From alt.pub.dragons-inn Tue Aug 15 08:58:08 1995 Xref: netcom.com alt.pub.dragons-inn:8627 Path: netcom.com!csus.edu!csulb.edu!nic-nac.CSU.net!usc!cs.utexas.edu!convex!news.duke.edu!zombie.ncsc.mil!simtel!news.kei.com!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!crl.dec.com!crl.dec.com!nntpd.lkg.dec.com!leggy.zk3.dec.com!orb!not-for-mail From: hutch@agora.rdrop.com (Steve Hutchison) Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn Subject: [Party][AI] Apprentice Inept 4: Offerings Date: 15 Aug 1995 06:54:50 -0000 Organization: Duchy of Wabesylvan Obspauk Lines: 700 Sender: news@Orb.Nashua.NH.US Message-ID: X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit [ Admin: This happens during the story chronicled by Jeff Simon, at the greatly protracted Party at Luthor Anside's housetree. ] A'arden shifted uncomfortably in his seat. After his black-clad customer had left, he had spent hours waiting for someone to come up and sell him a story. It was downright boring. It felt more like months than hours. All he'd heard, listening to the gossip that ebbed and flowed in the background, was that someone was poisoning the guests at that flashy new place, the "Stumble Inn". Aptly named, anyway. He shrugged, and summoned one of his apprentices. The gray little man looked indistinguishable from A'arden; this was intentional. "I go to walk the city in search of diversion," he said in the tongue of his homeland. The appretice nodded, and took his post. "Good Searching," he answered. A'arden wandered out onto the street, pulling around himself a lesser tale of insignificance. Thus warded from the hazards of thieves and importunate merchants, the Story Buyer drifted from one small party to the next. The weather this year had been unbearably hot at times, and perhaps that had contributed to the decline in the usual festivities. Normally (or so the stories had been told) the summer was a time of almost continual gaiety in this city -- starting with the Genera's Birthday Party in the spring, and lasting thru the harvest. But perhaps that was just the relief that came from the city weathering the great storm and the other strange events of the prior year. Twice, he saw street musicians heading north towards the more aristo side of town, north of the river, but he also heard the faint distant sound of song and celebration, and an itch that told him stories were being told there. He found the place easily enough. The giant housetree, the enclosing gardens. He was greeted by the woman Serene, who still worked from time to time at the Dragons' Inn. Somehow she had known that his own favorite drink was spring-water. A useful talent, for a waitress. He found his way to the quiet nook where the stories were being told. He was unsurprised to see the giant otter, with the black cloak and robes discarded, but the satchel still near, and its staff still at hand. A broad, muscular man was talking, telling a story that A'arden had heard before in a form pirated by a band of evil braumeisters. This man seemed to have the right of telling, and his version was more interesting anyway. The story buyer resolved to ask, at a later time, if the fellow would sell him this new version. Fire crackled in the stone-lined pit and A'arden sat unobtrusively next to the otter. Yes, the smell was right -- this was his secret customer. He waited for a pause in the story, for the muscular fellow to take a swig of the liquid in his mug, and whispered something to the lutrine fellow beside him, but the words came out differently than he had intended. "There's something strange happening here." "I know," the otter replied. "Isn't it dangerous for you to be this close to a real story as it happens?" "Oh no," A'arden replied. "I'm quite safe." Inside, he was almost panicked. He was NOT safe, the story was trying to suck him in. The otter watched him with a steady, violet glow in its eyes, and at the next break in the story, after the muscular man had tried to reproduce the sound of blues singing without benefit of music, the otter pulled the book out of his satchel. "Here, A'arden. Go transcribe the next chapter, I'll get the silver from you next time I come through." "Thank you," the story buyer said, desperately fighting the urge to stay to the end of the tale that the man was telling. At least he had resisted the need to sip from the glass of wine that the otter was slowly nursing. "Go," the otter said, pushing him away from the circle as the large human warrior began to glare their way. "Do continue, please, Jake." A'arden scurried from the room, holding the journal in his hands. A half-sob of relief escaped as he sat in a quiet nook and (pulling a quill and ink and a long scroll from the bottomless case he wore at his hip) he began to transcribe. *** Apprentice Inept Offerings By: Fox Cutter Steve Hutchison -- The Journal of Frinklan the Obscure -- June 2195 -- solstice I am writing this from a beach in the middle of the Mother River. A sand bar. The raft has gone aground. Foxeris is lost somewhere. I can't sense him across the apprentice bond. After the third day of continual