Sorry about not posting yesterday, I was just too annoyed.

So, like I said, I managed to pinpoint two of the magical sources I've been worried about. I decided to see if I could talk to or capture one, try to figure out what's going on.

For the record, that is not an easy thing to do. Magic isn't like radar. I can't conjure up a heads-up display that shows local magical sources as little blinky lights superimposed on a map of the area (well, I can, but I have to place all the lights myself, which is a huge headache). Pinpointing a magical source is more like finding the one miscolored thread in a five-dimensional tapestry woven by a team of Jackson Pollock and Hogath-Thleen, the Kotolpaxian god of insanity and yarn. (They did four collaborations in the early 1950s. Good luck figuring out which ones. Actually, if you can figure out which is the fourth, let me know. I need it for important reasons I cannot reveal at this time.)

So anyway, yesterday afternoon I headed into the city. One of the two sources was big, fuzzy, slow-moving, and underground. The other was small and bouncing quickly all over the place, so I went with the big fuzzy.

I caught up to it in a rather pleasant neighborhood of old apartment buildings, in a variety of architectural styles from the 1930s through 50s, none more than 15 stories or so. Lots of trees, flowers, nice place. The fuzzy source was about 50 feet below me and crawling south.

Now, in this sort of situation, your typical adventurer or cape will try to follow the thing. Look for tunnels or whatever, come running up behind it. Then, if it's easily startled or paranoid, it freaks out.

Me, I take the easy way. I just distort the fundamental fabric of space and time so that the points it's passing through are adjacent to a nice clear space on the surface, and poof, it appears before me. Not a trick I normally get to use much, thanks to that range limitation, but with your planet busy falling out of reality, all bets are off.

What came up was several tons of purple-gray slime, from which emerged a bewildering array of tentacles, teeth, and eyes. Eleven heads on stalks rose from the top of the mass, and the whole thing burbled continuously like a cross between a drainpipe and an angry beaver.

"Excuse me," I said, "can you talk?"

It burbled and peered around.

"Uh... spreh-ken dee Deutsch?"

Burble.

"Holoffelon isuliel Elvassa?"

Burble belch squish.

I ran through a couple of dozen languages with no particular response until, finally, I asked, "Par-lay voo Fron-sez?"

"Ah... oui, monsiuer," it said haltingly.

"Well, crap, I don't."

Suddenly, a figure positively reeking of magic shot past me and bounced back and forth between two buildings, jumping rapidly up to the roof of one.

"Fiendish monster!" she cried, striking a pose. She was a tall black girl, maybe 15 or so, in a school uniform. I was not aware that building-hopping was on the curriculum in the local private schools. I suppose they really do have one up on public education; I think they just get basketball.

Where was I? Right, "Fiendish monster." She shifted poses, pointing down menacingly. "Though you have cowered beneath the earth, heaven had its eyes upon you! The distant stars themselves shall render your judgement! Starlight rod!"

She was, apparently, of the ridiculous school of casting spells by shouting their names. A magical circle exploded in the air around her, the sun went dark, and a brilliant, cloudless, moonless night sky, with the sort of fat gorgeous stars you never see within a thousand miles of a city, spread over us. An unbelievably gaudy sort of baton thing materialized in her hand: purple, with feathers and a big star at the end.

She leaped off the building and pointed the baton downward. "Rage of Fornax!" she cried, and the stars above wheeled and shifted. A constellation flared brightly, failing as always to look like anything at all to me, and then gouts of flame poured from the sky, utterly incinerating the poor slime-thing.

"Corvus' Wings!" she cried, gesturing again, and the stars again wheeled, another constellation of nothing in particular flared, and great dark wings sprouted from her back. She sailed of the southeast, and as she left, the sky faded back to blue and the sun re-emerged.

So, yeah, I'm a bit cheesed off at the moment. She's gone completely off the grid, too. I can't find her at all, even though I looked all yesterday evening and all day today, and meanwhile the magical sources are flaring up and down all over the place.

