Magic Moms

I'm sure that Moms have super powers. Wow, it took me six tries just to write the word "powers."

For instance, this morning the resident Mom came into my room in a desperate attempt to wake me up. My comforter, a nice maroon diamond-patterned job, had over time slipped away from the front of the bed and to one side. I sometimes tried to fix it, but usually only managed to regain a few inches of ground, while feet remained in either direction. But when the Mom saw this, she grabbed it, and performed some manoeuver so complex it can only be spelled with an "o." The comforter had been put back in its proper place and I, still being inside the bed during the action, was moved somewhere just north of Chicago.

"Good morning everybuhhhhh..."

That's just one of the many skills exhibited by Moms. A low-level skill such as "Make toast w/out burning it" looks easy in practice but is hard to do, I've found out. Or maybe the "Tidy up" ability, which not only requires to be a level 12 and the proper amount of mana, but, I'm sure, time travel. The "Bottomless Bag" sounds like a handy one to have, but you have to possess an intimate knowledge of theoretical physics and Gallifreyan ancestry.

No Mom, I don't need to put on a heavier coat. It's the Volcano world Magmar.

But Moms are not without their weaknesses. Mine, for instance, has Indirectarum Givex, two made-up words that means she can't give directions to save her life. Or mine, unfortunately. She once drew a map on a scrap of paper that had north pointing down. She once told me to "turn at the Yeah Church," but the name of the church was not "Yeah," that's what a class was called that was held there. Of course I got lost. Just this past weekend she got herself lost in Wisconsin. That didn't bother my Dad very much but they still got lost, and she wrote them down herself. They both claim that it was Google's mistake, but the facts are there.

Literary Evil: No Explanation Needed

One of my first serious attempts at writing happened when I was sixteen. I don't know how I got the idea, or what it was for, but it was a little story about a group of warriors that fight the undead. It was simple, the shortest of short stories. Later on, I added more to the story. One of the characters, Weln, a mute archer, journeys alone to a nearby mountain. During that time, he remembers an event five hundred years in the past, his first encounter with the power behind the undead. At the top of the mountain, he finds his brother, the mastermind behind it. They fight, and Weln wins. They both utilize a telekinetic power granted by a purple pillar in a chamber of the mountain. The entire story is just over nine thousand words.

At one point in college I showed the story to a friend at work. After she read it, she said she didn't understand the purple pillar. Why was it there? How did it work?

But why did I need to answer those questions? To explain, let's look at some examples:

One of the most memorable evils in literature, for me, is Sauron in LOTR. At first he's a humanoid with great strength, then reduced to a lidless eye looking for jewelry. And yet the entire free world wishes to keep him from coming back to full power. He corrupts the hearts of men, twists Saruman into an instrument of evil and dries the land around him into a wasteland. But is he explained? Kind of!

He is the mightiest of the Maiar! Corrupted by the Great Enemy Morgoth in the First Age and most powerful of his lieutenants!

Which means nothing unless you read The Silmarillion, or you had access to J.R.R. Tolkien's private notes.

How does the ring hold his power? What will happen if he gets the ring? How is he just an eye on a tower? Where does his power originate? How did he see out of that helmet?

Elendil? Isildur? Hello?

Perhaps a more recent example. Stephen King's Dark Tower series is seven books long, and in typical King fashion, are a thousand pages each.

Quickly: Roland the Gunslinger tries to find the Dark Tower, the crux and structure that all worlds are based around. He wants to keep it from crumbling. It's supported, in the Universe's main world, by six infinitely old beams with the Tower at the center. The person responsible for destroying two of the beams, and nearly a third, is a man named the Crimson King. His goal is to tear down the Tower and bring about "Discordia," and rebuild the world in his image.

And again, if you only read the seven main books, you will have no idea how the Crimson King has his power, where it came from originally, what kind of creature he is, and what force he has at his disposal. But the explanation isn't needed.

Drinks are in the fridge. And try not to leave a ring on the Mantel of Darkness.

For both characters, they are the source of ultimate evil in their respective worlds, and both decry explanation. There could be some, sure, but in my opinion it would lessen the impact they have on the story. Instead of a powerful, unknown entity, that you just have to hope and pray you defeat somehow, you get a measurable quantity that you simply need to work around. It's no longer a fight against fate, but a fight against another person, even if that person is nearly nine feet tall, undead, or in command of armies.

Woah science

Some time ago, I had an idea for a story. That story would start with the main characters flying through space on a ship that happens to fly straight through the center of the universe. Good stuff. Pretty quickly in (current estimate is between 20k and 25k words) one of the characters, a demented, sociopathic genius, activates a device, just as it passes through the center of the universe, and is able to destroy the universe and recreate it, however he wants it.

Luckily, most of the other main characters witnessed this device's activation, thus, they and the ship they were on survives, allowing them to undo the madman's work.

One of the questions I had to answer for this story was: "What the heck kind of device does this guy have?" It was one of the big ones, a pressing question that kept me from going forward. I haven't actually written that part, yet the thought dogged me.

But then July Fourth happened. In between explosions and grilling, lab-coated scientists in Switzerland, playing around with the Large Hadron Collider in CERN, discovered what could, maybe, possibly, be a Higgs Boson. Good enough for me.

The Higgs Boson is referred to as the "God Particle," a name which pisses off many a scientist, because all it really does is provide a testable hypothesis for the origin of mass in elementary particles. I copied that sentence from wikipedia and like, every word is linked to something. In truth, the concrete discovery of Higgie would leave more questions than it answered, mostly about the unification of quantum chronodynamics, the electroweak reaction, and gravity, as well as the ultimate origin of the universe.

