(Warlock of Omaha Author's Welcome and Warning

I have just updated the story with editing and polishing as of 2/3/2019. I was happy to find a large and healthy community of fellow fan authors of Dresden Files fanfics. I'm new to the world of fanfics and was surprised that so many stories focused on Jim Butcher's main characters. I just assumed that in a fanfic, one would create new characters that would exist in the same world and that's what I have done.

My story has violence, but if you can handle the actual Dresden Files, then mine shouldn't be too bad. My story has sex. Once again, should not be too graphic for a Dresden File fan. Some may ask questions why my main character does what he does sex-wise, some questions he answers himself. As an author, my goal is to be honest. If one handed the average male some sort of lucky charm that could instantly convert nearly any woman into his personal groupie, how many would never use it? How many AT LEAST once? How many a few times? How many would use it to extreme? I think the average Axe aftershave commercial answers that question.

There will also be boring parts while my main character describes his gear, particularly his guns. You were warned in advance. That brings me to my first disagreement with Mr. Butcher. Mr. Butcher seems like one who knows a bit about firearms. His characters select firearms that make sense for their own personal abilities and situations. However, he consistently understates their potential effectiveness. Yes, there are many scenes where firearms prove their metal, but there are also many scenes where they seem far less effective than they should. One should have to be very high on the magical food chain before one could ignore a trained human shooter with a shotgun. Of course, he has over a dozen NY Times bestsellers, what do I know?

The other issue is magic. Mr. Butcher's conceit is that there could be this whole rich ecosystem of magical critters hiding in the shadows. My main character explains my counterargument:

"Magic is very rare in the real world. If it was common, why would every medium be fake? Why wouldn't there be real magic stage shows? If there was, say, a pack of fifty werewolves hanging out around Denver, that would mean there would be thousands in the US alone, not to mention the rest of the world. Don't you think one would have shown up on Jerry Springer by now? There is magic, but real magic is rare as hen's teeth. Which is why the mundane world is not prepared for it and someone with even a small gift can really play with it."

Mr. Butcher seems to believe that normal people work hard to ignore the fantastic. The wide variety of shows seeking ghosts and other paranormal phenomena seems to speak the opposite. The Dresden Files are very well read. I would imagine practically every reader would love to find even the slightest evidence of magic. Hence my argument that magic would have to be painfully rare.

Perfectly conceived or not, writing a fan fiction shows that I am obviously a big fan and find Mr. Butcher's writings very entertaining which is the ultimate test of a fiction book's worth and authorship.

This story represents a bridge between my world of a single unpublished novel and Mr. Butcher's and is meant to be a tribute of my esteem. I offer it here as a gift and my deepest hope is that you enjoy it.)

Warlock of Omaha

Chapter 1: Breakfast Time

I live a good life in Omaha. Omaha isn't the place to go for cosmopolitan entertainment. The restaurants aren't very good for many reasons, not least the way so many Omahans like a chain and the pre-cooked slop that gets shoveled off the back of industrial food delivery trucks to serve in them. The shows aren't great. Even when a big Broadway production comes through, you have to realize that the star talent stayed in New York. The top Broadway talent stayed with them. The B team that accepted positions in the road show, they're still pretty good and will give their best for shows in Miami, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco and especially LA, never know who might be in the audience there waiting to discover the next big talent. But Omaha? We're lucky if the travel team's understudies bother to telephone in a performance by the time they get here.

Unlike, say, Manhattan, where it will cost you a lot just to own a car. Driving into the show will cost a fortune in tolls. The drive will be a stressful broken field run on narrow streets dodging double parked cars and giant potholes when the traffic moves at all. When one gets close, one will need to pay for expensive parking and then walk a substantial distance through packed streets that smell like a locker room before one gets to the theater. It's easy to spend in excess of $1000 on such an evening and that's with cheap tickets, full price premier tickets, the sky's the limit.

For the B team understudies we get in Omaha, a calm sub 15-minute drive will get you to the theater and likely abundant free parking in comfortable large lots and spaces that have no trouble accepting my full-size pickup. Generally, the best tickets will only set you back $50 apiece. An inexpensive and stress-free night to enjoy the best the scrubs can provide. Which is, essentially, what Omaha offers. Omaha is quiet, well managed and well kept. The people are courteous, the schools are good, and the pot holes get filled. Omaha is probably the largest city in the US one can say that of. If one is looking for excitement and cosmopolitan adventure, Omaha is not your place. If you're looking for orderly and quiet, it's the best you can get.

