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Last timeloop I gave you my heart....

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Oh shit, that's a minor deity, it can probably read my mind even with the time stop I just put into place!

Wellp, guess it's time to relive my whole life story, this one usually makes them stop paying attention and sometimes even gives me unexpected below-the-surface thoughts hehe...

It was a regular tale of a noble birth, I suppose. I had a bunch of witches show up and try to outdo each other with their blessings and curses, depending on whether or not they were invited!

- She shall be trapped in time at the slightest negative emotion!

- nay, only until she casts some magic!

- she shall be unable to access her inner magic!

- she shall have free access unto thy magic, thou heartless witch!!

- ah, but only if it's a curse.... And only if it's an interesting one, at that!

I don't know, there were probably more lines in there, but those are the main ones I remember being told about after the one time I grew up a whole year while my mother and most of the world was trapped in time.

It was quite a shock to both of us. I was a self-sufficient seven-year-old who suddenly had a world moving around her again and suddenly got hungry much faster, and my mother, who apparently wasn't a statue, saw me turn from 3 feet to 4 feet in the blink of an eye when I accidentally cursed the annoying fly near her head to only make its presence known in the presence of a flyswatter.

Oh yeah, Felicity once asked how the fly could be annoying when it was stopped in time. But that's the thing - time doesn't stop for bugs or other unaware animals, nor does it stop for plants far enough away from human dwellings. I don't know which part of the curse did that but flies usually stayed away from the house with no plant life to eat, and I usually killed the adventurous ones pretty easily - they weren't used to humans with mobility after they passed through so many generations of inactivity from our kind.

Ugh, Felicity... I wish I had never dated her. She got her just desserts for cheating on me though, just imagine! Being a lesbian with gynophobia is bad enough, but an Amazon? Her whole d*mn family is women. Bitch gets to fight through fear the rest of her bitch life, and before you ask, yes I know I'm bitter. Still don't regret that curse though lol. She deserved it.

You know, my favorite thing about writing to you from a time stop is that I can delete it before I restart time and you'll never see it. It's really been such a benefit to this whole thing. You're like a therapist I don't have to pay and who can also never blackmail me because you'll never see these thoughts. Thanks, Dad. Also I don't think you'd have too terrible of a reaction if my deletes failed to go through. You've probably suspected I'm bi by now even if I never did tell you about Felicity without deleting it before you saw it.

I have to keep writing all my thoughts randomly and somehow encode my true plan here before this ... Wait, the god isn't even talking, has he not noticed his nonfunctional magic yet?

That one-tenth-ascended wolfkin I cursed with dog allergies saw my curse coming even if he couldn't do anything about it... He did do enough to make sure the curse mutated to make his own form safe for him but he can't be around his brothers when they change anymore so it's a win for me lol. Maybe I can get away with something like that with this godling. They operate on worship points... Ohh that's fun! Let's go with that one!

*ding* System notification!

Would you like to confirm the curse attempt "Complete invisibility to all nondivine beings"?

I confirmed quickly, and I swear I heard a faint cackle in the back of my mind as the system read

Curse applied successfully!

Guess the witch that cursed me with this system approved. The godling didn't notice the difference, however. His worship points wouldn't drop off immediately just because his acolytes couldn't see him, that would probably take a couple centuries. Next order of business, extricate myself from this mess.

"ok Buddy, you said you are who you are, which is incredibly unhelpful.... Oh!"

Please confirm you wish to submit attempted curse, "Not allowed to do anything physical to a being after refusing to properly introduce oneself when first conversation begins."

Again I confirmed immediately. The godling tried to swing at me, but his fist passed right through me.

Another day, another encounter resolved. I smiled as time began to flow around me once more; I never do get tired of that sensation.

How do people still not feel it?

Delete all sent text in this conversation?

Confirmed. Content deleted. Thanks for using the System!

You are a human wizard who will only cast very specific (yet imaginative) curses. In your time you’ve had to curse a wolf-kin with dog allergies, a beholder with pinkeye, and, after a bad break up, an Amazonian with gynophobia. Now circumstances have you face an angry ancient deity.

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I mean, seriously, who would want that? You definitely never would've harvested all The Water from that river and put it into 2-day-dose vials and made people work an 18-hour shift in your mysterious factory just to be paid in a single dose of the stuff. You'd never dream of trying to take over the entire Illuminati base in your spare time, all the while taking another dose of magic water every few hours whenever you start to get a bit tired or something. As for the horse, well, everyone needs a freeloader friend, don't they? People are too fickle. That woman you used to think you loved left you when she found out you were "abusing" your workers (her words, not yours.) You cut off her supply of magic water right away and she died 49 hours later when it wore off. Good riddance, you figured. Not everyone deserves to be immortal anyways. It'd been a good 97 years before she grew a conscience.

