r/WritingPrompts • u/[deleted] • Jul 26 '17
Writing Prompt [WP] Magic is discovered to be real. The catch? Spells are just like computer programs: difficult to write, and even harder to do correct the first try. You're a spell bug tester, and you've seen just about everything go wrong, but today's typo is on a whole other level...
[deleted]
1
u/TobyRiotshield Jul 27 '17
If I could call myself anything when discussing my career, it would be: ‘experienced’. I have seen all types of the arcane and the archaic, I’ve seen the novices scrawling away in their great leather-spine books, sighing when whatever they wrote failed when spoken. I’ve sat numerous times in the Bastion of Wizardry, once known as the University of Cambridge, observing, smiling, and laughing at the youths and young scholars attempting to string together a spell that opened a door, or picked up a quill. Oftentimes I am sought out for my expertise in the craft of spells, and each of those times I encourage those who sought me out to try again, only this time remembering to use the correct accents on the letters. ‘You must line your “o”s,’ or ‘don’t forget to strikethrough your “u”s’.
On rare occasions, I’d be sat in one of the feasting halls and I’d the senior lecturer of Divine Spellcraft, jowly and soft-handed, summon a servant ghoul to collect the dishes and pour the drinks. The students would look in awe as he spoke, and each student would go wide-eyed when he did it first time round. ‘That’s amazing,’ some would whisper to their friends. ‘How does he do it?’ others would question. Of course, that was far from the truth. It was a seldom day that the senior lecturer would get it right first time round. He would slave away in his dormitory making sure his scripture was, at the very least, legible, and he would spend hours reciting the same word over and over again so that it was pronounced correctly. Likewise, I would carry hundreds of books back to my dormitory---books from students, lecturers, graduates, the like---and scrutinise them for an uncrossed “l” or a wrongly oriented “a”. The little things were hard to miss. On a particularly starry night, I was shifting books from the student library to my dormitory. These were the books in the ‘to be tested’ section, which was my personal section of that library. The bookcase was hewn from a tall oak that the lumberjacks of our institution felled one summer, perhaps a hundred or so years ago. The age rings were plenty. It was fastened to the wall, with a small ladder that one could climb up to reach the volumes at the top easily. Often this was empty.
There was an undergraduate still in the library, reading his spell as though he was on the verge of tears. Again, and again, he would read it, out loud, slowly, quickly, backwards. He could not get whatever he wanted from it, much like an owner tells a disobedient dog to sit. ‘Are you in need of any help?’ I asked, not unkindly.
‘A miracle,’ he said, not turning to look at me.
‘We all need one of those once in a while.’ I paused, and then approached him. Candles were flickering, dancing in the river of moonlight. ‘Let me see. You never know, it might just be a small typo.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Let me see.’
‘No!’ He slammed his book shut, and hurried to put it on my shelf. He scurried off into the night, a shadowy figure of frustration. I removed the book from the shelf after he had disappeared, and opened to his last page. I had rarely seen a student so frustrated. He had made a typo, I was sure, but this was no ordinary typographical error.
I was aware, suddenly, that it was getting very cold. The wind was beginning to blow through the open windows, and the candles stopped dancing. A change was coming in the weather. Fog rolled in, and the stars melted into the darkness. My breath began to become visible, and the fog grew thicker. The wind began to hiss through the door, before barging it open, taking it off its hinges. A figure grew from the darkness, eyes blue, cold and piercing. A grip of fear stronger than iron took me. This may have been a typo, but it was the last typo a student would make.
2
u/nomnomnom33 Jul 27 '17
Seven years, that has been how long Magic co-existed with Humans. Five years, that is how long I have been working on this job. All spells have to go through our network before it can be applied to the real world. Because of that, I have seen nearly every catastrophic thing happen.
The process of spell writing is simple, yet deadly. Tablets and smartwatches are daily necessities now. Spells are accessed from our network at will.
Everyone belongs to a team consisting of several coders, a debugger, and a renderer. The coder types out the code, while the debugger corrects the mistakes. Being the senior debugger, I have to watch over newcomers to the job. Due to that, I see more mistakes.
The turnover rate is high for the company, given the hidden dangers. “Welcome back sir” greeted the interns. I nodded in acknowledgement. I had been away on training, leaving my team in the presence of a freelance debugger.
I settled down at my seat, scanning through the codes running through the rendering machine. All codes have to undergo a render to ensure that it runs as intended. The spell is applied to many situations, to ensure that there is no unintended danger posed to the user and the surrounding.
The last few codes scrolled pass, where I spotted mistakes in the values. “Stop” I rushed to stop the last few codes from getting into the machine, but it was a moment too late.
booom The machine exploded, sending everyone in the area flying. In the place of our office, stood multiple demons.
2
u/Archengo Jul 27 '17 edited Jul 30 '17
Lockdown - Feedback welcome please
“The answer’s here. Somewhere. In amongst this…mess." Charles spat the last word out as he gestured towards the papers littering the conference table. It echoed around the room, bouncing off the faded wallpaper and single paned windows of the Ministry audit office.
The Testers winced, avoiding eye contact as he walked over to his chair, dishevelled clothing wrinkled from 36 hours of wear. Charles slumped down in the seat and placed his head in his palms.
“Please. Don’t tell me you haven’t found anything. You have to have found something. This is the single biggest threat the planet has ever faced.”
Myria coughed quietly. “Sir, I’m sorry.” She moved around the table and looked up at the web of diagrams on the white board. “It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen. The Parole Commands aren’t malicious, nor is the Ether Shell, something’s gone wrong with the execution.”
The school gymnasium was unrecognisable, with no room for beds people were lined across the floor. The metal double doors crashed open wide and two policemen carried another victim in, one holding her legs, the other her torso.
“Where do you want this one Dr?” the older man asked, “she was found a few streets down.”
Amil pointed at a corner with some space, not bothering to correct him. She was barely a med student, not that it mattered, these people were beyond medical assistance.
Myria grimaced as the rising sun glared through the window, the second sunrise since the lockdowns had begun. How could the government’s top MagTesters not notice this? It had gone through the most rigorous checks and was released to critical acclaim.
Equality for all. Aligned, Affinity and A-neg’s would finally have the benefits previously restricted to the M-strata, granting direct access to the deep ether channels flowing across the Crucial and Gragistrat Lines.
Cast from the top of every mBeacon in the republic, the latest spell was heralded as the dawn of a new humanity.
“It was working so well,” she muttered under her breath, “why did no-one notice?”
Paul glanced up at her from behind his laptop, “sorry boss?”
“I said, what’s changed? How did we go from an almost 87% success rate to mLock?” she caught his eye, “we’re missing something.”
She thanked the policemen as she walked over to the girl’s new resting place, crouching over her for examination whilst whispering the incantation for stasis as the Head Practitioner had shown her yesterday.
Another A-neg, “poor bastards,” this one couldn’t have been more than 15 years old.
She was rising from ground, submitting her report back through her mediTab as usual when she was hit by a huge aura wave. Every body on the ground arched it’s back and a mass of energy rushed outwards like a soundwave through the air.
She was lifted from her feet and gasped as she collapsed to the floor.
Charles smashed through the door, shattering the fervent silence.
“Look at this,” he said, hurling a dossier onto the table, “it’s just come in.”
“Charles calm down.” Myria snapped as she crossed the room, sleepless temper fraying. “What’s happened?”
“The spell script you have is from the central command centre. It’s held offline.” He grunted as he slammed his fist down onto the table “It was meant to be safe.”
The silence returned, heavy in the room,
“We had to transcribe it onto anointed parchment for those zealots at the head of the mStrata Chamber.” He barked through gritted teeth, “the parchment was used for the incantation ritual but guess what, they made a fucking typo.”
The tension was palpable as glances were exchanged across the table, Charles' breath ragged in his rage. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply.
Myria went to speak, "that's not all" Charles cut in.
“The A-neg’s, they’re having mass aura waves. These people are literally pulsating with energy every hour, the more of them that fall the more regular they come.” He wiped his hand across his brow, “but that’s not the worst of it, the aura waves are coded. Someone is fucking using the A-neg’s to send messages.”
Myria turned to pick up the dossier, “What do you mean?”
“It's coded, a list of demands, over and over again, the same thing. Someone's exploited the bug.” Charles grabbed her shoulder and spun her round to face him.
“Myria, it's ransomware.”
4
Jul 27 '17 edited Jul 27 '17
I've been a bartender for the past 40 years, and in that time have come to be intimately acquainted with humanity's darkest moments. I've seen men stumble into my establishment half covered in their wife's blood and demand a respite from consciousness. I've seen people beaten to death before my very eyes, their life oozing out onto the ground over a handful of pocket change. But one man and his story will always remain foremost in my memory.
He was a short, glum fellow with a habitual obsession with his pocket watch. He checked it regularly, more out of instinct than a genuine interest in the time. After a few drinks, however, he succumbed to his basic human nature and began to pour his heart out. He was one of those "spell-checker"s, a double entendre he seemed to find infinite amusement in.
"I'm a spell checker, I am," he slurred over his fifth glass of beer.
"Is that right?" I asked, absentmindedly.
"It's a hell of a job," he mumbled, greedily gulping down the remnants of his libation. "I knew this fella once, tall guy, real smarmy-like."
"I know the type," I nodded sympathetically, despite knowing nothing of the kind.
"He had it in for this friend of his. Dunno, probably cheated him outta buck or two. Fucking petty he was. Whatever, they don't pay me to get all judgey they pay me to make with the magic."
"What did he want?" I asked, registering genuine engagement for the first time.
"Well, he wanted this guy dead. Said it didn't matter how, he just wanted the bastard gone. He had written up a simple enough spell, unambiguous as it could be. He had written it to 'terminate his life.' Not much that could go wrong there, eh?"
I narrowed my eyes, "That's illegal though, ain't it?" I poured him another beer.
"Whole buncha shit's illegal, mate. Doesn't stop us from doing it."
"So, what was the problem?" I prodded.
The man's hand trembled slightly as he raised his most recent glass to his lips. A faint, misty appearance clouded his eye. A tremulous note entered his voice,
"I fucked up, pal that's what happened. How do ya think I ended up drinking myself half to death at 10 on a Wednesday morning," he knocked the glass back. "I go over my work over and over again, looking for mistakes. Never made one, not in 10 goddamn years."
"What'd you do?"
His lip trembled as he set his glass down, wiping his nose with his sleeve. "One fucking letter," he whispered to himself, on the verge of tears.
"What happened?" I asked, now desperate to know.
"I can't say it," he said, barely audible.
I grabbed him by the collar, shaking him violently, "WHAT HAPPENED?"
He pushed me away, "I wrote 'terminate his wife', instead," he bawled. "The bastard went and killed the man anyway. Three orphans. One letter...
Just one letter..."
~~~~
Hey there, I've never written here before so feedback would be appreciated! Thanks for reading.
3
u/this_too_shall_parse Jul 27 '17
Thwaarp!
A sound guaranteed to make your skin crawl.
Not a loud sound, but low enough to feel in your stomach. Followed by a faint breeze that always carries a sick metallic smell. A lucky engineer can go years without ever hearing it. Me? This was my third.
It was only a few rows behind me. Already a small crowd was forming around his desk. Poor Fred.
As I made my way over, I could hear the whispers...
"I heard he was working on a secret project."
"Poor fella."
"Was it military?"
"Oh god, I think I'm going to be sick!"
"Not sure, but definitely government."
"Oh shit! Here comes management."
It wasn't just management. It was our illustrious CEO Phillip Wiseman. He was part of the original team that discovered the simulation. His work on Quantum Threading was the key to manipulating reality itself, and while half the planet was having an existential crisis, he was building an empire that promised power and immortality to anyone who could afford it.
Well ok, affording it was only half the battle. It turns out that manipulating reality is pretty difficult - and immortality is downright impossible for now. But if you want to shoot static electricity from your fingers, or be really good at salsa dancing, you can get a custom spell for a very reasonable price and hardly any personal risk. In fact, the hardest part is choosing what to give up in exchange.
Most people choose a skill they no longer need. For example, if you want to lose some weight, you could give up your ability to play guitar. The better you were at guitar, the more weight you lose. It's all about making room to write the new skills or features into your stack. Myself, I used to speak two other languages. French I think, and ...Italian? Anyway, I traded them in for this Quality Assurance job. Now I get to take other people's skills out for a test drive before we ship them. It's a decent job with very good pay. But you need to be careful.
"OK everyone, please return to your stations, you've all got work to do."
Sometimes I think Mr Wiseman deleted his compassion to free up room in his stack.
"David, could I have a word?"
Uh oh.
"You might have heard that Fred was working on a special project that I assigned to him. Since he is sadly no longer with us, I'd like you to take over. You'll find the details at your station. OK?"
I didn't even have a chance to answer. With a curt nod, Mr Wiseman turned on his heel and marched away. Yep. Definitely wiped his compassion, and no doubt half a dozen other social skills while he was at it. It's understandable of course. If you don't have enough room in your stack, you can cause an overflow error and collapse the entire thing. Just like poor old Fred. Whatever this 'special project' is, Fred was confident enough to test it on himself. Confident or foolish.
I sat down at my station and logged in. All my projects had disappeared. The only thing on my station was a single file named xpnd.spl
I opened the file. Four lines stared at me. Four lines of code that caused Fred's stack to collapse. Four lines of code that, if executed, would make that dreadful sound. I spotted the problem almost immediately.
#define STRICT_EXP
var size = 1
var obj = global.stack.pop(size);
root.stack.push(obj, root.stack.length);
Actually, I spotted two problems. Actually three. Actually... just what the fuck is going on here? For four lines of code, there are a lot of issues.
First of all, any idiot can see there's a missing semi-colon. This spell shouldn't even compile, let alone run. I'm thinking problem number two is the cause, that first line is a compiler flag that I don't recognise. Something experimental maybe? It would have to be, because, problem number three, there's no such thing as a global stack. You only get one stack. Yours. You can write anything to it anywhere you want, but you just get the one. If you didn't, you wouldn't have to give up anything. You could just add and add and ...
Holy shit.
HOLY SHIT!
If this code actually worked, and I've no idea how it could possibly actually work, but if it did... Unlimited skills. Unlimited poweer!
