Not a reference to real science that you know of. Those of us that have unlocked the deep mysteries of quantum mechanics know better, and we all turn away to avoid going mad.

Correct

The backfiring car was a nice touch. Took me a second!

>and the scientific accuracy of the explanation and the coin.

It's not that accurate though. Even though the coin is in a superposition, all the individual states will still fall, so there's no reason that the coin should be hanging in the air.

For the record, this prompt made me instantly think of the character Tremaine Valliarde, daughter of infamous criminal mastermind Nicholas Valliarde.

Upon being asked by a forger if she were there representing her father, she stopped, overthought, realised her silence was more intimidating than anything else she could have come up with and said “I’m here representing myself”.

Martha Wells is a fantastic writer and I think I’m going to go reread that series.

>So the coyote is what causes that hurry up and close the door feeling we get sometimes when it's dark and quiet.

... did you just curse us all?

It was damned hard to figure out the socially acceptable response to walking in on a bloodstained settee. Does one ignore it politely? Or does one make a light comment on pale fabrics on furniture just being an absolute disaster waiting to happen - especially when one has women visiting on the regular.

I couldn’t quite come up with a quip and my husband and his grandfather seemed to be eyeing me with some trepidation, so I decided to opt for ignoring it. “Nonno!” I said smilingly, putting my arms out for a hug and requisites cheek kisses. “Darling!” I gave my handsome husband his own kiss. It was a required ritual - otherwise Nonno would interrogate me to make sure everything was good between us and that I wasn’t annoyed with either him or his grandson.

I had a feeling I was the favourite granddaughter in law. The others were just so shy and reserved when the old man was around - well, not that I couldn’t be, but I’d learned fairly well how to mimic being a normal, well adjusted human who didn’t flinch away from social contact.

I cast my eyes over the two remaining men in the room. One of them, shame faced and shaking, was refusing to meet Nonno’s eyes. He was likely the companion of the unfortunate woman who’d bled on the settee. Probably trying to work out the cost of a replacement - that’s what I would do in that situation. The other man was absolutely stone faced, standing just behind the first man and to the right. I caught Nonno’s gaze and flicked my own towards the two strangers.

He sighed dramatically. “I suppose it is only polite, as you would say, to introduce you to these guests of mine. Grigori, make your bow to my granddaughter,” the stone faced man did, in fact, literally bow in my direction, murmuring something too low for my hearing that sounded vaguely polite and welcoming. “Grigori has recently come over from the old country to help me take care of some particularly hairy problems.”

I smiled at Grigori and mentally filed him under “grandfather’s business employees”. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

A car backfired noisily outside and I saw the unnamed man flinch violently. I could sympathise. It happened so regularly near this office that I had half a mind to find the car’s owner and get them to fix the damn thing. “Don’t worry,” I told him sympathetically. “If you come here often enough you’ll soon get used to the sound.”

Nonno chuckled softly. He seemed to enjoy it whenever I spoke to his guests. It was probably why he kept inviting me round to the office. “I’m sure Emidio will take your words to heart, though hopefully he doesn’t have to come back here too often.”

I smiled reassuringly at Emidio but he seemed to be lost to his own misery. I’d have to say something about the couch or he’d agonise over it all day. God knows Nonno would be far too happy to let him squirm about it.

“I hope I’m not interrupting,” I said to the guests, knowing that even if it were important Nonno would make me speak anyway. He was very big on power plays and emphasising his whole “family first” ethos. “I just wanted to let you know, I had a look around the dealership and I picked up the one I thought would be best for your purposes. Hybrid, very pretty, very fast. I checked everything and brought it straight here. Pauli has it stashed underground for you until you’re ready to play with it.” I vaguely noticed that both the guests were suddenly very pale and very still. Weird. I wondered with familiar paranoia if I’d said something strange. I ruthlessly brushed the thought to the side and decided to beat a strategic retreat. “If you’ve got no other jobs for me, I’ll be at home plotting my next campaign. You know how to contact me if you require my services. Ciao!”

I gave them all a little wave as I went to the door and then paused long enough to say over my shoulder “you know, Nonno, I’ve always avoided white furniture for the same reason I’ve avoided white clothes - blood is terribly hard to get out of them and always inevitably gets on them, no matter how careful you are. I’d go with black leather next time - much easier to clean.”

> "What?" he said. "You're helping me clean this up, you know?"

I had to re-read the end a few times to understand.

Originally I thought Dave was like a Men-In-Black sort of agent whose sidekick is the Coyote Mummy and the twist is that they're here to sus out and "clean up" the anomalous protagonist.

But if I'm reading this correctly, Dave can't actually see the Coyote Mummy and when he says "clean this up", Dave's just talking to the protagonist about the spilled drink.

[removed]

I stab it directly into my chest so I'll finally love myself

Your wielder keeps saying shit like: “I’m ready to die any time now, sword! How long do we have to keep this up? When are we done?”

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> This was also the basis of the “multiverse theory”, where it “snapped” into all possible states, with each one being it’s own resulting reality.

Not to be that guy, but a fairly recent study in quantum entanglement won a Nobel prize because they proved that the particles do “snap” into the possible state. Or rather, that you can suspend the possibility of it being one result of the other, and predict which it will be. Essentially, researchers discovered that it’s less “Schrödinger’ cat” (where the answer is some combination of “both” and “neither”) and more “this is already a red ball or a blue ball, but this room is too dark to determine what color I just grabbed.”

