Challenge #00543 - A168: Sufficiently Advanced... Rituals

[In a discussion about technically-proficient people (of any subdivision) and the lies-to-children told to those they have to interact with]

I think we know why wizards just act all cryptic and stuff…



I imagine they had to keep explaining their knowledge of the arcane to the average peasant over and over again until they just got fed up with it.

And that’s how we get wizards, mages and sorcerers who seem to delight in not giving a straight answer. – RecklessPrudence

There were those who saw Isobel as a god. There were those who saw her as an angel sent by their deity to see them safely to their distant and unreachable paradise. Some saw her as some form of divine intervention in mortal form.

One saw her as a friend.

And now… one different one saw her as a pain in their anatomy and a threat to their authority.

His title was Sir. A fact he reminded everyone of at the slightest hint of a slip. He wore ancient passkeys and sigils of authority, strung on a huge chain around his richly-robed body. He had a harem of under-dressed ladies who he apparently employed to keep him warm and distract any participants.

Pity for him her attentions were solely on the door he’d carefully blocked with his throne of office.

“None may pass,” he repeated. “None! Which word do you fail to understand?”

“I do not understand why you don’t wish to reach Eyisum,” said Isobel, feigning the unique ignorance of a foreigner.

“Eyisum is a state of mind. Eyisum is where our spirits fly. Do you wish to kill me, outsider? Do you wish to kill yourself? This chamber is sealed under the curse of Karantin.” Quarantine. “To enter is to die!”

Her scanners were thorough and had detected nothing in there that could harm a rat. And had, in fact, only picked up rats inside there. Large ones, certainly, but not deadly.

“Then it seems in your best interests to let me pass,” she finagled. “If to go through that door means death, then it seems the quickest and easiest way to prove my hubris to all.”

There it was. The telling flicker. He was a smart enough martinet to know that the machine-gods of Arta were not performing as advertised. Therefore he feared that the forbidden zones had similarly lost power. His power relied heavily on that of their gods. If that power was gone, so was his.

“To enter is to die,” he repeated. “I have men with crossbows to ensure that fact.”

“And I have micro-meteor-rated space armour,” she countered. “Your men are welcome to try it.”

“Enough of this nonsense,” he sneered. “Defense grid, fire internal lasers co-ords eighty by five-three-niner by twelve!”

Isobel heard them warming up and neatly stepped off the entirely suspicious and freshly-repainted X on the floor. Even then, they could barely have managed a first-degree burn on an unprotected citizen.

He’d lost. He’d very clearly lost.

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