sickness I managed to redefine the geas penalties as a curse and returned them to the ones who cast them. I'd love to be in Smoke Can for just a little bit, to see those weasels getting Moctezuma's Revenge every time their dear boy Canron leaves their sight. Must make it hell for their love life, too. So I've only got this nagging empty-socket sensation that tells me to find the kid. This I can handle. It's been a few weeks since I've had the materials to write with, so I'll try to remember everything that happened. We were at the river a half day south of the Old Road. Fox had been separated from us by a rockfall and then rejoined us after a hard night. He had a story about spending the night in a cave which is why he didn't notice the storm that I was fighting with for half the night. He also lost two whiskers, claiming it was from the fall. I believed it at first, but there was something that nagged at me, something disruptive that I could almost feel except when I paid attention to it. I first realized it after I found the raft snagged on the rocks by the river. It was a fairly good sized raft, like piece of a pier even, but with a few ropes gone, rotted away. I went back up the path to where Fox was waiting with Faith. She still hadn't gotten used to being soulbonded into a horse at that point, and Fox was helping her by adjusting the cargo bag she was wearing. I sent him off to look for some hemp in the fields to the west, and found myself staring after him wondering what it was that I was staring at. Faith nudged me and asked "what did you find?" so I told her about the raft. Fox came back about this time, wondering how I knew there'd be hemp there, so for the hour it took us to cut enough to make rope with, I told him about the Rules of Coincidence and such. Of course we used magic making the rope. It takes weeks to make a rope that lasts if you have to rot out the fibers and then dry them, then twist them into cords and then counter- twist the cords into rope, and soak them with a preserving solution to keep them from rotting in the wet, and then if you aren't a permanent factory with the right kind of tools and disposal procedures, you have to spend weeks to clean up the mess from the preservatives or risk pissing off the Good Folk, not to mention making it real hard to get help from any of the elementals and... hell. Here I go writing this tutorial again, as if Fox was going to be reading it and telling it back as a lesson. Well, maybe he will be, I can't tell from the shape of things right now. We repaired the raft. I called Undine the fae of water to carry off the parts of the hemp that would rot in water, and Faith, who knew the lesser earth-folk, the gnomes of this place when she was alive, taught Fox the whistle-song that would call them up, and we shared the leaves from the hemp with them and they helped us weave the rope. They're pretty friendly once you know them, but if you're not properly introduced they can be hostile. They still remember the Tribes from before the machine time and they want to be treated the same way that those people treated them. So we had to share our meal and give them smoke. It took a few hours. And then we loaded the raft with the stuff that Faith had been carrying, and she figured out how to balance herself on the raft with Foxeris. I stripped off my travel robes and put my staff and satchel in the middle of the raft and pushed the raft out into the middle of the river. It was the first time I've been able to swim for weeks and it took a while to get the kinks out. It was easier for me to swim ahead a ways then come back and make sure the raft went into the right channels. In a while I learned the voice of the water well enough to tell what the best currents were going to be, and I got back on the raft and steered with my tail. We had good weather, good light, so it was fairly late by the time I found us a beach to pull up on. I went in and found us a few salmon, Fox built a fire with some driftwood and wrote in his personal journal for a while, then I set the wards and went to sleep. I woke up around moonrise, and Faith had gone to sleep standing on the shore. It was the first time she'd had to sleep since she died. Foxeris was sitting outside my wards trying to conjure up something, and I think that was what woke me up. When Faith showed him the gnome-song, it was like the first time he realized just how much you can do with the common magics. I was too tired to make the wards stable enough for me to cross without taking them down, so I watched for a while, with the lightning-stick next to me in case he drew something to himself that was dangerous. I think I dropped off because the chant he was using was one of the really monotonous ones, and I didn't feel any danger up the Chao Lines. When I woke up a little after sunrise he was asleep with a fox curled up on his chest. I wasn't sure about this. It was a real live fox to all appearances, not a fox-spirit, not another foxmorph. There aren't very many foxes in this area, too much competition from the coyotes. Anyway, it was pretty easy to tell they