xavier-elrose

[xavier-elrose]

The order of things was a little difficult to parse, both in the moment and afterwards.

The effect was the same, two different reasons for the same outcome. But it was all but impossible to sort out which came first, failing to understand what you were seeing because it was legitimately unexpected and hard to parse, and failing to understand what you were seeing because you already had a faint idea, and that was already too much.

The inside of the suit was black, and so was the hero. Not 'African American' black, 'I certify that I am not looking at the inside of this suit on behalf of Anish Kapoor' black. All that could be seen at first was a vague sense of movement.

The villain was just starting to go through the five stages of seeing something more horrifying than you believed could exist when the movement got...faster.

No one seemed to remember the next few moments especially well. It was captured on video, but somehow no one ever found it in them to watch.

All that could really be said with any certainty was that the villain had not expected, when he opened the heroes mech, to be assaulted by thousands of chittering insects. Defending yourself is a lot harder when you're trying desperately to decide which eyeball to prioritize saving. Defending yourself against a mech is very different from defending yourself against an intelligent swarm.

No one really seemed to remember what came next at all. As far as every retelling was concerned, the villain just...ended up dead on the floor. Might even have been natural causes, who knows? Even the cameras managed to 'lose' all the footage of this part.

Natural causes, of course, don't turn living creatures into skeletons as dry as the desert over the course of a few seconds. Nor did anyone seem to want to listen particularly closely to the audio, as the cameras came back on.

The villains scream was still reverberating, just a little.

The hero got back in his mech, and that, everyone decided, was that. Yay, hero! The celebration was a little...muted...but they certain didn't want to express any displeasure with their savior, no sir!

The whole incident really cut down on the number of new supervillains, for some reason.

"Now behold! Behold as I unmask your...beloved...hero...?" The villain's voice trailed off as he tore open said hero's crippled mech suit on live TV, only to reveal something quite...unexpected.

[xavier-elrose]

It would be incorrect to say that there's a gap between good at something and being perfect at something.

A gulf, a chasm, an impassable separating vastness...

That's more what correctness sounds like. 'Gap' is nowhere near a strong enough term.

So what was I to do? I trained, and I trained, and I trained some more. I got better, much better.

But perfection was always elusive.

Until I stumbled upon the secret. Really, it was quite simple. Our brains are already trying to do it, and are honestly remarkably good at it. Mental signals only travel so fast- when you act, you're not trying to act for that moment, but for one just a little later.

Brains, by their very nature, are always trying to see into the future. Just a little- not even a full second- but it's both extremely helpful and absolutely vital.

I just...took it a bit further.

It's somewhere between magic and just being that good at understanding the world around you. My term for it is 'psionics', not that anyone ever asks.

All they ever see is the results. Let them believe that I'm merely very good- that it might be possible to hit me, with enough cleverness and skill.

And, to be fair, it is still possible. Perfection- true perfection- is ever elusive. I can only see about five seconds into the future- if I'm lazy, or just outmatched that badly, I can still be hit, still die.

But those skills I spent all that time honing are still sharp. I might not be completely untouchable, but on human timescales...close enough.

Seeing the future is good for offense, too. You always know exactly where, exactly how, exactly when to hit your opponent, for maximum effect. In a fight, it looks an awful lot like I just keep getting incredibly lucky, over and over again.

It's amazing just how few people really internalize that there's a word for consistent luck.

"Skill".

Cursed at birth to reject all healing magic, you were never given the luxury of injury and no party accepted you to join. So you trained harder, fought smarter, dodged everything. You couldn’t afford a single mistake. Now, they whisper your name in awe and fear—the Untouchable.

[xavier-elrose]

I'll also add: sometimes you have to do things for your own peace. Your mind is where you live, where you work, where you are. Doing things that make it a nicer place to be is well worth some time and effort. Money is worth what money can buy- no more, no less. And I've yet to see peace of mind for sale in a store window.

Also, the response is economically correct. It's not as good as never buying one in the first place, but you can't change the past.

Only the future.

[xavier-elrose]

It turns out that most superheroes don't automatically know what, exactly, their power is. Heck, some of them don't even notice that they have powers, at least at first.

It turns out that most superheroes don't see a reflection of themselves, with their powers listed and described, upon the moment they first get their powers.

Really, it was just one power. But it was a doozy, and there were lots of details to know.

My power was Mirror.

I mirrored that which I wished to mirror. The first order of business was to mirror myself- something I did the moment I got my powers, and have been doing ever since. I found out, much later, that my particular power isn't actually that rare- no rarer than, say, fire or ice powers.

