The Enchanted Duplicator
The Never Ending Quest - Episode 68547
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A self replicating spell. How utterly useless! Still, it was Stacy's first
encounter with anything that claimed to be magic, and seemed harmless
enough, so she decided to try it just for kicks. Holding the scroll with outstretched arms she chanted loudly, turning to the four corners of the Earth (as close as she could get without a compass anyway) as directed. She noticed a misspelled word and corrected her pronounciation accordingly. As soon as she reached the last line the scroll, stretched between her hands, snapped in half. Peculiar, but probably natural. It was old after all... Before she had time to finish the thought, the two halves of the scroll crumbled into dust which seemed to dissolve in the air before it hit the floor. Curiouser and curiouser. She must have hit some kind of self destruct mechanism. Maybe if she had pronounced the misspelled word as it was written... Well, too late now. Walking back to the lounge she noticed that the TV was on standby. The red power indicator seemed to be beckoning to her, so she sat down and picked up the TV guide to see what was on. After turning a few pages she realized she didn't know what day it was. She closed the magazine, rolled it up and slapped the roll against her open palm in frustration... Suddenly she felt extremely tired, and was barely able to keep her eyes open long enough to notice that she wasn't holding a TV guide any more. It looked like the scroll she had found and disintegated earlier, only newer. Struggling to keep her hands raised, she unrolled the scroll and skimmed the contents. Sure enough, there was the same text she had read and chanted earlier, only... The misspelling was in a different place. Or did she misremember? Well, there was one way to find out. She looked around, found a newspaper, rolled it up... and passed out. She came to in what turned out to be a hospital bed, feeling as if she had slept for days. According to the staff that turned up after a while, she had been found unconscious in her apartment with a couple of scrolls in her lap, and it had taken them three days to revive her. Fortunately the ambulance crew had had the presence of mind to bring the scrolls along, and she found them in the nightstand. A brief examination showed one of them to be the one she had created from the TV guide, and the other one was identical except that it had a different misspelling in a different place. She must have created that one as she passed out. Now she had two nearly identical scrolls, both differing from the presumed original by one letter. Could there be a secret message she would be able to read if she made lots of scrolls? Only there seemed to be a limit to how often she could make a scroll without running out of energy... It had been three days, it should be safe now. After pondering a bit she summoned a nurse and asked for a newspaper. As soon as the lady in white had left, she successfully turned the paper into a third scroll, which turned out to be different in yet another place. And she felt very tired again. Some thoughtful soul had left a pencil and a notepad on the nightstand. She took them and wrote down the different 'special' letters starting with the one she remebered from the old scroll. After staring at the letters for several minutes she couldn't see any pattern. She probably needed a lot more letters to make anything out of it, but even if she had to wait just a single day in between each, it would take months to make that many scrolls on her own. She started wondering if the new scrolls had the same power as the one she had read. Then she could use them to enable others to make scrolls... Just one problem with that plan. How do you find several trustworthy people who won't think you are crazy, if you don't remember any of the people you (presumably) used to know??
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Won-Tolla
7/5/2007 7:37:55 AM
Extending Enabled
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