The Evil Midnight Lurker what Lurks at Midnight in association with The Sailor Moon Expanded Project presents: Sailor Moon Expanded Gaiden AN AMERICAN WIZARD IN QUEEN BERYL'S COURT by W. Samuel Ashley Chapter 1: If I Knew Then... "...And let him be cast forth, into the exterior darkness." --Matthew 22:13 Santa Cruz, California October 17, 1989 Some days you just shouldn't bother getting up in the morning. Unfortunately, this never becomes clear until _very_ late in the day. Take this particular day. If I'd known I was headed straight for the most incredible SNAFU of my career, I'd have pulled the covers over my head, switched off the damn alarm clock, and hibernated for a few weeks. Well, that isn't really the case...I'd probably have rechecked my calculations, convinced myself nothing could possibly go wrong, and forged ahead into oblivion like the fool I was. I woke as usual to the dulcet tones of the Frantics' "Boot to the Head"-- nothing better to get you going on those cold October mornings. Not that I needed the stimulus on that particular day; I'd been waiting for it almost a year. Like a kid on Christmas to the tenth power: juiced up on excitement and anticipation until I could barely sleep the night before. Only I wasn't the one getting the presents...I'd be _giving_ them out, to everyone on Earth. Today would be the fulfillment of over twelve thousand years of struggle and pain, twelve millennia of holding on to a distant dream. Today was the day I'd bring the magic back. Some folks boast that they can trace their ancestry back for centuries. Well, whether your family came over on the Mayflower or was waiting at Plymouth with a concession stand, I've got news for you bluebloods: you're pikers. Latecomers on a cosmic level. My family line goes back four hundred and ninety-two generations, back before anyone else picked up the pieces and started recording history again. Yes, _again_... Breakfast, as usual, was a brutally plain bowl of cereal. It must look damn odd to outsiders, this huge fancy kitchen stocked entirely with convenience foods, but I had long since learned to accept my nature: I've got an advanced case of Kotobuki's Disorder, a very rare and currently untreatable mental illness that's seldom encountered outside Japan. It manifests itself as an utter inability to cook anything even remotely edible, with one odd exception: sufferers can make a decent curry. Don't ask me why. Trouble is, I HATE curry. The last time I dared to _eat_ a dish of my own creation I couldn't cast spells for a week. The extreme secrecy in which my life was shrouded made hiring a cook unfeasible...and made it _damn_ hard to meet girls...so if I wanted to eat it was this or dine out all the time. Well, by this time next month secrecy would no longer be a problem. Hell, my face would be on the front page of every newspaper on Earth: Michael Robert Maxwell, The Man who Saved the World! I'd be Time's Man of the Year, the surefire winner of the Nobel Prize, and-- perhaps most important of all--People's Most Eligible Bachelor! Of course, fundamentalists everywhere would be demanding that I be burned at the stake. There's a little cloud in every silver lining... A long time ago, in a galaxy...wait, strike everything after that comma. Once upon a time, there was a shining civilization built on the power of magic: an age of wonder and beauty, when tall ships rode the winds between the worlds; a...you get the idea by now. Unfortunately, ages of wonder and beauty have a distressing tendency to end in spasms of apocalyptic destruction. Odd that. The Silver Millennium met its end around twelve thousand years ago-- okay, twelve thousand, three hundred and forty-three last February--at the hands of a seriously demented sorceress named Beryl, queen of Arcadia. Her release into the physical plane of Metallia, the Mother of Demons and incarnation of all human evil, somehow warped whatever magical effects kept the rest of the Solar System inhabitable and wiped out all life therein; that and Metallia's subsequent banishment turned Earth's continental drift up to "frappe'," severely rearranging the landscape in a matter of years and causing no end of headaches for contemporary geologists. Somewhere along the way, Earth's mana wells--sources of all magical energy for this planet--were capped off. That pretty much sealed the fate of the first era of civilization, and even the memory of the Silver Millennium was distorted beyond recognition if not lost outright... ...with one slight exception. I made sure for the N^nth time that everything I might need was stored in pocketspace. Not hard to do as twenty-eight generations before me had dumped anything they didn't have room for, or which was too openly magical to leave lying around, into the extradimensional warehouse. The control ring I wore, one of three, came complete with a mental inventory program--sort of a precursor to the database. Yes, it was all there, same as last night and the day before that and every time I'd checked for the past week. Mental note: don't drink coffee today, Mike, you're wired enough as is. Among the last valiant defenders of Earth there was a man by the name of Jerran Mazael: a high wizard of the Golden Kingdom of Mu, sworn to defend the Emerald Throne and so forth and so on. Well, _high_ may be an exaggeration; Earth was apparently well behind the rest of the System magic-wise... but he was certainly no slouch. Jerran, being a perceptive kinda guy, realized the probable consequences of Metallia's freedom early on and took precautions: he sent his wife and daughter into hiding in the most geographically stable location he could find--somewhere in what's now the Canadian Shield, I believe --and gave them a concise history of the Silver Millennium, with instructions to keep it safe and the memory of Mu alive until things had settled down enough to start rebuilding, however many generations that might take. In this, Jerran's foresight very nearly failed him. All preparations made, I had just one stop before heading out: the family shrine. Built in the closest approximation of ancient Muvian architecture we could manage, the shrine hall took up most of the basement. A bit untraditional but it'd be a lot harder to