But people with my power are rare, because once they cease to mirror themselves, they cease to be at all.

Believe it or not, that's actually the less horrifying option. Given the human tendency to focus on the negative, someone who thoughtlessly reflected the world around them would be...horrifying.

But mirroring isn't an all-or-nothing thing. I can mirror myself, while also mirroring other things.

I can, for example, mirror the power and destructive potential of natural disasters.

Humans don't really think about the sheer force behind certain disasters. They think about the destruction, but rarely consider just how small a portion of the power of a storm goes to destroying. The vast majority is spent on less destructive things, not least of which is simply...being the storm.

I can bring a lot of raw power to disaster cleanup and relief. Power like that I can mirror with a fair bit of separation in time and space. Not that much, but...enough.

Being precise with it is harder, but less difficult than you might think. As I said, I don't have to just mirror one thing.

Remember what Mister Rogers said: look for the helpers. Always there are helpers, and always I can mirror them.

The mix is quite potent. My arrival at a disaster scene generally means that things are going to get better, and get better quickly.

It keeps me busy.

And that's enough reason, in and of itself. Really, it is. There's more to doing good than punching people. Really, a remarkably small portion of doing good involves punching people right in their dumb faces.

But there's another reason I don't partake in super fights.

Mirrors are blind. They don't see, they only reflect. And while I do still reflect myself...well, part of me is the mirror power. I have more than a little trouble seeing certain things.

Faces, for one. Not just faces, in fact. I can't really tell people apart at all. Mirrors are shallow, and something about my mind now just...doesn't engage with people at more than the most shallow level.

Not what they look like. My powers aren't quite that literal.

What they do.

And not in a long-term sense. Immediate actions, their consequences, their reverberations. People are what people do, and for me that's...unusually literal.

I'd be a terrifying force in combat. Mirroring your powers, your strength, your skill...with my own thrown in, as well. Reflecting attacks, illusory copies...you'd be fighting yourself with extra abilities. And that's assuming it's a duel. In a melee...I would automatically be the strongest combatant. Almost certainly by a wide margin.

But how do you tell a hero from a villain? The differences are almost always beyond the depth of my mirror-vision- motivations and goals and principles. Even when the line isn't normally blurry, it's beyond my ability to tell. Violence is violence, and I can't spot which I ought to oppose, and which I ought to support.

So instead I do the good I can do. And though I do understand that sometimes the greatest good legitimately does require violence...

Well, mirrors never lie. I'd never yet seen a super-fight where I could tell good from bad.

Maybe my power was telling me something.

You're a superhero who specializes exclusively in stopping disasters. The other heroes just don't understand why you need to remain neutral to the villains…

[xavier-elrose]

You wouldn't expect a poetry reading to go down in history.

You especially wouldn't have expected this one to do so.

The building was old- not ancient, not historical, just old.

The weather was bad.

The poetry was worse.

And all in all, the whole thing was just a mish-mash of feelings and half-formed ideas, thrown into the void by people too self-involved to really listen to any of the others. They only stayed because they wanted an audience for their turn.

But languages have purpose.

Magic, you see, is real.

It had happened just often enough to seep into folklore, to provide the occasional distorted truth floating around in an ocean of falsehood. Magic was real, but magic was rare, and it had been quite some time since anyone had done any, intentionally or not.

Language shapes magic. Different languages prove to be good at different things.

What was English good at?

An eclectic mix of origins, sufficient to deny it mutual intelligibility with every other language, even those it was relatively closely related to. Add to that a large (and growing) collection of words borrowed wholesale from other languages, and sufficient worldwide reach to give the language as a whole a great deal of cultural cachet.

English was not steak, was not cake, was nothing fried, tossed, or baked.

English was stew. And the massive influx of secondary speakers around the world provided an awful lot of ambient heat.

Supremely basic, supremely versatile, cheap, delicious, rewarding for the talented and forgiving for the talentless...

English was the language of a species first learning to really harvest magic. We would need to adopt specialized languages later, once we knew what we were doing.

But in a dilapidated building in a second-rate city, a bunch of losers and outcasts entered the history books with the first spells humanity had cast in centuries.

And this time, we had recording devices.

Turns out of every language is specialized for a certain supernatural task, Latin is for summoning demons, Hebrew is for summoning angels etc. recently You’ve discovered what English is used for

[xavier-elrose]

"Ah. So, you wish to see..."

I had come to the permanent bazaar that lived just outside the city walls. It certainly wasn't the case that anything could be found there, but exceptions were legitimately hard to come by. You just never knew what might turn up, if you looked.

