God falls to Earth with a Bump

It seems sometimes that any time I go Astral, I wind up at least having an argument with someone. I blame it on my background: I spent the first 20-odd years of my life studying science, maths and other such "serious" subjects. When I learnt how to AP, even though I was sending my spiritual form into a world where I saw unicorns, talked with dragons, and played the Game of Dancing Steps with fairies (Imagine Hop Scotch with moving squares played by creatures able to fly as easily as walk), I still stubbornly persisted in my belief that everything follows logical rules, even magic.

I was, of course, quite right, but so many people prefer not to believe that. Like all philosophies of magic, it has closed many doors to me, but has opened just as many. I can do things that wiccans and other such "traditional" mages can only dream of. And, of course, they can do things that to me seem impossible. Balance is everything, after all.

So, I tend to have differences of opinion when I'm Out and about. For all that, I've only ever been involved in two genuine Astral Fights. One was with a demon that had been tormenting a friend of mine. One was with God. At least, that's what he thought he was. Hard to believe that the guy was perfectly sane, huh?

It all started when I was wandering the Planes with no purpose or goal: I had Projected because I had nothing to do, and to keep in the habit, not with any real goal in mind. I was in the "Between Places Place", which is a rather odd place, but one I spend quite a lot of time in. I found it by thinking this way: Every Astral Plane is infinite in size. But there are many planes, and each is separate. So, logically, they must have an outside. So I went to the place outside all the places, and there I was.

That explanation doesn't make sense, but English was never invented with magic descriptions in mind. I figure you get the idea.

Basically, the Between Places Place is big black void, with thousands of big multicoloured spheres floating in it. Each one is an Astral Plane. I don't know if it is a real Plane, or if it exists because I imagined it did, but either way, when I want to go for a random Wander, I often go there.

Astral planes, of course, group together depending how similar they are. As I recall, I had just passed through an area of violet-coloured Greed planes, heading towards some planes which, from their pinkish-red colour, I presumed were Lust planes, when I came to a rather small, oddly-coloured sphere that didn't quite seem to fit in with any of the others. I could feel several dreaming humans within it who were feeling very distressed, and yet it was not a Nightmare plane. I decided it was worth taking a look into.

It's always weird entering a Plane by entering a sphere in the BPP: A sphere about 3 meters across contains an entire world. Exactly where you end up inside it is fairly random. I found myself standing in a city, like something out of a fairy story, all huge towers and marble and so on. And at it's centre, a palace. A very opulent one. The distress I had felt from the outside was coming from the palace. I couldn't be bothered to walk, or fly, so I focussed on the palace courtyard, and was there. I reached out with my mind, and detected four human minds: three unhappy dreamers, and one perfectly happy AP'er. This presented a nasty possibility, so I altered my clothing to rough brown robes such as you see being worn by humble travellers on television. Never hurts to appear harmless.

So altered, I entered the palace, and went to the place I sensed the 4 humans. It was a very opulent throne room. The AP'er I had felt was, of course, sitting on the throne. Kneeling at his feet were two of the unhappy dreamers: Two attractive young women. To one side of the throne was the last dreamer: a young man, in chains. I could feel myself getting angry, but was determined to find out what was happening before I acted. So, I knocked with my staff, and entered.

"Good day" I said. "I am a traveller, seeking shelter."

The man on the throne looked rather annoyed. "Get lost, peasant"

"Not a very courteous greeting." I replied. "Good manners cost nothing."

He looked quite surprised at this, but no less annoyed. "Do you know who I am?"

"No. You did not respond to my introduction with on of your own."

"He," came a voice from behind the throne, "is Simon, King and God of Middle Earth." The speaker came from behind the throne, a tall, white-haired and bearded man, "I am his court wizard, Merlin of Camelot."

I saw immediately that the so-called wizard was nothing but a Key Figure, an Astral Construct no more real than the people we create in our dreams. He had been created by Simon, as had the other 'people' that had now entered the room.

"A wizard, and a God? I have chosen a very impressive castle to visit, it seems" I said. "May I ask why you know him to be a god?"

"He created this realm, and everything within it. His power is as limitless as the stars, and all who live worship him."

"I see. But he is not always here, is he? Sometimes, he leaves this kingdom for a time?" I knew Simon was a AP'er, so he could not be here the whole time.

