Chapter Two: The First Law

Mitch scratched his head as they turned the street corner. He had seen much since his eyes were opened to the occult, and he was still alive, which probably indicated he had a pretty good handle on the situation. Now either his opinion of his perceptive power was unfounded, or the situation had simply changed without him knowing he needed a new handle.

“Domingo’s South of the Border Eatery?”

“They make the best salsa in the world. They used to be over on Franklin Avenue and then they decided to switch locations. The old place is a mexican Restaraunt too now, but the owners have no taste or skill. I’m positive they just grab random mexican food stuff from the supermarket, throw it together in the kitchen, then Nuke it for about thirty seconds.”

“Maybe I’ve overlooked something, but I’m not sure how mystic wisdom comes from nachos.”

“ALL wisdom comes from nachos. The Nachos made here. All other nachos are but pale reflections and cheap knock-offs.”

“It’s getting harder and harder to know whem you’re joking.”

“That’s why I never joke. Ever. Or maybe I always joke. The result’s the same either way. Pop quiz, you know why?”

Mitch stumbled a bit on an upthrust fragment of sidewalk, then caught himself. “Because people who want to think you’re serious will take what you say at face value, and people who want to find humor in what you say will do that too, without any input from you.”

John pulled open the door and held it as an elderly couple slowly walked out of it. The woman looked like she was going to thank him, then saw part of the tattoo on his arm, which was not entirely concealed by his “I Know Violence Isn’t The Answer, I Got It Wrong On Purpose” T-Shirt. The look on her face turned sour, and John responded by sticking out his tongue, a tongue Mitch did not notice was pierced when they talked earlier. If it had even been pierced at all then.

The couple, shocked as they were, quickly moved out of the way of the two men. John ducked inside after Mitch, then stuck his tongue out at the apprentice.

There was no piercing at all.

Mitch’s leg seemed to lose traction for a moment and he slid backwards into the door frame.

“Surprised?”

“Wheh… ah… where did that tongue stud thing go? Or come from?”

John shrugged. “I have a very maneuverable tongue. I was able to take it apart and hide the peices in my cheeks.”

“But that still would have left a hole where the metal would go. Did you hide that in your cheeks too?”

“Of course not. If I did that then the tongue stud would fall out.”

“Ow. This is making my brain hurt.”

John smiled a fairly smug smile. “In about five minutes, having your brain hurt will seem like a good idea by comparison. You know what five alarm chili is?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“This place has hot sauce that rates around… oh… fourteen alarms and a cowbell.”

***

Mitch looked at the shallow bowl of red sauce, then up at John, who was already scooping a corn chip into his own bowl of sauce.

“This is salsa? I thought salsa was supposed to be… you know… chunky. With whole parts of the peppers and tomatos that went into making it.”

John popped the chip in his mouth and began chewing, then swallowed and grinned. “Such folly. For maximum flavor potential, the salsa must be able to hold a large amount of the molecules in the spices that make it so tasty. Any tridimensional space in your bowl of salsa containing tomatoes or peppers or alien spacecraft can logically not contain such molecules, and will therefore not be as tasty.”

Mitch frowned and shook his head. “That could only influence the amount of molecules that could be in the salsa as a whole. You could take out the chunks and have salsa with the same number of molecules as chunk-less salsa. There’s just more of it this way. It has nothing to do with the density of the molecules and thefore nothing to do with taste.”

John nodded and reached for another chip. “Absolutely correct. You got a good sense of logic and reasoning. Almost seems a shame to warp it with the unnatural.”

“Warp it?”

“Context time. There’s all sorts of different ways to fling spells, different schools of magick. All of it driven by the power of a focussed mind. And I don’t mean that in the sense that you concentrate and suddenly you can make people forget their own names. I mean that in the sense that your mind is wired so that the only way you could not concentrate was if you were unconscious.”

Mitch carefully scooped some sauce with a chip and tasted it. Nerve endings on the tip of his tongue went wild and he quickly reached for his glass of water to cool things down. It helped, but not a whole lot, and he found that tears had developed in the corners of his eyes.

“That… that sounds a lot like Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.”

“It would be, except for one minor detail. Normal obsessions have no validation to the senses, or conventional reasoning. I met a guy… oh, way back… he refused to use an oven because he thought one of his cats was inside and would be killed. It didn’t matter if he had all three of them in plain sight in the next room, because foundation of the problem is that you doubt your own senses, and sometimes your reasoning. There is always the nagging fear in the back of your head that asks, ‘What if the world is not as it seems?’ And so obsessive compulsives have to try to live for two worlds. One everybody shares, this concensus world, and one they can’t even see, but might exist. And the consequences of ignoring that potential universe are too terrible to risk.”

