Here’s some more flavor fiction about my Mage LARP character. This was originally posted on 15 Feb 2006.
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Math grunted as he pushed the enormous gray metal box into its cubby-hole in the closet. He was sweating with effort, even without his (McNally’s) jacket or hat. He’d made a trip to a used computer store, and had come upon a wonderful stash of old-school server cases with hot-swappable SCSI hard drives attached to a RAID controller. Its only drawbacks were size and weight. It felt like it had been made from cast iron.

Well worth it, though. It allowed him mass amounts of storage, especially when the old server was filled with brand new hard drives. He figured that a terabyte of storage should be enough. Math dragged his sleeve across his forehead and moved the step-ladder into place. It wouldn’t do for any of the children to trip over the gigabit ethernet wire, even if they did disobey him and come into his workshop. He slid the cable, inch by inch, into its conduit, and then plugged it into the NIC he’d installed on the time machine’s controller interface.

A few minutes worth of work would have Quicktime Pro up and ready to record any of the results of his time viewings. After that, it was a matter of dialing up the right spatial and temporal coordinates. Simplicity itself. Well, discounting all of the calculations of spatial and temporal fields generated by current running through certain alloys while spinning at a specified rate in a…. well, pretty simple anyway.

Math chuckled as he flipped the switch. How much would Joy pay to know a day in advance whether or not the children were going to sneak out of their rooms?