"Of course he is always here." Replied the wizard. "where else would he be?" But on his throne, Simon looked a little uncomfortable.

"In a world where he is not a God, of course. A world where he is a normal, everyday man, with no power beyond any other human, from which he visits this one. Is that not so, Your Majesty?"

"Sire, this man appears mad." Said 'Merlin', raising his staff. "Shall I remove him?"

"No." sad Simon. "I want him to tell me how he knows what he does."

The wizard looked baffled at this, but it doesn't take much to confuse a dream.

"I know because I am the same. A visitor to this realm from the same world as you. Why do you play at Godhood here?"

This seemed to infuriate him. "I do not play at anything! I AM God! I created this world from nothingness, shaped it from raw chaos. I can do anything. I am omnipotent! Everything is obedient to my will. I am god!"

"You're no more a god than I am. Being able to reshape a dream is a long way from being a god. How can you be here, without knowing what this place IS?"

"I come here whenever I wish to. This is my world, more so than Earth ever will be. When I want to come here, I just close my eyes, and will myself here. And now I think it is time you leave."

"Not until you explain them" I said, gesturing at the dreaming women at his feet. "Who are they? Who are they REALLY, in the real world?"

He looked furious. "They are nothing in the fake world! And they are nothing here! They are my servants!"

I understood right then. "They're girls you asked for a date that turned you down, right? Girls you wanted, who wanted nothing to do with you. And him," pointing to the chained dreamer, "he'd be one of their boyfriends, probably. Or some guy who's popular, and dislikes you. These three are all people who embarrass you in the real world. And you're hurting them for that."

"Believe me, I wish I could bring them here. But I can't. These are my creations, and I will do as I wish to them."

I was staggered. He didn't know? He'd brought their dreaming selves to him, and overpowered their sleeping minds with his will, making them obey him, without KNOWING it? Having entered people's dreams before, I know it's easy to control a dreamer, but how could he have brought them here from their dreams without knowing he was doing it?

It came to me after a moment: Imagery is a powerful thing, in magic. I know necromancers can call the dead to them simply by looking at a photograph of them. One of them explained that by creating the image of a person, the actual person can be drawn into it. That would explain this situation: 'God' Simon had created key figures of these three, simple dream images of them, but he had wanted them to be the real people. And his desire had been strong enough to draw them to him, and without even knowing it, he had bound them in their dreams, making them follow his will.

It was also obvious to me that he had no idea what he was truly doing, or where he was: He had believed every word he had said to me. He was obviously a natural AP'er, someone who needs no training or practice to send his mind away from his body. That meant he had projected to a world where everything can be controlled by thought, and, not knowing any better, had thought himself a God. Understandable, really, when you consider what we can do in the Planes. But that didn't excuse his behaviour: Even wrapped up in their dreams, the three he had summoned here were in great distress from what he was doing to them: torturing the man, and enslaving the women.

Perhaps if he knew what he was doing, he would stop doing it?

"This entire world is the world of dreams, one vast world where we all come when we sleep. By being aware this is not reality, you are able to control the dream. And these three are not dream mages, they are the true people, dreaming themselves here, drawn by your desire for them to be here. You are causing the real people here a great deal of pain with your actions. You should release them, and stop glorifying yourself like this."

"I don't know who you are, or what madness you're suffering, but I have lost patience with hearing it. Merlin, remove him."

'Merlin' raised his staff. Lightning leapt from it, and I was sent flying through the door. I was more surprised than hurt: A key figure shouldn't be able to do that! But then I realised: Merlin was acting under the control of Simon, and was therefore simply a slightly indirect way of Simon attacking me, one that didn't rely on Si's powers of concentration, which would probably not be all that hot.

Still, Merlin was just a dream figure, and therefore no real problem to deal with: I threw my staff at him, and when it reached him, it unrolled as though it had been a large sheet rolled up, and wrapped the wizard up. Then, it burst into flames, and vanished into dust, taking Merlin with it.

That gave 'God' a REAL shock.

"How did you do that??"

"I told you, Si, ALL of us have powers here. Anything you can do, I can do too. And erasing a wizard who didn't even exist in the first place is very easy. Now are you willing to listen to me?"