“So how could that possibly fit into spell casting? It sounds like being focussed all the time, and yet having your attention divided between the physical world and a theoretical one, would be mutually exclusive.”

“Only when you approach it from that angle. See, most compulsions are failsafes against that theoretical universe. They don’t do shit in this one except draw stares, unless they start out of a true danger like checking to make sure the door is locked when you go out, or keeping track of your wallet. Magick obsessions and compulsions DO have an impact on the world everyone lives in. That is the difference that makes a difference.”

“But wait a minute. If obsession is the drive behind magick, or at least the fuel, how come there aren’t kids who start casting spells about Magic the Gathering or the Backstreet Boys? Or Trekkies who can make phasers actually work? Surely with all that obsession there’d have to be some sort of magickal effect, here or there.”

“I never said they didn’t. The difference is that obsession, like you said, is the drive. But an engine doesn’t do a lot of good if you have no transmission. And the transmission is this: Paradox.”

Mitch blinked. “Paradox?”

“Or contradiction. They are technically different things if you want to split hairs, but they have the exact same effect. Remember what I said about belief?”

“Believing that something is real makes it real. So believing in two things that don’t agree makes reality unstable?”

“That’s correct, if putting it crudely and also ignoring the time element. See, a paradox typically contains either two terms that don’t agree, or one term that doesn’t agree with the context that makes it valid, thereby refuting itself. There are other versions, but we should keep it simple for now. What magick uses is a paradox pertaining to the obsession of the magician. Since we’re in the business of flesh and living tissue, we’ll use a paradox about the human body. Exercise breaks down muscle tissue, and yet makes you stronger. Now, don’t disect that, don’t take it apart. Do NOT try to make it work rationally. Just hold the concept as a whole in your head if you can: Destruction causes construction. Injury causes strength.”

Mitch looked at the hot sauce in front of him and scooped a heaping amount of it on a corn chip, then popped it in his mouth. Taste buds went crazy and tears instantly began welling in the man’s eyes. He wiped them away with the back of his hand.

“He who can destroy something… controls it.”

John nods. “You are catching on, grasshoppa. The essence of the paradox element is that you have millions and millions of people who all believe that the world should be some way. Things fall down, not up. Fire burns wood. Cuts and bruises hurt. But they are not concentrating on these so called physical laws. If anything, they do it subconsciously, with a fraction of the power of their minds. When you add it up, it’s very formidable, but it can only form an average, a gestalt, a consensus where everyone can meet in the middle. You ever tried to use a car, or fridge, or gun that was designed by committee?”

“No, but I met a lot of people on a lot of committees in college. I suppose you refer to the fact that every six years when they do agree, they’ve reached a compromise so riddled with conflict it can’t support itself.”

“Exactly. Like I said, there’s a lot of minds behind it, so reality is very robust. But it’s riddled with contradictions. By using paradox as a brace against one common idea, you can use it to refute another one. You just have to be determined and your logic must be internally consistent. I use the paradox of destruction causing growth to draw power from it. I have proven, then and there, that the world is wrong, and stabbing myself in the side is not a detriment.”

“So it’s like the universe is poorly constructed and you just exploit the weak spots?”

John shrugged. “What can I say? Quality work takes time and skill. People are lazy.”

Mitch was suddenly aware of someone beside the booth and looked up to see a waitress carrying a tray.

“Here you go, one smothered burrito and one chicken fajita. Also, this man in the corner wanted me to give you this note.”

She put down their plates and fished in her pocket for a peice of paper that she handed to John. He looked it over, then turned around presumably to look at the man who sent the note. After a few seconds, John turned back to his meal and started attacking the fajita.

“Friend of yours?”

John shrugged. “You could say that. Called Dr. Vague. I heard he was out of jail but I didn’t know he was in town.”

“Why do they call him Dr. Vague?”

“It’s a long story that makes about as much sense as chemotherapy. They pump you full of chemicals that are not healthy for the human body, hoping the cancer will get greedy, eat lots of it, and die before you do. Do you know what those chemicals do in a perfectly healthy body?”

“I give up. Tell me.”

“They cause cancer. Assuming the tumor dies first, you’ve still been exposed to shit that knocks down your white blood cell count and angered many of your body’s cells enough to rebel against the organized autocracy with the brain at the top and form a people’s organ, with an economy so out of control they don’t know when to stop cell division.”

“So cancer is communism of the body?”

“You could say that, though I was thinking in terms of a general revolution against the entrenched power structure, with the shortsightedness of people who don’t know what it is they want as long as it isn’t what they have now. Vive la telomeres!”

“I must admit I’ve never known anyone that could connect biology to politics like that.”

“I can connect ANYTHING to biology. And soon you will too. Dun dun DUN.”

“What was that?”

“The dun dun dun? It seemed appropriate.”

“If you say so. You going to eat those onions?”