hide above ground level, and a room half the size of a football field the walls of which were hung with four hundred and ninety-two portraits and family groups--many of which were done on deerskins so old as to invite carbon-dating--would be considered odd even for this city. Then there was the flag on the far wall, the ancient emblem of the Terran Confederation: on a green field, a golden sunburst with twenty-three points--one blackened and broken. One point for each of the old Kingdoms of Earth, minus one for fallen Arcadia. I paid silent respects to 492-Times-Great-Grandfather Jerran, and walked down the rows of distant ancestors until I reached familiar faces. Nicholas and Sarah Maxwell: my parents, dead these three years. Lighting an incense- cone, I knelt and addressed their portrait. "Mom, Dad...this is the day. I cracked the last of the code months ago, but the planetary influences weren't right 'til now... waiting all that time nearly drove me nuts, but I managed. "Today our oaths are going to be fulfilled, the dreams of twelve thousand years realized. The seal's going down, and it's just the beginning; with full power to work with, and magic on the _outside_ of the Outer Seals, I won't need to wait another year. Uluru's next on my list; then Giza, Angkor Wat, St. Louis...I figure on breaking the seals on Tokyo in three months. "By this time next year, magic will be a power in the world again...and you can finally rest in peace. Mom, Dad...everyone... "...I swear, I'll make you proud." The devastation following Metallia's banishment exceeded Jerran's wildest nightmares. On top of that, he hadn't foreseen that some callous bastard would seal off the mana wells--no one ever found out just who did it, but the general feeling in the family is that it was a last bit of vengeance on Beryl's part. There was no safe place to hide. The seas opened and swallowed Atlantis, Mu, and Arcadia; earthquakes and volcanoes turned the surviving continents upside- down; anything left was pulverized by glaciers advancing with unnatural speed. Widespread drought and famine were the last straws; within five years, all traces of the Kingdoms of Earth had vanished, and humanity was reduced to scattered bands of desperate wanderers, trying to survive in a world that had simply gone mad. And yet, through all the chaos, through fire and darkness and the breaking of the world...through the fall of civilization and a swift descent into barbarism... ...somehow, Jerran Mazael's daughter held on to her father's dream. And her son after her, and her granddaughter...on and on, in an unbroken line...for twelve thousand years. They passed on the Ton-Lo Codex and the spoken and written language as best they could; they held on to the memory of Mu, while all around them the world changed... ...and they held on to the magic. I could have teleported over to the site, but even with pre-prepared departure and arrival circles it'd take too much time and power. Besides, I wanted to go by the scenic route: to take one last look at the world before transforming it utterly. This might be my last free moment for years; once the seals were down my _real_ work would begin. It'd take years just to get magic accepted by western civilization, as a benign force rather than the power of Satan or some such nonsense; developing a new magic-based culture could easily occupy the rest of my life. It was all too easy to imagine myself in the role of D.D. Harriman, from Heinlein's "The Man who Sold the Moon" and "Requiem": achieving his dream, yet unable to take part in it himself...until his death. 'Home is the sailor, home from sea...' ...Ancestors, I was getting morbid... Anyway. I drove the Stingray down Empire Grade, heading through the UCSC campus into Santa Cruz proper. The forested foothills and open meadows of the University of California at Santa Cruz were a beautiful sight as always; this place might be the only campus in the States where deer and cougar would wander into the parking lots. It was certainly the _weirdest_ university in the US, if not the world, but that's par for the course in the fair city of Santa Cruz. (By way of example. back in '86 the student body overwhelmingly rejected the official university mascot--a sea lion--in favor of a critter they felt was more distinctive and symbolic of the region: _Ariolomax dolichophalus_, a shockingly yellow mollusc known commonly as the banana slug.) Down past Cowell College and the Bay Tree Bookstore, swinging past the Festival Glen where some of the oddest versions of Shakespeare known to man are performed each summer; at last I turned onto Bay Street and the city. Magic is part and parcel of the world, an infinitely renewed energy that wells up from the molten core at certain spots and spreads across the Earth. At least, that's the way it's supposed to work. With the mana wells capped off, all the wonders that relied on that power failed and died; skyships fell like stones, wizard-built castles crumbled, and spellcasting became nearly impossible. Nearly. The seals consumed almost all the mana flowing into them, but a thin trickle escaped into the world. Some of this in turn was confined to the regions around the wells by an outer ring of wards, but a little--a bare minimum--made it out. The mystic knowledge of the Silver Millennium was predicated on the vast amounts of mana then available, and few or none of those spells would function in the magic-starved world; but there was _some_ magic left, and there were a scattered few who would not give up on it. Gradually, over thousands of years, new forms of spellcasting were discovered. On the surface, Santa Cruz is a nice, quiet little town on the north coast of Monterey Bay. On the surface. Dig a little deeper and you'll find we fit in nicely with the general view of California as a weird and silly place; dig deep enough and you'll realize that compared to this town, the rest of the state is a model of sanity and boredom. We don't generally have the open, in- your-face insanity that San Francisco and Los Angeles are famous for; Santa Cruz is more _quietly_ weird, the kind of weird that sneaks up behind you and reads strange poetry at you while daubing clown makeup on your face. Tokyo might be a magnet