I make no claim of ownership to the universes this is set in. Only the main character(s).

Stone does not warp. If you hit it hard enough it will crack, and perhaps shatter. If you leave it long enough it will turn to sand. If you heat it long enough, it will melt and liquefy. But you can never bend it. So I thought until I was asked to visit Saulxures.

In Saulxures there is a very old and very dead château. 'Château' is a french word which translates as "castle", but not every château is a castle. The place I went to investigate was basically an enormous and (formerly) beautiful house for rural aristocrats, with a good acre or more of property.

The only warning of what I would see was an envelope of the only existing photos available of the place. They didn't show anything special, merely a few shots in black and white from when it was intact, and a few from after it was abandoned. I know what long-neglected buildings look like, having made it my business to hunt down and conquer them as a small child. With the photos came a note reading "expect much worse than shown." I did ask Geoffrey, who officially assigned me the case, what this could mean, but he didn't know. It turns out I only got the job because someone else backed out at the last minute. I was the next agent not currently engaged.

In any case, by 'much worse' I expected to see what I usually see: mysterious explosions, profuse quantities of blood with no source, the odd piece of unnecessarily complicated and dangerous technology someone forgot to deactivate, or some anomaly like that. I didn't think I would face a violation of physical laws, or at least not this one, relating to stone. I could stomach telekinesis because it's a fact of my existence, and I could stomach someone being able to 'control magnetism' because there were and are hours and hours of footage showing Erik Lehnsherr's prodigious exploits, and I don't have the time, the energy or the skill to go through them and pick out the forgeries. However, no one even whispered to me that you could bend stone until I went to see that château in person, so I wasn't ready for it. If I could get emotionally invested in an abstract concept to the point of a truly visceral reaction to its nullification I would have vomited the moment I stepped out of my car. Instead I merely dropped my jaw, my portable phone, my notebook and pencil, and my umbrella. This was terrible, because I usually carry all of those items (minus my jaw) using my telekinetic power, at eye level height. My phone smashed and died, my pencil lost its head, my notebook soaked up all the rain out of the ground, and my umbrella landed directly on my head and stayed there. I had long ago removed the useless handle, you see, so now I looked like I was wearing a poor imitation of a Chinese paddy hat.

The château de Saulxures had warped. It had done many impossible things, but that is what you saw first when looking at it. It looked as though it had suffered some sort of implosion and yielded. If you can imagine what would happen if you had an empty can of coca-cola and sucked all the air out, that is what the château appeared to have gone through. Not one stone, not one lump of rock or otherwise solid and unyielding material had been displaced that hadn't obviously fallen out long before the incident. If there was a fabric to reality, and the material world was the pattern on that fabric, it was as if there had been an inward stretching of space. The mere thought of that made me wary to go near the property. Bad things happen to living beings when space bends significantly. Still, I had a paying job, and sometimes that meant nearly dying. I had a variety of other problems in my life which resulted in me nearly dying regularly, so it wasn't so bad to have that as part of my employment.

The owner arrived just in time to see me picking up my bits and pieces. Without a word he watched them float in the air, my rear car window roll down, and the debris fly inside and clatter to their final doom on the floor. I couldn't say whether he was particularly surprised or mildly distracted. In any case hysteria was never common in these parts. The really scary monsters, even if birthed here, generally didn't stay. If you wanted to join one of the two movements struggling to decide which genocide was preferable, you went overseas, far from the small folk.

Very slowly, the owner held out his hand. I think he half-expected me to shake it without actually touching. Instead, I stepped closer and took his frail sack of digits in mine, physically. Somehow, his petrified features relaxed, the simple gesture reassuring him.

"Ms Delamare, isn't it?"

"That's right," I said, "and you must be Eugene de Fleurville?"

He didn't respond, merely looked me up and down, as many do. Perhaps I was the first mutant he had encountered and he wanted to see some visual indication of my condition. My coat betrayed nothing of me, not that there was anything to see underneath. I look entirely human.

Making eye contact again, he jerked his hairless bonce at the house. "Shocking, isn't it?" I nodded under my impromptu paddy hat. The jerky motion caused it to fall forward in front of my face, as I still wasn't holding it except with my head. In my mind, if that stony face was going to break at all, that was the moment, in hilarity. There was no evidence of that when I levelled my hat, yet I blushed uncontrollably.

As he unlocked the gate I discarded the umbrella. I could have simply resumed making it hover above, but its image was spoilt to me now. The very thought of it would reddne my cheeks forever after. I had been seen with a ratty canvas paddy hat, and preferred to let my curls plaster and straighten on my cheeks than allow anyone to relish the sight again. In any case, if I needed a better excuse than shame, the rough landing had caused buckling to the spokes. It was an old thing, and my forceful modifications to accomodate my power had not helped its longevity.

The old man led me across the lawn explaining to me what was already clear from the photos, beside the warping phenomenon. The jungle was gone, the grass growing neatly and consistently. Trees which had fallen or grown forks from injuries were now taller and straighter than they'd ever been. A forest manager would have been jealous. The surrounding stone wall was free of years' worth of moss, and statues throughout the garden were devoid of even the slightest age or accident-related blemish. The entire property, including the main house with its morphological insult to Physics, had been restored to a better state of upkeep than it was ever recorded in.