I woke up in my nice big bed and went to take a shower in the large attached bathroom. It had been a long three-day Fall weekend and a big food festival had been in town. I had given myself the weekend off to spend quality time with my girls in the strict understanding with myself that I would get back to work on the bolts come Tuesday morning. I came down to breakfast full of industry and sat down at my chair in the dining room. Miranda immediately came in and put down my breakfast, four scrambled eggs, white toast with butter and jelly on, hash browns and beef bacon. I generally get one more thing on the side, today it was a waffle, but sometimes it's a pancake, French toast or a fruit pie. Miranda is an excellent cook, on her way to being an excellent chef, so it's really well made. I wash it down with a tall glass of was oranges within the last hour OJ and a glass of ice cold skim milk on the side.

For those wondering, Miranda is a very attractive young woman attending the culinary program at a local college. I'm very lucky she has chosen to live with me. I have plenty of room and the deal I offer, free room and board for chores is pretty good. I enjoyed watching her walk back into the kitchen after putting down my tray as she swayed away wearing a tight little chef-like outfit.

I could have chased her into the kitchen, but I always have a full schedule and today I had some very, very important bolts I needed to work on.

I suppose if you want to get to know me, knowing where I come from is a good place to start. I grew up in a small Midwestern college town where my Dad was a professor. It wasn't a state school, or even a secondary school. Just a small university in a small town far from even a small provincial city.

My Dad graduated with a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering before a degree in Computer Engineering even existed. At that point, as he explained it, "There were two places for a computer expert to get a job, IBM or a university. I didn't fit in at IBM and this is the university that gave me the best offer."

As interest in computers mushroomed, my Dad was always in high demand. He always wanted to get away and complete his doctorate, but the demand for his skills as an instructor were too high. He was always teaching more classes than he should have been and was always overworked. In turn, because I listened at the top of the stairs when my parents thought I was asleep and they were having serious conversations in the kitchen, I knew that he had made tenure in half the time and was paid more than double any other professor, though the pay was not common knowledge and my Dad was always careful not to flaunt it.

Despite being busy, he was still a good Dad. I never had doubts about how he felt about me, and he always wedged in time to spend with me to make sure I knew I was a priority. It was very important to my Dad that I get a good education, and despite living in a small town in a rural Midwestern state, the school board was dominated by college faculty who valued education highly, meaning our local schools were first rate. In addition, my toys were blocks, then Legos, then an erector set and finally electronic kits and opportunities few other kids had in those days to use computing equipment generally kept to college students, government labs and very well-heeled big companies. I know it gave my Dad great pride that I would go on to earn two Master's degrees and a Doctorate.

My Mom and Dad married before I was born so I was not privy to their courtship. I know my Dad was crazy about my Mom and did everything he knew to show he cared. He worked hard to provide her with a nice home and things. He was never shy in showing his affections. He gave her a son. As far as I could tell, my Mom was very fond of him. She was from some foreign country, I never found out where and she didn't want to talk about it, but despite speaking very clear and correct English, she always had a foreign lilt in her voice which I know my Dad liked. My Mom knew how to wear a dress, look her best and I know it gave my Dad great pride that when he was at an event, he had such an attractive woman on his arm. My Mom showed my Dad affection in the way of the day, she kept a tidy home, cooked meals he loved and looked after his son very well.

The magic came from my Mom. She came from a long line of "Wise Women." It was apparently very strange that I had inherited her powers. The normal way the power passed in her family was from mother to a single daughter, though not necessarily the first daughter. However, I was an only child. I learned, by listening at the top of the stairs again, that something had gone wrong with my delivery. I didn't get the specifics, but it meant that she could definitely never have another child. Further, it had done something to her that could not be fixed, only managed with frequent visits to doctors, medicines, pain and eventually three more hospitalizations. The last, while I was working on my second Master's would be the end. Did I get the power because I was an only child or even if my Mom had nine kids and five daughters would I have got it? Who knows? It's not like you can run a double-blind study with a thousand subjects to find out.