for supernatural creatures and magical phenomena, but SC is the place where all the _non_supernatural weirdness will inevitably find itself. You may well have seen SC without knowing it; "The Lost Boys" was filmed here, as was "Killer Klowns from Outer Space." Mind you, we don't really have vampires...we just have vampire poseurs, roaming downtown after dark in small black-clad cliques and inspiring passersby to cry: "Children of the night... shut up!" The Mazael clan now had a new goal; the restoration of civilization, they felt, could not happen without the restoration of magic. In the cataclysm's wake, however, a new attitude was spreading among the survivors: magic, _they_ felt, was responsible for the destruction of the world--so magic, and magicians of any stripe, were not to be trusted. At best, shunned; at worst... well, let's not go into that. Anyone even suspected of wielding arcane forces was in serious trouble. This perception wasn't universal, and most post- lapsarian cultures that did subscribe to it eventually forgot, but by the time magic could have been widely accepted again nearly every scrap of true sorcerous lore had been lost. Fear of mages, moreover, _would_ persist into historical times in the culture that eventually produced three of the most influential religions of the modern era. _Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live._ Thus, the family went underground. The Mazaels became nomads, wandering the world in search of any mystic knowledge or artifacts that had survived the Fall, and of the mana wells themselves. Our oaths and history were closely guarded secrets, passed on only along a single line of descent; at no time would more than six living people know the full truth. Husbands and wives adopted into the clan either swore oaths of secrecy or were kept out of the loop...or, later, subjected to geases to insure their silence. The line came close to extinction time and again, but we Mazaels are a tenacious breed... The quirky locals were out in full force today. Driving down Pacific Avenue, I noticed the Belligerent Poet accosting a hapless yuppie couple. Further along, the Hurdy-Gurdy Man was cranking his odd-but-delightful musical watchamacallit and putting on a puppet show; just out of his range, a couple of very good bagpipers separated the strong from the weak. An elite squad of Krishnas, more Goths than I cared to think about, and a small pack of neo-Nazi skinheads spouted their various brands of philosophy or vitriol with the usual absolute lack of effect on passersby; and a bunch of ninjas were assiduously failing to conceal themselves in the shrubbery. Probably a good sign. The Santa Cruz Weirdness Effect was cranked all the way up; you _never_ see ninjas on Pacific. (Usually they hang around Beach Flats, annoying the Boardwalk-goers.) Ought to make the breaking easier. At least, I heartily _hoped_ so. Over thousands of years of exploration, the family discovered the new locations of several mana wells. What little magic remained to the world was concentrated in their vicinity, but even that was a pale shadow of what had once been...most of the time. Mana wells vary greatly in strength; the four largest are at least an order of magnitude more powerful than the rest. From most to least mana output, the Big Four are located at Tokyo, Stonehenge, the North Pole...and Santa Cruz. Of course, the Tokyo well pumps out more mana than the other three put together. There's a sort of pressure-release system built into the Seals; if they simply bottled the mana up, increasing strain would eventually pop them like a champagne cork...and that kind of uncontrolled unsealing would be extraordi- narily bad. Anything could happen. _Everything_ could happen, and probably would, all at once. Instead, in addition to the constant consumption of energy that keeps the seals themselves in place, excess mana is vented through one of the Big Four seals into deep space. The position rotates among the Four every few hundred years; it's been Tokyo's turn since around 1432. The concentration of mana around the Seals has..._peculiar_ effects on probability and the space- time continuum; these are most pronounced around the current vent, but the other wells all have their little...oddities. As I turned off Pacific and headed down toward Soquel, I sent out a quick mystic probe to the nearby Anomaly. Good, very good... the links I'd set up to the St. George Hotel were all in place. The architect couldn't have _known_ he was building it around a permanent spacewarp, but nevertheless it's a five- dimensional structure and very easy to get lost in. The St. George was one of the linchpins of my scheme, an anchor to which I'd attached dozens of delicate manathreads; they spread across the county, linked to the borders of the Outer and Inner Seals and to the other Anomaly up in the mountains. When the moment came, I'd begin tugging those strings, and the Seals would distort and weaken; a few hours of that and the currents of mana would stretch them beyond their limits, and magic would be loose in the world again. Working magic became a matter of conservation. Even extremely simple, low-power spells like firelighting now required more time and effort than rubbing two sticks of wood together; the challenge was to either find some other source of energy, or reduce power requirements. Most wizards, I'm sorry to say, went with the first option. Necromancy is an ugly word. It's even uglier when put into practice. Most of the world frowns on killing people, or even animals, to extract their psychic energy and convert it into mana. This did nothing to improve magic's reputation, and somewhere along the line my ancestors decided something had to be done before humanity was poisoned against wizardry forever. Thus began the Hunt. The road led me down by the bay, past the Beach Boardwalk and the yacht harbor. As the morning fog burned off, surfers could be seen continuing their endless search for the perfect wave; Jack O'Neill was out there himself today, gray beard and eyepatch unmistakeable, no doubt testing some new refinement of the wetsuit. It was a beautiful day. How much would change, I wondered, after the unsealing? Surely not even the rise of magic