You didn’t think we’d forgotten the Dark Lord and the Dwarves while working on that Goblincore Guide, did you?
The LAST thing she had intended to build was Alice’s Spell For Destroying Very Large Things.
I mean, she meant it in an impressive, “Look at how smart I am, and what if I used it, haha” sort of way. If you can’t enhance your social life, at least CHOOSE for them all to have a certain fear of you. As if you’d actually set such a thing off! She expected it to improve her day-to-day circumstances enough to let her smile sometimes, right before bed.
It had instead made her incredibly miserable, ending her life as an academic shut-in…and worse off, killing the BUZZ she’d had from sheer Creation.
We might explain the mechanics of it later. Alice was in “Near Death Studies”, which we might call something like “Graduate School”.
Alice, who ended up drinking very rarely, got rather drunk that night and told people about it.
The visiting Bard laughed, thinking it was a joke. Then he saw his jolly audience grow somber in a sort of anti-sun radius spreading cold and unpleasantness out form Alice,
“But what wouldja DO with it? Take out a city. Take out a NATION, you feed it enough. Very tempting for any Necro with a big graveyard nearby? Be hard to control…so many dead…plague from rotting bodies…”
–The more depressed Alice became about her invention, the more she talked about just how MUCH damage it would do.
-At one point, she got on a table, and, instead of taking off her clothes like a respectable college student, she began explaining each equation, writing them with a sharp broom on the Ceiling.
-Some of the wises Magical Academes can read some of it.
-Nobody but Alice understands it.
-But they decided to buy Alice more drinks in the hope she’d forget.
* * *
Three days later, Alice awoke with something which can only be called a ‘headache’ because, while she could feel it down to her toes, she wasn’t actively trying to remove her TOES when she became conscious.
Fortunately, she’d burnt all her notes.
Unfortunately, they were all literature notes from her Lit 701 class, which she hated.
Every inch of the mechanism diagram was intact… and while she was drunk, she could see how it all made sense to her.
And Atlantis, which had, at one point, given her the worst stomachache of her life through not being careful with its prize oysters…wasn’t anymore.
And she realized she’d awakened when the white noise below became so loud that it gave itself a decent, definable sound:
It was the sound of thousands—tens of thousands?—more? …of people, all praying.
To her.
Alice reached for the hair of the dog that bit her, realized she’d drunk her emergency bottle, and pulled out a rather dirty vial of non-fatal pixie remover. She chugged it into sobriety. She wore her black robe because she couldn’t put on anything else.
Vaguely, she walked to the third floor window and thought she’d try to talk some sense into the mob:
“DARK LORD ALICE! DARK LORD ALICE!” it chanted, over and over.
Thus end all who dwell in which Graduate Student Was Not Meant To Know.
* * *
No, seriously, Alice COULD understand it. She remembered how she did it, a fact of which she informed the very, very concerned Dean of Students.
Alex’s Spell For Destroying Large things, reasoned the Principle, the Superintentend, the Vice Principles, and the Heads of the eternal internal political squabble which is generally called “White Wizardry” had two major drawbacks:
- Since nobody really understood but Alice, nobody BUT Alex could cast it.
- It COULD be upped. It COULD be made bigger. It was just about big enough, on its tiniest setting, to destroy the entire School. It could certainly destroy a nation. But it could NOT be lowered. You couldn’t, say, do an amusing magic trick where people surprise you with a birthday cake and you explode the candles, unless your body isn’t physically there and you hate all of your co-workers and everything in buildings around you.
The immediate Politicking of unspeakable sorts which began soon after people found this discvery for her to use Alice’s First Spell—a spell which would, if you were in trouble or in a very bad place, teleport you to someplace, no one specific place, safe, about the right temperature, with breathable air and other generalized capacity for reason human biological comfort and also nobody. Fricking. Else.
There she thought.
By the time she’d come back, the Rulers, their Advisors, Vizers, and (of course) their Wizards, Bards, and Palantirs had gathered together to decide they’d best a pre-emptive surrender so Alice would be so happy she wouldn’t need to destroy anything they, personally, liked in order to prove her power.
By the time SHE’D come back, she’d decided she wanted to spend a whole lot more time around a whole lot less people, and that’s BEFORE the horde of False Worshippers.
So Alice got her Dark, Foreboding, and most of all, Far As Hell Citadel, Far As Hell away, and then one of the particular leaders of the Men of the West, after a long conference with the Elf-King, declared war on a enemy who wouldn’t hear about it for a long time.
Then they all sent her long letters of fealty, and she came to rule.
They immediately began the Great Rebellion, which they didn’t feel a serious need to tell her about, but it was quite loud and visible.
Thus it is.
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Try Pickup Lines For A Giant Mutant Alien Praying Mantis — Jeff Mach Writes.
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