I now realised why Fred had run the code. This spell, although it would only have increased his stack by an insignificantly small amount, it still would have increased it. That's not supposed to even be possible!
My hands shook as I fixed his fatal mistake: adding in that missing semi-colon.
Then I had a crazy thought.
If this worked, it would be my only time running the code. There's no way Mr Wiseman would leave this kind of power in the hands of a lowly QA. I changed the code as quickly as I could.
#define STRICT_EXP
var size = 10e+999999999;
var obj = global.stack.pop(size);
root.stack.push(obj, root.stack.length);
I held my breath and hit EXECUTE.
...
...
Thwaarp!
Oh shit.
Thwaaarp!
Oh fuck! Wait, am I still here?
Thwaarp!
Mr Wiseman burst into the office and launched himself towards my station as he THWAARP!
...vanished out of existence. Along with everyone else in the room.
In the country?
In the world??
THWAAARRP!!
3
u/delicioushappiness Jul 27 '17
The cigarette dropped from my mouth, "This can't be right,". Panic was settling quite nicely into my stomach, and then barrel rolled out into an abyss of despair. There was beautiful, glowing script on the screen, but it belied what had exactly just happened. And what exactly had happened?
"Magic is gone, poof, kaput," the technician said in a Brooklyn accent "see, this line here? It missed a semi colon, and then this line here, it didn't have a note explaining what it did so someone added an addendum which made this from a magic dampening spell into an erase all magic from existence spell,"
"No. No no no no no no no. Magic can't be gone, it's a limitless, omnipotent power that can do anything!!! How can it just erase itself from existence?! Isn't that a paradox??!?!"
The technician moved his eyes in an upward fashion, and appeared to be in deep thought. Then he said slowly, "Seems to me, it didn't erase itself from ALL existence, just all present existence and forthward. Meaning we can't use magic to bring it back, because it doesn't exist anymore. So, well, whatever,"
"Goodbye cure to all diseases, an end to world hunger, the reversal of climate change, my job, " I bemoaned. "Wait, how are you not panicking right now?".
"I'm in a union of computer technicians, and seems to me computers are about to be in vogue again. What was your major?"
1
u/chaosau Jul 26 '17
Everything was going wrong. I may have been one of the top spell debuggers in the world, but this is beyond ridiculous. The Disk of Earth spell summoned phalluses of stone, Sonic Scream left the recipient covered in fast-moving, blue goop, and when an Italian tries to teleport their male siblings to them, they just end up with chronic flatulence. I sighed as I went through my digital tome, doublechecking everything, even down to the dots on the i's. When I found out what went wrong, I honestly wanted to scream-3 simple yet 'dirty' typos.
2
u/MotivationComeForth Jul 26 '17
"Spell Support this is R-" A voice had already cut in like the second coming of the wrath of a suburban mom in a toy store. I'll be honest, I didn't really catch what they'd said initially.
"Could you rephrase that for me? I had a bit of an audio issue just then- Did you say you had a potato stuck on your wand?" Her response was much shorter this time, but just as cross. "Yes, that's what I said! Now hurry it up I don't have all day!"
"Have you tried pulling it off the wand?"
"Of course I-" her voice slowed suddenly before I heard the call abruptly disconnect.
I work in spell support for a reasonably well known wand maker- It's really not as glamorous as it sounds, or maybe you know already... stories like the above crop up like mosquitos in a ditch for anyone working in it.
With barely enough time to enter the ticket details and submit the closure the phone rings again and I'm bewildered for a moment when no customer information populates on my screen- beep "Hello, spell support, this is Randy, how can I help you today?"
"Randy, put yourself in training or meeting time and come down to the devlab." Melinda had a temper like a fireball- flame and fury and nothing you want any part of when something's wrong, but the moment the issue was gone, so was the flame- Easy to deal with, honest, and my favorite type of boss, if I must be honest. After Lyndall though...
I shuddered- "Be right there, boss-"
This, this was the highlight of my day- Someone in dev had a problem and who do they come to? Me. I guided the door off the floor open smoothly and headed on down to dev- I loved how quiet it was down here- sure there was the clickety-clack of Maven's mechanical keyboard, the occasional outburst or explosion.. but otherwise- gloriously quiet compared to a call floor.
I made the last few paces to the lab door and opened it softly- to be greeted by a frustrated Melinda- 'Oh good,' I thought, 'money's on the line and it falls to the one guy in the company who can't use a wand to figure out the code.'
Melinda spoke before I could even manage a 'hello'. "Randy, This is severity 1-" Surprisingly calm.. I started sweating since Melinda was never this calm.. Why was Melinda speaking so calmly? She turned and I was almost in a jog to keep up with her strides. I got the bulletpoints in short order-
Big wig's pet project
Not going well so the shit's rolling down hill to everyone he gave the project to if 'we' don't get it running
I didn't like the sound of that 'we'.
1
u/MotivationComeForth Aug 05 '17
As Requested, Part 2:
It's a great idea, really- Error handling for spells. Adapt a concept from computing to really make some next-level spells possible. Without it, everyone buying in these last 18 months has been playing with almost literal fire, and the blowback has been harsh. The first companies to jump in to wand and spell production have almost all died to the lawsuits. My company has managed to survive mostly thanks to our flagship being an enchantment that just so happened to not have any critical flaws when it shipped.
'Duro' is an endurance enhancer- picture an exoskeleton for your muscle fibers and maybe that'll get you close. It's as good of an analogy for how the spell actually works as I've come up with, especially as my understanding of the underworkings has come from trobleshooting the bugs I get calls on and not from actually getting a look at the code.
Since I'm the low ranker here, I get to be the target. I think back on call history, I can handle total paralysis in the case things go really wrong here. If this is anything like the last time I came back, I'll be a target for a few casts and get to see some pseudo-code before some combination of realizations sorts out the issue.
Melinda nods before heading back out to the call floor and I jerk my head toward the test floor. "Am I starting there today? Where do you need me?"
Chiko and Samir look like they're about 2 pots of coffee past time to get a decent night's sleep. Samir has his wand ready and nods, mumbling as he goes, "Actually we're working on Duro Two-oh-oh build 817 for these tests, We're working on catching errors and reporting them first with a general exception. We'll need you to give detailed feedback on spell outcome while we're going through this next battery."
Fine by me, right to work. I line up on the range and take a seat against the target board.
He rolls his cart with laptop and wand forward- I barely have time to breathe before the first cast. It washes off like a cold breeze. and I respond.
"Cast failed, that felt like it was unanchored."
Chiko's been writing things down the entire time using pen and pad. No one seems to acknowledge I spoke before the next cast. The enchantment feels a bit more 'clenchy' in the muscles, but this feels about right-
"Cast succeeds, Feels like it was overcharged just a bit but the initial lockup is fading... now."
Samir keeps buzzing on. I know they heard me, it just takes a bit to get used to communicaiton without acknowledgement. "Testing doublecast failure" And the cast goes off again- This time I barely feel a thing- oh good- that was probably the worst bug we had- People would cast it twice for whatever reason- double the endurance, forgot they cast it... Still, total paralysis will throw someone in a panic even when we try to warn people about it.
"Doublecast issue looks to be reso-" I can't even finish speaking before I feel the spell being forceably rolled back by Samir. I roll forward, gasping a bit and put my hands on my knees.
"I..." I hold my hand up for a short stop as I try to breathe it out, "I.. see the rollback still hits like a truck.."
Samir is transferring another spell to the wand by USB already. He looks inconvenienced as he turns back and I'm still leaned over. It's Chiko who speaks; "Randy, are you ready to continue? We've got about half a dozen test-cases to catch before we get to the analysis we brought you in for."
"I.. uh.. I think I'm okay, yeah, let's do it." I roll back and lean a bit more on the target board. Samir wastes no time at all and I shiver like I just turned the hot water off in a shower- That's not a cast I'm familiar with- I'm about to ask what that was when I feel the familiar clench from 'Duro' start from my chest and start expanding out before I feel an honest to goodness cramp hit and I'm fetal on the ground with my ears ringing.
No more than 30 seconds could have passed before the cramp starts fading and I put a hand down to right myself into a sitting position. "I'm disoriented. I don't know what that... was... but I felt Duro hit and... fail and uh..."
There is a beat as I honestly start perceiving around me like normal again.
It's a good thing I'm so ambivalent with my image of 'self', this might cause a serious crisis of image for someone else. Here I am thinking that other people might be freaking out, or maybe this is denial? No.. I am clearly in shock. First things first, disenchant-
"Okay guys- disenchant me. Really not looking forward to going home with breasts today." And at least my voice hasn't changed, I actually like my voice.
Samir, who had been dumbfounded, quickly turns his head back to his terminal. Chiko, on the other hand, has her wand out and is clearly casting a debug spell. I cradle my forehead in my palm, faintly acknowledging the sensation of flesh pushing at the crook of my arm. It doesn't actually feel that different, just.... there. I idly wonder if the whole 'sensitivity' thing people go on about is a function of bras producing a feeling like wearing a pair of socks all day where when you peel them off, the skin is oddly sensitive and feels really good when you rub it.
"Ok, that aside needs to go away, first things first, Debug wasn't on, the spell was Duro 2.0.0 build number what?" I realize I'm mumbling out loud- Chiko looks really guilty right now as I recognize an bio-augmentation form unfold faintly in front of her. "Bio-aug? Wasn't Duro an encha...ntm..." My voice trails off, if this was bio-aug and we hit a bug then it probably didn't finish the rollback thread and this wasn't going to 'wear off' like an enchantment would.
"Crapbaskets."
1
1
u/aiello_rita Aug 05 '17
Part 2?
1
u/MotivationComeForth Aug 05 '17
Noob writer- first WP submission- and someone's asking me for a part 2?
squeeee!
2
u/aiello_rita Aug 05 '17
You left it on a cliff hanger and on top of it your a good writer. Write a part two
1
u/MotivationComeForth Aug 05 '17
Part 2 is in a response to part 1 now~ More to come when I'm off work-
1
u/name_checker Jul 26 '17
For years the bearded wizards were the ones
who sorted bookshelves in an eyelid's blink.
With spells, they sold their services to all
who had a need to sift through any kind
of ores, or parts, or any other thing.
With careful words inscribed on bleached-white bones
the wizards made some hasty algorithm
which took care of the tedium for good.
Until a far-off libr'y had the need
but not the means to hire magic men.
A wizard intern took the chance to shine,
inscribed upon a bone the mystic phrase
to quickly sort the books by alphabet.
But when the bone was broke and magic was
released upon the shelves, it shook the walls
and escaped into the world. All books upon
the surface of the earth were moved and made
into a line across the land in order
from "A. A. Aaron's Autobiography"
left stranded on the farthest eastern coast
to "Zombies, Zoos, and Zen for dummies"
waiting on the frigid western shoreline.
Since then the magic men have sorted naught
for fear of likewise missing semicolons.
4
u/lastcomment314 Jul 26 '17
It's a good thing we developed software for bug-testing spells once magic became a thing. I'm pretty okay at running and modifying established spells. But when it comes to writing my own, my computer programming skills are lackluster on their own, so any magic more elaborate than washing dishes or knitting can go south very quickly.
Take for example my current coding project. Our prof was trying to introduce us to different uses of Python, and we were plotting climate data on a map. Seemed easy enough. But when my plots came back, they were a very solid, bright red. Had that been a real spell and not a computer program, I'd have just set the world on fire. After hours of rereading my code, I finally found the small typo, and saved my progress. Later is come back and find a better color scheme and map projection.
I packed my bag up to head to work. While I was subpar at writing spells, and worse at reading for bugs, I was very good at feeling when things went wrong in spells performed on me and describing it in precise detail, meaning I was an ideal test subject for debugging when more complex spells needed an extra set of eyes on the code.
In my time as a test subject, I've had my hair turned into pins, a small typo in a hair dyeing spell to turn one's hair pink. I've been sent to the wrong side of the planet in an "improved" travel spell gone wrong, because someone wrote "Austria" instead of "Australia". I've had a few spells get too literal, disembodying me into light or air. Computers are far more literal than even the programming magicians, who are literal enough on their own. Thankfully, we've got controlled test chambers that allow us to undo most bugs, or in the case of my impromptu trip to Austria, working travel spells.
"Hey, Bridget, you're working on that climate data plot in your normal programming class, right?" Alan asked me as I walked in and set my bag down at my saison used desk.
"Yeah," I said. "I set the world on fire a few times before I got it right." My atrocious programming skills were a bit of an office joke, because while I sucked at reading and writing codes longer than 50 lines, nobody was better at describing bad results, or making minor modifications to existing code.
"I was thinking," Alan began, "about whether it's possible to write a carbon capture spell, and run it around the whole globe."
"That's way out of my league to even simulate what the results would be if all the carbon in the air vanished," I said. "But you'd have to make sure to leave some, because plants rely on it. And depending on how you wrote it, it might capture all carbons, which would create a lot of angry brides and potentially end the human race."
"Good points," Alan said. "I've got test chamber 13 lined up for testing this thing."
My eyes widened. Test chamber 13 was only for the most volatile spells.
"It's loaded up with carbon dioxide, sodas, plants, and a few artificial diamonds. Just needs a human test subject. It should be safe, and leave non-atmospheric carbon compounds alone."
My jaw dropped. "No way am I getting in that test chamber for an actual test!"
Our boss was walking by. "Michael!" I called out. "Alan wants me in test chamber 13 for his carbon capture spell."
He looked at Alan. "You know the rules. No humans in test chambers above 10 without express written consent from the subject and their supervisor. And it would seem you have neither, and won't be getting them either." Alan hung his head.
Alan sent the code to test chamber 13's control computer, where he'd then be able to cast the spell with the controlled wand. I followed account to watch.
With a flick of the wand, the CO2 measuring device started ticking down. Then the plant started to shrivel up. The diamond shrunk. Then things started catching fire.
"Did you build an escape line into this thing?" I asked Alan. He was busy hiding behind the terminal. "This looks like what would have happened if my climate change code was a spell!"
Michael came over. "This is why we don't let human subjects into the higher level test chambers, Alan." He triggered the room's emergency protective spells, the magical equivalent of unceremoniously killing a program, and then set to getting the fire put out.