could draw their attention away from the sea. Jack'd probably come up with a water-repellent/heating spell within the year. The thought crossed my mind, as it had countless times the past few years: could society cope? Would the chaos of returning magic save humanity or plunge the world into another, far worse dark age? As always, I squelched that traitorous impulse. Magic was needed, urgently, desperately. The human species was on the road to self-destruction anyway, and there was no other solution. I'd follow my ancestors' dream to its end, no matter what karma I might accumulate in the process... ...but for the sake of everyone in California, I'd best not repeat the error of 1923. Problem: how to maintain absolute secrecy and still hunt down mages who abused their power? Solution: a foolproof disguise, and the creation of a legend. Somewhere around the fifth millennium BCE, as primitive cities began to rise, Ninhurga Mazael and her children created an artifact of power beyond what most wizards of the day would have believed possible. They took the skin and skull of a dire wolf, invoking the power of its body and spirit, and made of it a fur cape in the classic barbarian-warrior fashion, wolf's head acting as a rather outre' hat. Whoever wore the Wolfsark could shift at will from normal human shape to an eight-foot-tall beastman, gifted with immense strength, great speed, and the senses and fighting spirit of the wolf. Wherever rumors of dark sorcery spread, the Mazaels followed. If there were indeed necromancers or daemonists at work, their careers would soon be cut short by an unstoppable force: the beast that could not be killed; the Guardian of the Arts Arcane; the Wolf that walked like a man. The old word "warlock" does not mean "male witch," as most think; it in fact means "oathbreaker." As my ancestors saw it, any mage who used the dark arts was betraying his craft and his species; so the beastman became known as the warlock-hunting wolf... or, eventually, the Warwolf. Though the legends have been greatly distorted, all tales of "werewolves" have their genesis in sightings of Mazaels at work. The Wolfsark is still in our possession--_my_ possession now, as the last of the line--preserved by means of magic and just as efficacious now as it was when first created. I've had to use the 'sark myself a time or two, though mostly to scare the living daylights out of people who've just discovered dark magicks before they have a chance to get in too deep. In the process, I've created new myths myself...to my eternal regret. If I'd known there was a witness to that last case, who would years later become a pretentious game designer who spells his name with a dot, I'd never have put on that act about being the living avenger of Gaea... Driving through Live Oak, Capitola and Soquel, I turned north once more, heading back up into the Santa Cruz Mountains and a rendesvous with destiny. A quick check of the other Anomaly--the Mystery Spot, where gravity operates at strange angles and water can flow uphill--completed the grand tour: time to get to work. At the forested foot of Loma Prieta, tallest mountain in the region, I'd set up a shielded workspace in a grassy clearing. A powerful spell of diversion, variously known as the "Who Me?" effect or an S.E.P. field, ensured that no passing hikers would pay any attention to me. Despite the emergence of other magical traditions over the millennia, the Mazaels kept their secret even from wizards. No hint of their true nature was ever allowed to leak out, for persecution of others might have led back to us. A little too paranoid if you ask me, but we _did_ survive where so many failed. This is not to say that the family was _completely_ isolated. Here and there, as they traveled across the world, my ancestors saw opportunities to nudge reborn civilization forward; under various aliases, they introduced non-magical knowledge into early societies. Most of these efforts were kept quiet, but now and then legends arose in their wake. Many demi-deities and culture-heroes the world over have their origins in my ancestors' intervention. Wayland, Maui, Quetzalcoatl, Susa-no-o... in most cases, of course, the truth has been distorted beyond recognition by local prejudices. It wasn't Prometheus but _Pandora_ who taught the ancient Hellenic peoples metalworking, and it was her idiot husband who unthinkingly set loose a horde of bound demons left over from the Silver Millennium. So it goes... Magic does not obey the laws of conventional physics, of what you might call the gravomagnetic spectrum. Magical energy, in effect, has _seniority_ over gravomagnetic physics, and can alter or negate any and all of its laws as directed. _How_ magic works--well, that's a mystery. My family has been studying the nature of magic for twelve thousand years and change, and while we know more than anyone else about _what_ magic does, _why_ still eludes us. The "what" isn't exactly simple. I could take four or five years and give you a basic understanding of thaumaturgical theory, but neither of us has that kind of time. Here's the least inaccurate summation I can manage: The fundamental units of gravomagnetic energy manifest themselves as particles or waves, or "wavicles", or whatever quantum buzzword is currently popular. The fundamental units of magical energy are none of the above, but more closely resemble _threads_. There are two basic types of spellcasting found in any mystic tradition. Most wizards must draw mana from their surroundings; in the new world, this Low Magic was very nearly useless. All living things, however, generate mana in much the same fashion as planets; those lucky few who happen to have very large natural storage capacities can fuel their own spells--these being High Mages--but even so, outside the mana wells their powers are replenished very very _slowly_. A High Mage in the barrens might be able to cast one or two major spells a year. [INTERNAL: The rate of regeneration depends partly on ambient mana levels; once the Seals are broken HMs are at full power everywhere...] My family rejected both paths, and found one far more effective. As there are over a hundred naturaly occuring chemical elements, so there are _millions_ of