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"Wow." Marty basked. "I am not worthy."
And then she made to leave. "Like, seriously, I'm in past my depth here."
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"Wait," Mialee says. "I thought you were all questioning your curse and whatever."
"Oh, the curse?" Mordenkainen says. "Yes, yes, yes, yes. One of mine. Quite impossible to reverse, I'm sure."
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Marty stopped dead in he tracks. "Say what?"
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"Oh, yes. You have to understand, that prophecy would have absolutely ruined the balance there in Mystara, and I sort of like that little backwater plane of yours. So, I made a few alterations I didn't think would inconvenience anyone overmuch." He smiles in self-congratulation. "Very tidy solution, as usual."
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"You don't think you... inconvenienced me?": She stared at him with jaw agape. "You turned my life upside down, inside out, and then you emptied it!" Her ribs were pumping like a bellows as her anger mounted. "Change me back! Change me back right now. Also, Mystara isn't a backwater! It's the world! To millions of people it is the whole world! How dare you condescend to us like that!"
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"Oh, calm down, would you?" Mordenkainen says. "This isn't something you can just 'change back.' It required immense cosmic alignment to do it right in the first place. It would take an immense genius the likes of whom you'll never meet, to even begin to..."
"The hair of an archon," Mialee says, working on the third page of a series of magical calculations, "fur of a guardinal, the tear of an eladrin --the celestial kind, not the elf subrace-- the toenail of a slaad, the favor of a demon, the spittle of a daemon, the betrayal of a devil, and the..." She stares at her paper, puzzled, "square root of a modron?"
"Well," the arch-mage clears his throat. "Anyone can make a lucky guess."
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Marty was about to clobber this insufferable old man even if it did mean getting turned into a toad or having all her hair fall out or worse. But then Mailee came to the rescue with a laundry list of very strange ingredients.
Or maybe more of a recipe. "Okay, say that again slowly." She requested. Pulling out a blue book she bought at the student bookstore, she wrote each item down, one to a line. "Archon, guardinal, eladrin, slaad, demon, daemon, devil, and modron? I don't know what half of those things are." She confessed. "What am I supposed to do with this stuff once I have it?" She asked.
Looking over some of the particulars, she added, "And some of these things are intangible. How would I go about collecting them?" The favor of a demon - was she supposed to do a favor for a demon, or have one owe her a favor, or was she supposed to be favored by one? Magic sucked.
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"There are ways to bottle intangibles," Mordenkainen says. "Of course, it's far beyond..."
"Trish loves that kind of stuff," Mialee says.*
*(apparently everyone at this university above freshmen level knows everybody else)
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"Trish can bottle intangibles." Marty writes that down in her little blue book, below the list.
"So, once I have all this stuff I bring them back here?" She asked hopefully.
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"Yeah, we'll have to craft it into a proper serum," Mialee said.
"But you really shouldn't," Mordenkainen says. "Trust me, the whole of reality is better off this way."