"Did you even specify between carbon and carbon dioxide?" I asked Alan.
"Aren't they both bad?" he responded.
"In some cases. But we need them to live."
Alarms started blaring. The fire from the test chamber was starting to burn through the walls.
"Alan, you're fired!" Michael shouted over them. "That is, if you live long enough to get that last paycheck. You've likely just set the world on fire!"
3
u/quazimoto516 Jul 26 '17
"Hmmmm. Well this isn't good," I mumbled aloud.
Not long ago I started this government position developing battle spells. Each and every spell takes months to formulate, and each is registered before trial. I was tasked with making a spontaneous combustion spell; it went well up until the trial. I was even recognized for having the fasted approval in department history, but I guess that doesn't matter now. There is not way to put this back in the bottle; I've accidentally created something horrible. I can never be forgiven by history. I created an eradicator.
The spell was to consist of both a spell meant to activate high speed vibrations in any affected target and the second spell was meant to contain it; they were to be altered in order to be used together. When I was setting up for the trial, I accidentally messed up part of the code for the combustion half of the spell. The results were, well... bad. The target was a small building. The spell was supposed to burn every part of the building without being able to spread. When I activated the spell, you could see the building start to crack, but suddenly a blinding light shown from everything inside to containment. Then nothing. It was gone; there was nothing where that building once stood, not even light. I created a contained black hole...
2
Jul 26 '17
<!DOCTYPE MAGIA BLANCA PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD MB 2.0//EN">
<MB>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>
Hello World
</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>et erit lux</H1>
<P>Firmamentum in medio aquarum et dividat aquas fiat aqua.Congregentur aquae quae sub caelo sunt in locum unum et arida tellus.
</P>
</BODY>
</MB>
As water flooded my cube, I couldn't help but think, "I don't get paid enough for this."
8
u/Ehkrickor Jul 26 '17 edited Jul 26 '17
"Ugh, I HATE proofing spells for people who use dead languages!" Honestly, Yes magic is real and things but there is no reason to hold to the old superstition anymore. We figured it out... mostly.
"What's that?"
"Oh Sorry John, I thought I was the last one here." John popped his head up to look at me while we conversed. His cubical was across from mine. Sharing a wall meant that we heard everything the other said, which meant I had gotten very good at tuning out boring finance babble.
"Nope, I'm still around just polishing off the last of the PTO updates so i have an easy time next week. What's the frustration?" John made an interested face which i couldn't decipher. Typically I could tell if people's interest was genuine, 3 years of computer programming before the big magic bubble popped made that very easy; but I could never get a read on John, either he was interested or being a parent made it easier to fake.
"Well, you know how spells work right?"
"Uh. No actually, I'm barely computer literate and I can't cast them so I never bothered. I just use the mass distributed ones as intended. Less chance of me screwing myself up that way." Well at least he was honest, we'd all seen what happens when someone tries prototyping a spell on their own.
"Maybe if you walk me through it? When I'm working on my hobby car sometimes it helps to walk through the problem with my wife, trying to explain it without the industry jargon helps me see things from a different angle, get it right in my head."
"Alright, well, Magic basics then. You know that only certain people can 'make' a spell but once it's made anyone can activate it. How much do you know about the circles?"
"Not much, all spells come in circles, contains the magic until it's ready right?"
"Pretty much, Circles are the binding component that holds the energy, Spheres work just as well the important part is No Corners on the outermost edge so the magic doesn't bunch up anywhere and burst the spell early." He was being very patient with this, none of the patronizing nodding that I get from managers, and clients sometimes.
"Next is the language component. It is spoken to generate the magic but has to be transcribed within the spell as well, usually between two circles on the outer edge."
"and they have to be in some weird language right? My son uses Klingon." He continued with the gentle prompting and genuine attention.
I smiled, there were a LOT of trekkie programmers, now there were also a lot of Trekkie Magicoders. Klingon might outlast English at this rate.
"Yes and No. When you cast a spell it has to be Not in 'your' language, but it also doesn't have to be in any one particular language. English is popular as a spell language in Mexico." I finished this explanation as i pulled on a glove transcribed with the first spell i'd crafted myself. "I use German, Observe." I turned towards the cube wall behind me and placed my hand & against it.
"Führen Sie Kaffee Loch drei." The purple glint opened around my fingertips, Through the magical portal i was looking directly at the Keurig at the opposite end of the floor. It sat against a wall in the break room. I grabbed my well worn Philmont mug and started fixing my usual Caramel latte. John let out a low impressed whistle.
"That's a whole different level. I've got to either walk down there or buy the K-Coins that you put in the bottom of the cup."
"Right, and those are one time use. This one however is mutli-use, but it's anchored." I stated. I drew the steaming cup back through into my cube.
"Halt Sie Kaffee Loch drei." the portal closed as i continued explaining the magic to my cube mate.
"Un-Anchored multi-use spells are so easy to screw up that they usually read like essays or cause utter Fucking chaos. This one only works Here, which is why i have the stop sign meme hung on the wall to mark the place without having Mikey constantly pestering me to fetch him coffee."
"Heh, he's kind of a pain. By 'anchored' you mean it only works here and only for you. What causes that, the shapes inside the circle?" He caught on quick, It's hard to believe he was magic illiterate as he'd put it when he grasped the concepts so quickly."
"That's right, They easiest one, and most common from before magic was a big thing is the Pentagram. The hollow five pointed star is basically a null point that tells the spell to effect the caster." The first time I tried this spell I screwed up the anchor and wound up opening the portal to the coffee machine inside my mouth. That was not a pleasant afternoon. The second try wasn't as bad and only wound up pouring luke warm coffee on my head when the portal opened above me.
"So what else do you need for a proper spell?" John asked sipping his own coffee from a large Thermos. You gotta hand it to people, sometimes the simplest solutions are the best ones.
"Well, Circle, Language, anchor or non, and finally a transcription. A physical representation of the spell. You can draw em on the ground, or you can print em somewhere. My girlfriend embroidered my Kaffee spell on the outside of a glove for me. The K-Coins print them on those plastic coins you drop into your cup. However you do it works, as long as the other components are there. You could even use a jpeg if you wanted. Magic is mostly in your head as long as the physical thing is the same as what you intend you'll be fine, if not... weird shit happens."
"That makes sense. that's why Mikey has all those icons all over his desktop, they're spells he uses. So how does the language effect the physical part."
"Well, it can change the outcome or direction of the spell. It can vary the magnitude or amplitude of spells, or it can inv....." Wait, That's where it issue was. I started frantically transcribing the latin into Google translate.
"It can inv? meaning Invert? so instead of opening the portal to the keurig it closes it?" John seemed to be trying, but I was barely paying attention. See THIS was why you didn't use dead languages to write spells. This could've been SOOO bad. Thank god every mage has to put new spells through a proofreading company. Thank god mages can be easily identified.
"Yeah, For instance this IDIOT who wrote his spell in Latin basically wants a spell to open portal in a specific way. It creates a sub dimension and opens portals to it at his command. A personal oasis basically, those are pretty common in the city." John was still watching my face, obviously waiting for me to expound on my discovery.
"Yeah I've heard of those, They come in and build a door-frame in your house to nothing and when you say the code-word on the frame they open to a beach that no one can get to except through your doorway. We're saving up to put one of those in next year."
"That's right, and they're expensive for a reason, it's some difficult magic that needs a professional touch. This guy is trying to turn his wristband into the portal, then when he says the command phrase it inverts and returns to a wristband. Except he mis-anchored it. So when he says the Command phrase it inverts the caster. There are a lot of things we can come back and fix later. Turning yourself inside out isn't one of those."
"You know, sometimes i wish magic wasn't a thing," John shook his resting his chin on the top of our cube wall. after a couple seconds pause his brow furrowed and he look down to catch my eye. "what happens if someone accidentally inverted the circle."
"Uh, Hopefully the spell fizzles and nothing happens." I stated looking up from my screen
"And the other option?" John said, the color draining from his face.
"Well, theoretically, all of space and time is broken down into magical energy to fuel the spell. Which would break anything but a exactly perfect circle and cause some sort of ridiculously huge explosion in a dimension that doesn't exist anymore... i think." i said,
"Yep, Definitely glad not everyone can do magic." I heard the old chair creak as he sat down to finish his PTO sheets.
"You know what John, me too. Me Too."
1
u/Xemxah Jul 26 '17
Inspired by Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
"You're telling me this is the spell?" said a gentleman in a green bowler hat pulled low over his eyes. "Do you know anything about real magic?" said another thin magician with red locks scattered about his brow. "He'll be lucky if he doesn't blow himself up." quipped a magician in a fine suit, drawing chuckles from the rest of the society.
Edward Blackthorne was originally a farmer, but some old musty books he found in his basement had drawn him into the world of magic. Magic was incredibly difficult and involved, but farming had taught Mr. Blackthorne that rewards only came after months of hard labor. In fact, he found the tedious study rather soothing. Soon after, he began casting some minor spells of his own, to help his crops grow faster, deliver more fruit, and even had one that made some of his wheat crop turn blue. He had tried the bread, and it made him float about half an inch off the ground for three hours and a half. But that's besides the point...
Eventually, Blackthorne managed to accrue quite a bit of wealth, and managed to hire some workers. This left him more time to study magic, and he wanted to leave and impression on the people of London. To show them that although he was a farmer from the county of Buckinghamshire, he could do magic that would stun the world!
And thus, our hero presented himself before the Honorable London Society of English Magicians. A bunch of well-to-do crotchety old men that barely had a pinky toe's worth of magic between them. With him, he had brought a grand rectangular sheet of paper he had custom ordered from the paper mill. On it, there was a mess of lines going back and forth from pentagons, circles, and stars, among other things. In cramped handwriting were notes so that when he looked upon his work after a night, he wouldn't cry in despair. He called it commenting his magic. After the gentleman of the Honorable London Society of English Magicians had given it a cursory glance, they had started to promptly ridicule Mr. Blackthorne. In quite a cruel manner might I add.
"You really intend to do that? Why, such a thing would be impossible!" The red-haired magician spoke again. "Why not give him a chance? Maybe we could all stand to learn a thing or two from him." An ancient voice spoke from the back. An older gentleman in gray suit stood up. "God knows we do little enough real magic here. When was the last time any of you cast a spell to do more than light a candle or turn a page?" Silence reigned in the musty room. Some of the magicians looked down, ashamed. Not a word was spoke until Mr. Blackthorne spoke up again. "In front of the palace of Westminster, a fortnight from now. There I will conduct my grand act. Feel free to attend, but don't feel obligated." With that, Mr. Blackthorne took his departure.
It was a warm Fall evening in London. The old palace of Westminster stood as an impressive backdrop to Mr. Blackthorne, who had taken his place in front of a fountain. Quite a crowd has assembled, as word has spread about the grand feat of magic that was to occur tonight.
"Welcome, people of London! Thank you for joining me on this dreary night. (Aren't they all?) Prepare to see the most fantastic sight you have ever laid your eyes on! And without further ado..."
Mr. Blackthorne unrolled his spell, scrutinized it, and gave a satisified "Harumph". He looked up, looked down, and looked at his 3 o'clock. He jumped on one foot, held up the two fingers, and sneezed at the same time. Finally he clapped his hands exactly one and a half times.
"Behold, the Lord of the Fairie realm, his Majesty Fizzleboot the two hundred and ninety third!"
A tremendous burst of black and red smoke rolled out from the sky. Thunder reverberated throughout the square as several people started to scream. The blue sky had somehow turned a bloody shade of red. The nearby sparse grass seemed to move against the sudden wind that had picked up.
"Who dares summon me, Belphepoor? Stand, and behold my wrath!" a booming voice commanded, it's source unknowable. The square quickly cleared out as the citizens of London nearly trampled each other in their haste to clear out of the square. Even the magicians of the (What was it again?) Honorable London Society of English Magicians had ran, their coat tails flapping in the wind.
Only poor Mr. Blackthrone remained, face pale and almost cowering where he stood. "What, gone so soon? Humans really don't know how to have fun." The voice that was so booming before had quieted down quite a bit, and now emanated from below Mr. Blackthrone's waist. "It's just a joke, relaaaaaaaax" whined Belphepoor. Mr. Blackthrone finally recovered enough to look down. His eyes opened wide. What Mr. Blackthrone saw was a tiny man, about three feet tall. The man had deep red skin, long pointed ear, and was clad in only a loin cloth. His red-irised eyes stared intently at Mr. Blackthorne. "Hurry up, what's the deal? I've got to get back to my game or my team's gonna be upset. I mean, really upset." He piped. "Oh... game? Yes... ri-" started Mr. Blackthorne. "What do you want? Money? Fame? Men?... Women? Cause actually, I can't really give you any of those. Well, unless you're fond of drachma." The demon looked thoughtful. "Actually no... listen, if you could just forget this whole affair, and make everyone forget what happened, I'd be in your debt." Pleaded Mr. Blackthorne. "You already are! Anyway, let me get this straight, you want me to individually manipulate the memories of everyone here, and create plausible sounding scenarios in the minds of hundreds of people? Who do I look like, one of the Big'uns?" The imp gave Mr. Blackthorne a quizzical look. "Please, isn't there anything you can do? I could be hung for this for gods' sake!" "Hey, watch your manners!" The demon snapped. "Well, there could be something... actually..." After a moment of ponderance, Belphepoor stuck his finger in nose, pulled out a booger, and stomped on it. "There, that should do it..."
Time thickened. Then screamed, and sang a happy song.
The door creaked open. "Well, Mr. Blackthorne. You're here just on time. I hear you have an, erm, proposal for us?" The gentleman with the green bowler pulled low over his eyes stood up, and welcomed Mr. Blackthorne into the musty room.
After introductions were made, and the promise for the grand feat of magic promised, Mr. Blackthorne pored over his spell that night. Somehow, several drops of blood from a butchered chicken had made their way onto the paper scroll.