Somebody out there knows what the fruitilicious is going on. I intend to find that person and shake them until either they start giving me answers or a lot of change falls out of their pockets. I have laundry to do.

Two, actually. I've managed to isolate two of the magic sources nearby. I'm going to go check them out. I'll post later with the results.

I've spent the last three hours on hold trying to get through to the Union of Concerned Special Citizens, and when I finally got through they traced the call and sent some third-tier cape to get his butt whomped. They didn't even listen to the warning.

Assholes. They're only acting like this because of the thing with Captain Goode and the marmalade dispenser, I know it. Or maybe it was the thing with the howler monkeys and their guildhall.

Capes. They can never take a joke, can they?

Guess I'm on my own for this one. Better head out.

It's been a whole day. I don't think your major superhero, action science, and occult research institutions have even noticed. Do I have to do everything around here?

Humans. Feh. Don't know why I bother, you never appreciate it.

So, I woke up from a nap to find a lot of magical blips scattered all over your planet. That's bad enough -- several dozen high-powered magical entities (And when I say high-powered, I mean HIGH. POWERED. Potentially on par with me, even) appearing all at once around the world is enough to ruin anyone's day.

But magic *doesn't work* in your cosmos. My Physgig dynamically alters the fundamental definitional constants of reality (at least, that's what the folks I stole it from said) to permit my continued existence and allow me to access my abilities, regardless of what cosmos they originated in, but it only has a 30-foot radius of effect. Everything outside of that is a big blank for my magical senses, because they stop existing at the edge of the field.

So, several dozen high-powered magical entities all over the world doesn't just mean, you know, you'll have to deal with them. It means magic works now. Yay, you say? You poor, poor, poor fools. If magic works all over the world, it means the entire world is no longer entirely in your universe.

Well, I got the word out. Back to my nap.

Well, despite the best efforts of the Time Brigade to drag me out of retirement to fight Evil Space Weasels, which turned out to actually be Evil Space Weevils but a certain Brigadier has *terrible* handwriting, and then I came down with Evil Space Measles, but I'm better, I'm back, and I'm celebrating turning 40,003 (subjective) by using my awesome magical powers to peer into my personal future.

Paradox, for the record, tastes kind of like ham marmalade.

I can see... a novel new form of sandwich and what appears to be... oh my. Somebody should tell that poor dear she turns naked when she changes costume like that. And... corn chips? Something about corn chips.

Stay tuned, mortals!

...there was a princess. But she was executed following the glorious uprising of the proletariat, so it was okay.

THE END

Seriously, what is wrong with you people?

Every spell is breakable, you see. If you create a spell that is completely unbreakable, a method of breaking it will instantly form. If you negate that method of breaking it, a new method of breaking it will form. So, I figured, make my most important spell breakable only by something I knew about and could keep track of easily, and put that thing somewhere safe and oh-so-very clever and unexpected.

I blinked down at the very familiar sword buried in my chest, and then up at the human teenager with the ridiculous hair and his ragtag band of incredibly strange friends. My elfsteel crown rolled from my head, and I sagged back against my throne of carven ebony. A tremor shook the Iron Tower, and then another, stronger. "Well, poop-apples," I said, and died.

Because I've been there, too.

Yours is not a world of magic. I'm sorry; it's just not. Most of what you think of as "magic" is simple psychology. Humans are built to talk to each other. After you fell out of the trees, you fell prey to runaway sexual selection. Your hair fell out, and you needed something to replace grooming as your social glue. Facing each other and making grunting noises was the answer. Protohumans who were better at it got more mates and had more hideous little microhumans, and so your brains developed a massive front-heavy structure built for talking -- communicating with, predicting, and manipulating your fellow humans.

Somewhere along the way, something went click (or, more likely, snap), and that structure gained the ability to predict and manipulate your inanimate surroundings. Logic and reason were born. Unfortunately, it gained the ability to communicate with them, too, and cared very little for the fact that they never communicated back. And so "magic" was born. You yell at your cars when they won't go. You plea with the lottery balls to match your ticket. At its most sophisticated and doublethinkful extreme, you recognize that the sky can't hear your request for rain, so you invent invisible supermen that can.

