Here we go again, lurching towards the middle of another year. Fortunately, we’ve got prompts to nudge us in the right direction. And even more fortunately, if we’re reading this we have all the modcons of life, that allow us such indulgences. Never forget that.
| Prompter | Prompt | Promptee |
| Fiona Grey | It was beyond her capabilities to ever comprehend that level of magic. She knew, because everyone told her so. | AC Young |
| AC Young | The sudden downfall was heavier and lasted longer than the forecasters had predicted. | Fiona Grey |
| Becky Jones | The dragons stopped for lunch in the bright meadow. | Leigh Kimmel |
| Leigh Kimmel | You look out the windows at the river behind the convention center, just in time to see a tug with a group of barges filled with iridescent ore. | Cedar Sanderson |
| Padre | “… a pale horse, and it’s rider’s name was Death and Hades followed him.” | nother Mike |
| nother Mike | Someone roped the river and hogtied it… | Becky Jones |
| Cedar Sanderson | The recipe was randomly generated from ingredients entered | Padre |
For those who didn’t know if they would have electricity or the internet or the time to create this week, there are spare prompts. Help yourself, and rejoice in this ability!
| Spare | When kangaroos court… |
| Spare | Follow the bouncing ball… |
| Spare | Your dreams come true… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKh6XxYbbIc |
| Spare | Remember when summer meant vacation days? |
| Spare | V.A.C.A.T.I.O.N… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMo3hHmbMT4 |
Remember to come back and share what you did in the comments. It’s a little like hanging up work on the refrigerator, and don’t forget to send in a prompt for next week. Because come what may, there will always be Odds in search of ends.
(Images by Cedar Sanderson, rendered with MidJourney)
More Odds Than Ends 
Odd… on the home page, the top picture is a square or close to one, and the frog in the middle has eyes! However, here on the weekly page, we have a cropped version, which looks a bit different…
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WordPress: Making pictures inadvertently decapitate frogs since whenever WordPress was invented.
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This week Fiona Grey and I exchanged prompts, with me being presented with: It was beyond her capabilities to ever comprehend that level of magic. She knew, because everyone told her so.
—
Felida was very interested in three fellow students practicing their spells. She was the only one watching. They were trainee archmages, practicing archmage-level spells, which only archmages could cast, and only archmages could understand – or so the prevailing understanding went.
When Felida had arrived at the school she had been tested along with everyone else. The test declared Felida to be an Ordinary Mage, Third Class, and she had since been taught accordingly.
Everyone knew that mages could be divided up into classes based on their magical strength at fourteen, and that mages could learn to cast only spells associated with their class and below. There was no point in teaching a mage the theory associated with higher class spells as mages couldn’t understand spells they couldn’t cast.
Felida secretly believed that the entire edifice was founded on sand. She believed that magical strength improved with practice, and anyone with enough raw talent could learn to cast any spell. But if she was right, the system suited the magical families, who could tutor their children pre-school to ensure that they were assigned to the higher classes, leaving the lower classes to mages from non-magical families, who didn’t know any better.
Proving her theories would be difficult, as large swathes of the magical community were invested in the continuation of the current arrangements. So she had to demonstrate the flaws in the current practice in as extreme a manner as possible, to make it as difficult as possible to ignore her and denigrate her ideas.
Felida had decided that she needed to learn to cast an archmage spell, by herself, without assistance. If someone from the lowest mage class could grasp the theory associated with a spell from the highest of all mage classes well enough to learn to cast it herself then this should prove that her ideas had merit.
Magical theory was very poorly understood, especially at the Ordinary, Third Class level. Felida had only ever been taught what she had needed to learn to understand the basic spells, and this frequently meshed badly, being heavily idiosyncratic and not mutually applicable.
So, Felida had set to work constructing a universal theory of magic. It had taken her a full year of hard work in secret, in the evenings after homework, to figure out something that would work for all the spells she had been taught.
Felida had experimented and come up with new spells to carry out new tasks. They had worked as intended, so she took that as proof that her theory was valid. But that alone wouldn’t be enough. The magical elite would simply declare her new spells to all be Ordinary, Third Class, due to the status of their creator.
She needed to demonstrate that she could use it to learn a spell that wasn’t of her class, otherwise her theories would be rejected out of hand. And even that might not be enough. Hence why she was observing the archmages practicing their spellwork.
One of her new spells was one that took a spell being cast in the vicinity and presented it to her eyes in her new theory. There was a minor complication, in that not all aspects of the spell were contained in the incantation, some were adjusted by the caster in the caster’s mind based on the caster’s intentions. And only the incantation ended up in Felida’s spell diagrams. If Felida was going to cast the spell she had to fill in the gaps – and do so in a way that it still looked as if it was the same spell – if her output was too dissimilar she feared the elite would simply dismiss it as a Third Class-equivalent, not the archmage spell she was after.