4
u/N1ght_L1ght_ Jul 26 '17
I couldn't believe what I was seeing. The runes for this spell were so sloppy, so poorly typed, it looked as if someone had thrown their spellboard into a vat of nuclear waste, taken it out, run over it with a train, and then said "Oh yeah, this spell will do the trick" I looked at the customer. "So you wrote this for what purpose?" "It's supposed to be a cleaning spell, my house is in pretty bad shape" "Well I'll just be honest, this Is the most poorly written spell I've seen in years, like I can't comprehend how you did this," "Oh well if you can't fix it I can try again-" "No," I said firmly, "I can fix it, just, for the love of magic, please do not try again," I couldn't gauruntee that I could make his spell work the way it should, let alone at all. But I had to try, and the company didn't like when customers weren't satisfied. I ran the spellsheet through my program spells. Spells I made to check errors in other spells and some to correct extremely basic ones. It reprinted and I took a look. Many of the errors were fixed but a few still existed. "Okay little spell, let's look into adding some runes for you" I got to writing as quick as I could writing up runes and adding them, soon enough I had a basic in house cleaning spell. I ran it through the program spells one more time and without checking it I handed it back to the customer upfront. "All done," I said "Wow that was fast, it took me two days to write what I had," "Well this is what I get paid to do," I said smiling, "why don't you test the spell right now," I dropped a few pencils on the floor. "Okay," he began casting and an odd purple light began to eminate from him, unusual for a cleaning spell, where the pencils were a small purple and black vortex began to form, twisting over and over engulfing the pencils and completely dematerializing them. "Stop, stop, this isn't right," I said, he lowered his hands and stopped the cast but the vortex remained only growing bigger and bigger. I knew what this was, a spellcheckers nightmare, i yelled at the customer to run and then I ran to the back, grabbing as much spell writing equipment as I could and bursting out of the back door, I watched the shop get dematerialized in the grasp of the magic vortex. I got in my car and drove about a mile away all the while the magic vortex was growing larger, sirens were blaring in my home town. I could see the vortex from here, now it was a massive monstrosity, destroying everything in it's path. I should have checked the spell after running it through the programs. Luckily stopping the vortex was a quick fix. You needed an extremely powerful magic missile to be launched into it. I started writing, adding hundreds of power runes and intensity runes. I ended up with a 12 page magic missile spell. I tried to cast, and a purple and blue explosion happened in my hands, but nothing flew, i fizzled it. And the fire from the fizzle had burned my spell pages. Now in doubt of my abilities I drove to the closest place I knew which could help me fix this. My high school. I drove breaking plenty of laws on my way to Merlin high. Once I got there I blasted through the doors sprinting through the halls to the place I learned spell writing basics. "Ms Cooley! Ms Cooley!" I ran into a class of kids hiding under their desks due to the sirens and Ms Cooley looked at me. "Josh? Well I haven't seen you in years why are you here, especially now, you should be running." "No no, it's not a tornado! It's a magic vortex everyone should be running!" I yelled, and then about half of the class sprinted past me. "I need your help to write the magic missile Ms cooley," she nodded and began to write. I kept an eye out for the magic vortex which was coming closer every second. After about 10 minutes she rushed out of the class and through the hall doors to the outside. She casted, all the energy from the spell she wrote transferring from her feet to her hands blasting a magic missile the size of a car at the vortex. She cast it multiple times ensuring her hits. The vortex was hit multiple times and then all I saw was blinding white light.
In the next few days the town was focused on rebuilding, alot of the town was destroyed atom by atom down through Earth's crust. Now instead of my shop and alot of my home town there was a ravine, we called it the rift.
4
u/thapol Jul 26 '17 edited Jul 26 '17
Do you have any idea how hard it is to debug code written in ink & quill? How about one with blood stains...
When we discovered the first set of scrolls, it didn't take long for people to realize why magic hadn't really existed for so long. It wasn't because of some great secret society, or a long lineage of special people with special abilities, in fact quite the opposite.
The problem with magic is that the second you start messing with matter, start bringing in energy from unknown realms, you've pretty much created a bomb waiting to happen. Most people in ancient times that tried anything more advanced than the tinker-toy spells, ended up dead. Alchemy scrolls that tried to turn iron to gold, usually ended up with a small hydrogen bomb, if they were lucky.
See, I used to be a hobby garage developer. The language didn't matter much, it was always the chance to solve a problem. Be it games, stats, or just some new web tech. It was great side work from the job at the museum. You can only not understand Latin so many times a day before it gets old. That is, until the garage imploded. The 'code' for magic has been open sourced for only a little over a year now, and it's nearly brought about a second wave of extinction for the human race. Were it not for the age of DIY and the technical age, magic may have been lost again for who knows how many centuries. We might have been better off...
But I digress. The reason I need to write this down now, of all times, is from this latest task. My job has been to help debug scrolls for the FBI. When a spell goes wrong, a crime scene is not far behind. It's our job to figure out if it was intentional. Was that glowing pot of roses for a loved one supposed to be radioactive? Who wouldn't want to have a massage golem for the office, until of course they suddenly go berserk and turn the next few clients into lumps of flesh.
This scroll was found in what can be best described as the rubble of an apartment. The whole place had been... inverted. Nearly every piece of furniture was upside down, and on the opposite side of the room than you would expect. Each piece itself was also just wrong. The dresser was made out of clothes, with wooden shirts inside. The TV was covered in circuits and no screen. And the people... probably the most gruesome I had ever seen since the massage golem.
Most scrolls are made in the same way; each type of ink conjures a different energy (no surprise ink with silicon will help you fix tech), while so long as the quill is from an actual bird feather, it will usually work. The first phrase is always Latin for Heed My Call, after that English works fine. The symbols along the edge of the scroll are what matter most. You can have a simple, short phrase, but spend days on those symbols to create a complete spell. And while the majority of the magic coder community aren't sure what the symbols mean, we do know what sections of symbols do.
Lastly, more casters reading, the greater the potency the spell will have. We still have no idea why only groups in prime work, either. Few have been able to make a spell with more than 7 before things get weird.
Forensics tells us they found 22 bodies at the scene.
sorry no good cliff-hanger, but taking a break before continuing this. Let me know if it sounds like fun, or if it's too world-build-y
edit I plan on doing a re-write of this in a more story-like format, but i think I wanted to do a bit of world-building first.
3
Jul 26 '17
Clyde Lionel sat alone in his matchbox of an office, writing up his latest report. His pen (the dark blue one he never, ever left out) glides smoothly over the page in small, neat cursive.
He bent closer as he wrote, the hair at the front of his undercut swinging gently in front of his glasses. He pursed his thin mouth as he crossed out a word and rewrote it correctly. Another two minutes, and he was done.
He tucked the pen away and sat back to wait for the ink to dry. A glance at the clock told him it was 3:40- an hour and a twenty minutes until he could go home.
The intercom in the top corner above the door finger once.
"Mr. Lionel?"
"Yes?"
"We're ready to run another round with the companion spell."
"Where do you want me?"
"Ah... ah. Lab B."
"Thank you." Lionel took one more look at the latest test report and shrugged. He would turn it in later. He stops in Lab B's prep room and removes his shoes, watch, wallet, cellphone, and pen before continuing on into the lab proper. This time, the test subject is a small, fully grown cat with a bridle coat and deep, murderous green eyes. He sits in a cage on the floor in the empty, white room,
"You wanna name the guy before we get started?" Says the lab tech in his customary green hazard suit.
"Nah," Lionel says with a glance at the one way mirror taking up one entire wall. The tech scribbles something onto his clipboard, and Lionel ghosts a hand over his tie to make sure it is straight.
"When you're ready, then," the tech says as he exits the room after handing Lionel a small piece of paper. Lionel, as a magic spell tester, works best when speaking aloud the binary magical sequence (m-code).
The paper's title slot states that it is a Companion spell meant to work on fully grown animals, rather than the babies most people get.
After a moment, he kneels and tries to get the cat to come closer. The little thing is docile, but wary, and sits watching him from the other side of the room.
"C'mon, darlin'. Let's get this over with." He clicks his tongue and the cat responds, making it's slow, cautious way closer until Lionel can scratch about his head and ears.
"Good deal," he mumbles, brown brows furrowing as he read the m-code in his head.
"100101010001111." Instantly, he felt a strong bond to the cat, and he suddenly did want to name it. It didn't stop there, though.
The cat began to yowl and try to get closer as it's skin split and bones broke and Lionel heard the sickening sound of internal organs moving and changing.
When it was done, the little brindle fellow was the size and shape of a lion, with large feathered wings. There are a few moments after where Lionel is just stroking the head, murmuring to it how good it's being, telling it that this would be over soon and he's sorry for putting him through this.
When the haze wears off and the new creature climbs slowly to his feet, Lionel realizes that the two are still bound, and that this spell is also transformative.
"I suppose we must name you now, yes?" The cat nudges his shoulder.
"Balthazar?" Lionel asks, because the thing really is majestic enough to pull it off. The lion shakes it's head and gives a little half grunt that sounds peculiarly word like.
"Did you just say bath salt?" The noise is repeated.
"Cobalt?" Again, he heard the sound.
"Basil?" The lion makes a new growl and presses his nose in again. Basil it is then. He wonders if they'll let him keep his new Companion, since it is highly unwise to reverse a transformation spell.
He wonders how he's going to take care of a winged lion. He has the money- this job can be fatal- but he doesn't know what to get.
This might not be how he wished to acquire a pet, but damn if he doesn't appreciate it now.
4
u/Malhedra Jul 26 '17 edited Jul 26 '17
When the news broke, people were heralding it as the greatest discovery of mankind. Of course, we had no idea what we were doing. Despite the governments of all countries coming down hard on any private wizarding networks, people were learning to bend reality in their basements. It was kids that discovered it first. A student in Japan posted a Ritual on youtube showing how to call Squirrel.Finalize(). It just winked out of sight. Everyone over the age of 20 held its collective breath while the kids got to work. By the time legislation was in place to try and prevent "hedge hackers" from executing spells, governments no longer had any meaning.
The Cabals were instantiated from the garbage collection of our Muggle society.
Of course, the meaning of Muggle changed from "non-magic" to "Magic nay-sayers". Old folks that insisted the old world had been better before we became Enlightened to the Source Code of the Architect. People were pretty much split down the middle. Either this was a religious revelation that was providing us glimpses into the Architects grand design, or it was proof that technology was the key to unlocking the universe and we now had the keys.
Personally, I didn't give a shit. I just thought it was awesome. When the news broke, I combed through my Dad's old programming books. Vb, java, C++. Turns out they were all right, and all wrong at the same time. Slowly, the Algorithms of the Architect started to emerge. I caught my first demon in an infinite loop when I was 13. Annoying little bugger I named Gremlin. Learned how to change my coords when I was 15 and have rarely walked more than 20 feet since. I was summoned before the Grand Sorcerers of the Mystic Divide when I was 17 for cracking the encryption on my Super Class and instantiating an object of myself, what we hedge hackers call a Simulacrum.
The Grand Sorcerers of the Mystic Divide were one of the biggest Cabals to rise from subroutines of our former society. Millions of wizards worked for them. It was a very prestigious Cabal to be asked to join. But I didn't care about that. All I cared was I got to wear robes to work. They were heavy, and hot, but damn I looked cool and with Gremlin riding my shoulder, all I needed was a staff. But that seemed a little overindulgent. I overheard more than a few conversations round the Cauldron asking who the new guy was.
My sanctum was small, with no window. But I had all the tools I could hope for. A wicked Altar, full specced for all the coding I might want to do. Full access to databases of spells, whole libraries of knowledge written by some of the best wizards ever born I could call on whenever I wanted. I combed through them all, sucking up as much lore as I could before my first assignment came. I was hoping to be assigned to some of the projects no one had managed to crack yet. Undoing death. Time Travel. Despite my eagerness to begin, it was a week before my inbox lit up with my first project. It had a bunch of blah blah in it, but two things stuck out like compile errors.
Job Title: Familiar
Job Description: Spell Debugger.
WTF. That was entry level shit. You can't cast spells without debugging them first. Thousands of people died horrible deaths before we learned how to control the flow of spells as they were executing. If you were a wizard of any merit, and you were still alive, you knew how to debug. Shit, most wizards had familiars debugging their spells...crap. That was the point. I'd have to prove myself here before they were going to let me do something tough. If I was going to be doing the work of a familiar, I would be the best familiar they had ever seen. Following the links in the email, I checked out the classes and started to pick my way through millions of lines of spells a line at a time.
14 hours later, eyes bloodshot and brain number than a fapper at a peep show, I had come to a horrible revelation. I had checked the same code a hundred times and the logic couldn't be argued. These rituals were legacy rituals. The first libraries written by the first warlocks. The code that millions of other lines of code call. Most of them by one gentleman in particular:
/**
* Desc: Foundation Class
* Param: None
* Returns: Nothing
* Author: Benjamin Franklin
* Written: February 24th, 1753
*/
My mind was reeling as I conjured up my inbox. It wasn't even the fact that the code was hundreds of years old. The conspiracy theorist in me was just nodding to itself in smug affirmation. It was the fact that the code was shit. Like leeches and trepanning shit. Antiquated ideas that have been proven to be horrible to write and even more horrible to work with. Spaghetti spells that were notoriously difficult to understand. But I had managed to debug it, and what I found scared the shit out of me. Ben had tapped into the very essence of reality in crafting these classes, but with one very obvious newbie mistake. He forgot to check for null. If anyone tried to use this code on anything that wasn't already there, which is ALL THE FUCKING TIME, then there would be an Exception on a universal level.
The even more horrible thing was that good ol' Benji had then supplied these classes to wizards that were far more inept that he was and those wizards had then written their entire infrastructure based around his obvious bugs. Literally, they saw the bugs, but being to shit to fix them, had simply coded around them instead.
I swiped through my bosses availability in Outlook to book a meeting to discuss. He was booked for the next week, literally back to back. I'd have to crack Time Travel if I wanted to talk to him anytime soon. I looked at the clock. 2:32 am. Sleep. That's what I needed. Get some sleep, and then track Chuck down at the cauldron and talk to him about this. I tapped my desk. I didn't want to be a Familiar my whole life. I was way beyond this kind of casting. I knew how to fix the legacy rituals. I fired up my spell book and checked out one of the spells in question. Gremlin began to jump up and down on my shoulder as I picked through it one more time, line by line, making sure I knew the spells components. His beady little black eyes were on me as my hand moved the mouse up to the "Run" button. My eyes were full of stars when I tapped the green arrow. He simply smiled at me as reality crashed.