But there's no real magic. Just a trick of your brain's oversensitivity to certain things, like the trick that lets you see a face in two dots and a curvy line. :)

( However... )

I know because I've been there!

In the future, all television remotes will include a "derail plot" button. Pressing this button causes the remote to calculate the precise disruption to the current program that will most entertainingly subvert its storyline. Nobody knows why it does this, because it inevitably just adds a Dalek.

If the program in question already contains Daleks, it adds a Spider Dalek.

Most of Western Europe was devastated when, during a particularly boring speech by the Prime Minister of Great Britain that interrupted the quarterfinals of the World Cup, the button was simultaneously pressed by 427,843 viewers.

Froborr's not been posting much, has he? That's because of his terrible secret. Which I can't tell you. But, being a familiar, I talk to all the other wizard's familiars, and I hear all kinds of other terrible secrets!

* Tomatoes are neither a fruit nor a vegetable! They are actually baby refrigerator magnets.
* Ferrets do not like being immersed in Dran-O.
* The Maxifragelan word for "weasel" is the funniest word in any language, ever, anywhere in the universe. It is pronounced exactly like the English word "weasel", but in a BBC announcer voice.
* Amazing spoiler for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Aeris dies!
* I live in a hat. It is a very nice hat, but I have too many roommates -- usually 12 of them, but they keep coming and going. My roommates are pudding cups. Also there is Mrs. Spoon.

I'm Cephy the Head Squid!

Well, okay, I have no idea if it actually is because I never studied Sedimentary Magic while I was there. But I've been fiddling with it myself, and discovered something very important which may or may not be an established technique.

As you are all no doubt aware, Sedimentary Magic deals with food which is either layered or constructed of the remnants of prior food (sandwiches, shephard's pie, leftovers in general). Microwave ovens are a major tool. I was experimenting with leftover Chinese delivery (the MSG allows me to use my Metamorphic Magic senses to monitor the state of the food), and kept running into a problem: I'd dump the rice and food on a plate, reheat it, and the result would be individual grains of dry and unpleasant rice and Chinese food. There would be none of the marvelous cohesion that makes chopsticks practical.

However, I have discovered the key. I had a container of rice I hadn't even opened yet. I tried popping the whole thing in the microwave without opening it, and 2 minutes and 45 seconds later I had hot rice indistinguishable from the freshly delivered stuff. In fact, it was slightly stickier than when delivered!

I shall conduct further experiments to determine whether it works if, say, you ate half the rice the day the food was delivered, then closed the container. Hmm, on second thought, I'll wait to conduct those experiments after I answer this more immediately pressing question: how do I get the broccoli rub to stop screaming and put down the knife?

1. Where is your cell phone? Nonexistant
2. Your spouse? Uncreated with the rest of my universe, such that she never actually existed to begin with.
3. Your hair? Poofy.
4. Your Mother? Eh.
5. Your Father? Also eh.
6. Your favorite thing? My hat. It's got a squid in it.
7. Your dream last night? Don't remember.
8. Your favorite drink? Snarglefoos tea.
9. Your dream car? That dragon that sounds like Sean Connery. You know. From that movie.
10. The room you're in? That's lair to you, buddy. Well... retirement lair.
12. Your fears? We do not speak of THEM, for THEY might be listening.
13. What do you want to be in 10 years? Beta Lyrae.
14. Who did you hang out with last night? Cephy.
15. Muffins? ENERGY Muffins, baby.
17. One of your wish list items? Captain Superguy's mechano-suit. Who's the tough guy now, huh?
18. Where you grew up? Faerie.
19. The last thing you did? Drank root beer.
20. What are you wearing? Robes and hat.
21. Your TV? My what now?
22. Your pet? Cephy. He's a squid. He lives in my hat.
23. Your computer? Smuggled from the future! Or it was. It's obsolete now.
24. Your life? Long, complicated, and far from finished.
25. Your mood? Planful.
26. Missing? Par.
27. What are you thinking about right now? Sweet vengeance.
28. Your car? A six-foot stick that flies.
29. Your work? Is finished.
30. Your summers? Elsewhere, where it isn't summer.
31. Your relationship status? Widower, twice. Done now.
32. Your favorite color? Fuchsia.
33. When is the last time you laughed? Today
34. Last time you cried? 2261.
35. School? A very, very long time ago. Or every day, depending on how you look at it.