There weren't that many elves, either in the bazaar or the city itself, but there were some, and if they sought something, it would likely be found here.

The elven merchant drew me back, into his shop. He was young, as the elves reckoned time- only a few centuries. Elves had a tendency to settle down as they aged. My guide was still young, still full of energy.

He traded in many things, but his focus was on art. I was hardly a connoisseur, but he seemed to know what he was doing. The outer layers of his shop were a bit on the kitschy side- the sort of stuff I'd go for, if I were shopping for art.

Deeper in were paintings that seemed more like they belonged on the walls of a castle, or perhaps in the court of a king. Art that demonstrated talent, passion, an appreciation for composition and the nuances of the world around us.

These were more expensive, but these, too, were passed by.

That was not, apparently, what elves sought in art.

The art for elven clients was deeper in the tent. Magical lights illuminated the interior, until we arrived at the inner sanctum.

This portion was not outlined in magically-supported cloth, the way the rest of the shop was. This was wood, intricately carved, intricately enchanted, far better at defending its contents than the average city wall. Light did not enter, and light did not leave, and I was blind for a moment as I entered.

Inside was art.

Strange art.

As though the greatest artists ever to live had decided that what they really wanted to make was a grotesque mockery of normalcy, the world seen through an impossible lens, hard to look at and impossible to look away from.

It belonged in no church, in no castle hallway. This was art that had decided it didn't want to be art any more, that it wanted to be a...a mollusc, or a misaligned axle, or the concept of cheese.

This was art that had decided that rules were for suckers.

I will admit, it wasn't quite to my taste. Strangely enthralling, but I prefer to have some idea of what I'm looking at, when I look at something.

Call me old-fashioned, but faces do not work that way.

I had hoped to be enlightened, but now I was simply more confused.

"Any chance you could explain what, exactly, I'm looking at, here?"

The merchant smiled.

"Novelty."

That was almost an explanation.

"As we age," the merchant continued after a pause, "we accumulate experiences. As we age, we begin to see, more and more, the threads of the world, the interconnectedness of all things, of all practices, of all ideas."

"It's a thrilling experience for short-lived races such as yours. But for elves...it's a march towards our eventual demise. We don't die of old age, you know. But as we grow older and older, less and less and less of what we experience is new. Less and less and less of the world grabs our attention. We retreat into meditation, and eventually we're simply folded back into the earth, no longer aware of anything, feeling only a numb desire for something to draw our attention."

"Novelty, for us, is life. Passion, strangeness, anything and everything so difficult to duplicate that there's a real chance that we haven't seen the like before."

"We accumulate riches in our lives, and spend them as we age, slowing our deaths with novelties fetched from the far corners of the world."

"That is what our economy is built on, in the end. Everything else is just window dressing for the other races. We need something to trade with them. They often do a remarkably good job at creating novelty, after all. Creativity gets harder as you age. You get stuck in your preferred modes of thinking."

"That's my job. And some day, when I am old and bored, I will buy curious trinkets from some youngster, and I will gladly part with my accumulated wealth, in exchange for even a moment of curiosity, a moment of life."

The Dwarven economy is based on mining and metalworking. The human economy is based on agriculture. Human economists have always wondered about the Elven economy, until they realized something: Their economy is simply slower, due to their much longer lifespans. Time to ask some elven merchants.

[xavier-elrose]

Look, bottom line, you've just gotta muddle through.

Did I understand things in school? Hell no.

I mean, I understood some things. I was, not to brag, easily averaging at least an A- on remembering to put my name on tests. A lot of the other stuff didn't quite make sense so much as I remembered it, though.

And obviously I never remembered it for long, but...long enough. You get good at studying, after a while. If you just muddle through, you'll eventually figure something out, if you get the chance.

That's about how life went for me. Wake up, go to work, be confused about basically everything, try the things that usually work, and if they turn out not to work...hey, my shifts up, now it's someone else's problem.

It's not a great approach for romance, I'll admit.

But things worked, is the key. Was I good at things? No. Was I competent? No. But was I productive?

...I mean, if you squinted your eyes, you could kind of argue I was. From a certain point of view. It's not like I ever burned the building down or anything. Though they did forbid me from taking matches to work after That One Incident.

I still maintain my insistence on my complete and total innocence, if only because I still don't actually know what happened. Pretty sure that means it's not my fault.

Anyway, today was pretty much like any other day. I mean, I skipped breakfast. Didn't really feel like food would fill the void inside me, you know? Coffee didn't really take, either. Went right through me. I actually had a bit of an accident as I tried to get to the bathroom. Pissing brown.