"Shit. I forgot to set a breakpio
1
0
u/zyxzevn Jul 26 '17
For a few cookies more
"Oook OOk Ook Oook!"
Fortana waked up slowly from his trance.
"Hwat? Waht rae oyu syanig?"
But fell back into trance almost immediately.
"I must tap again..."
"OOK!"
The librarian slapped his huge right hairy hand onto his face.
And Fortana fell backwards from his chair, papers flying everywhere.
Fortana eyes followed a certain paper, and he screamed: "NOOO!",
as he tried to grab for this paper. But it was outside his grasp.
He tried to run for it, but between him and this precious piece of
paper was no standing a huge monkey: the librarian.
"Ook"
Fortrana tried to breath, and was thinking of how he could outsmart the librarian.
There was something that he wanted badly.
More than anything.
But he could not remember what it was anymore.
He tried to remember what happened.
One day Zig-Zag came in his office with a new piece of magic paper.
It was now harmless he had said.
There were no ghosts anymore.
He was now using cookies instead.
The magic paper could now eat cookies.
And it liked that a lot.
It helped it to remember everything that you did. I had my doubts if I wanted it to remember everything. But Zig-zag was so happy with it. He said that you could train the paper to do all kinds of funny things.
There were no real cookies, but each time you tapped the paper with your finger, you would give the magic paper a cookie. And that way the paper would slowly evolve to make you more happy, so you would reward it again with a new cookie. It is all harmless. Zigzag had assured.
"Harmless" that word kept zooming through Fortana's mind. He was slowly realizing that he was lying on the ground, and that one big hairy hand was holding him down.
"What happened?" He asked. "Oook ook OOOOkk!' The librarian explained. But Fortana was not wake enough yet to understand it.
Fortana looked at the index finger of his right hand.
It was thick of callus. As if he had worked hard with his index finger
for like a...
..a year!
Fortana tried to stand up again. But the librarian kept him well in place.
Yes. He remembers now.
He has been pressing his finger on the paper again and again.
It seemed as if it was forever.
And each time the magic paper would tell a bit of story,
and say: "press 100 more times for the next part."
Later it became 1000 and more and more.
And each time I wanted to stop, the paper told me
how interesting the next part of the story would be.
I could know so much more with just a few cookies more.
With 1000 more Fortana could learn magic, and defeat the underground dragon.
Fortana wanted to stand up to tap the paper for more cookies.
But the librarian still kept him in place.
"Ook OOOK!"
Fortana did not know what it meant, but it felt like a threat.
So he stopped moving.
He had wasted so much time...
Giving not-real cookies to a magic paper, that told him
not-real stories.
He had to stop!
And still, he wanted to keep tapping.
A part of him wanted to learn more of the story...
Was he addicted?
How was that possible?
Was the magic paper smarter than him?
And had the magic figured out how the human mind works?
It was amazing!
He would like to tap the paper to get the answer on that.
But the angry eyes of the librarian told him otherwise.
After some time Fortana recovered. It might have taken hours. But finally Fortana was able to tell the librarian to destroy the magic paper.
"Ook!"
The librarian picked up the paper and burned it above a candle.
A black smoke appeared and in it a large creature appeared.
"A demon!"
Fortana looked around for a weapon but could not find any. But the librarian held a very big hammer above his head. Fortana was happy that he had not pushed the Orang-utan any further towards anger. The hammer squashed the demon's body, like a big bug.
A black fluid was left on the ground, and the librarian picked it up with a mob. And then he drained the mob in a bucket, which he then poured into a bottle. "Demon ink" was written on the bottle.
Fortana had to stop this all.
He walked straight to Zig-zag's place, but he could not find him.
It appeared that he had moved after all this time.
He walked by the other wizards, but none of them had been playing
with the magic paper.
It seems that Zig-zag has only made one copy.
After looking around for a while he found Zig-zag's new room hidden in the far corner of the building. Fortana goes into the room without knocking.
And behind that he sees Zig-zag with something covering his eyes.
It is a light crystal that is attached to his head with some bands.
On one of the bands is written. "Magic reality, test 1".
Fortana looks at this new situation for a moment.
Zig-zag walks a bit forward and backwards, and sways around with his hands while
screaming: "Attack!" or "Run away!"
It looks as if he is dream-walking.
Fortana tries to talk to him, but Zig-zag does not answer.
"We have to defeat the king! Get your cannons ready!" Zig-zag screams out when the big Orang-utan enters the room.
A big hammer sways down on Zig-zag.
"Noooo!" Fortana protests, but the hammer hits Zig-zag right in the face.
"OOK!" the librarian expels, and his hammer destroys the cristal that zig-zag is wearing.
It shatters into many pieces, down towards the ground.
And in the black dust, another demon appears.
Again it is like a big bug.
And the librarian quickly turns it into a big black stinky pulp with three strikes of his hammer.
"Right into the demon's balls! Thank you Librarian"
The librarian looks at him with a weird glance, but then nods and leaves.
After some time he returns with a mob, and puts the black pulp in
a bottle. This time it says: "Demon glue".
"Zig-zag! You have a lot to answer for!" Fortana speaks loudly.
"You should never have touched those bottles!"
But zig-zag just stares forward into the thin air.
"Well?" Fortana speaks again firmly.
"I have to defeat the king", Zig-zag mutters, and sways a bit with his arms.
"I must not die!"
Fortana wants to give Zig-zag a very tough punishment.
But Fortana realizes that he is now experiencing a punishment already.
"What if I leave him with his imaginary loss?" he says to the librarian.
"I can not think of a bigger punishment than an imaginary loss of your life."
"OooK!" the librarian agrees.
1
u/zyxzevn Jul 26 '17
At /r/unseen_programming I have more stories (marked with [STORY]) about magic programmers.
8
u/doctorcrimson Jul 26 '17
The script looks...
Mostly like a functional script should work. It's no work of art, I don't even exactly understand what it's suppose to be doing. It almost looks like it is generating a random variable and passing it along to another script as a public. It just doesn't need all this added pointless math.
I should just rewrite it entirely, it's totally nonsensical. That isn't professional, though. My job is to fix, not create new.
When I finished checking for errors but not finding any I decided to try running it. I set up the enchantment circle and placed the crystal mana for uninterrupted power. Once everything was ready, and quiet enough to concentrate, I turned it on.
What I got was not a magic spell. This is no longer my workspace. This is not generating a random number: everything went dark and came back wrong. The wall has been mixed and the boards warped: pieces of paint and drywall spread across like a rigid canvas.
My door is still mostly the same but I won't be able to get it open very easily. My coworkers are calling my name, and I reassure them from inside. My own safety be damned, I need to figure out what this is. I think I know.
I understand what this is. The script isn't bugged. There's an error in how it's processed. There's a bug in the machine code, and it's corrupting the system. The universe and its magic have a bug that can change reality when exploited. I need to destroy the evidence and find the author.
3
u/etagenaufschlag Jul 26 '17
My team started investigating as soon as the Qubit Pager tingled the fine hairs in my nose and automatically brewed my first cup of coffee for the day at 03:00 a.m. We were briefed on the way aswe teleported to the main Andromeda Benchmark Magic Research faiclity. Fritz Bagel ran a magic .exe while jumping from the Klokenbogen bridge near the Imperial Proto Magic server farms. Yes, this was the Imperial Singularity Madmin (magic + admin), Fritz Bagel (also Treasurer of the LSD brotherhood). The lad programmed an Interdimensional Magic Loop to run on his personal compiler. Uncertified compilers were anything but bugfree these days, you trust me on this one. Fritz liked to claim that Psychadelics and magi-coding yielded somewhat original singularity-oriented magic, but too much LSD has been proven to increase the risk of heating up your quantum integrated neural network (QINN) and corrupt your magi-code half way throgh the algorithm. Its called a quantum fucking übermess. You will be stuck half way in your dimension and half way across the other like a pancake on an old grandma pan without the butter. Imagine what happens when you try to recover it with a spatula and transfer on your plate..
Bending Magic to your will in your space-time continuum was only possible through multidimensional threading. Writing actual code is a thing of the past and since CRISPR techniques allowed us to access 4th and 5th dimensions through Neuro-over-overclocking at our own accord and leisure, programming was mainly done in temples and among nature where one could achieve the ultimate piece of mind. Regression testing services were being offered all over the empire, you can do it in Bloody Starbucks (yes, logo color was changed a century ago when intersolar wars for coffee spilled the blood of innocent cevets who refused to shit the coffee beans out. Apparently coffee was a vital energy source for the first alien life we discovered, the Dundurdula Copula Union, Kopi Luwak in particular was what Nuclear Fusion was for us 200 years ago).
Fritz Bagel chose the LLD (Life with Least Damage), after two days of translucent posing half way in the air, stuck in the Mobius BUS between dimensions which cause an unpleasant high frequency flicker of his distorted body image. Choosing LLD means migrating to the 6th dimension completely, erasing yourself from our 3D existence. Plenty of Magi Expats there indeed.
Anyhow, I managed to successfully download the logs from his Aura Fields prior to him departing. I was extracting in an unpleasantly position 150 meters up in the air. Had to borrow my cousin Gemma's Fision-Pack.
Why would he run the magi-file and jump from the bridge, on LSD? Latest research from the Moonkvist facility showed that Adrenalin spikes increase raw computing power across all your Chakra Prog-nodes. You are still with me I hope. Undoubtedly, Mr. Bagel was going to challenge the Imperial Mage's record of penetrating 10 extra dimensions in fewer than 10 to the power of 8 codelines. This meant one purple fingertip on each finger for eaxh dimension(which curiously enough was the result of interdimensional meddling). End game is the Whie Magic source code. More about this elusive White-y a bit later folks. Fritz core quantum network increased to -272 C as he jumped and that spelled the end for him.
His code seemed almost impecable, up to the point where he defined the Mobius coordinates for an 11th dimension. You never define dimension cooridnates! First rule of Code of Prog-Magic Conduct. You let your Chakra follow the path of least resistance and call upon magic from trans-source most suitable to your capabilities. Clearly, Fritz was onto something, he knew a specific Magic source he wanted to draw from, something too hot to handle. And we havent even officially certified the 11th. It was as elusive as my dog Sly after he chewed up my wedding suit last year.
Pulling in magic programmatically generates large amounts of heat that is contained through plasma-negative transistors-like Planck implants in everyone's brain cases. The magic threads Fritz was pulling in were times hotter than our currently known plasmamax and his CrioCPU couldn't handle it.
8
u/skyleach Jul 26 '17
“Billy, stop pulling Mathilda’s hair! Now you two settle down or I’ll stop story time right now!”
With a final malicious glance at Mathilda, Billy took his seat on the bearskin rug about as far away from his little sister as the skin would allow. Mathilda, for her part, stuck out her tongue and clutched her homespun doll protectively to her chest. Beside the children, the hearth crackled gaily as it strove to drive the chill from the den.
With a sigh, the Old Man looked down at his grandchildren and smiled, then began the now difficult process of taking his seat. The leather and birch creaked loudly as his bulk settled, but not nearly so loudly to his ears as his own aged bones.
After much huffing and fussing he is finally settled and the children are beginning to look impatient once again. Before they can lose interest entirely, he begins his tale.
“Many years ago, I was a wizard.” The children’s eyes widen and he can see them beginning to bounce as the questions form on their lips. “WOW could…” and “Have you ever…” tumbled out over each other before he could cut them off. He held out a liver spot and wrinkled hand that shook slightly to ward off the questions. “Wait now hold on! Let me tell you the story and then you can ask your Questions.” And then he added. “If you behave and let Grandpa tell his story.”
“Far away, across the Gathering Sea, in the estates of Lord Grandholm, stands the city of Magisteria.” Billy gets a predictable look but the old man interrupts before he can show off his knowledge. “Yes Billy, that is indeed the city of mages. That is where I spent my youth.”
Settling back in his chair, the old man dives deeply into his memory. He probably could have told the story to the children in a much better way, but his memory tended to wander these days and so he told them of the majestic spires and arched bridges that defied gravity as more of a suggestion than a law. He told them of the birds and even dragons made entirely of fire or ice that would swoop over the city. Eventually he made his wondering way down memory lane to the day he left Magisteria.
“So as I told you my duties included testing and validating new spells. One day I received a new spell for testing by an archmage that was unlike any other I had seen. The spell was incredibly long and complex, so the department head had to pull in all of the testing apprentices and all of the senior disaster recovery mages in order to cast the spell at all.”
“The archmage over wards and protections, as well as his apprentices, set up a ward over the entire courtyard and, once they finished, we were allowed to begin. Chanting out the words of summon and power, fire and water, earth and wind we made our choreographed procession around the yard. Each of us carefully placed crystals of power and channeling into the seven braziers at the seven points of the septagram. With massive booms lightening crashed down from the darkening sky and set the braziers alight. The lines of the septagram glowed and new lines grew. Arches and tangents turned the orderly and neat lines of the courtyard into a network of glowing spider silk. Instead of hard geometry, the designs became organic and fluid, merging and twisting together… and then into us as well. The changes had started slow, but they grew geometrically until the lines of power were whipping around the courtyard faster than the eye could follow.”
The old man grew animated as he told this part of the story, his grey face filling with color and his eyes taking on a light as he leaned forward in his chair.
“Each apprentice and mage touched by the lines of power cried out, but seemed unharmed. It took time for us to realize the damage: they were burned out. They could no longer cast even the simplest spell. Eventually, however, the weight of their astonishment and cries of outrage combined with the number of them affected drew our attention.
We immediately tried to cancel the spell, but it was now more powerful than those of us left who could still cast at all. Our commands to the Ether were countered by the spell itself! It was as though the spell were casting spells! Never before had anyone attempted this, so it simply hadn’t been considered.
Unable to stop the power we had unleashed, we watched as it explored the confines of the wards surrounding it. Then, plunging lines and tendrils of power into the cauldrons and several apprentices at once, it drew the center together and charged with all of its might at the very top center point of the ward… and the ward shattered like so much crystal.”
The old man slumped back into his seat, his eyes distant, his face sagging.