Basically, the particles are binary; They’re either positive or negative. No in between. So they entangled two particles, which means that they always do the opposite of one another. If one particle measures positive, the other is always negative. It doesn’t matter how far apart those particles move. You could put them on opposite sides of the galaxy, and they’d still always be opposite one another when measured. It has some neat ramifications for things like long distance communication and quantum computing, because if you manipulate a particle on one end, you could potentially send data to the particle on the other end. Like the world’s most complex cups and string.

What won the Nobel prize was when a team discovered that they do “snap” into place when you observe them. Or more accurately, that if you measure the first particle, the second particle is then hung in suspension until you measure it. When you observe one particle, then later observe the other, the second particle will still read opposite what the first did. Even if time has passed.

Prior to the discovery, it was believed that you had to measure them at the same time, because the states are only known when measured, and it was believed that they were always in flux. But the team proved that isn’t the case; You can wait a while, and predict what the second particle will be based on the old results of the first particle. This also technically means that the first particle is hung in suspension, (rather than being in flux) and we simply don’t know what the result is yet because we haven’t measured it.

Ok, so. There's this spell that is meant to heal injuries attained in war. I learned it from the medic in one of my first battles. Apparently not many humans inquired about spellcasting, and he was proud of making this one up himself so he eagerly explained the inner workings of the spell to me: In sacrificial magic, there are no rules or constraints as to what must be sacrificed to power the spell, contrary to popular belief it's not just blood or a life that must be used. Anyway, he figured that if he could get a soldier to hold the catalyst while he did the casting, he could bind the soldier to a sacrifice: in exchange for the energy on the battlefield (fear, anger, pain, from not just the subject but those around them), the soldier could return part of thier body to the condition it was when they casted the spell. And it worked. He would bind as many soldiers as he could before they entered the fight, and they would emerge from battle with an easy treatment for their wounds.

I saw lots of potential in this, and asked him to write down the spell for me. After the war, I continued my studies in spell modification, and was able to work what was meant to be a convenience into something far greater. The sacrifice of the energy gained from a brief battle was not enough for what I wanted. I searched what little texts I could find on sacrifice magic for any ounces of power I could pile onto the spell without causing detriment: the heat of breath, anxiety, disgust, whatever I could find. In the end, it came down to a simple problem: I had piled on enough sacrifices to power the spell, but gathering this power would take time, and the spell catalysts I had access to were.. leaky vessels. I needed a catalyst that could hold the energy long for the time required to gather enough for the spell. So I searched.

And about a year before I met you, I was looking in the tomb of some great warrior from long ago, and next to his coffin in the heart of a forest I found not one, but two catalysts that had been left for his journey in the afterlife. I was excited, but I knew better than to simply steal them. I set up a summoning circle in the dust of the tomb floor, and prayed hours in the dark to commune with his spirit. And with enough patience his confused ghost briefly took form. "Are you still using those?" I asked him, pointing to the catalysts "Why of course not" he said, "My gifts have served their purpose, and my journey ended long ago." "So I can just go ahead and nab these off you?" "I don't see why not" he responded. I thanked him and sent him back, leaving the tomb with the power of immortality.

"Wait" said my wife "why did you take both of them?"

"I'm getting to that"

Anyway, with two powerful catalysts, I could go further with my plan then I had previously thought. The spell was finished, and I bound myself to a sacrifice: I would surrender some of my anger, disgust, urine and about a paragraph of all the other random things I could tack on to this spell, and in exchange, when it was ready and when I was willing, I could return my entire body to the state it was when I casted the spell.

"So you age a few seconds at a time, and bind yourself back to the spell as soon as you can?" Said my wife "That doesn't really count as immortality"

"No, that wouldn't but here's where the second catalyst comes in"

With two catalysts, I could cast the spell twice at the same time, and when I used one of the sacrifices, the other one would still be gathering power, and I worked it out so that I could re-bind myself to the casting time of the first spell, with the second catalyst. I can never permanently age or get injured. At all.

"But what if you die?" My wife asked "wouldn't that kill you just like the next guy?"

"Not really" I said

I would be dead, but different to most corpses, a spark of hope remains within me. The emotions that one undergoes in their last moments are more than enough to power the spell, sometimes twice over. So it's impossible for me to die without at least one charged catalyst. If somebody can find me, and grip the catalyst in my corpses fingers, then carry out the second half of the spell, I will be returned to my condition at the time of casting.

"Which is alive" my wife realized.

"Exactly"

"And why, exactly, are you only telling me this now? I could have found you dead, and I would've thought I lost you for good. Who, exactly, did you expect to revive you??? I can't believe you would just leave me in the dark about all this. Why didn't you tell me you were immortal on the day we met??"

"First of all, chill, I made an arrangement with the spirit of that guy who's catalysts I took to whisper instructions into the ears of those near my body. Secondly, I can't exactly going around telling everyone I have the secret to immortality, because they will want me to make them immortal."

"Why don't you want me to be immortal?" She said hysterically "I'm your wife!"

"Well I've only got just the two catalysts and.. Actually I could just bind you the same way the medic bound the soldiers. Or I could just teach you the spell. We could share the catalysts and that wouldn't really make a difference. That's a pretty good point you made"

My wife stared at me, dumbfounded.

Up to the writer I suppose. Could be 1920s mafia ordeal, or you could take underworld literally, and have this crime family be demons.

Holy unreliable narrator, Batman!

Agreed.

Scrooge McDuck (he won)

Thanks!

gives me yandere vibes.

​

i approve.

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You paint a really good picture! It was like watching a show in my head

That last line wa great.

I really like this!

I want to follow Harold, Cash, and Ivan on whatever their adventure turns out to be.

Can't figure it out either, would like to know as well.