were bonded. It's times like this that I wish I was better at ordinary magic, because I couldn't tell the terms of the bond between them, and the thing with his whiskers was bothering me too. Finally I decided to look at it when we got to the Dales -- they have a specialist there that I was planning to look up anyway, to fix this damned apprentice-geas. Guess I won't have to do that after all. Faith needed some help and I gave it to her -- she needed to be curried, and she'd picked up a rock, and she was finding out just how much food she really needed, and the horse spirit was uncomfortable with a catperson-ghost woven into her, so she was moving farther and farther away, which snarled Faith all the tighter into the horse-body. We finished currying and cleaned up the campsite and shoved off. I spent a few hours thinking of a way to help her and got nowhere. Like I said before, I'm not an expert in Spirit Magic. I'm pretty good at Dreamwalking, though, and there is a place in the Dreamtime where you can find answers to impossible questions. So I found the best channel in the river, the most propitious current, and got ready. I gave Foxeris my staff to use to steer the raft, and mixed a small amount of the dreamwalker's drug. It's made from a ritually purified mushroom, the venom of a blue dart toad, and some hemp leaf to calm the stomach. Conveniently, we had that last bit, of course. I stripped all the water out of my fur and put the four drops of the elixir onto the hemp leaves, then swallowed the drug. I chanted the spell -- if you ever read this, Foxeris, you have to ask me the words, they're a part of the oral traditions -- then I lay back and watched the colors go sharp and mobile and the light become drops of unbearable liquid sharpness splashing across the landscape and shattering against the river. The fires all woven through Faith and Foxeris and his new friend became visible, and I knew that if I moved, and touched their bodies, that my own fires would mesh with theirs. If they were asleep I would enter their dreams. But that wasn't what I wanted to do, I wanted to enter my own dream, while still awake. I stepped out of my body. I had been doing this a lot of late, and I was almost used to how I look. Tallish otter, pale gold fur at the tips but dark brown underneath, weird looking purple eyes, kind of scruffy looking because I haven't groomed enough lately. When our paths cross my mate keeps me much better groomed. But this ash-waste desert is hard on everyone. Foxeris looked a little strange. From here I could clearly see the faint silver gleam of a fine spiderweb spell link attached to each of the places where he was missing whiskers. It was very good work; I might not have noticed it, with the other turbulence in his aura from the apprentice-geas. But, his fox-familiar Jinx was sitting on his feet while he steered the raft, and his own aura looked a little dimmed and subdued. I decided to pursue this at a later time. Jinx looked at me and yerfed, so I moved over to Faith. Again, from here, things looked strange. The horse's own spirit wanted to leave, and tried to shy away from me, but I knew her name and when I whispered it, she calmed down and let me touch her. I ran my paws over her, checking for injuries in a way much like the technique used to check an injured person's physical body. What I found wasn't good: the poor mare's silver cord had frayed, and the second spirit of the body, the dream-pattern of life that would keep her alive, was only a whispery echo. She snuffled at my fur and the look in her eyes was a plea for freedom to join the shadow horses. I asked her to wait just a little longer, and warned Faith without words that I was going to examine her. She was well, exceptionally well, and quite strongly tied into the horse-body. I stepped back. Where the mare had no life-dream, Faith had one, and it was so brilliant that it was almost blinding. I resigned myself to finding one of the two Wizards I knew of who could do body-shaping work, since the horse form would not allow Faith to fully integrate her spirit. The horse brain is just not sufficient. But I was hanging around here too long -- the drug I had taken would become poisonous if I didn't move on to the place I had visioned when I prepared it. I looked again at my body, sitting in its loose, relaxed posture, and steeled myself for the transition. I touched my own head, and the gateway to the dream realm stood in front of me. The river was all rivers, and the sky above was black darker than the place between the stars that hung like fat silver apples next to the moon and the sun. I put my paw on the gatepost without looking at it and stepped across the threshold. Fish swam around me, red and blue, while a distractingly large crab crawled deliciously across the sands below. I kicked and spun, propelled myself forward towards a place I knew from an earlier time. The sands spun, the coral became a torturous forest punctuated with long strands of seaweed. I spotted the landmark of dreaming that had guided me here in the past -- a starfish, huge, with a small forest