"I can bring him back from the dead easily enough. But I will send you to Hell first!" and he threw a ball of fire at me.

I knocked it aside. "Been there before, Si. It doesn't scare me."

"Of course. I should have realised. You come here, and lie, and destroy.. you are the Devil!"

I laughed out loud at that. "You really are out of your gourd, you know that?"

He didn't seem to appreciate that. "Die, demon!" he screamed, leaping up from his throne, and the ground beneath me exploded.

It didn't accomplish much: I had purposely made my Astral body very fluid: the shards of rock did as much damage as slashing at a lake with a knife does. None at all. But I wanted to show him he wasn't the only one who could make the ground shake. With a moments concentration, I knocked down the walls around us, revealing an empty wasteland around us.

Where had the city gone? In dreams, anything out of sight is no longer there. We hadn't moved. Nor had the city. But we were somewhere else, even so.

He didn't seem to like my levelling of his precious world. A thick beam of energy leapt from his hands, that I was barely able to deflect from me. He didn't let up, though, so I used the small amount of concentration I had left to conjure up a bunch of little sparks, which immediately flew to him, and started zapping him with stinging little zaps of light (like the thing in Star Wars that Obi Wan made Luke train with).

Too bad for Si, he didn't have a lightsaber and the Force to help him, and those little sparks were dancing around him so fast, he couldn't catch them to destroy them. And they stung enough that he couldn't keep his attack on me going. He was too busy trying to swat them away, and wasting lots of energy with pointlessly-powerful blasts of energy that were rarely even hitting their targets, and were about a hundred times stronger than they needed to be anyway. But while he was wasting effort on a bunch of sparks, I was concentrating on a spell someone I knew from the Net had taught me: He called it the Mirror Maze, and it's a darn clever spell. It basically creates the illusion of an infinite maze, made up of mirrors. What you don't see when you're trapped in it is that the maze only extends as far as you can see: There is no maze around a corner until you walk around that corner and see it. That means, of course, that you can spend you whole life walking it, and never find your way out, because there IS no way out. (Follow this link for the inventor's description:Mirror Maze)

Anyway, once I had cast it, I had a small ball of silver in my hand. I vanished the sparks, and he turned back to me. I threw the ball at him, and it exploded into a sheet of silver, that wrapped around him, and he was in the mirror maze.

I left him there, figuring he wouldn't get out of it any time soon. I wanted to get the captive dreamers out of the way. I brought them to me, and conjured up Key Figures, in the shape of bracelets, which I placed on each of their wrists. The bracelets would remain on their dream selves permanently, and would ward away Simon's influence. They wouldn't be drawn to his world again. Then I open an Astral Gateway, to a Plane made up of happy, carefree thoughts, populated by little glowing fairies, dancing lights, and warm winds, and sent them through.

That problem dealt with, I created a special window in front of me: it was a clever little thing I had worked out but not had the chance to test before: It was the size and shape of one of the mirror panes the Mirror Maze was made up of. On the other side of the glass, I would see Simon, as if I were looking through one of the maze mirrors. And he would see me in the mirror. But, since he was seeing only my reflection, he would be unable to attack it.

The view I got was him walking, very bad-temperedly, down a corridor of the maze. When he saw my reflection, he hurled a blazing ball of energy at me. It smashed the mirrored pane, but the spell simply moved my image to another mirror. He smashed that one too. And I moved again. He didn't smash this reflection, probably because all he was accomplishing was to reveal even more of the Maze than he could already see.

"Well now, God," I said, "For an omnipotent deity, you seem to be having a lot of trouble solving a simple maze."

"When I get out of here, I'm going to rip you to shreds" he snarled, and carried on walking. After a few moments, an idea seemed to occur to him, and he created an Astral gateway that lead to his city. Naturally, as soon as he stepped through it, it vanished, and he remained inside the Maze. The Maze remains centred on you, whatever Plane you try to skip out to.

"Well, that was impressive." I said mockingly, "A doorway that magically transports you to where you already are. Amazing."

Another attack, this time a lightning bolt. I don't think he expected it to work, he just wanted to smash something. The NEXT lightning attack, though, was quite impressive: Streams of lightning blazed out of him, in all directions, shattering everything they touched, destroying pane after pane of the Maze. And after he had smashed hundreds of them, in every direction? He was in a large round hole, surrounded by Mirrored tunnels in all directions.