varieties of manathread. Each has its own unique frequency; each is attracted to a particular configuration of matter and/or energy, and can most easily affect it. These "configurations" cover a range from the simplicity of, say, a water molecule or a single photon, all the way up to such "macro" phenomena as trailer parks, giraffes, or random thoughts about Quentin Tarantino movies. Normally, however, they don't do much. Unguided mana just sits there, altering probability in various subtle ways, but nothing more; each of Earth's mana wells has its own particular tricks. The Tokyo well attracts supernatural entities and other forms of extreme weirdness, the Santa Cruz well scooping up any leftovers; Wiltshire causes crop circles. The three small mana wells surrounding the Bermuda Triangle do _not_ cause ships and planes to disappear-- they _make people believe_ that ships and planes disappear. Similar effects keep sasquatches and yeti away from anyone with a really good camera, cause religious images to appear in rice pudding, and convince otherwise sane and rational people that Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe are dead. (They're happily married and my next-door neighbours. I tell you this in the certain knowledge that you won't be _allowed_ to believe me.) In order to truly warp reality, mana must be motivated--ironically, by the very same sapient life-forms its probability-shifting helps bring about. A picnic blanket, precisely eight feet square, red and white striped: check. Arrange corners at the four compass points, weigh down. Check. 1/50 scale model Volkswagen Bug, red, placed on north point. Check. Green glass vase holding three carnations and a plastic chopstick, placed on east point. Check. A road map of Outer Mongolia, folded into an origami swan; cloth napkin with the Declaration of Independence scribbled on it in gold crayon; eleven pocky sticks arranged in the form of the kanji "ki"; all on west point. Check. The 1973 Tolkien Calendar, missing December; a statue of Bettie Page carved from a nickel-iron meteorite; both on south point. Check. CD player on northwest side with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony playing on infinite loop: check. CD player on southeast side with Warren Zevon's "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" playing on infinite loop, _backwards_: check. Around all this, the Septagram of Infinite Recursion and the Enneagram of Unbinding laid out in police-line tape and Christmas-tree lights: check, double-check, and _triple_-check (can't be too careful with magic circles). It's at times like this that you really _appreciate_ S.E.P. fields... Wizards' work is more peculiar than most wizards realize. All that chanting and gesturing, sigils and incense, eye of newt and hair of dog--it's all meant to draw in the right sorts of mana, linking and shaping the threads into a construct which is then energized by the will of the caster. Get it just right and reality changes in the way you desire. Get it completely wrong and your will has nothing to do with the pattern you've made, so nothing happens and the construct dissipates harmlessly. Get it just a _little bit_ wrong--but you don't want to know about that. Really. Thing is, most wizards in the modern world aren't really aware of the process on any significant level. Nine out of ten spellcasters haven't even developed their mystic senses properly, and are basically working blind. (I should point out here that as far as I can tell, the ability to sense magic is present in every sapient being--but most humans will never get more than the occasional chill down their spines. This sense _can_, however, be refined and heightened with practice.) Furthermore, of that ten percent who can perceive arcane forces with some degree of clarity, the vast majority see only flowing rivers of energy--and must work those rivers clumsily, with great effort. To shift the metaphor, think of their spells as thick rope tied into elaborate knots. And now we come at last to that tiny minority, those who have learned to refine their mage-sight to the point that they can sense--and _manipulate_--the individual manathreads, peeling string off the rope and playing cats'-cradle, weaving powerful and subtle magicks that no mere wizard can possibly match, while using a bare minimum of energy; who can work great wizardries even outside the wells. That is a very tiny minority indeed. To wit: Me. I am not a wizard. I am a Spellweaver. The key proved to be a spell meant to give nonwizards mage-sight--more properly, to enhance that facility in those who had never developed it. Around 6230 BCE, great-etc.-granddaddy Jubal found that spell could be used as a sort of training method--once you'd seen magic, you knew what to look for and could concentrate more effectively on developing the power within yourself. A few generations down the line, someone thought of applying it to an infant--and _that_ was the breakthrough we'd been searching for. If one had this spell applied repeatedly from a _very_ young age, cranking the sensitivity up a bit every time, mage-sight rapidly developed to the limits the spell was capable of--said limits being a little beyond those of the magics then practiced by the family. The children grew up able to work spells with just that much more attention to detail--and that included the Spell of Sight. _Their_ children, under the slightly advanced version, could in turn use magic with even greater ease, and needing significantly less power. The tradeoff was time: it took much longer to form a spell matrix of such precision than a conventional wizard would have needed. After a few generations, this cycle hit a wall: there was so much mana within the wells that the spell could be refined no further, for at this level the power began to obscure the increasing clarity of Sight. Any further improvements would have to be made outside, in the near-total absence of mystic forces--but by this time, the nascent spellweavers could work their magics reasonably well in the barrens. So it went, generation after generation refining their Sight and their powers, learning to manipulate mana on a level no wizard of the Silver Millennium had ever even imagined... ...except