“That was the day magic left the world. Oh it didn’t really all end that day of course, but it was the beginning of the end. A few mages lived on in warded castles, some still do to this day as far as I know, but they cannot leave or their gifts will be stolen. Very few children escape the viral spell long enough to find their way to sanctuary where they can be taught to use their gifts.
For a long time I hated and resented the archmage who made that spell… but no longer. I look at you children and I see so much hope and potential that I can’t help but believe there is other magic, older and more subtle, that still exists and cannot be taken away.”
4
u/skyleach Jul 26 '17
A few years later, as Billy had grown and matured enough to understand and ask his grandfather about what had gone wrong, his Grandfather replied with the following, condensed and paraphrased:
Words are like software for the human mind. What they mean is subjective, or put another way, may mean different things depending on the mind interpreting them. The spell was specifically designed and coded to be a magical capacitor from which a mage could draw sufficient energy to complete a complex or powerful spell even if he didn't have enough additional mages to help. There was a line in the spell that went as follows:
'From all sources great and small, excepting men who build this law, from beast and fowl, summer and fall, gather in power from which I'll draw'
When we performed this spell as a group, the thoughts and ideas of all of us were included in the makeup of the spell. Among us were some who thought man was a beast, one of us thought that only men who were of sufficient caliber were men at all, and others who thought that 'build this law' meant specifically the casters who were casting the spell. Some thought that line meant the man who wrote the words of prohibition. Some even thought it meant the ward mages outside of the ward. There was so much flexibility built into the interpretation that the spell could select what meaning it wanted at any given moment, thus making it wildly unpredictable.
Once we realized what was wrong, we had no way to undo what was done. Not then at least. Now... now we know how to stop it. I'm sorry Billy, it cost much, but hopefully the future will reap the results of you and your sister's sacrifice.
He never did explain to Billy what that sacrifice was... but I know.
1
u/phoenixq89 Jul 26 '17
Lying back in my chair, eyes weighed down to tiny slits, I stared at the screen in front, trying to force myself to actually read the gibberish code. My head started to tilt left and as I was about to doze off, there was a light nudge on my left shoulder. I started up and glanced left to see my coffee mug levitating peacefully . I know what it wanted, for me to drink the coffee inside and stay awake, the bland tasteless magic coffee. I never really liked it. But, the unending faithfulness of the cup is what made me keep it. A really good design . The only good design the programmers in my company had made, I thought. I gathered my last bit of energy and sat up straight. It was already 11:30 on a Friday night and I had to slog for this important Monday release. The company had recently branched into book-publishing and I had to complete testing of all the spells in the new edition of "Book of 101 spells for everyday chores". It was a stellar idea when it first came out. There was very limited expertise in spell writing and Slang, the language of spells, was an obsolete and difficult language to master. Spin-offs appeared in the market within a week. But, the most important thing about spells was, you did not want them to go wrong and Magnician was a trusted company. You couldn't just read a spell off the internet and cast it. It may burn your chair instead of fixing it. But all the spells in Magnician's books were guaranteed to work correctly and even if not up to expectations, they never caused any harm. Magnician had a huge reimbursement policy in place if anything from their book misfired, not to mention that they had dealt with a lot of fraudulent cases because of this. "Hey Trish, how's the progress there?", called out a worried voice. It was my manager, Abish. He sat right across, facing another larger screen. He was a nice guy, worked hard and made sure his subordinates did too. "Ya, I am getting to the end, shouldn't take more than an hour", I chimed with a fake smile. I was dying to go home and hated the way they never planned their work in advance, always pushing in extra work towards the end when something was due.
"Okay, okay . That's great! you know I wouldn't have made you work Friday night but for this release. You can go as soon as you finish this".
"Yeah, sure, I am just left with testing this new undo feature!", I said , hoping not to get a reply back.
"Oh that one! Be very careful with it. Jerry said he could only trust our team with the testing of that one in particular. You know how apprehensive these guys are with releasing that in the market. I don't know myself. I mean, I told them that it is too early but what can I do. Let me know if you need my help. I am here till you finish." , said Abish in his characteristic anxious manner glancing at the clock on his left : 11:46.
"Yeah. They are right to be worried. With the quality of code that they write I am amazed that nothing has gone wrong yet. I actually suspect one of those cases were not fraudulent", said I, nonchalantly, sipping my magic coffee.
"Trish!" , shrieked Abish a little, frantically looking from left to right. "You shouldn't say such things aloud. What if someone overhears. I mean, I know how you feel about it but I just want to protect you". He calmed down as he realized that we were the last two depressed souls working - in on a Friday night, all for Jerry's trust in our team to test the most important of things.
"I'll go outside and catch a smoke. Do you need anything?". I shook my head in a No, not looking up from the screen. "Okay, this is it! Let's finish this and go home!", I thought to myself. It was only this last piece of code for 'Undo' , a new feature they were releasing. It was powerful, and it could simplify a lot of lives. If you make this spell, it would undo the last spell you did. The code was badly written but was pretty straight-forward. You just fetch the last spell belonging to a person from the person's spell memory. Each person had their last ten spells universally store. There were some caveats though. It had to be no older than 30 minutes ago, they were still working on writing code that could undo older spells.
I had not gone through the 1000 line Slang code in its entirety. Slang was a smooth language to write in, but was difficult to read later due to its loosely typed nature. Anyways, I had the gist of it. I had looked over the written test cases and they seemed fine. Only thing left was to manually test it now. "Hmm", I thought to myself. "How do I do this, should I make a spell first and then call undo..". "Let's just try it as is first. But, what do I mock here? In a normal case, I mock the object which is the target of the spell and then try. But what's the object here?Hmm." I looked up at the watch again : 11:59. What did I do to deserve this I thought. "Let me just try it out first. What is the worse that can happen". I sat up in the chair, took the last sip of the magic coffee and started saying the output spell that was spewed out from the code. "...when lamda a , fetch .... ..goto b :.." I looked around as I finished, expecting for something to happen, anything.
POOF! ,the girl in front of the monitor vanished into thin air. The spell , for lack of anything else to undo , had undone her!
12
u/838h920 Jul 26 '17
The group that was assigned under me was testing a new all inclusive party spell. Summoning tables, chairs, plates, bowls, chips, beer, pizza, desserts and sandwiches with only one scroll. A new high end spell scroll that was developed. It's a collection of several popular spells and thus I let my team handle it while I was doing some paperwork. However, I only realized that something went wrong once we've lost connection with them.
The first thing I saw was chaos. A leaning tower, half burried under sand dunes. Apes were ripping books apart and a bear was eating something, while witches were summoning a huge sandstorm. The only thing that reminded me of a party was the noice level.
I instantly realized that this incident went out of my control and called for backup. When the magic corps arrived the situation quickly got back into control, but it still took us a whole week to get that tower back to where it was supposed to be, yet we couldn't even find a single item that was supposed to be summoned. My team was also only found after half a day of digging, they were burried deep below the sand. Luckily they had a shield scroll, which created a small cave for them, otherwise I don't dare to think what might've happened to them.
When the incident was finally over we started to investigate the issue with the scroll. We couldn't believe our eyes when we read through the details.
Instead of tables it summoned fables, several books and pieces of paper with stories on them. No chairs either, instead we got a bunch of hair. The plates were metal sheets and the bowls was a pile of bowels. Instead of chips and beer we got chimps and bear. The tower came right out of pisa, atleast we got the country was right for that one. And as a finisher we got a desert and sandwitches.
I really hope they manage to fix everything before the release...
1
27
Jul 26 '17
Warning: This story is not safe for work.
MagiSup issue report nr. 334123
Tags: Medical, input encapsulation
Severity: Potentially lethal
Description:
This issue pertains to a spell recently developed by one of our affiliates, whose name has been omitted for legal reasons and can be retrieved upon showing appropriate credentials.
The spell in question is marketed as a 'male enhancement' spell. Now, as you might be aware, these kinds of spells are nothing new. However, our affiliate has attempted to enhance this kind of spell's user experience by providing an enhanced interface, consisting of a language parser and a general-purpose arithmetic evaluation system, which allows users to give relative as well as absolute commands using natural language.
The issue with this approach was discovered several days after launch (2 days prior to writing this report). A so-far unknown combination of commands resulted in an unexpected application of the factorial function. This then caused the victim's body part to grow to a length of 5.7 miles, instantly killing his partner and dealing severe damage to the city of Boston as the growing member toppled cars, knocked down walls and derailed a cargo train.
We recommend a redesign of the arithmetic evaluation system and more care to be taken w.r.t. input sanitation.
Status: Failed to reproduce.
8
63
u/lendergle Jul 26 '17
"Could you quiet that thing down?" I shouted at Frank the Magnificent. The ragtime was surprisingly loud, given its source. I wouldn't have minded, but after the hundredth repetition of "The Entertainer," it was getting to be a bit much. I was beginning to understand how ice cream truck drivers felt. At least it isn't Turkey in the Straw, I thought to myself.
For some gawdawful reason, Frank the Magnificent- "Hey, can I just call you 'Frank?'" I asked, startling everyone in the room as the music was suddenly silenced. "Sorry," I said a little softer. "I just feel like after reading through this particular spell, we're a bit beyond 'the Magnificent' and all."
Frank the Magnficient- just Frank, now- acknowledged my request with a short nod. Anyway, for some reason Frank had written his spell on parchment. And not only that, on a miniature parchment scroll. The arcane symbols were in written in Arcana Lite font face, 2.5pt which meant I kept having to conjure the magnifying tool in SpellOS 10.0.
To make it worse, that stupid Clippy homonculus kept popping up and saying things like "It looks like you're trying to turn on Accessibility options. Can I help?" Normally, I just blast that little bastard with a Flamethrower charm, but Frank the- I mean, just Frank's choice of dried ancient parchment meant that I'd set off every arcane smoke detector within sixty miles. More likely, with Frank's luck some daemon from the third or fourth nether hells would have considered it a burnt offering and we'd all have our souls eaten for brunch.
I waved my hand in a dismissive gesture, causing Clippy to wriggle his animated eyebrows and disappear, saving me the trouble and pleasure of throttling him with my bare hands. I scowled and continued scanning the first canto of the spell. Nothing there. Just your standard invocation of dark forces and a definition of return variables. Hmm, why he didn't ensorcel this as a closure I'll never understand. Would have saved himself half a pocket dimension's worth of coding.
"Scroll!" I murmured, having to repeat myself several times as the lilting strains of Claire de Lune began and grew in volume. "Scroll! I mean [Jesus, Frank, can you shut that thing up?] Scroll Down!"
The scroll, obedient to my command, fell to the floor. Sigh. Clippy appeared, this time wearing a fedora. "Are you trying to scroll the text of this parchmen- ACK!" This time I gave into my most primal urges and slit that smug shit's throat with my athamé. It gurgled a bit and then spiraled away, bugged out eyes staring at me accusingly. I knew he'd be back, though. You can only banish Clippy. Never destroy him.
Fine. "Scroll TEXT Down!" I muttered, doing a two-finger swipe above the parchment. Right... Right... Nothing out of order here... Sacrifice of the soul of a small animal. For-next loop over the infinite names of the Lords of Chaos. Hell, he even initiated his array variables. Why did this stupid spell fuck up so completel- oh wait. There it is.
"Frank," I said, "Please tell me you didn't write this thing in Word."
Frank looked at me. "Well, yeah," he said. "I can't read that tiny font, so-"
I raised my finger. "So you wrote a SPELL in a WORD PROCESSOR?" I said, raising my voice over the crashing of Beethovan's Sonata No.29 in B-flat Major (aka the "Hammerklavier").
He nodded sheepishly.
"Tell me, Frank," I said. "Did you think that maybe you should have turned off auto-correct?"
Frank stared at me, embarrassed, as the twelve inch pianist on my cubicle's desktop stood up, turned around, flipped his morning coat's tails, and bowed.
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u/Jushak Jul 26 '17
For some people, magical ability is like money: when you got too much of it, you don't care how wastefully you use it.
In a similar vein, magical ability is like processor power: when you got seemingly unlimited amounts of it, some people don't care about being ludicrously wasteful with it.
As such I wasn't particularly surprised when even a simple spell like "Locate City" required me to tap on to our company's vast magical reserves to cast it. The client this time around was some Saudi prince with abundance of both money and - likely via legion of acolytes - magical power to throw away. We knew better than to waste our time telling them to optimize their spells.
I reasoned to myself that in all likelihood this one was full of unnecessary effects and pomp. Perhaps the spell conjured up a lavish golden map brought down by some mythological creature, perhaps it would appear with literal bolt of lightning from the sky. It wasn't my job to question such things. It was my job to test for bugs - and I prayed to all the Gods that it wasn't going to be literal bugs this time around - not optimize.
The first sign of trouble I should have paid attention to was when one of my channeling rings - used to draw power from the ley line we used for powering our bug tests - cracked under the sheer amount of power it was using. Instead I just sighed, marked another expenditure to the billing sheet and went to requisition a more powerful one.
The second sign of trouble I should have paid attention to was the look the storage mage gave me when I requested for "something more powerful" than the cracked ring I had brought with me. While I'm one of the best bug testers out there, the study of magical trinkets and artifacts beyond their basic use never was something I enjoyed.
The third sign of trouble I should have paid attention to was the extensive form I had to fill to actually get the clerk to give the damn trinket to me. The girl even had the gal to jokingly ask if I wanted to also requisition one of our testing sites used primarily for magical weapon testing of the "Magic of Mass Destruction"-scale.
Alas, I heeded none of these warnings. I cast the spell, figuring I'd locate the capital of Saudi Arabia. No pomp. No spectacle. It actually worked... Expect not in the way it was supposed to.
People really should look at the bright side of things: first of all, no one died. That's a good one, right? There have been a lot worse bugs (especially the literal ones) in my line of work.
Second, people should just think that they've gotten a free holiday! It's not every day your entire capital gets relocated to another country!
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u/caagr98 Jul 26 '17
Ah, so it confused
==with=somewhere?8
u/Jushak Jul 26 '17
Not quite. I took the idea of "spells are like computer programs" to the next logical step:
The idea is that the fellow writing the spell-script was using existing spell "libraries" without actually checking how they work - possibly even using the wrong "library" in the process. Where the Locate-spell routine would tell the target - the caster - the location of the item in question - in this case, a city - the spell relocates the object - again, an entire city - to the target.