Felida decided to go with a shield spell. Not only was it relatively simple to her spell analysis, and didn’t seem to have much external adjustment, it was also very useful, as lesser mages were occasionally subjected to pranks by their betters. This was treated as being very amusing by those who carried out the pranking, but was most definitely not amusing to those being pranked.
She thought that she finally had understood the spell well enough to write its structure down, so she headed indoors. Once safely alone in the Third Class dormitory, she wrote down what she understood the shield spell to be. Then Felida reviewed it against her theory – it looked like what she had written down should work, and be a good copy of the original.
Felida now had the spell written down, in a form she understood. So all she had to do was actually cast it. All – for even the simplest archmage spell required a certain expenditure of magic, and she wasn’t entirely sure that even with all her practice since she’d started at the school that she had the raw power.
The next morning, Felida was late to breakfast. She had waited until the rest of the Third Class students had left the dormitory before extracting the shield spell diagram, and trying to cast it. To her surprise it worked first time, although the magical expenditure meant that she had little left over for her lessons.
After breakfast, when she was on her way to the first lesson of the day she was pranked. She felt the spell strike the shield through her residual connection to the spell, felt the shield give a little, and then felt the moment when the shield held, and the prank spell was ejected. To her surprise the prank spell rebounded off her shield, and struck the prankster, an Ordinary Mage, Second Class.
Felida ignored the effect, and continued to class. Halfway through the lesson she was summoned to the school authorities.
The prankster had complained that she had been taught spells that were beyond her class. This was a very serious issue given that mages could only comprehend spells of their class or lower, and teaching a mage a spell she couldn’t understand was potentially extremely dangerous to all concerned.
The Second Order Chief Master investigated, and soon determined that the shield spell Felida had cast was an archmage spell. At this the Archmage Chief Master was summoned. Both Chief Masters were furious that an archmage would teach a Third Class student such a spell.
Felida was asked again and again who had taught her the spell, but each time she told the truth and said that she’d figured it out for herself. The Chief Masters cast a truth spell, and asked her again, but she merely told the truth once more.
The Chief Masters refused to believe her. They summoned all the archmage students (the teaching archmages wouldn’t dream of doing something so potentially disastrous) in the school, and asked them one by one, under truth spells, if they’d taught Felida the spell – all truthfully said they had not.
The Chief Masters were still convinced that Felida had been taught the spell. But since they couldn’t figure out who had done it, they went to the ArchMaster, and Felida was expelled for refusing to tell the truth and tell them who had taught her the spell.
Felida wasn’t daunted. She made her way to the nearest town. She may have been expelled from the school, but she still had some qualifications from her previous years. These enabled her to set herself up as tutor for lower class mages.
It was hard work, and she was constantly struggling to make ends meet. She taught any who wished to be taught, but the parents frequently didn’t have much money to pay her. She made sure to teach her new theory to all who passed through her doors.
Her pupils were rarely classed above her, and never higher than Ordinary Mage, Second Class, but they were always amongst the best students in their class, because they started out with a better understanding of spell theory than their teachers.
Eventually the magical elite tried to shut Felida down, but it was too late. Her theory had already started to spread. Eventually it spread through the classes, and as it did evidence grew that all spells were understandable by all with the correct theoretical understanding.
About a decade after Felida perished due to old age, the magical class system finally collapsed.
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This was my second attempt at posting the above. I suspect my first attempt failed because I couldn’t spell my own name.
If it ends up appearing more than once, I apologise in advance of this, but after it will appear to have happened.
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Felida has spunk. Good for her!
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[…] quick blurb this week for MOTE, inspired by AC Young’s prompt about the weather. It was a trade this week – go check […]
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[…] challenge went to Leigh Kimmel: The dragons stopped for lunch in the bright meadow. Go on over to More Odds Than Ends to see what transpired with everybody’s prompt responses. If you want to join in, just grab a […]
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Now mine is up on my LiveJournal at https://starshipcat.livejournal.com/1358362.html. It’s another bit of “Varnishing Day,” but I’m still not sure how it fits into the larger whole. Maybe this winter, when the retail business is in its off season, I can go through this stuff and pull it together.
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Cedar prompted me with “The recipe was randomly generated from ingredients entered.”
“We need to try this new restaurant! It’s going to be the coolest thing ever!”
Bill looked over at Janet and sighed. Generally, when she latched onto an awesome idea, they were going to do it. He had never been able to dissuade her from her latest obsessions, so he just went along with them, nodding sagely until they turned out bad or she moved on to something else. They worked out… most of the time.
