Tag: magic

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A Little Rice

I’ll resist the urge to double back to edit the previous two days’ work as a lead in to this third. I think we all know how that would go if I did. I will note that there are a few things I’d like to clean up back there that I’ll pretend are emended as I move forward.

“The trill of an incoming text startled her. It read: He warded your phone…”

Her anger at being left behind seethed and she tried to throw her phone into the road—to hear it crack into the pavement and splash glass and circuitry over the gravel—but she couldn’t make her hand let go of the thing. She made a couple more incomplete casts before dropping it roughly, but safely, into her lap.

“Well, shit,” she echoed.

Karen assumed that if Malachi warded her phone he’d probably hidden her too. There was no use flagging down an unlikely passing car for help, so she grabbed up her phone and searched for how to treat a sprained ankle. Between HEM—which sounded like marketing—and RICE (rest, ice, compression, elevation) she knew she could handle the latter.

Once she pulled herself up to the bench and out of the dirt, she brushed off her gritty palms and began the short incantation to cool her ankle. She’d both frozen and boiled glasses of water and been commended for her quickness, but she’d never practiced precise control of either. She didn’t want to turn her ankle to ice, so she aimed the spell at her slipper first to cool it slowly then carefully moved her focus over to her ankle. The chill immediately brought relief to her hot flesh and swelling joint. She chanted in a timer and left the ankle cool for a bit while she thought about how to apply compression.

[running out of time so I’ll just list a few things as notes for later:]
– looks for something non-magical for compression first because of Professor Carrol’s training about avoiding magic if you can
– cant find anything so she tweaks a ‘push’ spell into the shape of a C, but ultimately can’t keep it in place
– next she works on breaking the ward on her phone. She can’t but she does discover a timer there and has to decide between calling 911 and waiting for and explaining it all to a Highway Patrol officer or just waiting
-eventually she gets back home where she puts her decision to protect herself in to action

419 words on day 797

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A Warded Phone

Karen had managed to crawl back to the shade and was resting on the dirt, back against the concrete picnic table’s bench, with her injured leg extended. She may have been pissed that Malachi left her stranded along highway 56 between Clayton and Springer, but she was angry at herself for allowing it to happen.

The other problem was that she understood why—and agreed. Which paradoxically cooled the first anger, but simmered the second. She wasn’t an easy girlfriend for a man like Malachi to have, she thought. He was serving his first tour in Vietnam the year she was born. [fact|logic check that] She supposed her youth made her exuberant about being with him while it just made him embarassed, and he was trying to protect her the only way he could because she wasn’t doing enough to protect herself.

Karen shuffled her phone out of her front pocket and was glad to see a single bar of coverage. “Hi, Margaret. It’s Karen. I need a text-hop…and I need your help with something else…I’ll tell you when I get there.”

Karen hung up the phone and texted Margaret a single character: ‘K’. When nothing happened she checked her coverage—still a bar. The trill of an incomming text startled her. It read: He warded your phone.

[Action]

217 words on day 796

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Like A Can of Tuna

Work and weekends have taken a toll on my production in the last small measure of days. I’m up early this Monday—though not terribly—hoping I’ll not sacrifice the writing today.

I dug out rocks again yesterday and again drifted into some thoughts on worldbuilding and mundane magic. Saturday I asked what the consequences would be if magic were used to sweep a floor or do dishes on a regular basis not just when your fairie godmother swings into town for the prince’s ball. I compared mundant magic to electricity, but didn’t explicitly make the connection to the way we ignore electricity everyday.

I think that mundane magic would experience the same troubles. People would no longer find it interesting. They’d find it useful and ubiquitous. When it ran out they’d still be flipping switches in the dark while their brains stared blankly like cats at a can of tuna.

I don’t exactly know how I got from there to this next stop. And I’m not sure how it becomes useful in a story world I ain’t writ yet. But I wonder if we real people like the idea of magic because of it’s newness, because it holds the possibility of giving our adult brains the chance to learn something new. Truly new. That maybe there is a feeling we get as toddlers and children as we experience everything for the first or fifth time and not for the five-millionth. The feeling of growing a brain. Of wet virgin neurons painting our lives on blank sheets. A feeling we crave without knowing. One the seems like it could be satisfied if only we could learn to levitate cars or transform lead into gold or become invisible or fly a broom.

Ok. So now stuff that into a plot and see what squeezes out the other end.

304 words on day 736