Shaking my head, I forced myself to focus. Couldn’t forget that my fiance was a freaking tree in my living room, and that dead cats vanished from my bedroom. Gathering my magic, I let the awareness of it spread through my whole body. I felt more in touch with it than ever before, like I was a trained dancer. I slowly walked down the stairs, and checked every room of the house on the main floor. No cats. Seriously, this is why I am a dog person. I bet a dead dog wouldn’t get up and walk away. He would have been a good boy and stayed dead. I did notice that most of the windows in my house were broken. Walking up to the large ones in my living room, I thought about how to fix this. Marble is too heavy, granite presents the same problems. Maybe I could cover the windows in quartz. I put my hand on the window, closed my eyes, and conjured quartz. Surprisingly enough, it was fairly easy. The energy drain from me was low, and my earth magic was more than happy to make the quartz almost perfectly see through. With new confidence filling me, I locked every outside door of the house and went to every window and covered them with thick, sturdy quartz. By that point, I was a little drained and slumped on the couch near my arboreal woman.

  Throwing back the last of her drink, I said, “Well babe, what the fuck.” I didn’t really expect an answer. She didn’t give one. I set my .45 on the table in front of me with my knife and put my head in my hands. Think. What would Sarah do? She would probably tell me to “Stick it to the man”, whatever that means in this situation. Cheater time. Whatever Diety that decided to alter the fabric of the universe probably doesn’t care about little ole me. And if that’s true, then maybe I can do a little universe altering of my own.

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  Running through the twisting branches of magic threading my soul, there was something there that I had to try. Runes. My instincts were telling me that runes and enchantment were linked, but only in a symbolic way. I ran out of gas conjuring quartz throughout the house, but what if I didn’t have to? Looking at my hands, I conjured a small, flat stone. Then, I concentrated on Einstein’s famous mass times light squared equaling relativistic energy formula, but this time, energy meant mana. The formulae mutated in my head from m*c^2=e to m*c^2=e=E. The big “E” meant energy, as in magical energy, mana. The little “e” was the kind of energy I didn’t care about, the nuclear kind. I am definitely not smart enough for that yet. Sinking the energy matrix into the rock plate, I put it in my pocket. Free mana! Now, the feed wasn’t that great, but it didn’t tire out and it was constant. Now, I just needed something to handle the overflow, the excess mana I wasn’t currently using.