An adept wrestles with sleep deprivation, cosmic musing, and termites.

It’s three in the morning.

At least, that’s what the clock says.

There’s a sleepwalker downtown, lives above Johnny Danger’s Rave and Snack Bar. We had a pretty complicated arguement involving his girlfriend and some punk’s spilled drink and my impaired reasoning skills. So as soon as I fall asleep, I know there’s going to be swarms of locusts or snakes the size of bullet trains trying to get me. Or mice. Rats in the walls.

But there aren’t rats in the walls here. Just termites. It’s a cheap apartment. On the one hand, it costs only about two hundred and fifty bucks a month. On the other hand, its only redeeming feature is that it has its own washer and dryer. The dryer doesn’t even work right, but the landlord won’t spring for a replacement or even a replacement part. Balance of power, really. Nobody in this area signs agreements. Paper trails are not good. The bastard can toss out anybody he wants, for any reason; even if they pay rent for the month he can evict them saying they didn’t pay. But he doesn’t, because he’s liable to have his feet eaten off when his shoes come to life. It’s a balanced power thing.

The walls are also thin enough to let sound through easy. I can hear my neighbor and his choice hooker of the night going at it like ferrets on a steady diet of pop rocks and crack cocaine. They say some drug alchemist actually made something like that, and if you eat or drink a certain substance of his choice, it’ll cause your stomach to swell and rupture.

Maybe that’s what actually happened to that kid on the cereal commercials.

I don’t mind hearing them banging tonight, and they really are banging. They’re liable to knock a hole in the wall with the corner of the bed. It’s not out of any perverted thing, it’s just loud and annoying enough to prevent sleep.

He’s a warbuck, I think. Yeah. Collects old coins. Loves money even more than he loves sex, but by only a really narrow margin. Pays top dollar for call girls and escorts, as long as they don’t cost a thousand dollars or more. From the sounds I hear through the walls, which are thin and riddled with termites, I guess he really gets his money’s worth.

Damn termites. Gonna fix them.

Before the cash mage, it was a chaos mage. Funny guy. Cool guy. Think his name was Chance. What are the odds? Ha ha ha. We talked a lot about magick and he gave me the Cliff’s Notes version of Entropomancy at Marcy’s Pool Hall.

Take a box of ball bearings and dump them on a billiard table. No conscious direction to it, just random. Then when they all stop moving, eyeball the distances and groupings between them. They clump together according to the Bell Frequency Curve, because all the bumping and bouncing averages out the energy. Turns out absolute chaos and absolute order are identical. And when you’re a chaos mage, he said, you can control that pattern according to the extent of your presence in the pattern. Whether the energy hits or misses you, you change it, and that gives you an edge. Can’t do it from the outside even if you SEE the pattern, thanks to Heisenberg. Course, just because I understood how it worked didn’t mean I could DO it. It’s the difference between reading a textbook on optics and actually seeing a rainbow. Perhaps it’s just as well.

Tim shot himself in the head playing Russian Roullette. Guess his luck ran out. I really miss him.

I ransack the medical cabinet in the tiny cramped bathroom. Aspirin, tooth brush, toothpaste, sunglasses — what the hell? — floss, pliers, bandages, more bandages — damnit, I thought I told Tina not to put her fricking tampons in here — iodine… aha! Hydrogen Peroxide.

Before Tim, there was a Merchant type there. Fred or Frank or something. Not too bad, but you had to watch him, or he’d really skin you. We worked out a commission thing where he’d hook me up with who was incurably sick, and I’d go fix him up. Or her. They paid me some cash, he’d swear them to secrecy and get a cut of the money, I could pay the rent, everyone was happy.

Then he cheated an old, old clockworker, or so that’s what the man said as he barged in with guns blazing. And it was a fucked up gun, too. About the size of a blow-drier with a big wind up key in the back… and it shot silver dollars. Fred/Frank never had a chance. Even though metallic silver is non-toxic inside the body, the coins made some big holes in the vital organs. Then the old guy shuffled off mumbling about carrots and when they would be done.

Left his “Changemaker” gun behind. I grabbed it during the cleanup operation. You gotta put a bill of some sort into this crank thing, run it through, and then wind up the gun. I don’t know where the silver comes from, or where the paper money goes, and frankly I don’t think opening up the thing is going to tell me how it works.

We buried Frank/Fred out of town, under the dirt floor of an abandoned farm; Tina, Shane, Gaz and myself. Gaz tried to remove some of the silver dollars from the entry wounds, but they wouldn’t move beyond the surface of the skin. I guess you get what you pay for. We played dumb for the police, of course.

There should be a funnel around here somewhere, but every time Tina’s over here she re-arranges everything. If I didn’t know any better I’d say she charges up on it — ah, here we are.

Tina once asked me to explain Epideromancy in terms she could understand. I tried, but the problem with all adept magick is that words are not very well suited to explain feelings. And one of those things common to all magick is that you have to have a feel for it. So I had to read a lot of literature to find the words. I told her that all organic bodies have built in feedback loops that tell when it gets damaged. When damage is detected, the body begins the healing process, and rebuilds the damaged parts stronger, so that it can handle that same level of damage next time around; this is why scar tissue happens. Injury, therefore, is a natural prerequisite for improvement. No pain, no gain.

All the mage really does is devote more resources and brainpower to the healing and rebuilding and such; it’s normally a subconscious automatic thing with only a small amount of mental force backing it up. Blasts and Greater Warping are when the order of the instructions for healing the body are reversed, and transmitted to the target’s body through pheromones, dermal electrical charge, and what can only be called animal magnetism.

I hear a snap of some material — probably a riding crop, but it could be something else — and a yelp, and I can smell blood. Mr. Moneybags next door and his “friend” must be having fun. Now THERE’S an image I’m never going to get out of my head. I still try to shake it out and pour more peroxide into the spray gun.

Magick is hard to explain because now explaination is ever enough to tell you what to do. You have to actually be behind the wheel of a car at some point to learn to drive, no matter how much they tell you about the engine, the clutch, the steering wheel, anti-lock brakes, and remember to buckle up, it’s the law. That’s half of why it’s so scary to the mundanes, I guess. The other half is that when you can twist reality to suit yourself, you have about as much power as someone with a revolver. It’s slightly more versatile than a gun, but it’s still an expression of power. Even more so than a gun, really, because you can take a guy’s gun away, but seperating an adept from his magick is harder.

I suspect magick will never really be acceptible to everyone, unless we reach a point where everyone can use it. People wouldn’t like it if crazy people ran around with fully loaded shotguns all the time, and that’s a pretty good description of what a whole bunch of mages would be. So looks like the guys at the Golden Arches have a big job ahead of them.

Termites don’t digest wood on their own, you know. They have protozoa in their guts that release anti-cellulose enzymes. I managed to whip up something like that in my saliva a long time ago, chewed my way out of a locked room like that one guy in the James Bond Movies. The guy with metal teeth. Jaws I think.

It tasted TERRIBLE.

The hydrogen peroxide is going to kill or injure those things in the termite’s guts, in theory, and then they shall starve to death. Very fitting. I pick at the plaster in the corner until I get a good look at the wood-eaters. It’s a good night. About three thirty now, a little after, really. I’m wide awake after I slammed my finger in the medicine cabinet… course now I have to shoot the spray gun with my other hand, but that’s a fair trade.

Time to taste the rainbow, suckas.