"That's quite a few years of bad luck you just built up there, Si" I observed.

"You're dead, demon. I'm going to take you to the deepest part of Hell, and I'm going to nail you there."

He still thought I was the devil then? "You want Hell, Si, let me show you part of it."

I concentrated on modifying a part of the Mirror Maze. You know that scene in Terminator 2 where the liquid metal guy stops being a floor and morphs into the cop? Imagine that, only it was the mirrored walls, floors AND ceilings that were changing, and they were becoming some very unpleasant shapes, mostly nasty looking dinosaur derivatives. They all started attacking him. He started smashing them. The interesting thing was, though, that their reflections didn't shatter when the Mirror Monsters themselves did: They just walked through the mirrors, and attacked. And when you consider how many mirrors there were, there were hell of a lot of monsters in a very short time. He was enveloped, drowning in silvery magic, until he finally burst free, as I cancelled the Mirror spell.

"Good going, God, you really had them on the run there." I smirked.

"You like mazes so much, demon, try THIS one" he yelled, and the ground heaved as walls rose through it. I was in a large rock maze. Was it a Mirror Maze type, that went on forever, or a more normal one?

I conjured up a SeeSphere, and focused it on Simon. He was sitting on his throne, looking down onto a huge, circular maze. Which I was standing in the centre of. That answered my question: This was a genuine maze. So, how to find the way out?

I placed the SeeSphere in the air in front of me, and stepped back. Then I concentrated, and two beams of light came out, one red, one blue. Faster than the eye could follow, they shot out into the maze, following the walls, blue on one side, red on the other. In seconds, they had mapped out the whole maze, an image of which was now being shown in the SeeSphere, with the route to the way out shown clearly in purple. I shrank the Sphere into a tiny disc, and placed it on my wrist, like a watch.

Just before I moved to start towards the exit, I hesitated. Simon was certain to launch attacks on me when he realised I was not lost in this maze. And his attacks, while unsophisticated, could at least hurt me and slow me down. So, I conjured a small blue spark up. (Okay, I KNOW I use glowing sparks and spheres a lot. It's a useful shape, and since I think of magic as energy manipulation, they glow. So it's unoriginal. So sue me)

I sent the spark to Simon. Unobserved, it flew to his throne room, and landed on his neck, at the base of his skull. There, it extended micro-thin tendrils of energy into his head, in the same way I do myself when I want to touch someone's mind. (When I do telepathy, I do it by extending a part of my energy self into the other person's, and by linking them, gain an insight into them.) Now that I had a Key Figure connected to his mind, I could sense what he was feeling, and hear what he was thinking, so long as he was "Thinking Loud." You think loudly when you think in specific words: Most of your thoughts are, I should imagine, thought like that. Those thoughts are easily read. Some people would say that you ALWAYS think in words. They are of course completely wrong. Do you really think "Hey, that car is going to hit me if I don't run across the street quickly to get out of it's way", or do you see the speeding car, realise what it's doing, and react without a single word passing through your mind?

Anyway, I had advance warning of his attacks, should he make any. I started along the route to the exit. It wasn't long before he thought I was going far too confidently for his liking. Since he had conjured the maze up randomly, he didn't actually know what route the exit WAS, but he didn't like the way I seemed to know where I was going. He decided to cave in the ground ahead of me.

Forewarned, I leapt back just as the ground beneath me gave way, and landed on solid ground. Unfortunately, I had to get across the rather large hole in the ground. I could have flown, but he would almost certainly have willed me to sink, and that would have wasted my energy, resisting his power. I wanted him to tire himself out, while I used as little energy at all. Some misdirection was called for.

I gestured at the pit, and nothing seemed to change. But when I stepped out, I walked as though there was solid ground beneath me, and every footfall made an audible noise, and beneath me, my reflection walked upside down as I did.

Furious, Simon visualised the glass I was walking on to shatter and fall into the pit. Glass shards fell by the thousand, but I carried on walking, my reflection beneath me, my footsteps echoing.

Again, he caused glass to fall in shards. Again, it had no effect. And a third time, and a fourth, and then I was onto solid ground.