that it soon became obvious that someone _had_. The Great Seals could not be perceived with conventional mage-sight; all one could do was _deduce_ their existence from local effects. As the family grew in skill and subtlety, that changed: the eightieth generation since Jubal could just make out the Seals' structure--and what they saw was no conventional magic but something very much like their own weavings. Only far, far, FAR more complex and subtle. They couldn't even begin to understand the Seals, let alone dispel them. We never have worked out just how _that_ happened. Ever since, though, we've been mapping the Seals, in ever-increasing detail as the Sight became clearer. The apparent limit was reached five hundred years ago, and it's taken us most of that time just to fully chart all the near-fractal details of each well...but now, after so long, we were ready. _I_ was ready. Where my great-great-grandfather had failed, decades ago, I was going to succeed. There was no chance of error. The New Age of Magic was about to unfold, and I'd be leading the way... 12:30 PM. The setup was as ready as it'd ever be. Time for the initial bindings. Sitting crosslegged at the blanket's center, I extended my senses into the realm of the invisible. All around me, energies ebbed and flowed, currents of force in colors no nonmage knows drawn toward the prosaic yet powerful collection of artifacts on the blanket. The silvery pattern of the Great Seal overlaid it all, threads converging here at an inner corner of the vast pentagram they defined; my own strings of arcane power were woven through that impossibly complex web, warp to its woof. With a thought, the loose ends drifted toward me, ready for the first stage. A Mazael with a goal will never turn away from it, never give up as long as the faintest possibility of success might exist. It would no doubt be proverbial, if absolute secrecy weren't one of our goals. For twelve millennia we pursued the golden dream of magic without flag or fail, hanging on to the past with an unbreakable grip while pursuing the future in an unstoppable charge. A thousand times we came close to failure, to losing the path and the dream, but always my ancestors found the will and the means to carry on. Much knowledge has been lost despite all our efforts; the family's understanding of the Codex has fluctuated quite a bit over the ages, and I strongly suspect that the translation spell now used to convert it to English tends to present the information in rather more mythic form than Jerran's original intent. But I grew up learning to see things no one else could, and to work with that unseen world to accomplish miracles. I was raised on a diet of fantastic stories: tales of the Warrior Angels who protected the Nine Worlds, of the StarHunters who embodied the powers of the constellations, of the great wars that created the Silver Millennium and the dark uprising that ended it; of the Hunter Orion and his doomed love for the Angel Mercury; and--best of all--the adventures of the Iron Captain, last of the Stone Guardians of Earth. As a child I wanted to _be_ the Captain, or at least to be a crewman on his skyship, the _Nemesis_; to hunt the pirates of the Asteroids, foil the schemes of the Usurpers of the Tenth Planet, battle the dark armies of Arcadia-- --well, perhaps I'd have a chance to forge my own legends. The last knot slid into place; the labor of millennia was very nearly complete. There remained only a final charging, and then the Unsealing would at long last begin. Worlds generate mana. I know, we've been over that one before. What I didn't tell you then is that each of the worlds of the Solar System creates mana with slightly different characteristics; a skilled mage, such as myself, can call down trickles of power from the other worlds to lend strength to certain types of spell. To strengthen spells of ice, cold, mathematical calculations, or information-gathering, invoke the power of Mercury. For power over light, metal, or divining the true nature of things, call upon Venus. If teleportation or the creation of psychoplasmic artifacts is your desire, Earth itself holds the key. Luna, our inappropriately-termed "Moon", can aid in spiritual healing. Fire and foresight are under the purview of Mars. For lightning or botany, invoke Jupiter. To assist in spells of healing or death, call upon Saturn, but _very_ _carefully_. Uranus's magic strengthens the element of air, and the creation of true matter from nothing. Look to Neptune in matters of the sea, or of clairvoyance. If you want to cast a spell involving alterations in the flow of Time, do _not_ invoke Pluto, because to do so is to insure your spell will fail utterly. Do, however, call on that remote world for sound magic. Finally, for spells of storms and sheer destruction, Nemesis--the tenth planet, unknown to modern astronomers and all but the few _real_ astrologers-- is your best bet. "Spirits of space, spirits of the worlds," I chanted in the best approximation of ancient Muvian the family could manage, "hear my need, lend me your power!" This wasn't really a request, there was nothing sapient out there to hear it, but it helped to focus the spell. "Mercury, thrice-mighty messenger, bring me your gift of knowledge that I may not fail! "Jupiter, lord of the lightning, bend your energies to this task! "Nemesis, bringer of righteous wrath, help me to destroy the seals that bind my world!" And so on, for the better part of an hour, gathering power from above and channeling it into the spell of unbinding. This day would severely tax the capabilities of my anti-laryngitis amulet. At last, the second stage complete, I broke for a late lunch: warmed-over Chinese food, garlic shrimp and lemon chicken... ...and, ancestors save me from my own foolishness, fortune cookies. Magic, as I've pointed out, warps probability. Thing is, this doesn't just apply to _places_. People who practice the arcane arts sometimes find that the arts are practicing them right back, and they have acquired..."quirks," you might say. Little things, like constantly getting other people's mail, or never (and I mean _never_) being able to find a parking place within half a mile of one's destination. Life's