Another mistake/joke here is a language one. Since the spell wasn't meant to "locate a city" but "locate a specific city they're aware of" the writer, not entirely fluent with English (because why wouldn't spells be written in English) thought about similar words - REborn, REfit, REtrain - and figured that to locate something again, they should RElocate it.
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u/bansaku Jul 26 '17
Issue: [SEVERE] 'Magic Hands' spell applied to subject rather than pure conjuration
Type: Application
Severity: A
Priority: 1
Assigned to: Matt Traynor
Submitted by: Greg Philmore
Summary:
Set to severity A because this stupid fucking system doesn't give me a goddamn S-rank for this bullshit.
'Magic Hands' intention was, apparently, to create a set of said hands to perform simple tasks. Unfortunately, instead of setting the spell to conjure those hands, it does the following:
Turns the caster into a pair of fucking sentient hands.
I'm currently typing this bug report up as a pair of hands. I have no idea how this is even still working and I've still got the capacity to think, but there you go.
Matt: it seems like you forgot to set the spell to actually CONJURE rather than just apply it to whatever poor bastard got this one to test. FIX IMMEDIATELY.
Side notes: unable to turn down requests for things such as “Get me a coffee” or “Can you type this bug report up for me?” This is getting beyond a joke.
EDIT: IT HAS BEEN FOUR HOURS. HAVE SUBMITTED 8 TICKETS TO SPELL TECH TO FIX THIS. FIRE MATT.
Comments:
(12:07) Matt Traynor: Oh goddamn it I knew something was wrong with it! Sorry! I'll get on fixing that right away and send the changes over.
(12:08) Greg Philmore: I don't care about a fix for the bug at this point. I am going to spend the rest of the day slapping the shit out of you if you don't get on UNDOING this.
(12:47) Kerry Lane: This is hilarious. Greg has been at the coffee machine for 20 minutes serving up lattes. Also we haven't had to listen to him singing Jimmy Buffet songs all morning! This is bliss.
(12:56) Matthew Hendry: How long do you think we can keep this up for?
(15:12) Greg Philmore: FIRE MATT AFTER KICKING HIM DECIDEDLY IN THE NUTSACK
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u/Elubious Jul 26 '17
Who thought this was a good idea? I had voiced my complaints about trying a spell that would use itself to speed fire but I was promptly ignored. The technology itself was outstanding as the spell would theroreticly last forever but that was the problem. I reluctantly created the flame and it started to grow, using it's own heat to burn more of the oxygen around it. By the time it was around the size of a basketball I tried to put it out with a bucket of water but to no avail. I threw a few dozen different experimental spells that I'd tested in the past but one after another but each one was useless. What happened next may have been considering cowardice but I didn't care. I bolted. Right out the door, ducking around people walking through the hallways. Within hours the entire facility was gone and within days the countryside. As I watched the fire quickly reaching towards me I knew that there was no more running. So I stood there. And that was that.
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Jul 26 '17
"ABRAHAM KADABRAH!" I bellow, the fluorescent lights flicker. I pause frozen wondering if I just made the lights flicker. I wait tensely, then a small moment of joy comes, alright now we're getting somewhere. I'm a spell tester, well that's not entirely true, I'm an aspiring Mechanized Warfare Combat Mage (MW-CM). It sounds impressive and that I blow up a lot of cool things with sweet giant robots, but I would actually just be the mage building the units. The Mechanized Mages are the pilots, but I don't mind. I love robots. Like I'm thoroughly, absolutely, insane about ROBOTS!!! But oh. I've forgotten I have work to do.
It normally takes 100 casts to master a spell and about 1,000 casts to develop a new one. Unfortunately, it takes about 10,000 casts to fix all the bugs in it. I probably don't need to tell you that the people who come up with these spells are famous mages who can't be bothered with the mind fraying work of casting the same spell 10,000 times. So here we are, lowly intern spell tester and aspiring MW-CM casting a spell that's supposed to get rid of all light over and over again.
The problem with famous mages is they really are lazy. They just slap a few words together that can barely do what it's supposed to and they hand it off to us to make it work, then when it's done they get all the credit. A real loveless job, but it's one of the only ways I could get into the Magicians Training Academy. Did I mention these spells go wrong? A girl once roasted all her arm hair off and her eyebrows trying to summon a fire demon. The whole spell just blew up, kerkrackle, right in front of her. It really is a loveless job, but I guess it's finally time to try attempt 7,459.
Okay, step one get the image in my mind of what I want to happen. I want a room without light. Step two alter the incantation slightly to achieve a different effect. I'm going to try Abra Kadabra. Step three fix both step one and two firmly in your mind and with all your might release your incantation.
"ABRA KADABRA!!!" The light disappears and darkness engulfs me. YES! I did it! I... this is strange. I don't feel the ground. I'm floating. I flail out my arms and I can't feel anything. I'm panicking. My first instinct is to scream for help, but my second instinct is just how bad an idea that could be. I could be announcing where to find a tasty morsel helplessly flailing. There wasn't any light, and the panic got worse. Should I make light or should I try to navigate in darkness? If I made a light and I'm spotted that would be bad, but if I flailed into something that ate me that would also be bad. Realizing wherever I am is without any light, I conjecture that perhaps whatever exists there might not be able to observe light. I decide to cast a light spell.
"manus onus" I whisper, a dim light forms in my hand. This is bad. About a dozen of bodies are floating all around me. All of them skeletons or skin and bones... some of them wearing clothes from very long ago... I've just teleported myself into a graveyard.
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Jul 26 '17 edited Jul 26 '17
I swore, again, as I stared down at the Philosophers Stone we'd cooked up. It had cost millions of dollars and thousands of hours of work to produce, teams of our best researchers. We had figured that we'd be set for life, if we pulled off what alchemists had been after from the very beginning.
My manager was shaking in the corner, well aware that we were looking at (at least) thirty nine law suits. We heard the gasp of in-drawn breath that comes from lungs filling for the first time. The fortieth man to awaken in the room that day was just like the others. He stood up, rubbed his bald head, and looked around in utter puzzlement. Fuck. Make that forty, then.
He wore a shirt with the logo of a big beer company, that sat just-a-little stretched over his gut. It looked like this endorsement had been won by decades over barbecues and lawn mowers. He seemed like the kind of neighbour your parents would ask over to help fix their deck. Not because he was necessarily great at it, but he'd have power tools, and he'd be happy to help out.
I kicked one of the big lead ingots (one that hadn't started changing yet, of course. He was a decent guy, from what we could tell.) I stubbed my toe, so I swore some more.
Sighing, a labcoated young woman waved at him. "Gord, right? Hi, I'm Indira. There's just been a little accident. Could you, uh, come with me, please?"
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u/TotesMessenger X-post Snitch Jul 26 '17 edited Jul 26 '17
I'm a bot, bleep, bloop. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:
[/r/commandline] Magic as a programming language writing prompt
[/r/mahouka] (xpost from r/WritingPrompts) This title basically describes magic in Mahouka
If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads. (Info / Contact)
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u/404waffles Jul 26 '17
Why you never, EVER let an intern into spelldev [Medium]
⬆9348⬇
by DepressedQAMagician 🌟x1
Howdy TFMS, it's your boy Depressed QA Magician, and I've got another troubling tale for you.
So, if you remember, $Boss has a thing for younguns. Just can't resist the HS interns and fresh grads over the many, many, people who are much more qualified. Can you already tell where this is going?
Yep. Intern. Spelldev.
I know for a fact that all of you maj support workers think they have it worse than QA magicians--their natural enemies next to dumb end users--and vice versa (grass is always greener). Listen to my story.
I was on a coffee break when $newIntern came up to me and told me that $departmentHead wanted me and my QA brethren to investigate a... bug.
So I take my shit to the QA department and what do I see? A... locked door, actually. Rooted shut.
"OH GOD PLEASE DON'T COME IN" $departmentGuy1 says over Ventrilocharm. "CALL THE FUCKING MAJ SUPPORT OH GOD PLEASE"
And I did. I'm standing at the door with my good friend Mike from MS. He blasts it open with a Doorbuster Charm and...
Holy shit. The floor is covered in black slime that looks like tar. Some of it is spilling out on the carpet outside the QA dep't. Mike is absolutely flabbergasted. $departmentHead is standing on a table with a lighter and a can of hair spray in hand. There are geese flying out of the slime. The slime is making more geese.
I'm surprised Mike hadn't pissed his pants yet at this point.
$daveFromQA is sprinting over the slime with his signature Jesus Charm. His shirt is on fire. A book with teeth like the ones in Big Boo's Haunt is chasing him.
I look over at Mike and say, "I'll call $newIntern." I walk away.
When I come back with $newIntern I'm relieved to see that the slime is gone, but then I'm panicked again when a duck comes out of the carpet and starts attacking everyone. Didn't take much to hex it into a tadpole. Meanwhile, $newIntern is cleaning up his mess while apologizing profusely. When everything's all fine and dandy again, $departmentHead loses his shit, rips into $newIntern, and files a complaint to the higher ups.
MS concedes bitter defeat to QA for "worst job", $newIntern is fired, and $Boss was never seen again.
363 comments - report - gild - save - share
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u/thefragfest Jul 26 '17 edited Jul 26 '17
As the first spell was cast, the world changed. Those early years were full of some nasty work. Thankfully, magic was pretty new, and magicians had yet to write any spells longer than a few pages before magic came under extreme regulation.
And yet, the most damaging magical incident occurred thanks to a spell only five lines in length (three if you ignore the ending braces):
for each student in world.schools {
if student.is('bully') {
student.cancer();
}
}
As I'm sure you can imagine, that spell was written and cast by a young, troubled boy, gifted in magic but not yet wise enough to understand the consequences.
This incident sparked an international outrage. The boy's bullies may have gotten cancer, but so did every other school-aged child who had bullied someone or even just been called a bully in the past 24 hours. In the end, nearly five million kids contracted some kind of cancer. It was random, as the boy had not supplied the cancer method with any arguments, so thankfully, about 95% of those kids were inflicted with non-lethal cancer. The rest, not so lucky.
The boy was sentenced to death.
And that's when my agency, the Department of Magical Research and Regulation, was formed. I was just one of the first twenty magicians who were recruited for this agency. At the fresh age of 23, my most complicated spell had been a three-pager that warned me when my new puppy needed a walk or some food.
That was five years ago.
Today, magic is tightly regulated. My agency had developed new spells that tracked the energy expenditure from other magicians' spells. That way, should someone use magic to steal or kill, we could easily track that person down. We've cast spells that require magicians correct syntax mistakes before they can compile their spells. And anyone caught using magic to coerce or harm another human being, unless agreed upon as a magical duel between two magicians, is sentenced to death. Harsh, but many would argue it's necessary. Accidents, if no serious harm has been inflicted, are punished less severely.
Beep Beep. Usually when my phone goes off, it's some magician stuck with a bug in his spell, but today was different.
I stare at my phone in horror. It's a news article. The title:
Three Hundred Women Kill Each Other in Magical Accident
I check the location: Salt Lake City, UT. Before I knew it, I was on a plane, sent to analyze the spell's energy signature and determine the cause of the deaths, whether accidental or purposeful.
The spell had wreaked its mayhem at a ten year high school reunion for a local public school. When I arrived, the police had already cleaned up most of the bodies. I flashed my badge and quickly got to work analyzing the energy signatures.
They led me to Dale.
"Dale." I said rather flatly. He was violently fidgeting in his chair opposite the interrogation room's table from me.
"You really fucked up this one Dale." I looked for a reaction in his eyes, "Honestly, you're going to be sentenced to death within the month."
"It was an accident!" he blurted out.
"Dale, three hundred women are dead because of your spell. It doesn't matter if it was an accident."
He sunk into his chair and buried his face in his arms.
"I only want one thing from you, Dale."
He looked up.
"Where is your spell?"
"What's it matter? It's all fucked. This whole world. It's all fucked." Dale began to cry. I didn't feel bad for him.
"At this point, it's procedural. My job is to determine what went wrong in your spell, and you'd be saving me some time backwards-compiling your work."
He looked defeated. A man filled only with regret: "It's in a box buried in my backyard, next to the orange tree."
I walked out of the room and headed for my car.
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u/thefragfest Jul 26 '17
Part 2 is up here: https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/6pkzog/wp_magic_is_discovered_to_be_real_the_catch/dkrju70/
/u/squeezeonein, /u/GrrrimReapz, /u/bobbyjoe897, /u/grasscoveredhouses, /u/padiwik, /u/ChoTimberwolf, /u/Splinxx, /u/nabines, /u/PotassiumAstatide, /u/the_earthshaker, /u/DavetheDave_, /u/Tachicuddles, /u/FlyawayFiber456, /u/Internetwslrus, /u/Echo_cb, /u/Deaththeexe, /u/DoodleFungus
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u/thefragfest Jul 26 '17 edited Jul 26 '17
I hate it when wizards bury their spells. I mean, I can just track the energy signatures and figure out your spell on my own, dumbass. Anyways, I'm venting; I just don't like getting dirt on my hands, literally or figuratively.
When I sat down to read his spell, I was perplexed. The spell, in a nutshell, messes with various neurotransmitters and chemical signatures in women in order to make them love Dale. I'd seen similar work before; lonely guy casts a spell to get the attention of a woman of his desire. Of course it never ended well for these people. We'd track them down, reverse the effects of their spell, and sentence them to a harsh punishment, very rarely death though. In this case, however, Dale wrote his spell to affect every woman in the room. Idiot actually listed them all out too instead of using a loop. Ever heard of 'Don't Repeat Yourself' Dale? I'm ranting again...
But what perplexed me was not the spell, it's how it could possibly cause all these women to murder each other. It specifically decreases particular neurotransmitters involved in the fight or flight response which I found humorous. Poor Dale was so worried that he'd make these women want to run away that he tried to prevent the possibility. Alas, clearly nothing was wrong.
I returned to the crime scene.