Yet the place was no more habitable than when the only substantial obstacle to occupation was the sheer cost of living in it. In halfway decent shape, you could have bought it for next to nothing, but you would never find a local income big enough even to heat half the rooms in the winter. North-eastern France is woefully depressed. It's because there are so few people up here that it is surprising when a mutant doesn't cause a strong reaction. Although in this case I suppose there was easily enough weirdness that you wouldn't bat an eyelid at a mere telekinetic. If my partly foreign heritage was more visible, there would be a mystery. My family abroad always winge about my growing up and living far away from everything, but it does serve that I sound like I belong here.

"Have you tried going inside since the incident?" I asked as we approached the front door. I didn't want to meet any further terrors without warning. Unfortunately he shook his head.

His key fit the lock, but only turned once. At first I thought, nearly hoped that the mechanism itself had changed shape just enough to not be able to open anymore. It turned out the door simply wasn't locked. The wood itself had visibly warped, being a much larger object. The curve was just enough so the hinges wouldn't allow it to open fully, but it was enough to get through. De Fleurville led the way.

Now, I had never been in a château before, nor have I visited another since, so I still know little of what on earth most of the rooms were apart from barely recognizable kitchens and bedrooms. I remember there was a lot of very pretty and fairly useless-looking furniture. I might have asked my guide for vocabulary, as he appeared to be very strongly affected emotionally by all this stuff - quite a novel phenomenon on his countenance. He wouldn't have seen its like for decades. I was busy getting riled up at the constant affront on my beliefs. In spite of living in a world full of people like me, I remained stubbornly attached to those truths I thought stable. Every new X-man or woman I met or heard of, and every cosmic scale event that I couldn't shield my eyes and ears from was a piece of my childhood-old investment in the knowledge and method of science chipped away. And yet, as a mutant, I investigate strange and unusual occurrences for a living.

After a fruitless and frankly boring tour of all the superfluous and uninhabited space in the warped stone house, during which we found no bodies, no blood, no dead or living animals, and no alien spaceships, we ventured into a little inner courtyard, where the centre of the implosion appeared to be. This would have been a fairly substantial void with a clear opening to the sky up above, but with the inward pull, the crooked walls blocked out most of the light. I was about done with the place, and so did not pay it so much attention as I should have. It was the owner who spotted the first sign of strangeness other than the obvious.

"There's a pentagram on the floor," he said. I looked down, and there it was indeed, in phosphorescent paint. At least, I assumed it was phosphorescent. Just because it glowed white and not green was not enough for me to even consider some more magical nonsense.

"Yes there is," I said, stepping closer, feigning interest. I had already written the case off as an unsolvable. I would still get a few francs for the paperwork. "I wonder why."

"And you almost stepped on a magic wand."He went to his knees faster than I could protest, and came up with a delicate object fitting that description nicely. There was a handle, and a tapered spire, with a bend of 30 to 40 degrees at the join. The old man very gently handed me the wand, as if giving it credence as some legitimate agent of sorcery. Abandoning all hope of doing the forensics properly, I allowed myself to wonder whether the curve was by design or a result of all the other curving. Thankfully there were no other fancy items lying around.

I struggled to hide my enthusiasm in leaving the grounds. That I was going to have to take a special item to the lab for fingerprints and the odd test to see if it had exotic properties likely kept me from jumping for joy at being able to flee. The rain flattening my hair and destroying the precious little makeup I had bothered to apply certainly no longer bothered me.

"Is that it?" asked the owner as I approached my car and opened the door from ten feet away. I turned and told him the usual drivel.

"Don't let anybody in without confirmation from me or my boss. Don't go in yourself. If the whole thing goes boom or something let us know quick as you can. And don't brag to anyone about your fabulous new uninhabitable demeure. You live in the middle of nowhere; don't make it harder for us than we have the funds to deal with. If I have to speak to a single bureaucrat above me, I will have to hunt you down and get you and every last person in this and neighbouring communes to sign a vow of silence on pain of death."

On balance he took his instructions well. He only showed a little panic when I told him what sort of things the authorities might have to do. He was after all quite old. In his mind he must have had little to lose. Though I would have liked to see the moment of realisation, which was surely coming, that he and everyone he knew had probably already been subjected to the kind of procedures I implied. When we parted ways he thanked me for my time, which was nice. Pay is all right, validation is better, especially from the folk on the ground.

I got inside my dear vintage deudeuche (2CV) and she leisurely drove me away toward HQ. I say she drove me because that's what it looked like. I had excised the driver's side back seat to allow room for mine to recline more than it was originally meant to, and was able to drive the car like that, not touching the steering wheel or the pedals, not even turning the key in the ignition. At one time I wanted to contrive a system where none of all the traditional driving tools would even be in the car anymore, so that I could directly get the fuel spraying and nudge the steering and change all the gears etc. But the mechanic who I originally asked to make the appropriate mods said it would be an assault on the poor little car. I never had the heart to do anything more after that. I almost regretted removing that rear passenger seat.

Since my phone was dead and it was pissing down, I had an excuse not to call in my having completed the first phase of my assignment. I drove straight home, enjoying the countryside (what I could see through the rainy veil at least), and letting all the nonsense of the morning drain from my mind, the so-called 'magic wand' completely forgotten, dumped on the seat beside me, an innocuous piece of polished wood.

Damn fool I was.

Thanks for reading.

Oh and I read your review, Igenlode, thanks. It was very illuminating.