little annoyances, elevated to the level of running gags. Whenever I open a fortune cookie, and read the pithy saying within... it is always, _always_, one hundred per cent accurate. And I don't just get the standard proverbs or vague well-wishes, either; once in a while something undeniably prophetic pops up. "Your car will be struck by lightning tomorrow," say, or "There is an 1834 silver dollar stuck to the heel of your sneaker." Given that, cracking the cookie could be described as a bad move. Whatever it had to say, I'd be stuck with it--no way around the future. And normally I avoid prophecy like the plague; on the whole, I think knowing the future is something to be avoided at all costs. Foreknowledge destroys hope... ...but the siren call of the crunchy sesame cookies and their little pink slips of paper has seduced me more often than I care to think about. For one thing, when most of your friends love Chinese food it's hard to avoid the damn things. And how much prophecy can you pack into one of those things, anyway? So, half-afraid and half-expectant, I unfurled the fortune and read: "By the end of the day you are going to wish you had stayed in bed." Disturbing. But so damn vague that it could mean anything; maybe I was going to get rained on, or the anti-laryngitis charm would give out... Okay, let's try another. "You will soon be going on a very strange journey." Wonderful, the fortune writers were Pratchett fans. Could point to success; hopping round the world breaking the seals, or something similar. Throwing caution to the winds, I picked another cookie out of the bag. Just time for one more before zero hour... "Continue your current course of action and you will meet your one true love within three months. Turn aside now and lose her forever." _Well_ now! If that wasn't a good omen, someone had redefined the term while my back was turned. I'd always (if somewhat reluctantly) held the fate of the world to be more important than my love life--or lack thereof--but if the two were actually intertwined that tightly, I wasn't about to complain! But there wasn't time to consider this further. 2:43 PM: time for the main event. Once more gathering the strands about me, sending awareness out through the entire network, I began the Unsealing. Ever so delicately, exert pressure on the northwest-central node at the first level: so. There, it's already fighting back--but the anchors have long been in place, and my threads bind it securely, forcing the node more than fifty feet out of position. That wakens the others, but they will shortly have their own problems. Loop an aleph-hitch around the conduit to the northeast- central node, watch as its defenses shore up--then mount a sudden assault on the southwestern point of the pentagram, out in the Bay. Weren't expecting that, eh? Two nodes of the ten are out of balance now, and things are getting just a bit hairy. The first great defense kicks in, as the Seals begin to vibrate on a destructive frequency. My own network automatically counters with damping oscillations; a brief duel of vibratory shifts ensues before the Seals concede the round, and while they've been busy I have taken two more nodes and begun the war for the second, middle-band level. Forty-five minutes have passed, and the strain is incredible--but I _will_ not let go! Move and countermove, attack and defense. The Seals assail my mind with fears and phantoms, but my mental screens are more than sufficient to hold them at bay. The air about me threatens to catch fire or freeze solid, to no avail. Six nodes are distorted now, on all three levels. It is past four o'clock, and still the battle continues, but every defense, every power the Seals possess has been analyzed for generations and I know their every weak- ness; they cannot stand against me. Great-great-grandfather's failure in Tokyo will not be repeated today-- --what--? The next defense _should_ be a power surge, but that's not happening. Something new is taking shape, woven through the three Seals-- --Jerran's Bones, _it's another Seal!_ _TWO of them!_ This can't be happening, there was no sign, no trace--but there they are, already throwing my weaves off balance. Three of the nodes are nearly back into position, my hold on the rest threatened. I should back off, shut the network down and revise the whole scheme to incorporate this development-- --no. I've come so far today, I was so close--and these two Seals, I see now, are just variants on the first three; I can still win! The battle resumes in earnest now, as I improvise new strategies with increasing haste. Gravity is beginning to fail around me, but the artifacts are no longer necessary and as long as I can hold myself down it doesn't matter if all that junk drifts off. I see now, the Seals are using the power of the Mystery Spot against me, redirecting the Anomaly my way. Clever, but not nearly enough! Five nodes back where I want them, halfway there and it's not quite five o'clock yet, I'll be done before nightfall-- --and then, a sixth and seventh Seal materialize, and I belatedly realize just how much of an egomaniacal fool I've been-- --but by then it's far too late, as the seven Seals channel the power of the other Anomaly directly at me, and the fabric of spacetime gives up and stops trying-- --and I have just enough time left in this world to see the ground begin to shake, and to know that I've made a terrible mistake. You've probably read a dozen descriptions of bizarre interdimensional rips and the hallucinogenic effects they have on those caught up in them, so I'll spare you all that junk about shifting senses and the taste of paisley, and just say that they're pretty damn accurate. I fell through a myriad dimensions in an instant that stretched to an eter--wait, you've probaby heard that too. Never mind. I'll try to stick to the high points. You see some pretty weird things on a trip like this. I especially liked the marble city floating on a pink cloud, and the infinite wall studded with titanic, petrified gods; but I could really have done without the vision of a black lake and a terrible city rising behind the moon. Dread Carcosa vanished, to be replaced at last by some semblance of reality... ...Reality was a white