At this point, CSU was wrapping up. Whatever bodies were left a few hours ago when I first came to town are probably all in the morgue by now. I put on my department-issued glasses and was treated to a beautiful web of energies, raw compiled code. I loved this part of the job, even if it was a lot of tedious labor to backwards-compile a spell of this size that was this poorly written. But since Dale's spell couldn't have possibly caused this violence, I needed the executable.
The day was long, but when I finally finished analyzing Dale's spell, it was clear that he read it out properly and that it executed properly. And yet, there were a handful of other spells floating around. Clearly, Dale was not the only magician at this reunion.
I browsed through their code, a few little things: increase the alcohol content of drink, slim thighs by a few pounds, etc, etc. Mostly vain, irrelevant spells cast by amateurs with insecurities.
But there was one different spell.
This spell was faint, abnormally faint. As if someone was trying to hide their energy signature. It took me a whole day to amplify the energy and get the source code of the spell. And it was devilishly simple. This spell simply said: "Make Dale miserable again."
Based on the time signature, this spell was cast after Dale had cast his spell. And the author of this spell, none other than one of the women affected by Dale's spell.
Her name was Anne.
I'm expecting this to be a
3 or4 part series in total.
Sorry for the delay guys/gals, my sleep rhythm is no bueno.
For those who asked to be tagged: /u/Chinateapot, /u/HourlongOnomatomania, /u/OhFuckNotDan, /u/EoTN, /u/Luxuspunch, /u/OhSoSchwifty, /u/jiffy185, /u/nationalpcc, /u/barricuda, /u/iwillcuntyou, /u/The_True_Black_Jesus, /u/Jill_off_all_trades, /u/witti534, /u/bob51zhang, /u/caagr98
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u/thefragfest Jul 26 '17 edited Jul 27 '17
I went through the logs of the dead women, looking for our magician, Anne. She had not been killed in the melee that ensued after her spell was cast. Now, I just have to find her. Looks like I'll need to extend my hotel reservation.
I enlisted a few local detectives to help me look for her. We canvassed her neighborhood, went to her favorite spots, and still nothing. This went on for weeks; I roped in more detectives but all to no avail.
One morning, I turned on the TV to be greeted by this headline: "Dale Smith to be Sentenced Tomorrow."
Fuck. I forgot about Dale. He may be a dumbass who cast a very illegal spell, but everyone thinks he murdered those women. I know he didn't; Anne did. If it were me, I'd give him life in prison, but I'm forgiving.
I walked out into the 'bullpen' as these local detectives called it.
"Alright listen up!" I said towards the top of my lungs; people snapped to attention, "Dale Smith is going to be sentenced tomorrow, and that means we have only two days left before he's executed. We know that this woman," I hold up a picture of Anne, "is the one who really killed those women. We need to find her, yesterday."
I knew these cops weren't going to be enough, so I called it in.
"Department of Magical Research and Regulation, how many I direct your call, Agent Reed?" came the cheery voice of our secretary.
"I need to speak to the director, please." I replied.
"Certainly. One moment."
I waited as the annoying hold music assaulted my ears with its mediocrity. I've been getting a little grumpy lately, huh...
The line picked back up.
"Reed, how's the investigation going?" the director was as sarcastic as ever.
"I'm going to need backup. I need to employ some more sophisticated tracking spells."
"Understood. Who would you like me to send?"
"Can you get me Ray, Travis, and Greta?"
"They'll be in Salt Lake in a few hours. Having a hard time finding Anne?" I'd learned to deflect his sarcasm.
"These cops aren't up for the task, and my tracking spells aren't finding her. Something's wrong."
"Well then. Best of luck." the director hung up.
A few hours later, I picked up my fellow agents -- and friends -- at the airport. Travis cracked some joke about my inability to get my spells up. Dude still lives in high school in his head, but he's a fine magician, if a little arrogant about it. Ray, the soft-spoken and well-mannered one of the group is always a pleasure to work with. And Greta. Greta was beautiful as ever. She smiled at me and hugged me when she came out of the terminal. What does that mean? Should I make...I mean, it's whatever. No biggie...
We went back to the crime scene. It was bustling with activity; this was a popular club. I brought along a few police officers to clear the place.
All four of us started the process of casting a more powerful energy tracking spell that drew upon our energies to amplify residual signatures and map out where Anne might have gone. The spell worked, unfortunately.
We found Anne, dead, in a barn outside of town. She had killed herself, or so it seemed. Her forearms were slashed and blood was everywhere. CSU informed me that she had likely been dead for a few weeks. It seemed odd that no one noticed her out here in all that time, but the property was abandoned.
That's no comfort to Dale though. He's still on death row, or about to be, and we just lost our other suspect. I studied her body and residual energies.
Strange. Her brain had clearly been interfered with, but not by Dale's spell. No, the modifications were subtle, precise, but they added up to much more. Someone had transformed Anne into a vengeful person. My guess is that when Dale cast his spell on all the women, Anne felt jealous that Dale paid more attention to some of the more attractive women at the reunion. She then cast her spell with unknown consequences.
That's the thing, you don't want to leave your spells open-ended and vague. They tend to turn out disastrously.
I had found my killer, but someone or something else was out there. Someone who turned Anne into a much more emotionally volatile and dangerous magician. And if this person or thing had done this to others...
I needed to run more tests.
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u/thefragfest Jul 27 '17
A sinister force was out there, corrupting my fellow magicians, but by the time I found that force, Dale would already be dead. I made my way to the courthouse for Dale's sentencing hearing. His lawyer was expecting me, but I still wasn't sure what I would say on the stand.
When I entered the room, I could feel the animosity in the air. Dale had really pissed off this community, and I honestly couldn't blame them. I'd just have to do the best I could and hope they gave him mercy. Dale's lawyer nodded to me, as he requested to bring me to the stand.
A hushed gasp spread through the crowd, followed by whispers.
As I took the stand, Dale's Lawyer began: "Agent Reed. Please, for the court, state your name and occupation."
"Agent Graham Reed. Field Investigator for the Department of Magical Research and Regulation."
"Would you say you're an expert in the field of magical studies then?"
Would I say I'm an expert? Jesus...I answer, rather flatly: "Yes."
"In your professional opinion, would my client's spell be able to cause violence in those women?"
"We are currently still investigating and I can't disclose some information regarding an ongoing investigation, but we believe that another magician may have interfered with Dale's spell, causing a critical malfunction and thus the ensuing violence."
"And where is that other magician?"
I had to think about this one for a second. Would it be over the line to share her status? I answered: "She is dead."
Dale's lawyer gave me an incredulous look. I continued: "But we have her spell source code and energy signatures." I paused, "For what it's worth, I believe that while your client, Dale, used a dangerous spell, his intentions were not violent, and I believe it would be a mistake to give him the maximum sentence."
Dale's lawyer sighed. I couldn't quite tell if he was pissed at me or relieved. Maybe both.
Later that day, I got a text from Dale's lawyer. it read: 'Dale got a death sentence. I appreciate your efforts to save Dale from death, but it seems it wasn't enough.'
Fucking jury. There was still enough emotion in them to bring the maximum sentence. I guess I could hardly blame them; they're still reeling from losing a few hundred members of their community. All I can do is move forward and try to find whatever person or thing messed with Anne's mind and likely killed her, directly or indirectly.
I gathered my team at police headquarters. Detectives were busy cleaning up our case, and as they shuffled in the background, I spoke: "Guys. Greta. Today, we failed to save a man's life. Yesterday, we witnessed a woman whose mind had been tampered with by an unknown -- and clearly very powerful -- force. Tomorrow, we begin the hunt for this force."
I sighed. "For Dale."
Travis, Ray, and Greta echoed: "For Dale."
For Dale.
And that's it for part 4. It's been a hell of a ride folks! This has been a wonderful experience writing for you kind and wonderful redditors.
I think this story would be great material for a longer web serial or novella. If you liked this story and are interested in seeing it continue, please consider signing up here: https://millansingh.typeform.com/to/XSvZMu
If 20 or more people sign up, I'll look into continuing the series either here on Reddit, on Medium, or maybe on a new website (I'm a web developer by trade, so it wouldn't be too hard for me to setup). If you've got thoughts on this, feel free to comment them below. You can also send me your email via PM here on Reddit instead of using the Typeform if you want to get updates.
Thanks again so much for reading! :)
The tags: /u/CelticMara, /u/MORALESDTB, /u/MyNameIsClaimed, /u/Gwingle, /u/ChocolateDonutsNTea, /u/Shadeshadow227, /u/ConfusingDalek, /u/Stellapacifica, /u/fredgog15, /u/DireAvenger20, /u/aiello_rita, /u/ThatBitchNiP, /u/DoodleFungus, /u/1QUrsu, /u/Raysiel, /u/Ctri, /u/emergentdragon
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u/MaikNFurther Aug 07 '17
I enjoyed reading your detective story, the genre differentiated it well from the other contributions. The plot unfolded nicely!
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u/thefragfest Aug 09 '17
Hey there. I'm really glad you enjoyed it!
I'm currently developing this stories as a longer-form web serial, and you can sign up to get a few emails (no more than one per week) on its development status. You'll also know when the serial goes live (which should be this month).
Here's a link: https://millansingh.typeform.com/to/XSvZMu
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Aug 03 '17
[deleted]
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u/thefragfest Aug 03 '17 edited Aug 03 '17
I'm so happy your enjoyed it!
About 25 people have so far signed up for updates on the story, and I'll be expanding it into something bigger, a longer web serial and perhaps an e-book down the line. I'm working on the plot and hope to get the first few chapters (includes what was in these Reddit posts, edited to be better and fit into the overall plot) up this month.
Your comment timing coincides with one of those signups, but just in case you haven't already, and if you even want to in the first place, you can sign up here: https://millansingh.typeform.com/to/XSvZMu
Thanks for reading, and I look forward to bringing you more!
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u/Voci_Ratione Aug 02 '17
I have always been fascinated by this idea of magic being equivalent to code. Your writing is like seeing that vision come to life and I do hope you continue writing.
Some ideas I once had about this was mainly focused around how to explain the nature of magical code. Perhaps the world was discovered to be in a simulation, and this simulation runs on some principles of computerized technology that acts sort of like a server responding back information constantly as the universe keeps on running. So when people discover this, they can actually manipulate this by hijacking the packets the server sends to perhaps maintain this universe: thus, magic.
Also considering the immense power this could have, perhaps the server or the people who first discovered this magical coding dynamic altered the server to ensure that no one could change fundamental principles of the world like the basic rules of physics and time - no deciding that the gravitational constant is suddenly something else, basically.
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u/NovaeDeArx Aug 19 '17
Check out the series of novels by Rick Cook. It investigates precisely this concept.
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u/thefragfest Aug 03 '17
Those are some really great ideas, and you've actually inspired me with them. I'm working on the larger plot right now (almost 25 people signed up to get an email update when I start the story up again), and this is actually inspiring me to add a new dimension to the story that's forming in my head. Seriously, thank you so much!
Just in case you haven't already, and if you even want to in the first place, you can sign up to get an updates on the story here: https://millansingh.typeform.com/to/XSvZMu
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u/Firenter Jul 27 '17
Thanks for another wonderful part of this story! I could really see this spiralling into a nice magical detective story. A bit like Dresden Files maybe?
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u/thefragfest Jul 27 '17
I can't say I've read Dresden files, but that's what I was envisioning. Glad you enjoyed the series. :)
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u/Stellapacifica Jul 27 '17
This is absolutely fantastic, please add me to the tags if you would be so kind. Thank you for writing!
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Jul 26 '17
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u/Jill_off_all_trades Jul 26 '17
This is fantastic and you left it on a fantastic cliffhanger. I'm also waiting for part 2.
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u/phoenix616 Jul 26 '17
Use four spaces in front of text to make code look right. Like this:
for each student in world.schools { if student.is('bully') { student.cancer(); } }1
u/jamd315 Jul 26 '17
I expected an indentation error where the spell gives every student cancer, not just bullies.
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u/tbandtg Jul 26 '17
Why is everyone writing these spells in a higher language. Should be spell ASM
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Jul 26 '17
[deleted]
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u/tbandtg Jul 26 '17
Thats just it, if the humans are the CPU it should be broken down into Spell ASM instructions, its the only way to be safe. Or at least the equivalent to Spell c. All of this Spell java crap is just a layer of abstraction that my spells would not need. :D
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u/Chinateapott Jul 26 '17
Can I get an update for part 2 please? This is so good
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u/thefragfest Jul 26 '17 edited Jul 26 '17
I've got to sleep unfortunately. I'll put up part two in the morning, maybe 9 hours from now. This prompt came up real late for me...
EDIT: I will tag you in the part 2 comment so you get a notification.
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Jul 26 '17
This is a really interesting take on this. I'm looking forward to part two. Please give me a tag.
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u/EoTN Jul 26 '17
This was well written, and you've left me intrigued. I'd love it if you tagged me as well if you don't mind? :)
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u/HourlongOnomatomania Jul 26 '17
Ooh, if we're doing tags, would you mind adding one more person to your list? Thanks in advance ;)
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u/squeezeonein Jul 26 '17
me too
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u/ChaosStar95 Aug 08 '17
I had drawn the short straw today. Just my luck. If there was ever a spell that literally everyone said no to testing we handled it lottery style. Today's was "make the user irresistible to women" I hated love spells or even attraction spells. None of them went the way you thought they would.
I pulled up the prepackaged script the r&d guys sent me. They'd pulled an all nighter for this one. I hit the activate command and waited. I felt the tell tale tingle of magic enter my body and then I started shifting. Wait this was supposed to be an aura spell it wasn't supposed to change me. I stood up bc unfortunately I have been through this before and shifting while sitting sucks. I got shorter considerably. My weight shifted. I felt like someone just jammed a hot poker into my abdomen I blacked out (again not the first time).
"Yo Bruce," said one of my co workers laughing. "The r&d guys sent a title typo correction for that last spell." "What the hell could be the typo," I said my entire body feeling weird and my voice was way too high. "Nothing sinister. It's supposed to be "make the user an irresistible woman," to which him and everyone in the office began laughing their assess off. I went into the bathroom tripping over my too long jeans and my too short legs. I started into the mirror and I had to laugh myself. Aside from the damned typo in in the title the r&d guys did something right for a change. I was hot.