“Seriously! You know how AI is the future? They are launching the most awesome concept here in town. A completely AI driven restaurant!”
“Well, it promises to be novel, I’ll give them that. I just am not sure if I want to trust my dinner to an AI.”
“It’ll be fine. Actually, it’ll be great! They are offering a few people free sample dinners this week as they test and improve the algorithm. I scored us tickets!”
Bill sighed. “When?”
“Tonight. Want to make it a date?”
“Sure. It can’t be worse than the bugs prepared 13 different ways.”
At six o’clock sharp, Bill and Janet were waiting to be seated. The maître-dee led them to their table and their waitress took their drink orders, then left them to their conversation.
“This is going to be epic!”
“Yes. Whether a disaster or a success remains to be seen, but it will definitely be a novel experience,” Bill replied.
“How can it be a disaster? I mean, I’m sure there are some kinks that need to be worked out, but it can’t be that bad.”
Bill smiled. “It’s going to depend on how they are using the terminology.” He pointed to a notation on the menu. “The recipe was randomly generated from ingredients entered.”
“What do they mean by that? I can think of a couple ways that this could work for good or ill, so I’m curious to see how they do it.”
“A couple ways? What do you mean?” Janet asked.
“Well, if they randomize the amounts of things in the recipe, it could go very bad. For example, if the recipe asks for a pound of habanero powder and a dash of shredded beef, it will be inedible, while the reverse might actually be delicious. If they go with randomly generating a selection of recipes based on available ingredients, it might work better. We’ll see what they come up with. Hopefully, GIGO won’t literally be Garbage In, Garbage Out.”
Janet stared back at him, her mouth agape. “You know, I never thought of that. We’ll see what comes out of the kitchen.”
Bill smiled slightly. ‘We’ll see,” he said. “Whatever we get, it can’t be worse than crickets 13 different ways.”
Janet shook her head, ruefully. “I still can’t get over those cricket flour chocolate chip cookies. I mean, they were pretty tasty, as long as you didn’t know what they were made of.”
“And if it’s a completely inedible disaster, we can hit the taco shop down the street from our house on the way home.”
“That actually sounds good. Thank you for putting up with this.”
In the end, the dinner was actually delicious. The AI seemed to be selecting recipes based on ingredients input every day and a library of available recipes. Bill and Janet decided it was a nice experiment, but not worth a regular expense for a novelty.
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Padre tossed out…
“… a pale horse, and its rider’s name was Death and Hades followed him.”
[huh. I thought it sounded familiar, so I googled it, and Lo and behold, it’s from Revelations. The really odd part is that most of the quotes had “it’s” which is it is, not “its” which I think of as the possessive. Anyway… so, the fourth horseman of the apocalypse. Riding a pale horse, his name is death, and hades follows him… ]
When the pale horse galloped across the sky, with a blackened skeleton on its back, the crowds in the cities went wild. They had not believed, but now they saw this vision in the sky, and they were terrified.
[ugh, I don’t like that…]
The club was rocking to the sounds from the new band. It was jammed, with everyone who could fit standing and rocking, side-to-side, since there wasn’t enough room to do more. That’s when Abilene realized that the words, the song that they were singing sounded vaguely familiar. Most rock bands, especially heavy metal bands, you knew they were singing, but no one knew what the lyrics were. But she frowned, even as she swayed, and she heard, “… a pale horse, and its rider’s name was Death and Hades followed him.”
She shook her head, and looked around. No, they couldn’t be quoting from Revelations, could they? And that verse?
That was when the Angel descended, with a flaming sword, and opened the doors of the club. “Be not afraid!” It announced, even as the crowd tried to stampede in all directions.
[that’s kind of silly…]
Y’a know, one of my experiences growing up revolved around the Bible. See, the church we were going to … I think that was the Baptist church, maybe… anyway, they urged parents to get their children to read the Bible. So my father offered to pay us five bucks for each half of the Bible, the Old Testament and the New Testament. 10 dollars altogether! Which seemed like a lot of money to me at that point in my life.
So I set out to read it. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus… whew, who put all those begets in there? Knocked off the Old Testament. Five dollars!
And started on the New Testament. Matthew, Mark, Luke… huh, they’re kind of repetitive. And all those letters to the Romans and so on?
Then I hit Revelations! Wait a minute, what is this!
“… a pale horse, and its rider’s name was Death and Hades followed him.”
Weird and wonderful, but… keep going!
And, after a while, I had my ten dollars! Not sure I completely understood all of that, but I had read the whole thing. Word by word.
Not the last book I ever read, by any means, but definitely an interesting collection.
Maybe I should go back and read it again…
[so, a couple of shards, a reflection on childhood memories, but… I guess that’s what you get this week, riding on a pale horse…]
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