RPG The Colour of Magic [PG]

[Ozymandius Jones]

[SIZE=1][COLOR=Navy][SIZE=3][B][CENTER]The Colour of Magic[/CENTER][/B] [/SIZE]

The day began as every other day began on the disc of the world. Birds, pretty pastel sunlight, the works. Only one thing spoiled the early morning of the Ramtops ?

?Nnngh.?

Rincewind the Wizzard was in a house. He was not being chased, yelled at, hunted or otherwise inconvenienced. And yet ? somehow ? he was still panicked.

?Mmm? Were you saying something??

That voice. That simple, little unassuming voice?the cause of all his problems over the last however many years.

?Nnngh.?

Normally Rincewind was a bit more eloquent. Not much, true, but at least able to squeak out an ?Ugh,? or ?Arrgh,??currently?

?Nnngh.?

?Do you think I used too much yellow??

Somehow?

Rincewind gazed, glassy-eyed ? at the swirling maelstrom of colours in front of him. Realization was tugging at the outermost edges of his mind; a realization that he fought to stave off. He managed a squeak.

?I?.don?t think it?s the [i]yellow[/i]??

Reverse karma. Such a thing ? conceivably ? should not exist. And yet, it did. Even here. Even, [i]especially[/i] here. Especially when it looked as if everything might have ? possibly ? been alright for a little while.

He?d been invited ? a word that, in this case, was not being used as an alternative word for ?ordered? ? for a vacation - a word that, in this case, was not being used as an alternative word for ?exile? by Twoflowers. He?d ? against his better judgment ? agreed.

[i]Somehow, that explains it all?[/i] he thought, muzzily staring at the painting before him.

It was ? in a word ? tacky. Seven or eight obese dogs gathered around a table, smoking cigarettes and playing what ? on close inspection ? seemed to be Cripple Mr. Onion on a baccarat table of green felt. Given the correct advertisement, it could have caught on. At least with the elderly ladies with taste that varies in direct proportion to their pocketbooks.

However, there was menace lurking behind the amateurish brush strokes and the thickly applied paint, behind the dogs and their game ? spirals and starbursts and figures of eight that ? against all logic ? were [i]glowing[/I]

Glowing a strange, brilliant shade of purplish green ?

Octarine.

The Colour of Magic.


[CENTER]
**[/CENTER]



The wizards were nervous.

This was a normal mental state for wizards, but it was one they?d sort of ? grown out of in the last few years, with the Modernization of Ankh Morpork and the threat of being dragged kicking and screaming out of ? or was it into? ? the Century of the Fruit Bat. Now?now the feeling was back, and with a vengeance.

And just over the last few months! Wizards were once again becoming unpopular. It happened routinely ? bad things happen, blame the wizards, good things happen, thank the wizards, rinse, repeat ? but they?d been thinking they?d broken free of the routine.

This month?s tragedy de force was The Paintings. They(had been popping up all over the place, sold to art boutiques and junk shops alike by some unknown dealer. They were the typical here-today-gone-tomorrow work that caught on so quickly in this city ? but these were somewhat different. These were not quite right.

Mustrum Ridcully ? Archchancellor of the Unseen University ? stepped into his office and coughed.

The Paintings had been opening up a doorway to Elsewhere. Not always the same elsewhere ? sometimes the Elsewhere was clearly the Dungeon Dimension, at other times it has simply been?.well?elsewhere ? but elsewhere none the less. Somehow, the things were interacting ? and merging ? with the latent background magics of the Disc in dramatic, destructive ways. The Patrician was making worrisome noises ? and what worried the Patrician worried the Wizards.

And so Ridcully scanned those assembled in his office with a wary eye.

This ?Painter? had to go.[/COLOR]

OOC: Check the [URL=http://www.otakuboards.com/showthread.php?p=740349&posted=1#post740349][B]Underground[/B][/URL]. [/SIZE]

[OrangeJulies]

[COLOR=DarkRed][SIZE=1]Arrhenius wasn't quite sure how he had gotten there.

If he closed his eyes, he could pick a few random, chaotic images from the darkness: the hard wood of a pub table yawning out in front of him, chin in a puddle of beer - being dragged to his feet - being dragged somewhere else - still being dragged - some disgruntled muttering asking if anyone knew any charms to get a man sober. Some kind of bodily... [i]noise[/i] and a groan of disgust.

