Long Forgotten Memories

2011/10/18

After much TLC (read: delicately beating it into submission with a hammer, among other things), I finally finished putting back together my power generator. It’s just a small little fuel cell. You give it water, some food, and a bit of sunlight and it produces an electric current. A current harnessed to drive work in other machines.

Why go through all of this work? Why not use magic?

For one thing, magic can be unreliable. Its strength depends on the season, the current orientation of the moon, stars, sun, and other celestial bodies, what you’ve eaten this morning, what your neighbor’s eaten this morning, the mood of the nearest unicorn, if you’ve paid your taxes, how many times you begged for luck in last night’s card game, among other things. And that’s just for magical items.

Unicorn magic can be even more temperamental. As nice as an individual unicorn may be, they usually have a mean streak the distance to the moon and back if you so so much as hint that their last spell is almost-but-not-quite-perfect-you’re-so-close-you-just-need-to-tweak-this-spell-like-this-Promise!LastTime!

Especially when you follow it up with I’m-sorry-I-was-wrong-can-you-tweak-it-justeversoslightlythatway.

The gaze from a frustrated unicorn have been known to level cities.