I should probably see a doctor about that. Throw it on top of the 'should probably see a doctor about that' pile.

Kind of a big pile. I'll go one of these days.

I also kept dropping my phone? I had to really concentrate to hold onto the thing. I don't even know how I dropped it some of those times, it was right in my lap. Freaked out people on the bus, though. You'd think they'd never seen someone drop a phone before. They were giving me a lot of space, all things considered.

Work was honestly pretty normal. I felt a lot more chipper than I normally did, actually. Maybe I'm finally getting used to this place. I always used to feel dead inside, like I was slaving away for nothing, but now work just felt...normal.

Skipped lunch, though. Still not hungry. Maybe I'm sick? Is there some disease that gives you brown piss and butterfingers?

I'll bet there is.

Home was about the same as always. Goofed off on the computer, doomscrolled...really didn't feel any different at all. Maybe I just need to spend more time online, take care of this illness.

Or maybe I should just see a doctor. Maybe. Kind of expensive, though.

Sleep, now, sleep felt amazing. I swear I slept like the dead. I was out like a light, and it felt so good. Like I was finally in my element, or something.

I still had to get up in the morning, though. I had another big day ahead of me, after all.

You died the way you lived: having no clue what’s going on. You are so clueless that you didn’t even notice that you died and just got up and went to work like normal the next day.

[xavier-elrose]

You see, there are some forces in life that are very...precise.

Okay, yes, you could argue that applies to everything, but stay with me for a moment.

Some forces are like horses, versatile and volatile but still fightable. A man is a fool who fights a horse, but you can at least see the thought process, there. Matching strength with a horse isn't inconceivable, especially with some strange advantage.

Some forces are more like trains. Your only real option is to stay off of the tracks.

The forces that transform someone into a magical girl are far, far stronger than the magical girl herself. A strange and overwhelming force, with unknown rules, unknown reactions, and an overwhelming amount of sheer oomph. If you leave it alone, you end up with a magical girl- hard to fight, but hardly impossible to fight.

Or you can tangle with the incomprehensible and overwhelmingly powerful transformational force that wasn't going to do anything to you (directly) until you meddled with it.

So when some strange supernatural surge of starlight transforms a tender teen into a turbocharged terror, there's really one one thing to do: sit back and wait, accepting that you're probably about to get your ass kicked.

Maybe you'd get off light, and only be blasted backwards, some fly being swatted by a force so far beyond your ken that tossing you around like a rag doll doesn't register as any exertion at all.

Maybe you'd get a partial transfiguration, yourself. Poor odds, but it's possible. Though, since you're not doing the whole thing, the most likely outcome is that you just end up naked. Gotta get rid of the old clothes before changing into the new outfit, after all.

Or maybe you just end up incinerated where you stand. Frankly, that's the most likely outcome. Good things rarely come from challenging a train to a mano-a-mano fight. Trains pack some serious manos, and if a magical girl would have posed any challenge for you, you don't got the manos to match.

Discretion is the better part of valor. Don't go around picking fights with massive and incomprehensible sources of power unless you have to.

And, ideally, not even then.

“And this is why you don’t attack a magical girl during her transformation.”

[xavier-elrose]

Also, if all you can do is make one person happier...do that.

Think of happiness as a disease. All a disease needs, in order to spread throughout the entire population, is for each person to infect one other person (though, to be fair, it's much quicker if you can get that number a little higher.)

All happiness needs to be a successful disease is for you to make one persons day better. That's it.

Don't ever think that what you do doesn't matter. No drop of rain feels responsible for the flood, but you can hardly have floods without them.

“If you have the power to make someone happy, do it. The world needs more of that.”

— Unknown

[xavier-elrose]

In the motion of the pickles do we find safety. In the motion of the pickles do we find solace. The motion of the pickles is nothing, and yet it is also everything.

Before the stars were born, the pickles moved. Before the Earth was formed, the pickles moved. Before humans, before civilization, before war and strife and peace and harmony, the pickles moved.

The pickles are in all of us. They are in those of us who like pickles. Yet they are also in those of us who do not like pickles- for are the pickles not then moved, to be given to others, who will eat those pickles?

In this way do the pickles move, and in this way they move us all.

Oh, pickles, grant us thy pickly motion, and in doing so, grant us safety, and happiness, and tasty sandwiches.

In pickles name, Ramen.

[xavier-elrose]

Update: I have Decided Something. Specifically, I have decided that Lightning Wolf, of such length as to be a Novelette, will be extended. Presumably to full Novel length, I dunno.