You'll never admit it to yourself, but you didn't start out taking advantage of people. You used to be kind, back in the first 26 years before you found the fount of life and death. But something about that insane craving on the second day just changed you. You rationalize it, saying it made you "ambitious." You write books on how to manipulate people into believing you're their friend, but you call it "winning" friends. You write LinkedIn posts on how to turn a daughter's wedding into a business opportunity. You randomly text strangers to see if they'll buy some useless cryptocurrencies off of you just to add a little bit more to your trillion-dollar "nest egg."

You don't remember why you call it a nest egg. It never occurs to you that a 15-digit bank account's worth of money can be used, not just earned. You could give it away and let yourself die and give every American free healthcare for 200 years, but that would take away from the allure of your drug. After all, no one gets sick when they drink the magic water you hoarded. Well, not unless they stop drinking The Water but that would mean they stopped working for you, and why would they want to do that? After all, your workers are a family! Why couldn't that woman you used to call your wife see that? But you don't dwell on that, at least not for more than 15 minutes every hour. It's not even worth thinking about. She's dead anyways, and good riddance to her. You stop and say hi to Jed. He's been working for you for 228 years now and he still looks like he's 31. He's living the dream! You slip him an extra vial of The Water and tell him to take the weekend off. Enjoy himself. You don't take advantage of anyone! You keep them healthy, even approve a whole week of vacation for some of them when they deserve it. Advantage. Ha. You swing by and sit for a while with Tommy in the back room, where the boy is sorting screws. He got his first sip of The Water at age 7 when your wife's back was turned, but he's big enough to run the screw machine and sort whatever comes out of it by size. You tell yourself he's not mentally 7, just physically. You tell yourself that you're 100% certain that mentally he has 100% matured into an adult over the last 147 years. Just because he still calls you Daddy and occasionally (though less often over the last 50ish years) still wonders where Mommy is, doesn't mean that you're using child labor. No sir, he is 100% a consenting adult to whatever manual labor you make him do. You do show something of a soft spot though -- you've never withheld water from him for missing quota like you did to Sandra that one time 77 years ago. He's not a child, you tell yourself, but you know he's not an adult either. You add a vial of water to his fruit punch before you leave.

You're a perfectly loving father.

If you would’ve known that that stupid river was the fountain of youth, you never would’ve drank from it. That was 300 years ago. You’re permanently stuck at age 26. The only one you really have left in your life is your horse, who also made the mistake of drinking from it.

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You never know that those kids are wanted criminals until you see one of their pictures in the paper. "Really?" you think, "But he was such a nice kid. Always wore blue though. And his friend always wore black. Wonder why." Then you go on with your day.

You unknowingly purchase a house right on the border or two gang territories that fight often but have declared your property a neutral zone

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You are suddenly able to see numbers above people’s heads which are counting down and you have no idea why. One person you meet reaches 0 and…

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she looks slightly above your head, confused.

--0? That's weird. Wonder what it means?

--No idea, but you've got a 0 as well. Hey, you wanna get some coffee, maybe see a movie?

-- Love to. Let's go now.

On the way, you see another woman who has an 11. She does a double take, looks at you and says "11? That's the smallest number I've seen yet!"

You are suddenly able to see numbers above people’s heads which are counting down and you have no idea why. One person you meet reaches 0 and…

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Our watchers advised us of the Change, but we didn't notice its full effects right away.

The first realization was that hunger and thirst were separate emotions. We had to set alarms to remind ourselves to eat and drink, or we'd die.

Many of the Depresseds committed suicide by turning off their alarms. Some of them recovered after killing Disgusteds who nagged them to take care of themselves because "you look like shit, dude". The Amazeds cooed over their recovery but the Thoughtfuls had other things on their minds for those first years: the makers.

Who were those brings that had notified us of the Change? How had they escaped our notice for so many millennia? Our attempt to re-establish contact failed, and we began to realize that the reason for our ignorance was simple: the Makers didn't want contact.

The Jealouses were probably the first to discover what had happened to a few of the Depresseds, the ones who'd recovered.

Tom Greene was born a Jealous. He had killed a male Thoughtful at age 16 because he'd seen a female Grateful kiss him.

For a while he became even more jealous of the Thoughtfuls because he realized they were smarter than he was, and after 22 kills - all Thoughtfuls - he realized that he was now capable of thought.

Quickly he killed a Hungry and a pair of Thirsties, and he was ecstatic when he felt the need to eat without his timer. In fact, his food timer went off just 8 minutes after he finished lunch the day after killing the Hungry, and of habit he ate again.

By age 30, Tom was a Full - capable of every emotion available in all of Chicago.

The academic community wasn't aware of what Tom had gained, but they had connected him via security footage to some 75 murders, and they formed a pact to kill him the way he'd killed so many. A team of 40 Thoughtfuls and 4 Contents worked on the drone that would take out the serial killer, and they succeeded.

