#96: Wizard’s Tower

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After a while Chad walked in. Shelby noticed his arrival and smiled. When he’d conjured this place he’d had in mind it being something of a wizard’s roost. He was happy to see that Chad was using it.
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“Hey there Son. You’re just the Mage I want to see. Pull up a chair and sit a while. Help your self to a Ceegar.” Shelby said.

“You know. I never could figure out what you saw in those stinky things. I guess it’s time I try one...” Chad said as he pulled up a chair across the table from Shelby. A little dragon offered him a large cigar. Chad held it in one hand and examined the thing.

“ Welcome to the ancient and arcane club of Wizard Smokers. You’ll be the second member. There’s a ritual among us Wizard Smokers Son. ” Shelby said with a smile. “You notice there’s no smoke hole in the butt end of that cigar?”

Chad looked at the cigar. Sure enough one end was just a rounded dome. He wasn’t really sure he liked the direction this conversation was taking. Was he really going to to put a butt-hole into his mouth?

“First thing we got to do is snip the end off. A lot of old timers use their teeth and bite it off. That’s unseemly behavior for us SwahVay and Deboner Wizards.” Shelby said accepting another cigar from the little dragon.

“Being as we are DragonForce Maggi we have a reputation to live up to.” Shelby said. He had made a reflexive move to bite the end of the cigar off with his teeth and controlled it. Chad saw that and smiled slightly. Shelby pretended not to notice.

“So we’ll let a dragon bite the end off.” he said.

“Here you go darling.” he held the cigar slightly aloft for Elvira.

“ewwwwww” she said. Quick as a striking bullwhip she snipped the end of the cigar off with a flick of the tip of her tail.

“How’s that?” she asked

“Razor tail tip?” Shelby raised an eyebrow.

“Yup.” Elvira replied.

“ Good touch. Next?” Shelby said.

“My job.” Akatsuki said. Shelby hadn’t noticed the other little dragon earlier but he wasn’t a bit surprised to see her. Where Chad went she went. Just like him and Elvira. Akatsuki daintily flicked her tail tip also and snipped the tip off of That’s cigar.

“Ok...Now it we need some fire.” Shelby said.

Exactly on cue each dragon spit a tiny fireball that homed in on each cigar. Shelby took a big draw then blew out a cloud of smoke.

Chad did like wise .

cough cough cough cough Chad immediately broke into a fit of coughing...cough cough

“My God don’t inhale it” Shelby told the young mage. “that stuff will kill you.”

cough cough Chad got his coughing under control. “Then why do it?”

“I dunno” Shelby confessed. “it’s a thing. I like to play with the smoke. It helps me think.”

Chad thought about that for a minute and decided that it seemed reasonable. He tried again. Hmmm...it was kinda fun to play with the smoke..

“Now cut that out” Akatsuki was indignant. Chad was doing indecent things with the smoke. Chad grinned and quit doing it. Shelby just shook his head.

Boys.

“A bit of background first. I have a SoulStone in my head, if you’re not real clear on what that is it’s ok. It’s still pretty much a mystery even to me. I’m still learning. It all goes into the Library“ Shelby said

“The Library?” Chad said? He liked Libraries..

“ I’m getting to that. Elvira tells me that something like it is growing in your head also but don’t be alarmed cause it’ll be microscopic for like a hundred years or so. They grow really slow. The one in my head is older than humanity and it’s still not very big. She says they’re also growing in the brain’s of anyone with a dragon tear necklace, but even slower. Some how the SoulStones are all connected. I dunno how. Hell it might be wormholes or subspace for all I know. “ Shelby said

“The point of all this is that we all, me and you and the DragonTear wearers are all potentially in instant communication with each other if we want to be. We can also remotely control anything we have had the nanites make or that we have conjured out of SSmoke. I’ve been calling it Quantum Entanglement but I really don’t know. Call it SuperScience or magic or something else entirely maybe? I’m still learning.” Shelby said

“The library part is new. I just learned about it. I guess you could say it’s a form of info-dump. Elvira tells me that a SoulStone has room for a BUNCH of data. A zillion times more than our poor brains do.”

That was going to take a while getting used to, Chad thought. He figured he could probably do it though. Imagine, the internet in his head when he wanted it.

He and Shelby gazed out over the top of Flint Island for a long long time. Occasionally they spoke either by QE or vocally.

Mostly they just smoked, drank and thought.

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The Next Episode will be
#97: Cry Havoc and...
The Previous Episode was
#95: The Library…
the First episode was
#1 : Prologue
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