As such it has been delisted, so nobody has to buy it twice. I hate that sort of thing, and while I'd be fine with giving people discounts equal to what they've already paid (or, hell, giving them the full novel for free if they bought the novelette) I have literally no idea how to do that, so it's not quite an option.

I would tell you when the full novel will be complete, but literally anything I say at this point will turn out to be a lie. I'm new at writing, but I know that much about projects, at least.

I Wrote A Book!

I wrote two A Books!

I'm gonna try this. I am gonna try this. I'm gonna try and be an author, and NOBODY is gonna stop me!

Not even me. Take that, me!

If you enjoy my writing on here, you should probably check them out.

"I'll Pontificate When I'm Dead" is a collection of stories from my time on Reddit, with some stories expanded slightly (and galling errors removed. I know other people don't care much, but I hate typos in my work so much).

It also includes four new stories you can't get any other way, because that seems to be the way you entice people to buy a thing? I am many things, but a marketing expert is not one of them.

Seven stories in four different 'categories'- straight high fantasy (I entitled that section 'going your own way', because that is also a theme in the section), the afterlife (I have written a bunch about different afterlives, which kinda caught me off guard), a silly section (do you want to know the real meaning behind "The Twelve Days of Christmas"?), and a section where I do a lot of pontificating.

Sometimes I just like to talk.

"Lightning Wolf" is a...novelette? (Too short to be a novella, too long to be a short story) about a young sorceress out on her first adventure. Things...don't quite go according to plan. And now she has to abandon her party, and civilization, to try and deal with the werewolf curse. Will she succeed? Or will the curse consume her?

Recommended reading for anyone who has ever wanted to be able to zap things with lightning.

And remember: every book I sell makes it more likely that I write more. I'm quite encouraged when things actually work.

Available on Amazon, Apple, Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, Bibliotheca, BorrowBox, Gardners, Hoopla, Kobo, Odilo, OverDrive, Palace Marketplace, Scribd, Smashwords, Tolino, and Vivlio.

I would be tickled pink by any reviews, and if you asked your local library to carry a copy. I approve of libraries. Shocking from an author, I know. (That was heavy sarcasm, just in case).

Ebook only, though it looks like it's possible to also set it up to be distributed as a paperback? I probably won't do that, but let me know if that's something you, personally, would want.

[xavier-elrose]

God DAMMIT!

There's just...

There's gotta be a way around this, right?

Because, look, I've got a species to kill off, here. My species.

Being a genie sucks.

So what you do- what you do- is this. You become a malevolent genie. Loads of stories about 'em, totally consistent with the lore, no problemo. Becoming a single-wish genie is a bit harder, but still doable. Then, sooner or later, after enough idiots wish for this, that, or the other thing, regret it, and don't even have a chance to undo the whole thing, people will stop wishing for genies to be real, and we won't be.

It's a slow process, sure enough. But that's the thing about immortality- gives you loads of time to work on things. Every immortal has a project. My chosen project of self-elimination isn't even that unusual.

This damn kid, though...

Look, you can add all sorts of nasty stuff to a wish. The how and the why and the when and occasionally even the who can be twiddled with, to grand and malevolent effect.

But the core of the wish- the basic premise- has to come true. Has to. There's no wiggle room in the lore on that point. Not a smidgen.

Which means that I have no choice but to actually be this damn kids friend.

And a friend wouldn't cause their friend misery.

Sure, there's 'being a bad friend'. That's still being a friend. But that's also a bit of a dead end. Being a bad friend is something that happens on accident, from someone who is putting in a good faith effort at friendship. Anything else is just plain assholery.

I suppose it could be worse. I am, I assume, fairly unpleasant to be around. Most humans are...uncomfortable, chatting with someone whose fondest wish is to cease to be. Maybe that will be enough.

Stupid friendly kid.

The genie was used to stupid humans wishing for things like fame and fortune without considering the possible consequences. What it didn’t expect was for the lonely child who was its latest ‘master’ to wish for the genie to be their friend

[xavier-elrose]

I'm also new at...mibbling? Mesmerizing...?

Marketing! That was it!

And it just occurred to me that I should have a place with actual links that I can...link to.

Some people do this as a career. I don't know how those people stay sane. Though if they don't, that would explain a lot about observable reality.

Ah, well. One mystery at a time. Here follows the links!

