Category: magic

The Dangers of Smoking (Original Version)

Originally published 07/09/2007

Here’s another old one, also over ten years old. It was originally broken into two parts, but I broke it up into a few more for ease of jumping around, if there’s a particular section of the story you might want to revisit. This one in particular is heavily indebted to an old Peircedskin story, “One Man’s Rubbish”, which is worth a read if you haven’t found that gem before. Also, as an odd lore note, while there is no mention of Pigtown in this story, the Rod character is this story, and the “Rod” character who owns Pigtown in most of my later works, are all versions of the same character–who is the person listening to The Wizard’s tale in “Losing Control.” I had a series of something in mind to explain how Rod got from point A to point B back when all of this started that never panned out, but this early set of stories are all loosely connected together regardless.

Table of Contents

Part 1 – A Chance Encounter With Rod

Vincent peered into his closet, unsure of what he should wear to his meeting. Mr. Mathews was one of the most important clients of his company, and he had to make a good first impression. Finally he pulled out his blue navy suit and laid it on his bed, getting out of his standard work suit to change. After stripping, he paused a moment to look over his body. His 190-pound, six-foot frame was smooth and muscled from many hours at the gym and with a shaver. Even though Vincent hated to workout, and hated breaking a sweat even more, he knew how important it was too look good as a company representative. After going to the gym, he would immediately shower, he couldn’t stand being dirty for any long period of time. He also hated the hair on his body, and trimmed most of it off except for his pubic bush. His apartment reflected this tidy attitude, and Vincent spent almost all of his time at home cleaning everything. Any of the girlfriends he had had left after a few months because they couldn’t stand his constant cleaning, but Vincent didn’t mind, it was easier to keep everything clean when he only had to pick up after himself.

He pulled out his ironing board and pressed his shirt and pants, then put on his suit. He picked up his other clothes and tossed them in the dry cleaning hamper, and then found the appointment book where he had written down the location of the meeting. Mr. Mathews hadn’t wanted to come to the office for some reason, but Vincent was ok with that so long as he got a bonus for sealing the deal. Flipping through his notebook, he saw that he had written “Bremerton Pub, 6 p.m.” under Thursday with an address in the harbor district he had looked up online earlier. Vincent felt his stomach turn at the thought; any pub in the harbor district wasn’t going to be anything like the upper class soirées he was used to. But the customer was always right, so he climbed into his car and drove downtown.

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Losing Control (Original Version)

I’m hoping to publish a longer story once a week or so, but I know that I won’t be able to always have sizable new content for you all. However, one thing I have been wanting to do for years is organize all of my stories in one place with a more comprehensive tag/category system, so this is the beginning of that project. When I don’t have a new story to post for the week, I’ll go back in my archives, clean up an old story, and repost it here. I’m going to be starting off with some stories that I haven’t touched in a very long time–like this one! My first story, almost twelve years old! Like a small child. Almost a teenager even. A story that is also a tween. I think this is now sufficiently weird.

In addition, for some of these, I’m planning on working on fixing up some of the writing, and also potentially extending them. I already have an extended rework of this story is process in fact. Some of those enhanced versions will be published here, others will be for Patron eyes only, depending on how I feel about them. I do want to preserve the original work, however, so I won’t be cleaning these archive versions up too much. The writing is a bit…well, it was twelve years ago! I was trying very hard. In any case, some of you might not have ever seen these stories, and others might like to revisit them, and now they will all be in one place, eventually! Hooray!

(Original version, published 4/22/2007)
I’m not a fan of destroying peoples’ lives, but sometimes they just deserve it. Being a wizard, it’s important to not lose control and let your power go to your head. Of course, I feel that I have a certain duty however to assist other people in realizing that they shouldn’t let their power go to their heads either. For example, do you remember Mike, the quarterback?… No of course you don’t remember Mike, Jerry’s the quarterback now and always has been. Let me just tell you a story then. Let’s say that there was this guy on campus, and he was a quarterback, and very popular, with a great body. All of those things would give a guy a lot of power, right? And a reasonably good person might use that power to do something good, right? You know…instead of picking on a wizard just because he would rather read a good book of spells than spend hours at the gym grunting like an ape, right? Well let’s say Mike wasn’t a reasonable good person, and that he did pick on a wizard, and that wizard felt like Mike was out of control. Or perhaps he had to much control. So all I did was make him lose a little. Ok, so it wasn’t really a little, but let me get to the story.

Mike had just got home from a frat party where he had a wonderful Saturday night. Not only was there plenty of beer, but the girls had been almost as bottomless as the stockpile of kegs as well. If he counted right, he had made out with ten, gotten blowjobs from six, and fucked two. The girls went crazy over his six foot three, 230 pound chiseled body, and blue eyes. Of course, he may have lied to a few of them, like when they asked if he loved them. He didn’t, but their bodies were damn hot, and that’s all that mattered to him. He unlocked the door to his apartment off campus and stepped inside. Dodging a pile of old pizza boxes, he threw his coat onto the couch and stumbled into the kitchen for a final beer before going to bed. He should clean up his apartment, but he didn’t really care that much. We wasn’t here most of the time anyway, he reasoned. He opened the fridge, pulled a can out of the 12 pack box, and sat down at the table, shoving a stack of papers aside to make room. One of them fell in front of him, and as he picked it up, the salutation caught his eye, “Dear Mike, the asshole jock.” He read the first line a few more times, thinking it was the beer, but there it was, written in script on a piece of plain paper. Curious, he went on the read the rest of the letter:

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