of coral and other creatures actually living on it. I swam deeper, past one mighty arm, to the place below where it was slowly, slowly, prising open an equally large clam. They had been waging this contest of wills for a long time. Once in my youth I met another Dream Traveller here, and she told me that she had seen the contest begin in the handed-down memories of a thousand generations of her ancestors. She was very old at the time, but her great-grand-daughter was becoming a Dream Traveller and she told me that she would pass on the memories when grandaughter grew older. The clam held a pearl, a concentrated essence of the wisdom grown over the millenia of its life, sifted from the things floating on the currents of the sea. I did not need that particular wisdom. It would be too much. Instead, I found a place where the clam was slightly open, where the starfish had weakened it but too far away from its mouth part for it to insert its stomach into the clam. There were pearls, small ones, no bigger than my thumb, ugly and warty and with a sick glister that held no attraction for vanity. Oh, I know, clams don't make pearls. Well, there's a reason, with pearls this ugly. The pearl I sought was a lumpish thing, encrusted with frothy bits of coral. It tasted horrible. When I finished eating it, the knowledge of what to do was there with the bitterness in my mouth and the bile in my gut. I swam below the coral and past the sleeping sharks, out thru the tunnel into the light below the ocean. Swimming down, I broke the surface of the waters and the river was below me, and the raft was drifting towards a landing. I stood by my body and waited for the aura on the sun to change from the pale blue of the dreaming drug, so that I could re-enter my body. That night, I found a largeish salmon lurking in the waters below our landing. The salmon runs used to be bad when there were so many humans taking them, and it's still part of my mate's job as a Ranger to re-establish them in some of the wild rivers. They were re-established here, and this one had a scar along the left flank; it wouldn't make it the rest of the way back to the place it was spawning. The salmon roasted very nicely over the fire. Foxeris was not happy about having fish again, fifth time in a row, but he was even less happy about having the dried meat and noodle travel rations. Jinx ended up eating some of his. Faith ate the oats and some sedge grass that I'd sent the kid to gather while I was fishing. (Yes, Foxeris, there's a reason for me writing down what we eat at every meal. It's your job to figure it out though.) So after dinner, I was still too wasted from the dreamwalk to show Foxer how to do anything new. He practiced the meditations and wrote some more in his personal record. I heard him ask Faith at least four times how to spell different words, so the Spell Checker was still working. I dug out my map and checked the delivery schedule; we were about four days out of Dales if we didn't have too much trouble with the falls. The Mother River used to have a flood control dam at Dales, but the Earth Folk and the Water Folk took it apart when Smoke Can was uplifted. The sunset was glorious. Down below the ashplain, at the curve of the waters where they turn completely west, where the haze of the three volcano peaks set the sky on fire, the last two nights had been amazing. I thought hard about sleeping on the water, that night, but something had to be done for Faith, and I had to do it very soon. *** The ritual started at dawn, which meant I had to prepare for it all night. Foxeris slept. Faith slept -- she'd be needing her strength. The thing that I'd known before was that the horse-body that Faith was in, would not support a sentient mind, not without changing. I knew that if the horse-spirit was freed, then Faith would start to degenerate. Her spirit would be injured, maybe maimed. But the mare-spirit only wanted to be free and it was starting to damage the body in its attempts to escape. None of the Spirit Mages or Healers in Dales would be any help with this. Dales is too small. The only reason people are there now is because of the old dam, because of the place of power that the Tribes left there that was regained when the waters receded. Besides, it was another three days before we could get there at the rate we'd been travelling, and I guessed another two days to find a competent Spirit Mage to do the work. Well, arrogance is one of the requisites of a Wizard. I had eaten a Pearl with a grain of truth at the center, so I knew what to do. An hour before dawn I woke Foxeris and had him take the assistant spot. What I had to do would take all day. The traces of dreaming drug in my system might help, but maybe not; I did know better than to try any other potions or elixirs. It's never a good idea to mix spells that are too similar, because they can fuse together into something that isn't what you intended from either. All Foxeris had to do was to dance, at first. Then at the noon hour he had to hand me a knife, and then take up the chant for an hour while I did the things with the knife