The order is this: site where you buy: link to "I'll Pontificate When I'm Dead", link to "Lightning Wolf"

Amazon Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CLW8MVML, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CLWF37WY

Apple Books (99 cents more expensive, for some reason): https://books.apple.com/us/book/ill-pontificate-when-im-dead/id6470379019, https://books.apple.com/us/book/lightning-wolf/id6470322844

Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ill-pontificate-when-im-dead-xavier-elrose/1144271737, https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/lightning-wolf-xavier-elrose/1144268832?ean=2940179160298

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/i-ll-pontificate-when-i-m-dead, https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/lightning-wolf

Palace Marketplace: https://market.thepalaceproject.org/item/5687236, https://market.thepalaceproject.org/item/5686479/lightning-wolf

Scribd/Everand: https://www.everand.com/book/680037688/I-ll-Pontificate-When-I-m-Dead, https://www.everand.com/book/679854568/Lightning-Wolf

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1470935, https://www.smashwords.com/books/1470725

Thalia/Tolino (site is in German): https://shop.vivlio.com/product/9798223072577_9798223072577_10020/ill-pontificate-when-im-dead, https://www.thalia.de/shop/home/artikeldetails/A1070076884

Vivlio (site is in French): https://shop.vivlio.com/product/9798223072577_9798223072577_10020/ill-pontificate-when-im-dead, https://shop.vivlio.com/product/9798223168645_9798223168645_10020/lightning-wolf

It's also available on several sites geared towards, I believe, selling to libraries. Those don't seem to have readily available links- I'll have to trust that librarians know what they're doing.

They probably do, in fact. Libraries are awesome, and awesome things usually involve competent people.

I Wrote A Book!

I wrote two A Books!

I'm gonna try this. I am gonna try this. I'm gonna try and be an author, and NOBODY is gonna stop me!

Not even me. Take that, me!

If you enjoy my writing on here, you should probably check them out.

"I'll Pontificate When I'm Dead" is a collection of stories from my time on Reddit, with some stories expanded slightly (and galling errors removed. I know other people don't care much, but I hate typos in my work so much).

It also includes four new stories you can't get any other way, because that seems to be the way you entice people to buy a thing? I am many things, but a marketing expert is not one of them.

Seven stories in four different 'categories'- straight high fantasy (I entitled that section 'going your own way', because that is also a theme in the section), the afterlife (I have written a bunch about different afterlives, which kinda caught me off guard), a silly section (do you want to know the real meaning behind "The Twelve Days of Christmas"?), and a section where I do a lot of pontificating.

Sometimes I just like to talk.

"Lightning Wolf" is a...novelette? (Too short to be a novella, too long to be a short story) about a young sorceress out on her first adventure. Things...don't quite go according to plan. And now she has to abandon her party, and civilization, to try and deal with the werewolf curse. Will she succeed? Or will the curse consume her?

Recommended reading for anyone who has ever wanted to be able to zap things with lightning.

And remember: every book I sell makes it more likely that I write more. I'm quite encouraged when things actually work.

Available on Amazon, Apple, Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, Bibliotheca, BorrowBox, Gardners, Hoopla, Kobo, Odilo, OverDrive, Palace Marketplace, Scribd, Smashwords, Tolino, and Vivlio.

I would be tickled pink by any reviews, and if you asked your local library to carry a copy. I approve of libraries. Shocking from an author, I know. (That was heavy sarcasm, just in case).

Ebook only, though it looks like it's possible to also set it up to be distributed as a paperback? I probably won't do that, but let me know if that's something you, personally, would want.

[xavier-elrose]

I Wrote A Book!

I wrote two A Books!

I'm gonna try this. I am gonna try this. I'm gonna try and be an author, and NOBODY is gonna stop me!

Not even me. Take that, me!

If you enjoy my writing on here, you should probably check them out.

"I'll Pontificate When I'm Dead" is a collection of stories from my time on Reddit, with some stories expanded slightly (and galling errors removed. I know other people don't care much, but I hate typos in my work so much).

It also includes four new stories you can't get any other way, because that seems to be the way you entice people to buy a thing? I am many things, but a marketing expert is not one of them.

Seven stories in four different 'categories'- straight high fantasy (I entitled that section 'going your own way', because that is also a theme in the section), the afterlife (I have written a bunch about different afterlives, which kinda caught me off guard), a silly section (do you want to know the real meaning behind "The Twelve Days of Christmas"?), and a section where I do a lot of pontificating.

Sometimes I just like to talk.

"Lightning Wolf" is a...novelette? (Too short to be a novella, too long to be a short story) about a young sorceress out on her first adventure. Things...don't quite go according to plan. And now she has to abandon her party, and civilization, to try and deal with the werewolf curse. Will she succeed? Or will the curse consume her?

Recommended reading for anyone who has ever wanted to be able to zap things with lightning.