The following Monday, they all - individually - went down to the cafeteria before their reminders sounded.

Some became Happy, others Ecstatic, a few even kissed each other in a way not known to have happened before among people not born with Lust.

Talking together that day, they realized they were all Fulls, and when they correlated the data - all the Fulls had been on the Greene drone project - they realized the reason. By murdering the Full, they were now Fulls.

Their mistake was publishing. As soon as that paper hit the journals, every Jealous in the nation headed to Chicago, and it wasn't long before the University of Chicago had no faculty left.

Murder had gone national. It was very similar to the United States we live in today.

Everyone is now born with only one feeling. It is possible to kill another person to obtain their feeling.

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Three years later, my fiancé was dead again, and her murderer taunted me daily. I had to be careful this time; hundreds of people were after me to get Scarlett back. That was the only way they could resurrect their own lovers.

A person can bring back a person they knew by killing their murderer. However, a killer becomes more difficult to defeat with each life they take. The love of your life has been killed by a famed, elusive serial killer on FBI’s most wanted list. Tell the story of how you try to hunt this serial killer whilst preventing others who wish to revive their lovers and the FBI which means to take down the killer before they get more dangerous.

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Preface

When I was a child on Ñizón, my great-great-grandmother Beatrea used to tell me stories about her childhood. She grew up in the days of the Great Barrenness after our planet’s last nuclear war.

My favorite story by far was of when the earth-men came. They were different than we’d ever imagined; easily susceptible to physical abuse - an earth-person might die if struck by a falling tree, for example - but they were nearly immune to electromagnetic radiation. This explained, of course, why they were sending out signals via dangerous radio waves, which our receiver satellites had received for millennia before their arrival. This started some 4000 years before our Final War, so the great nations had been able to decode the messages, by which they taught us the language of these species -- they were possible invaders in the future, and knowing every language in the galaxy is quite important to the Ñizonis.

When the earth-men finally came some 2500 years after the Final War, Beatrea’s family knew it was against the code of the Interplanetary Council to appear to earth-people. They had not yet had any sort of cataclysmic war of the type that all planets seem to have before they come to their senses and become peaceful peoples, deserving of membership in the Interplanetary Confederacy.

Beatrea’s father* was not the type to listen to the Interplanetary Council; and I feel certain that several millennia earlier on a different planet she would have been a staunch supporter of the Brexit that started the dissolution of your European Union, or the Trumpian isolationism that initiated the collapse of your United Nations so soon after that. 

And so it was that Beatrea, my own great-great-grandmother**, met the earth-people. They were four males, weighing combined probably less than B’s father, or even than her dad or mother. One of them was smaller even than the adolescent Beatrea, at her tender age of 3 winters (or about 50 earth years).  

The earth-people, who spoke only Spanish, stayed with my people for the 63rd part of a year (some 3 earth months, I think) before returning to their hyperspace cruiser to head home to their planet. They harvested all kinds of things: water from our reservoir; some sand, which they thought was blue; a few of the antique weapons used to hunt bipeds before they went extinct in the Final War, and some other things. They kept mentioning something else, too, and asked our people to speak to some little gadgets they had.

Anyway, Grandma’s stories were so intriguing that they inspired me to become an Earth specialist. The stories presented in the chapters to follow are taken from accounts of visitors to earth that I found in the Great Library of the planet Krako-Aione, the government center of the Interplanetary Confederation. I thought it would be interesting to copy them to English, the main language of Earth since at least your first observed imperial cycle. 

Hopefully this story makes sense to you; excuse my possibly poor English; and enjoy!

*****THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO ALL ÑIZONIS, MAY THEY LIVE LONG AND PROSPER, AND TO ALL EARTH-PEOPLE, CITIZENS OF THE NEWEST MEMBER OF THE INTERPLANETARY CONFEDERACY.*****

___________________________ *or is it leader? chief? I’m not sure of the English word for the person who makes the decisions for the family; earth-people seem to say father, but it has recently come to my attention that “father” is a gender-specification for you too, so that it means exactly the same as “dad”. I was too close to my publishing deadline to change every instance, so I’ve elected to add this footnote rather than attempt to change every reference throughout my journal. **here I do refer to a female ancestor; and I do apologize for confusing your language. I hope I speak well; for my English comes from Ñizonis who hadn’t heard a nicely-encoded broadcast of the English language in many generations. It is rather different from our own language system

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Pre-preface.

This post (in Spanish) was first published on my old blog, when it was called “spanishmajor”; it was written for some third-year Spanish classes in college -- the first paragraph or two as a way to use a bunch of vocabulary words from a list, then the next semester to have a story of my own that was at least a page long.

The story that unfolds in the next few posts is sort of a sequel to that, and was inspired by this post from writing-prompt-s, though it won’t necessarily have that in it. After I finish the story (if that ever happens) I will post a table of contents and a bibliography with these links.