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36. It’s worth understanding that ‘witch’ is not a gendered or ethically loaded term in Mundania – it’s more of a lifestyle descriptor, applied to people living one step removed from formal Wizarde culture who spend a lot of time boiling plants in tumbledown shacks.
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37. Eliza, I’m sorry, but I really can’t work out the maths for this bit. Can you get someone to do it, please?
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38. pickled walnuts.
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39. Once upon a time, this sort of revelation would tip proceedings into chaos, but with the Light vs Dark tensions a thing of the past, it’s all just a good laugh these days.
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40. The infamous ‘wizarde wheeze’ was a cloud of poisonous gas released in East Lundowne, which turned all its victims into huge, dying rats.
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41. It’s almost like some kind of BDSM thing, to be frank. I watched a Bogbert get chastised by its master for failing to clean his riding boots correctly, and as it scurried to fetch the punishment stick, I was certain I saw it rubbing its moist green hands in glee.
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42. Since DTR is no man’s land, the shops are completely tax-exempt, so despite the gorgeous black-beam facades on the buildings and the candlelit rooms full of leather-bound tomes, the area has taken on the strange atmosphere of a duty-free lounge.
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43. It’s never good to walk into what you thought was a sweet shop only to find a group of people very suddenly falling silent and looking up at you from a clandestine map.
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44. There are twelve of them. They are not in any way tame. They can be very stressful to spend time with.
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45. Its name has a comparable relationship with its subject as that of the Nine Tame Alligators.
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46. There are usually a lot of laughs to be had throwing magically conjured rotten eggs at the pantomime incarnation of the Mundane head of state when she comes in to arrest Miller and Deathwish.
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47. Eliza, why has this testimonial slipped in during the last edit? Can we take it out – it makes me look like a mug.
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48. I mean, you can soldier on with canned spells and a positive attitude, but you’d just be embarrassing yourself.
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49. Despite being the size of a city, Greeblewhoz apparently doesn’t have room to carry ‘passengers’, in their words. If the faculty judges you mediocre, then regardless of how influential or socially prominent you are, your money’s no good to them.
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50. It used to be called the Unicorn, but the proprietors painted over the sign during the war.
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51. In actual fact, I never intended to go on this tour at all. I was just stopping at the Horse to use the toilet and was accosted by Joe. After a half hour of his rapid-fire anecdotes, intermingled with rambling theories about prison, I said I would give him a groat if he could prove any of it was real. Joe won his groat. I saw some things.
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52. Grimblestead is a tragic place. As part of the Forgettening, none of the Mundanes were permitted to remember their friends and relatives who died in the war, and so every one of the cemetery’s graves is forlorn and untended.
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53. It certainly wasn’t for me.
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54. Eliza – I’m sorry, but I can’t finish the chapter. The Grimblestead cemetery visit went badly awry (see copy filed above), and I think I need to stop thinking about Mundania for a bit. I also desperately don’t want to make the situation there any worse, so I think it’s best if I stay out of it for now. There you go – I admitted it. I fucked up. And it wasn’t for the first time, either. I’ll come back and tidy up the chapter, I promise. And after that, I think we need to have a bit of a chat. It could be that I’ve got some things to make right, and some apologies to make. But before all that, I need to get the Wizarde business out of my head: I’m off exploring for a few weeks. In the meantime, you can start editing that copy from Wasteland, maybe? Bye for now – Floyd.
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CHAPTER EIGHT: WASTELAND
1. Hurt my hand, though.
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2. It turns out that among the Worlds, there’s actually a reason for the cliché of not looking at explosions as you walk away from them.
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3. Make no mistake, though, it’ll cost you a pretty penny. The Apes will be all smiles, gesturing you into frame and waving their cameras, but the second they take the shot there’ll be an orangutan right in your face, rattling the tin for an outrageous sum.
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4. Sometimes it doesn’t even take an outsider. The police state of Magna-City Three became so oppressive the city itself was declared illegal, prompting a grim-faced hypercop to shoot every building into dust with his pistol over the course of twenty relentless years of action.
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5. I met a woman who’d managed to start a deep animistic tradition based around a selection of faded GI Jim dolls, which her hosts came to call ‘the small warriors’, so anything’s possible.
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6. Cynics might say Derek’s random wanderings tend to have an astonishing habit of taking him to settlements on the brink of reestablishing organised civilisation. If that seems unfortunate to you, then just consider this – if Wasteland wasn’t a constant warzone, where glinting-eyed megalomaniacs spilled