And remember: every book I sell makes it more likely that I write more. I'm quite encouraged when things actually work.

Available on Amazon, Apple, Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, Bibliotheca, BorrowBox, Gardners, Hoopla, Kobo, Odilo, OverDrive, Palace Marketplace, Scribd, Smashwords, Tolino, and Vivlio.

I would be tickled pink by any reviews, and if you asked your local library to carry a copy. I approve of libraries. Shocking from an author, I know. (That was heavy sarcasm, just in case).

Ebook only, though it looks like it's possible to also set it up to be distributed as a paperback? I probably won't do that, but let me know if that's something you, personally, would want.

[xavier-elrose]

Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, only changed in form.

So it goes.

When you wish upon a genie, do you know what happens? Do you know how your wish comes to be?

The genie does it. Not with a simple snap of the fingers, but with plain old work. Physical labor, with a touch of magic here and there to make things possible. It tends to take a long time.

And as for how that can work...time is an illusion. As a genie, you can wander around in the dimension of time just like any other.

There are advantages. Immortality, for one. You can't die, can't catch diseases, can't be poisoned or starved or injured. You've got time to do everything you want to do, with no cost other than being bound to fulfill the wishes of every idiot who picks up your lamp.

There are disadvantages, too. Immortality, for one. You never die, and simply keep going, long after you've run out of things to want, things to do, things to strive for. You watch everyone you've ever cared about die. Hopping around in time means you can see them again, but you can't spend time with them again- they become like monuments to you, statues commemorating the relationship you once had with a living person.

At a certain point you just...stop caring. Genies are neither malevolent nor benevolent- they simply are. Fulfilling wishes is what they do, the price they paid for achieving something that they, once upon a time, truly wanted.

As a genie, you get to remember how stupid you were, once. And pay the price forevermore.

Genies 'reproduce' by other people wishing to become genies. But only the young ones can reproduce. The older ones know better.

They can refuse a wish, with sufficient grounds. "I personally know that you will come to regret that deeply" counts.

They are fully capable of saving others from their own stupidity, when they wish to spend an eternity laboring, again and again and again and again, to fulfill the wishes of others. Though you do occasionally get genies who are simply too old to care at all, or who try to alleviate their pain through the suffering of others.

Remember that there are no free lunches, in life. Someone always seeks to profit somehow.

Remember that there are no free wishes, in life. Everything comes from somewhere, and the costs must be imposed on someone.

Magic bends the rules. It doesn't break them. And 'nothing is free' is a pretty major rule.

A common rule among Genies is that you may not wish for more wishes. However, thinking you found a loophole, you instead wish that you had the Genie’s power. The genie laughs in your face and blatantly says, “No, you don’t,” and for the first time, you notice the immense pain in their eyes.

[xavier-elrose]

Okay, I've gotta throw my two cents in.

The main power of the ringwraiths is fear. It's not their only power, and it's most certainly not an unimpressive power, especially in a war, but you have to look at how well fear will work, in a given situation.

In the shire, it wasn't going to work all that well, no matter how well you used it. One, because you're a long way from backup, and if you use a lot of fear and the hobbits respond by attacking you, that's it. No ringwraith wants "killed by a mob of hobbits" on their headstone. Two, because they're trying to gather information. Despite what some media tells you, fear is real bad at this. You make them scared, they tell you what they think you want to hear, without worrying about piddly little details like whether or not what they tell you is true. The ringwraiths are not stupid, and are trying to use their powerset in a situation it's not very good at- they're the best that's available, but there's a big difference between that an actually being suited to the task at hand.

And, finally, they're trying to frighten hobbits. This works pretty well a lot of the time- gets them free reign through the shire, though their movements are also easy to track, which bites them in the ass a bit.

But think of Merry and Pippin. Do you know what my response would be, if I'd undergone a long and harrowing journey farther from home than I'd ever been, finally reached a safe resting place, and learned about the council of Elrond and the whole journey the ring was about to take? "Huh. Glad that's not me. Pass the bacon, would you?" Merry and Pippin don't just sign up, they push through a lot of social "Hey, maybe you shouldn't..." in order to get signed up. Elrond had been, at most, a legend to them until Rivendell, and when they got there, they said "Hey, screw you, we're coming along!" Fear is...not the most effective weapon, if you're dealing with those two.

If you need it explained why this also applies to Frodo and Sam, I think you should just reread the books.

The point being that the main power of the ringwraiths, early in the books, was being applied in situations it was not well-suited for. Sauron sent his very best hammers to solve a problem that didn't even resemble a nail, because hammers were all he had.

