Well, I’m at the very end of page four, and I’ve just finished the introductory stuff and can get into the meat of the paper now.

You know, I hate this kind of paper. It’s all academic masturbation. Am I just good at it? Or is that ego masturbation? Whatever.

I’ll take this short break in paper-writing to mention a two-by-four-to-the-face kind of oddity that has been on my mind since Saturday. In the Mage LARP, I play a shaman character named Phil. He’s a white boy, from an ancestry of Germanic tribal shamans, that deals primarily with city and technology spirits. And the storyteller has him hopping timelines.

Just to make the story more complicated, the storyteller involved an Ecstatic, who is part of a Chinese sect that incorporates Akashic ideas and disciplines into their teachings. This ecstatic is from another timeline – one in which she was married to Phil. Take 1984, add in Michael Foucault’s Panopticon, and you have this dystopia. The character is described as a petite and athletic Chinese woman in her early twenties.

Now, everybody that knows me knows my thing for Asian women. Geek-related or trip-to-Japan related, or whatever, it’s there. I make no apologies for it.

After a scene in Saturday’s game wherein the Ecstatic and another Akashic protected Phil from a sniper, while he meditated and communed with a spirit that was helping them, I was struck by a severe sense of import and oddity. Something about the story of an almost-me and a partial-other (the Ecstatic is nothing, physically or inclination-wise like the player) is begging to be told, written…. experienced.

I want to see it as an Anime. I want to write it. I want to dive into this idea. But I have no desire to leave anything behind. I want a back door, so when the story is over, I’m back here. I want it to be entertainment, but I have this pull into something or somewhere that’s more full, complete, real, unreal, adventure, important, risky, authoritative, respect-filled, powerful. That’s the word. POWERFUL. I want a refresher. A water bottle of POWERFUL that I can take a swig from when I need it.

It’s like when Nate talked about the wizard throwing fireballs down Main St. It’s like when I told Eric about the dream of the girl with gray eyes. It’s like the craving for physically manifesting my spiritual leanings. It’s like the craving for a cataclysm.

I don’t think Gone Wired has this in any size mug.