room, of uncertain dimensions, occupied by a tall olive-skinned woman sitting at an ornate oaken desk. Her features were vaguely Grecian, though you rarely see that dark green hair among those of Hellenic ancestry. She wore a flowing gown several shades darker than her hair. She was staring at me, as if...as if she had never before in her life been surprised, or even believed that surprise was possible, until that very moment. If Phileas Fogg, sitting in his study, had suddenly been visited by the angel Gabriel, he would have looked very much like this person did now. I would have said something witty to break the tension, but I was completely paralyzed. "You're five years _early_," she nonsequitired. Well, there wasn't a whole lot I could say to that, was there? Come on, larynx, work with me! She doesn't look happy, and I can't exactly defend myself if I can't _move_, for Jerran's sake... Mystery Woman got up from the desk, looking more pissed by the moment. As she swept toward me, a baroque metal staff appeared in her hand...or was it, as it appeared, really a giant key? I wondered what it might open, and worried that it might turn out to be me. And then, quite suddenly, there were two of her. The new one--an exact duplicate of the first, except for the large jewel atop her staff/key--held her double back, saying: "This is necessary." MW1 didn't look too happy about that, but she calmed down almost instantly. Well, if you can't trust yourself, who can you trust? "Please explain." "There are...complications. Other players are entering the field, and the warriors must be ready for them." MW2 nodded toward me. "He is the key." No, actually, I wanted to gibber, that thing you're holding is the key, I'm just Mike, and could you please tell me what in Jefferson's name is going on here?! MW1 sighed. "Then he must proceed. Despite the consequences." She stepped up to me and touched her staff to my temple, her crimson eyes boring into mine. Those eyes...Mystery Woman might seem to be in her early twenties, but her eyes were _ancient_. The weight of eons was in them, and pain beyond measure: but a spark of hope still remained, was in fact growing brighter... "I would spare you what is to come, if I could," she whispered. "If you had waited...but that would doom us all. "In days ahead, you may not believe this...but I truly wish there could have been another way. I am sorry." And with that her key/staff/whatever flared neon-bright, and reality went on vacation again... When my senses finally rebooted, I was lying flat on my back in two inches of mud, the sky above me was an absolute flat black that shouldn't be possible in nature, and I was surrounded by giant fungi and less identifiable objects. I should have stayed in bed... --End Chapter One IN OUR NEXT THRILLING EPISODE (assuming you found _this_ one thrilling): It's a classic tale of Nature versus Man as our hubris-laden hero finds himself lost on an amazingly hostile planet. And if he makes it out of the jungle and into civilization, Mike'll be in even _worse_ trouble... (Yes, that _is_ usually phrased "Man versus Nature." But in this case the reverse is so much more accurate...) General notes: This story begins around two and a half years before Tsukino Usagi first becomes Sailor Moon (in spring 1992 according to the SME timeline). The Warwolf's M.O. owes a great deal to Lee Falk's "Phantom." Orion and the Iron Captain: see Ben Harrison's "Hunter's Moon" and Frank Barr's "Trenchcoat-Mask" for the truth behind Mike's slightly distorted ideas. Nearly all those folks mentioned above really _can_ be found wandering the streets around here. I haven't even scratched the surface. @_@ Mind you, I've never actually _seen_ ninjas in town, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit... And the St. George Hotel is quite real, or was up 'til it was destroyed in the quake of '89. I and a few friends are willing to swear in a court of law that the hotel could not possibly have existed in three-dimensional space. (You could be on the second floor and look out through a sixth-story window-- or onto the _roof_. And none of the interior angles were remotely Euclidean.) The dimensional warp seems to have been nullified by the quake, as the new St. George is resolutely 3D. *sigh* The Mystery Spot, while it does exist in real life, is (so far as I know, never been there myself) just a bunch of cleverly-constructed optical illusions. A tourist trap, nothing more. Jack O'Neill is a local icon, inventor of both the wetsuit and the fiberglass surfboard, and founder of O'Neill's Surf Shop. Without him, surfing would not be what it is today, and Santa Cruz wouldn't be Surf City (tho' we'd still have the best waves on this side of North America). The hapless yuppie couple were played by Margot and Brendan Yale from Disney's _Gargoyles_. :) The S.E.P. effect is of course Douglas Adams's Somebody Else's Problem field (see "Life, the Universe, and Everything"). The city on a cloud was Serranian, in H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands; the god-studded wall was the Source Wall at the edge of the DC Universe, created by Jack Kirby (the Wall, not the DCU). Carcosa and the Lake of Hali were created by Robert W. Chambers and later adopted into Lovecraft's Mythos. Chapter Outline 1: If I Knew Then... Intro; culminates with botched attempt on well and awakening in DK 2: The Angry Gray Planet Two weeks' slogging through the Pallid Jungle searching for civilization... 3: Things To Do On Shaizaar When You're Doomed ...only to learn he was better off in the jungle 4: The Game of Wolf and Youma The dangers of passing for a local...and of meeting an ally 5: Stalking in a Winter Thunderland While snowed-in over Fimbulwinter, an unlikely romance blossoms, and plans are laid (and a very silly sword created) 6: Mission: Implausible The desperate gambit begins: trek to Kel Shaizaar 7: The Queen of Air and Darkness Tragedy, confrontation, and escape in that approximate order 8: No Mortal Man Can Win This Day But a bunch of 14-year-old girls can. 'Nuff said. Ep: ...What I Know Now "I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed..." --Sam "May Evil beware! ...And may Good dress warmly and eat plenty of fresh vegetables."