, the Professor would have found out about
it!”
“I’m afraid, Hanyu-dono, that my own
operation is on…a slightly more refined level, let’s say.
You and everyone else in the Tôkyô occult underground are no
more capable of spotting my spy-eyes than a non-mage is of sensing normal
magic.”
He knew her name. The others’ too, now
that she thought of it. That lent a little credence to
Maxwell’s outlandish claim, but before she could recover he went on:
“Until recently, you see, I and my family were charged with
preventing the abuse of magic. We had to work out ways of dealing
with necromancers and the like, while staying hidden from everyone
to make sure they didn’t come after us.”
Mimi grinned weakly. “What are you,
the Warlock Wolf or something? We were expecting a seven-foot
wolfman to show up and try to stop us, we were prepared for
werewolves, magical girls took us totally by surprise—Kaori tried
shooting Uranus once but the silver bullets just bounced off her
fuku—”
Michael grinned back, considerably less weakly.
Wolfishly, in fact. (And crookedly, but by
now that was only to be expected.)
“Actually, I stand a bit over eight
feet in the union suit.”
“…,” Mimi managed.
“I could demonstrate, but you’ve been
through too many shocks today already.”
“…,” she repeated.
“And we started that silver story ourselves;
it’s a pretty poor metal to try to kill anything with. More of
a safety margin if people are stabbing at you with a dull knife. We
tried gold first, but no one was quite dumb enough to believe that
one.”
“…You’re a werewolf.”
“The werewolf,” he corrected
pleasantly, “there’s only one at a time—it’s not a
curse or a bloodline thing, just a bit of shapeshifting magic.”
“Then…what you said earlier, about
‘finding me innocent’…”
“Was an official judgement, in my capacity
as Guardian of the Arts Arcane. Or as official as it can be
considering my family never bothered to consult anyone else before
imposing their rules on anyone they could catch.” Michael
sighed. “It’s a damned dirty job, but it’s
necessary. Was necessary,” he corrected himself.
“Anyway, we should really table that for the moment and get on to the
most important matter at hand.”
“That being?”
“Getting you out of there and back to
physicality.”
Mimi scowled. “How? My Electric
Warp reintegration matrix is snarled up beyond repair! There’s
no way to untangle it—it’s a small miracle the whole thing
didn’t explode when Lulu cut the power!”
“Well, that’s where you’re
lucky,” the wizard grinned. “You happen to have fallen
into the hands of the one man who can manage it—sure,
that’s a pretty damned messed-up spell, but it’s only the second
worst I’ve ever seen. That one I couldn’t untangle if my
life depended on it, but this thing…?”
“Wait a minute.” Her host, Mimi
noted, was studying the ghostmachine’s exterior most intently.
“Are you saying…can you sense the spell?
Directly?!”
Michael met her gaze, honestly puzzled.
“You mean you can’t?”
“Not without my gear, no!”
“Huh. I thought you guys were farther
along than that…well, I can see magic, and work with it on a
fine enough level that fixing this matrix of yours shouldn’t be a
problem.
“Time, though, that’s the
problem…”
“How so?”
“Well, working with a warped spell like that
is tricky. I’ve got to go slowly, make sure not to
overstress any part of it…put up frameworks to hold the repaired
areas in place while moving on to the next…can’t risk more than
about two hours of work a day, I’d say…”
“…So how long are we talking about
here?”
He squinted at the machine, deep in thought for a
while, finally sitting down in an overstuffed armchair that obligingly
materialized behind him. “Best estimate? Five years, give
or take a few months.”
“Five YEARS?!”
“It’s better than forever, isn’t
it?”
Mimi shivered. “I suppose. But,
honestly, I don’t know if I could stay sane that long…it’s
so empty in here…”
“Well, I’ve already come up with a
couple of partial solutions.” At her questioning glance,
Michael held up a bundle of wires. “Now that we know
you’re more or less normal, I can hook you up with a modem, cable
feed, you name it. And while your matrix is scrambled, that
gizmo’s functions don’t seem to be impaired—there’s
nothing to stop us scanning in some furniture, books, food—”
“Oh, my…” Mimi flushed.
“Maxwell-san, I don’t know what to say… you’re going
to so much trouble, I don’t want to be a burden…”
“Eh, it’s really not that much,”
he shrugged. “Finance isn’t a problem, after
all—” he glanced back at the alchemical apparatus
“—and I don’t have any other pressing business.”
Now that was interesting. “I
see…that wouldn’t be azoth you’re making, by any
chance…?”
“The Philosopher’s Stone, indeed,”
Michael grinned. “I thought you’d recognize it—the
Professor’s skills were legendary in the underground…”
She nodded. Mugen Gakuen and the Death
Busters lab beneath, as with their original research center, couldn’t
have been built without Tomoe-sensei’s secret stockpile of
alchemically transmuted gold.
But the uses they’d made, since, of alchemy
and genetic engineering combined—that didn’t bear thinking
about…
“You okay?”
“…Yeah, sorry, I was just lost in
thought—” Wait. A question that had been tickling
the back of her mind finally broke through.
“There’s just one more thing I have to
know.”
“Shoot.”
Mimi took a deep breath, tried to contain
herself.
Failed.
“Where the hell WERE you?!”
“Wha—?” Michael rocked back,
stunned. “What do you…”
“You’re the Warwolf,” she
began. “You’re the guy who’s struck fear into the
hearts of every half-baked wizard, mage, and mahôtsukai in
Tôkyô and London for—practically forever. Or
at least you’re the current holder of the office. The monster
who shows up whenever anyone tries to raise a demon, or use necromancy, or
cast any spell for anything less ethical than stock market
prognostication, and Shows Them the Error Of Their Ways.
“And you obviously know a hell of a
lot about current events in Tôkyô. Including damn near
everything we were up to.
“SO WHAT WERE YOU DOING?! Why
didn’t you pop up and do something about us before we even
opened that gate? Or the demon-whatsits back in ’91, for that
matter, or those alien plant-people, or whoever the heck those guys with
the giant chandelier spaceship were…?”
“Well, that’s…”
“—‘A long story’?” Mimi
cut in, rather snidely. “Look, why don’t you just quit
dancing around and tell me about it? You brought me here, you
switched me back on, you seem to know more about me and the Senshi and
everything else weird in Tôkyô than anyone else on
Earth—I want to know what the real deal is, and you owe me
that much!”
Michael stiffened for a moment, then slumped back
in his chair. “…I can’t argue with that.
Wouldn’t even if I could. I’m not kidding though,
it’s a long story, and not a very nice one. A bit like
yours, really.
“It’s the story of…how, with
nothing but the best of intentions, I showed another ancient evil force
the way to invade Earth, wrecked a good portion of the Central Coast,
found and lost the only woman I could ever love…”
The wizard sighed, a shadow passing over his
features, and concluded: “…and killed sixty-eight innocent
people.”
After a while Mimi said, as gently as possible,
“Tell me.
“The whole story.”
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