that I had to do, and at the moment the sun touched the horizon he had to do the counter-chant. If this sounds boring, and grueling, it is. It was. Everything went well for the first few hours. Foxeris did the dance, and Jinx joined on the other side. Faith was in the center of the ritual circle, and she understood the ritual well enough -- she was in trance starting at the moment of sunrise. The point of the thing was to lead her thru a day that would symbolize a new life. It was similar in some ways to the Ritual of Conception. The hard part would be the Shaping magic. The mare was a mature living thing. Children can go thru the Change because they're still changing physically. Grown folk are not as flexible - - Shaping magic has to be done slowly and with great care. I know a few of the basic spells of Shaping -- the Unlocking spell and the Terms of Closure, and a little bit about how to construct a Form Ideal. I learned them when I was in the Lone Star Army, at the same time I learned how to do weather magic. They were part of the ritual, they'd be done at the right time. My part was worse that Foxeris' part -- he stutters, and until he grows past that, he's going to be doing the physical parts of the rituals. We can't risk him singing a part off key, not with Faith's life and spirit depending on everything going right. I had built the ritual with a part for him to do that would sing itself, by the time we got that far. But I had to sing starting at dawn and going until noon, and then I had to pick up again after Foxer's part and keep going until sunset, and this is the middle of the summer, the days are at their longest. Still, he managed the dance, with Jinx copying his movements on the other side of the circle from him as he moved around the cardinal points. I managed the song, such as it was. Inside our circle, the mundane world was changed for the Real world; the world of Time became the Infinite Wheel. As the Source of Life reached its highest point, I took the knife and cut free the spirit of the mare. She galloped away down the Wheel, and I gave Faith her first meal in the new life that was entirely hers now. Foxeris almost lost it when he started the song. I hadn't warned him that it would sing itself and he tried to struggle against the spell before Jinx stopped him by howling the missing notes. Well, he did his part anyway. I had to sing again, and Fox had to resume the dance. At this point I was not an otter in good voice, but that didn't really matter, the important part for this half was the words, not the tones. I had to talk Faith's horse-body into accepting Change. It wasn't easy, but then Foxer and Jinx both started echoing the song, and that helped. It shouldn't have. At sunset, the second knife touch came, the one that symbolized the end of the life cycle. Faith knew it was coming, but Foxeris didn't, he hadn't read the symbols correctly, so when I put the knife to my throat and drew the blade across, he panicked again. But I didn't see what happened, because I was dead. * * * Foxeris Journal. Here I sit, someplace off the river (I'm not really sure where yet), wet, lost and alone. Even Jinx is gone. It's been sometime sense I've been able to set pen to paper, after all that's happened. So here I sit, all alone in the night. I'm not sure of the day, or where Frinklan and Faith are. Though I've stopped getting sick, so I assume there within the range of the geas again. As I looked up at the stars, I'm glad that the journals are both waterproof. Right now I'm writing this in the back of my journal, I'll remove the pages when, no make that if, Frinklan and I get back together, he can spell them into the normal journal like he's done before. I'm shivering again, I feel so alone out here, like I'm the only thing alive in the world. It never hit me how much I've depended on other people in my life, first my family and friends, then Frinklan, and in the last few days Jinx. But now, for the first time in my life I'm totally alone. I'm not sure why I'm writhing now, I just fell the need. Maybe Frinklan is right now as well and that's why I want to. I don't know. I sigh, there is only one way I can think of to find the boss, continue down the river, eventually I'll get to Dales. Once there I'll look up this Alex he was planing to see, I'll stay with him for one month, if Frinklan doesn't show up, or we can't find him, I will have to assume him dead again. As I looked over my rambles here, I guess Frinklan would be proud, I'm articulating myself pretty well. I guess I should go over what happened from my last entry to here. Starting with Jinx. '95 may 14th I yawned and stretched, this chanting was getting to damn repetish, not that I don't ENJOY chanting the same thing over and over, like I had been doing for the 3 hours previous. It was after midnight and the gnome-song didn't work at all, at least I think it didn't. Faith never told me what exactly it was suppose to summon. I made a quick glance over at Franklan and decided that I was outside of the wards, and even if I was wrong I didn't want to chance getting hurt by walking