Well, finally done. This thing is bloody long. Not as long as, say, the entire "How I Became a Supervillain" saga, but much longer than any individual part.

Some of you might have vague memories of having checked here in the last day or so and seen a post that looked remarkably like this one, only riddled with typos, unclear writing, self-contradictions, and turns of phrase more appropriate to a self-insert fanfic written by a 12-year-old girl, such as describing hair as "flowing".

I assure you, that was entirely a product of your imagination.

( Parthenice and the Inevitable Power Creep )

Hee-hee. "Trampy boots". Get it?

It's turning out very long, and it's heavy on action, which I don't usually write that much.

Also, I got completely derailed for a couple of days by the acquisition of Gaiman's awesome Marvel 1602.

Still, back on track and will have it for you tomorrow. For real, this time.

Probably.

Working on writing up a short adventure Parthenice and I had while I was training her in the art of supervillainy. Unfortunately, while the adventure was short, the story is proving to be less so. I'm 1,300 words in and we've almost left. I'll try to have it done tonight, but it may not be up until tomorrow.

I hate hate HATE the new Update Journal screen. It has a great number of flaws, but probably the worst of all is that, at least on my 1400x1050 display, the Post to Journal button is just off the bottom of the screen.

It's an old and lazy meme.

Ask me anything. I'll answer unless I deem it Knowledge Man Was Not Meant to Know.

So, I watched the Doctor Who Christmas Special, which was execrable. That in turn led me to download Torchwood, with the exception of about 1.5 episodes was eye-searingly horrible. Then I started downloading Battlestar Galactica (the remake), which is actually quite good.

I'm midway through the second season (just watched Resurrection Ship), and I have concluded that there are two basic laws which govern the Battlestar Galactica universe.

1) Apollo is always right.
2) No one ever listens to Apollo.

Two other observations: Baltar is one of the great TV SF characters of all time. And I hate President Rosslyn for exactly the same reason I hated Sheridan: she's power-hungry, incompetent, stubborn, and dangerous to everyone around her, and her only saving grace is that she's absurdly lucky. But to the Sheridan-template she adds religious fanatacism, drug addiction, and hallucinations. Great leader, there.

Your clothing sucks. Seriously. It sucks hard. Your clothing is tight, constricting, and governed by a byzantine labyrinth of rules that no sane sophont should ever have to try to master. The mad drooling of an idiot god cannot compare to the complexities of the necktie or the incomprehensible babblings of those women that stand outside awards shows and act bitchy about something-or-other.

It didn't always suck. You had the right idea in the Middle Ages, or at least your monks did: simple, weather-appropriate, cheap, concealing, and plain. In terms of looks, the 18th century was great, too, but I would not want to actually try to wear those things. Nowadays, your clothes manage to simultaneously be complicated, boring, and hard to wear.

Workplaces are the worst. Women can wear pretty much whatever they want in the office -- pants, long skirts, knee-length skirts, sweaters, suits, sandals -- so of course they inevitably choose to wear the least comfortable thing they can find. Men, on the other hand, are forbidden to wear anything comfortable, presumably because there is a possibility they might choose to do so. Knee-length shorts, sandals, shirts without buttons, all banned, and of course the tie is required.

There is no imagineable article of clothing less useful than a tie. Even socks are more useful than ties -- they have the virtue of being easier to clean than the shoes they protect, much like coffee filters. Only the French could invent the tie (look it up, this is true) as a handy napkin, then proceed to make it out of silk, thus ensuring that it cannot ever actually be used to wipe anything!

Don't even get me started on your shoes.