How had I done it? Simple: In the best traditions on The Matrix: Do not try to shatter the glass. It cannot be done. Instead, realise the truth: There IS no glass.

I know, I know. I just couldn't resist it.

I had never conjured up a sheet of glass to walk on. Instead, I had created a key figure: A mirror image of me, pale and transparent, and floating upside down in the air. It had been this thoughtform I had walked on; a thoughtform that looked for all the world like a reflection in glass; a thoughtform that made a noise like footsteps on glass when trodden on; a thoughtform that put its foot directly under mine, so I could walk. There had never been any glass.

So where did the shards of glass come from? Simon had created them, remember? He had visualised the top of the pit suddenly filling with shattered glass, which then dropped into the pit. If I HAD been walking on glass, he would indeed have shattered it. But because there was no glass, his visualisation of glass shattering had simply conjured up glass shards, without ever affecting the thing I was really walking on: a flying thoughtform that mirrored my actions. I think that was a darn clever idea, personally.

His next attack was to have the walls smash together. No problem, I knew it was coming, and I just flattened my body out, so the walls had no effect. He sent in a monster, I conjured up another monster which ate his monster. He filled the corridor with water. I didn't need to breathe. He filled the corridor with fire. I turned myself into a walking flame, and passed harmlessly though his fire. And so on, until I walked out the exit.

It wasn't all that easy: When he realised I was nearly at the exit, he was about to close it. So, I had my little blue spark stop reading his intentions, and take over one of the key figures that he had populated his room with, to give him an admiring audience. And that key figure started throwing fire at Simon, disrupting his concentration long enough for me to walk out the door.

Incidentally, I'd like to make the point that I could have simply "teleported" myself out of his maze at any time, it not having any protection against it, the way a Mirror Maze does. But it wouldn't have tired him out, so I let him waste his energy on trying to stop me.

"Well, Si, you gave it your best shot," I said to him. "But it wasn't enough. Are you still going to claim Godhood?"

"I don't care what tricks you may be able to use, demon. I know I am a god, and you cannot change that." he replied, but his voice was worried.

"Oh well. I tried. Sorry about this, Si, but having seen what you've done with your power, and the people you've sucked into your sordid fantasies, I can't leave you free to continue it." I genuinely was sorry. The only way I could stop him drawing people into his nightmares was a fairly unpleasant fate.

"You can't hurt me, demon"

"I don't need to, Si." I raised my hand, and pointed at him. "You have abused your power, and harmed others with it, and showed no remorse at the pain you have inflicted, and stated your intention to continue doing so. You have refused every chance offered you to redeem yourself. Simon, I strip you of your power. Simon, I confine you to limbo. Simon, I declare you cursed." A grey mist flowed out of my finger, and enveloped him. It faded away, and he was gone.

I focused on him, and went to the place he now was. I was in a grey nothingness, only he and I visible.

"Where is this?" he demanded shakily.

"Limbo. You will remain here forever. You will cast no magic, travel to no place, conjure no company, until you repent. On that day, say aloud that you renounce your claims of Godhood, that you will never again chain another human to your will, that you will use your power for the good of others, and I shall ear it. And if I believe you mean it, I shall free you." And with that, I left him in the grey void.

He didn't believe it at first, of course. But hard as he tried, he could not leave. And when he conjured anything into being, from a human companion to a chair, it was engulfed by the grey mist, and vanished. He could not leave it, he could not create things in it, he could not reshape it. In fear, he tried to return to his body. That worked, and he sighed in relief. He was free of limbo. He sat back, and projected back out of his body, intent on hunting me down.

He found himself in Limbo again. Every time he projected, he was in Limbo. Every time he sleeps, he dreams only of being in Limbo. He has not yet renounced his status as God, and he remains in Limbo.

How did I do it? Did someone make me a demigod while you weren't watching? Nope, it's just a modified Mirror Maze, just made of grey mist instead. He's in a sphere of featureless grey that's barely bigger than he is. But when he creates something, the mist moves between him and it, and by moving it out of his sight, t appears to destroy it. When he tries to travel away, the travel works fine, but the mist goes with him, and so it seems to him he has not moved. It is a simple spell, and a very effective one. He still has no idea what it is, or how it works. He remains trapped to this day.