into it. With I yawn I stretched out on the ground, and started my decent into sleep. "Oh dear," A female voice said, "Don't go to sleep yet!" I opened one eye, and looked up. About 3 feet from me sat a red fox vixen, not a morph but a normal vixen. She sat on her hind legs, holding her tail to her chest with her fore-paws. Her tail was interesting. At best guess I would say it was about 4 feet long, where as her body was 2 or so. She grinned at me, her slitted eyes reflecting the starlight. "Who are you?" She chuckled, and dropped her tail, "You tell me, your the one who summoned me." I sat up, "What?" She moved to all fours, and came over to me, her face inches from mine. "You performed a summoning-bonding spell, which summoned me, and bonded me to you. You decided what my name is." I closed my eyes, the boss had mentioned something like this. I appeared to have summoned my self up a Familiar, though Frinklan said I wouldn't be able to do that spell until I was a Journeyman. "Is that why you can speak?" She shook her head, "Everything can speak, in it's own language. The spell allows you to understand mine, and me to understand yours. It also makes me smarter, that's why I know more right now then you." She lightly waped my nose with one of her fore-paws. "Oh." I said. "What that means is I can now understand English, and you can understand Foxen, though I'm the only one who will speak intelligently enough to make any sense." I nodded, "Oh-Kay." "Now," she said, "Give me a good name." "Ah...um... I can't think of anything." She sighed, "Oh great just my luck." "Luck..." I paused, "Jinx, I'll call you Jinx!" She laughed, sitting back down, holding her tail again, "Jinx, I like that." I nodded, "Well Jinx, if you don't mind, I'm going to sleep." She tip her head, "Ok." I laid down, and closed my eyes, seconds later I felt weight on my chest. I opened my eyes and saw Jinx curled up on top of me. "Excuse me." I said. "Your warm," she said the closed her eyes. I chuckled to my self, and closed my eyes again. That morning I explained to Frinklan about Jinx, him nodding a bit, but not saying much, though he did have a slight worried look in his eyes. As the day went on we moved down the river, and Frinklan went into dreamwalking. On the 16th the boss kicked me out of bed an hour before dawn. I stood and moved into the position that he told me to get into, still trying to wake up. As I started into the dance (something I'm only kind of good at in the first place), my mind, in it's half asleep/half awake phase, was having trouble remembering the steps. It was Jinx who solved the problem by doing the steps opposite of me. She must have enjoyed herself because she didn't stop after I awoke all the way. Everything went ok, I passed Frinklan the knife when I was supposed to, then contuied with the dance. I didn't expect what happened next. Then from my lips came song. I gasped, I knew I had to sing, but I did not knowing that it would sing it's self. Instinctual I tried to stop my self. Frinklan looked at me, then glanced at Jinx. Then Jinx did something I didn't expect, she started to fill in what I was choking off. Slowly I relaxed, letting the song flow. Jinx joined it fully after a bit, in better tune that I could normally be in. This contuied as the day turned moved to the night, I was still dancing and singing not really paying attention to what was going on. The sun sank below the horizon, the top finally vanishing from view. Suddenly there was a sound as loud as a thunder clap, and I was hit by a blast of super hot air, filled with small rocks and dirt chunks, pounding into my skin for a second. At the same time the song stop coming from my lips. I turned and looked into the circle, the first thing I saw was that all the loose dirt had been blown out. The second was Faith had collapsed inside the circle. The third was Frinklan, knife in hand, slicing his throat. I panicked as he fell and started to run inside the circle when Jinx said, "Stop!" I looked down at my feet, where she had quickly moved to. "No, I have to help Frinklan, if he dies--" Jinx cut me off, "No! He is already dead. Don't enter the circle." "But--" "NO!" she shouted, "Take three steps back." I did, tears welling in my eyes. There was another thunder clap, and another blast of air, cold this time, hit me. Going towards the circle this time, instead of away. I looked inside the circle, Frinklan was lying on the ground in a pool of blood. "Why?" I said. "Don't ask right now." Jinx said next to me, "Just sleep." "Sleep, but--" I didn't have time to finish my protest because Jinx touched her nose to my side, and I was asleep. ----- This story is posted to rec.arts.comics.creative, alt.fan.furry, alt.pub.dragons-inn, and spk.literary. It is copyrighted 1995 by Stephen Hutchison and Fox Cutter. Permission is granted for archive with rec.arts.comics.creative and alt.pub.dragons-inn, and spk.literary. All other rights, including repost, are reserved to the authors. This story may not be distributed for a fee except by permission of the authors, and this copyright notice may not be removed.