Thinking that maybe I could use this particle as a basis for Crazy Guy's device (I call him CG in my notes because I don't have a name for him yet), I started researching, and I think it's doable.

The device would have to create a "Vacuum expectation Value (VeV)" of  246 GeV or General electron Volt (basically, 1.602×10⁻¹⁹ joules times 246). This is the VeV of a Higgs field, which is the field required to create the Boson unique to that field (Hence: Higgs Boson).

This diagram shows the HB interactions with other particles shown with the Standard Model. It's totally dissing Photons and Gluons

At the time of activation, CG's device would create the field, as well as a HB particle inside that field. To do this, the device would have to incorporate a particle accelerator (of which the Large Hadron Collider is the biggest in existence) to create an HB. This is where the "genius" part of crazy guy would have to come in. He has, in theory, developed a way to have a Higgs Boson be created just as it passes through the center of the universe.

And now all science goes out the window. I really have no idea if what I've said up to this point makes sense to someone who actually understands this gook, but from this point on: what I say, goes.

As Higgie passes through the center of the universe (Or "Into the point" as CG calls it) it simultaneously destroys and creates all matter. Because an HB is both its own antimatter and CP-even (Which means it would be the same if it was switched with its antiparticle and its left and right were swapped) it accomplishes both at once.

However, the last aspect of the device is that it draws matter...a DNA sample perhaps...from the user. It then imprints this sample as the new standard model for the universe.

This means that CG is able to create the universe in his own image and with his own rules. He is immortal, invincible, all-knowing and all-powerful. He is God, and king, and he rules forever. Yet his universe is still built on rules, and even he cannot break them.

Except that the people that witnessed him activating the device are also preserved, just as they are, stuck in a ship floating in space. And they are the only ones that realize what is going on.

Addition! Crazy Guy's name is unofficially Ulysses Divus. Which means that it's official unless I think of something better. Fun facts: "Divus" (pronounced Dee-woos) in Latin is the male singular of God, immortal, or deity. The female singular is Diva. Eh? Eh? Yeah.

Bulb

   It is a forgone conclusion that whenever I attempt to do something, a project, a task, a chore, that I will either break something or hurt myself. The first and only time my father asked me to help him rotate the tires, I lost one lug nut and swallowed another. A few months ago I was cutting down a tree branch with a trimmer, and, in a whirlwind of motion that I have yet to explain, I found myself caught by an ankle up in the tree, ten feet away from where I had been standing, the trimmer lying on the ground mockingly still and my trapped body swinging in the wind.
    Well, this afternoon I tried changing a light bulb. My parents had left the house for some function and I was left with this simple task. It was one of three light bulbs in the kitchen fixture, set in the center of the ceiling. I thought first to get a light bulb their storage area, but realized I didn't know what kind to get and, given my track record, would finish the project with a birthday candle stuck in the socket upside-down. I went into the kitchen and starred up at the fixture, determined to figure out which one was burnt. I flipped the light on and temporarily blinded myself. Recovering, I saw which bulb was burnt, and pulled a kitchen stool under it. Before I mounted it, I decided that it would be best to turn the light off again. I removed the small cushion that was on the stool because I knew that it would slip out from under me. Proud that I had remembered that fact, I climbed onto the stool. However, I misjudged both my height and the height of the stool and crashed the top of my head into the ceiling.
    After a brief lie down on the hard kitchen floor, I regained my stance on the stool, crouching slightly to avoid another bump. I realized I didn't remember which bulb was burnt out. So I climbed down, marched to the switch, took a good look at the fixture, turned it on, and blinded myself again.
    Eventually I discerned which bulb needed changing again, and carefully climbed onto the stool. I carefully unscrewed the screws keeping the white dome which covered the bulb in place, but dropped one of them onto the floor before I could get the dome down. It seemed to be waiting for the chance to escape, because as soon as I got down off the stool and placed the dome on the table in the center of the kitchen the screw had vanished. After crawling around for a few minutes, bumping around under the table (and accidentally mistaking a short black twisty tie for the screw) I found it, trying in vain to wedge itself through a vent on the runner. I had a funny thought about calling the screw "Steve McQueen" to mock it into submission when I heard an ominous grating noise from the table. Peering level with it, I saw the white dome about to roll off the other side of the table.
    Diving through the legs, I superbly caught the dome moments before it would have smashed like a snowman hit by a wrecking ball. In doing so however I managed to fling the screw at the wall, and it might have known it was never really going to escape because it decided to bounce off and smack me perfectly in the forehead.
    It rolled flaccidly as I got up, dome in hands. After I secured the dome and the screw, I got back up to ceiling-height and unscrewed the burnt bulb from the fixture. Carefully stepping back down, I noted the bulb's wattage and placed in on the table. I then found the right kind of bulb to replace it with; the last one. I climbed back up, nearly bashing my head again. I started to screw the new bulb in to place in the fixture, and when I thought I was done I bent down to get the white dome.
    I heard the bulb fall loose with a heart-stopping "ping." Bent forward as I was, I attempted to jump down into the path of the bulb (The last one!) to catch it, and catch it I did. Unfortunately I also landed with one foot right on the stool's pillow, sending me skidding across the hardwood floor. I tried to catch the table to stop myself, but ended up with the burnt out bulb in my other hand instead of the table it was resting on. I crashed into the sink, bashed my knee into the cabinet below it, slipped backwards and conked my head on the floor. One of the two bulbs had broken when I landed, smashed so that only a tiny jagged mountain range remained where it had been. It was only the burnt bulb, but I still had to clean it up.
    By the time I had cleaned and finished everything, I had two bumps on my head, a small mark where the screw had hit me, a bashed knee, and a broken light bulb.
    But I considered it a success, because I didn't end up hanging by my ankle in a tree. And don't you think that wasn't possible.