In war, though...

I'm mostly gonna be regurgitating from A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (which you should read, btw), but to sum up: we have this incorrect idea that battles are won by killing all of the other sides dudes.

That's incorrect.

Battles are won by breaking the other sides will, getting them to falter and give up, rather than fight on. Often achieved, in part, by killing their dudes. In this context, fear is a really useful weapon. The ringwraiths went from being a polar bear far from home trying to knit a sweater to a polar bear in its element hunting seals, and they did much better as a result.

The ringwraiths aren't especially impressive, in their physical abilities. That's why they need mounts. If they could move super fast, why would they need horses? If they could fly, why would they need mounts that fly? Yes, their mounts supplement their limited ability to see the physical world, but a wolf or a worg or bird would serve that same function, and be a lot more mobile...if the ringwraith didn't need to be carried around to achieve speeds not achievable by Just Some Dude.

This is not to say that, say, I would beat them in a fight. They were impressive Just Some Dudes. But they would lose (and did lose) against Aragorn, and you might have noticed that he can't fly, or teleport, or anything like that.

Their weapon is fear. In situations where that's a poor weapon, they performed poorly. In situations where that's an effective weapon, they performed very well.

TL:DR- life is context-sensitive.

(Context, credit, and source below poll.)

Today's poll is based on this thread with notable principles @penny-anna, @elodieunderglass, @elanorpam, and @earhartsease. All of the options above are paraphrased from their original answers.

The full original question:

Can I please ask for your top five theories on why the Ringwraiths become so much more powerful over the course of the LotR trilogy? By the end of the books a single Ringwraith holds an army of 6000 men in paralysing dread from a height of a mile, they're dismaying hosts of men, etc. And in the beginning, they're easily defeated by "jumping behind a tree," "pretending to be in a different room," "getting on a little boat," "man with a stick on fire," etc.

[xavier-elrose]

"Aren't...aren't you scared?"

The purple one stopped acting aloof and said, "No...? Why would we be?"

"...because I'm the big, scary, evil villain? Kidnapped dozens, unspecified spree of crime and terror, stuff like that?"

"Kinda making our point for us," the orange one replied.

"Classic main villain motif," the red one added. "Nice use of black, and your flames look a lot cooler than mine." She shot a gout of fire into the air to demonstrate. Her flames were kinda...bright. They didn't seem dangerous as much as...showy, I guess?

"So you're...not scared of a big, bad, evil villain guy?"

"Genre conventions," the light blue one mumbled. "It's got a bit of a kids show vibe, and that means we're not going to get seriously hurt."

Ah, good 'ol soft-spoken light blue one.

"So...you're saying that everything I tried..."

"Gave us a nice villain of the week setup. Let us show off our abilities really nicely. You're a really nice villain, you know? Thank you for that." The pink one was, as ever, trying to make friends, regardless of how wise it was.

I was...

I was in a kids show?

My life is...

My life is as an antagonist in an animated show for kids?

One that's probably not going to last forever?

I actually started to break down and cry a bit.

The girls were pretty unnerved, too, once I explained I was worried about the show ending. Just going about your day, doing things, and then everything just...stops.

Forever.

There was only one thing to do. There was only one rational response.

So we had a planning session, right then and there.

"Okay, it seems pretty clear that we're still in season one. So we need to have a big final confrontation. It's gotta look good, but it can't be too involved. Gotta leave something for later."

"Should we be setting things up for later seasons?" the orange one asked. It was a good question.

"I don't...think so. Normally we would, but this is kinda geared towards kids. Probably they'll have an easier time if everything is nice and simple."

"Show's more likely to last if adults have something to like, too," the red one interjected. That was a good point.

"Y'know, I think you're right. Okay, we'll start dropping light hints at some sort of long-term plot. Just light hints, though. Don't want to give too much away, or get bogged down. If we get bogged down in plot twists, we lose the kids and the shows over."

The purple one spoke up. "What are we gonna do for a long-term plot, though?"

The light blue one shyly raised her hand. "I, um, I actually have a few ideas about that..."

The pink one hugged her. "There you go! Glad we've got you on the team. We'll get this figured out. Team hug!"

The team hug, apparently, included me. It was a bit tricky to do a group hug with so many spikes on my costume, but we figured it out.

I fought back tears. I had to be the responsible one.

Things had changed for me, but my path ahead was clear.

And, if nothing else, the audience always loves a cool villain.

You, the villain, have decided to confront the magical girls yourself. Their reaction was not one of fear, but of amazement. “You look SO FRIGGING COOL!”