The most recent thing he could remember was being slapped in the face a good few times and shoved forward into the office of Archchancellor Ridcully - someone he had shared a few good dinners with, but had never really spoken to back when he was an old man.

...Blast, that [i]still[/i] didn't sound right when he thought it.

He had the feeling that Ridcully was eyeing him. Warily. And probably not just because there was a veritable desert of stubble reaching out on either side of the small fuzzy worm he called a goatee.

The last time Ridcully had seen him - before the incident, of course - that stubble was a flowing white beard, full of wisdom and cliche. The bags under Arrhenius' eyes had been from old age, not long nights with only liquor and loose wome- um, it didn't bear thinking about, for a proper wizard - for company.

"So..." Arrhenius flicked his gaze over the others lined up in front of Ridcully's desk, and for the moment pretended they weren't there. "When you said I would 'never again set foot inside the doors of the University,' did one of us misunderstand? Because I thought it was crystal clear."[/SIZE][/COLOR]

[Raiyuu]

[font=verdana][size=1][color=darkgreen]Curi was grumpy. Or, he was appearing that way, partially as a front and partially because he actually was feeling grumpy. He was, to an extent, feigning a sullen exterior, because he had learned to associate the Arch-chancellor's office with tellings-off about wandering into people's rooms, asking awkward questions and baiting the Librarian, and the sullen act tended to foreshorten lectures, as Ridcully became frustrated with his unresponsive subject. And he was feeling genuinely grumpy because Ridcully's office was stacked to the ceiling with int'restin' things - shelves groaning with books (some of which glowed, screamed or strained at their manacles), shiny metal sextets and astrolabes, exotic plants and this week's Thing Curi Wanted Most In The Whole World, a highly-polished, sparkly omniscope. Normally, all these things would make him giddy with glee, but while int'restin' things made for a happy Curi, multitudes of int'restin' things he wasn't allowed to [i]touch[/i] made for an intensely sulky Curi.

His eyes were prone to wander, but in this room they kept being drawn back to the omniscope, like it had a gravitational pull on his normally miniscule attention span. The gilt frame glittered around the smooth crystal seeing-piece; resembling a large, ornate magnifying glass, the omniscope could, with the right magical direction, be focused on any point in any dimension in any time. This one held the record on the Things Curi Wanted Most In The Whole World leaderboard. He'd Wanted it for almost a whole week now. Think of all the int'restin' things there are in the whole Multiverse. The omniscope would let him look at all of them. He could draw little sketches of them all in his sketchbook. He might even have to ask the Dean for another new one, and a pencil sharpener, after an hour or two on the omniscope.

But fusty ol' Ridcully wouldn't let him touch it. He had an unpredictable magical aura, apparently. It took enormous concentration for even a Faculty Wizard to make the omniscope show the desired place and time. There was no knowing how the instrument might react to a powerful magical being with the attention span of a senile goldfish.

Ol' Fusty seemed about ready to start his telling-off or whatever it was, now, but Curi decided if Ridcully didn't get on with it in the next five seconds he was making a dive for the omniscope.[/color][/size][/font]

[4815162342]

[SIZE=1][COLOR=DarkOrange]Violent set down the latest issue of the Times and sucked on her teeth grumpily as she looked at it and shook her head. DeWorde had made it too easy, she thought. The latest edition to the paper, that was...the crossword puzzle. Way too easy. Of course, that was probably because he wanted more than one out of a hundred people to be able to complete it...maybe that was it.

She stood and headed for the cabinet that took up the majority of her small apartment's living room, searching through a drawer until she came up with a pair of shears. Grinning for once she moved back to the table and sat down once more, pulling the paper back over - time to take out articles that would be useful to have records of!

Within a half hour the paper was seperated into two piles - one with articles she was keeping, the other full of articles she was going to mark with red ink and send back to the Times office. She grinned in wicked delight, this week's paper had twice as many articles to ridicule than the last one had had. She was going to have a busy evening ahead of her, that she knew for a fact.

Before Violent started work on it, however, she picked up the crossword puzzle and scrawled a large, angry, "X" across the entire puzzle, hopefully DeWorde would get the message and have [i]two[/i] puzzles the next paper - one for the idiots and another exclusively for her. She didn't have that much faith in the genius of Ankh-Morkporkian's... [/COLOR][/SIZE]