New Story (Title-pending) Teaser
Added 2025-07-25 13:53:28 +0000 UTCIgnore the squeak of lesser minds as they rub two half-baked ideas together; greatness begins here.
Archartificer Magnifiria the Mindglow read the inscriptions upon her obsidian cup, its rim traced with fine copper filaments that hummed faintly with thaumic energy to keep its contents a perfect 81ºC. She raised it to her ruby lips and sipped from the cake‑flavored ambrosia. The enchanted choker on her neck transmuted every calorie into a charisma‑enhancing elixir, its tiny brass coils releasing the byproduct as minute puffs of perfumed vapor.
Beauty mattered, and genius deserved an audience that did not look away.
As she gently, lazily stroked her cat’s fur, her gaze turned to linger on the source of her greatest frustration.
Magnifiria, High Elf, Lvl 320 Greater Emeritus of Knowledge
INTELIGENCE ‑ 9,999
Magnifiria’s sculpted eyebrow twitched at the four‑digit number before she dismissed the status window with a scoff.
A thousand books orbited her workstation in perfect, planetary arcs, each one recited theories and definitions in the preserved voices of history’s greatest scholars. Their paths mirrored the stellar objects of the home plane, a mnemonic compass she had tuned until even their shadows kept time. At the centre floated her newest “lifetime achievement,” a dragon‑hide tome containing all mortal magical knowledge. Each sheet, format 4A0 in the size system she herself had standardized, was longer and wider than Magnifiria was tall.
For eighty years she had slammed head first against that barrier, chasing that five‑digit, god‑tier INT stat. Today she would break the system by forging the first Crystal Integrated Runic Cogwork Engine, a core of pure intellectual sorcery, capable of calculus that would answer every speculative whim and, incidentally, reorganise civilization around better shelving.
She waved Prince Fluffington off and activated the mechanism that sealed the marble tower. Arcane shields and cog‑latched shutters slid into place with a soft hiss of escaping steam; stained glass dimmed, doors shut, lids closed. On a pipe-fed pedestal, locked within a ring of magneto‑gear teeth, a fist‑sized blue prism was primed for the task at hand.
Magnifiria plucked a volume from the outer ring with a gesture, chanting out its contents at dizzying speeds, stripping its text and formulae by turning them into glowing runes that flowed into the swirling crystal. The labour demanded steady rhythm and a trance‑like focus; hours passed in productive silence broken only by her song‑like voice. The now empty books were discarded onto a growing pile.
Each book primed the orb for the next piece of information, its light flickering faster, greedy and ravenous.
As the floating books thinned, only the largest tome remained: the massive flat and warm surface, the perfect favorite nap-spot for a one Prince Fluffington.
Normally, his anti-magic collar would not interfere with the book’s anti-gravity enchantment. Yet as Magnifiria reached out for the World’s Largest Tome, her levitation spell snagged against the familiar’s equipment and both spell and enchantments hiccuped.
Magic failed.
Physics became the book’s new master.
Gravity returned, sending the tome and the cat crashing down.
CRUNCH
SPLAT
The forty meter drop abruptly ended with the greatest mortal intellect on record flattened like a pressed flower. Its glancing blow bent the podium where the altar stood, cracking pipes and sending the sphere flying off into a corner and hitting Prince Fluffington in the head.
The familiar, shocked and distressed, batted the thing away, desperately trying to figure out whether this constituted a breach of contract. It quickly concluded that, regardless of lawful termination, being in the scene of the crime was not to its convenience.
Forgotten in a corner of the room, amongst the pile of scrapped prototypes, the orb began to glow.
--
AN:
The prologue/chapter00 of the story I will be releasing and, hopefully, draw in new readers (to say this story is a very hard last-ditch effort would be an understatement). Need to provide some finishing touches, but should have everything in order soon.
Hope you guys enjoy, will keep you updated!
Comments
I joined for M&M also but stayed around for everything else. Keep writing and if there are any more Rick adventures bouncing around in your head feel free to share them.
C D
2025-08-03 20:32:18 +0000 UTCThanks for sharing this! This is an amusing chapter: some definite clever bits, and it's somewhat reminiscent of Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams in its absurdist sense of humour and its karmic reply to pride, which by my lights can only be a compliment. I'm not *deeply* emotionally invested, but it doesn't overstay its welcome, and I'd read another chapter after this on the quality of the writing. A few miscellaneous notes that don't touch on emotional investment, but which might help sell some of the particulars: - You might want to avoid using a hyphen to delimit the intelligence stat; it can be read as -9,999 (negative) INT, which is rather amusing but probably not a desirable source of confusion. - Rather than "turned her gaze on the source of her frustration", which makes it seem she's attending to a persistent object in her environment (it's not the cat, but a lazy read could even suggest the cat), something like "flexed her will to summon the source of her frustration" may help signal what's going on, and mirrors her dismissal. Possible bonus points if you can suggest that checking the number is a compulsive tic of hers? - It's important to the read of the squashing action later in the chapter that we get an impression of books floating *overhead*. I didn't feel that was made really solid: there is a mention of "orbiting", but that can be on any axis, and I personally happened to imagine it on the horizontal x/y plane, which doesn't place them overhead. - On a similar vein, I thought there could perhaps be a slightly stronger connection between the huge dragon-hide tome mentioned earlier and the one that squashes her in the end. If you're not reading carefully, it's not *too* hard to miss that the book that squashes her is literally bigger than she is. This is already in an alright place, to be clear—the fact that she gets so comically squashed obviously implies a certain scale and mass, and it is again called a "massive flat surface"—so consider this a much more nitpicky comment, and feel free to disregard it more casually. - Again a bit trivial: a tower is mentioned, but it's not entirely clear where it is in relation to our POV. Are we within it? Before it? Atop it? - Back to slightly more important: the cat goes from in her arms at the start to atop the squashing tome when it falls. Some time has indeed passed between these points as Magnifiria works, but it's not very clear how the cat could have gotten onto the tome. Can the cat fly? Was the tome summoned and then dismissed? (As for my mention of emotional investment: that's often just kinda hard in a prologue chapter that only touches shallowly on characters who aren't ultimately going to participate in a story, and since it's short, it might be less of a concern. I'm not sure I have much to truly suggest on that front. You could try adding some small but deeply particular detail to suggest more humanity and internal complexity of Magnifiria, who is otherwise a fairly straightforward character, but it's not hard to make it worse rather than better. But anyway!) Hope that doesn't feel too daunting, because my impression of the chapter truly is that it's genuinely in a pretty good place. If you're looking for some points to polish, though, there are some options for you. Excited to see what you do with this new work! I always enjoy your storytelling. Cheers.
Ambigravity
2025-07-28 00:01:00 +0000 UTC