However, my Mom made the best of those years. She was a good wife to my Dad and made us a family. While a woman of her era was expected to stay home, she started a business and had a small shop just off main street. She used her talent and the recipes of her line to produce simple lotions, remedies, scents and soaps. In an era when "Ivory" was considered fancy, her products developed a dedicated following. Her remedies wouldn't cure cancer but they could help someone who was sick keep their appetite and energy or help a woman in chemo keep her hair so she wouldn't have to face one more heartbreak and humiliation at the worst possible time. She even sold a secret love potion, but only to truly desperate women. My Mom told me the potion didn't make someone fall in love, it made the one who drank it a bit more confidant. There was one time she gave the love potion to Mrs. Simpson whose husband was a drunk, a philanderer and a wife beater.

Mrs. Simpson came to the store one night as my Mom was closing and I was already working the mop. She begged, "Just give me the potion, maybe, if he loved me more, he wouldn't beat me. I can't take another beating tonight."

Mrs. Simpson was already pretty beat up when she came in that night. My Mom gave her the potion and refused payment. Mrs. Simpson took it and threw that bastard out that night. Police Sgt. O'Malley started spending nights on Mrs. Simpson's front door and had to convince Mr. Simpson, several times, that a restraining order really did mean business. Eventually, Mr. Simpson left town. A few months later, Mrs. Simpson became Mrs. O'Malley and nine months after that, Hope O'Malley was born. Hope would eventually become my Mom's assistant at her store and Mom left the store to her in her will. It felt a bit weird, but Hope lived for that store and I was making bank in Omaha, so it seemed like the nice thing to do.

So, I had this power. It's hard to describe what it's like to have magic, like trying to describe sight to the blind or sound to the deaf. Apparently, it slowed my development. Around age one, as my brain tried to learn how to deal with all the signals, I wasn't keeping up with other kids to the point my Dad wanted to get me extra help. Luckily my Mom understood what was happening and kept him in check. I caught up by age two and didn't realize everyone else couldn't see and feel "the sparkles." My Mom taught me what she knew, and I studied and practiced and experimented.

So, does that mean I was a total magical badass? No. Which begs the question, "How does magic work?"

There's no way to really explain "How magic works." It's way more complicated than I would ever be able to put into writing, but I'll try and give a dumbed down, simplified version.

Firstly, you have to have a well of power within to draw upon. How does one measure such a well? Well, unlike role playing games, it's a lot more complicated than spell points or levels or whatever and the well represents the simplest part of the system. By dint of great effort, I've developed an ability to see, not perfectly, what someone's well is like. The typical person has a well about the size of a small cardboard match, a flickering small cardboard match. I've been around some serious wizards, theirs are more like bonfires. My Mom and me? Maybe a small indoor woodstove?

But a well of power is just the beginning. The next thing you need is a will of steel. The will is what brings the magic out of the well, which it doesn't want to do, so that you can do something with it. I'd love to say I was a total badass with an indomitable will, but my will is very domitable, maybe it's soft pine or hard cheese.

So now your will has the magic out in the open ready to do something, you need to be able to concentrate. While your will is still pulling. Concentration is what makes the magic do what you want, i.e. a spell. My concentration is okay. Chess is also a discipline which requires good concentration. I was the high-school chess club president and champ, which despite being such a small school, meant something since many other kids were the children of serious academics who took chess very seriously. I went to the state competition three years for our school. My best finish was second place. Not the best concentration ever, but at the high end of normal human.

Lastly, a lot of things about magic aren't intuitive. To be a great wizard you need to get some good magic tutelage. My Mom taught me what she knew, but I suspect that was a whole lot less than what a serious wizard might have learned.

What can you do with a minor magical talent? Not a lot directly. Despite watching the Empire Strikes Back roughly 800 times, I was not lifting boulders. I did manage to get that trick so I could get a roughly light saber sized item to jump into my hand. You can also do what my Mom did. Some natural ingredients are just naturally sympathetic to magic. By casting a spell in a certain way, on a carefully selected group of ingredients, assembled in a very particular way, one can infuse more and more power over time into a thing, like a potion, and get to a point where one can accomplish something. This sort of slow infusion can also be spread across people, hence the ancient "coven" which might be composed of very minor talents who could pool their power. Not as fast or direct as a single real wizard, but my Mom could still do some amazing things.

Now, when I think back on it, I wish I had been a better student. If I had focused more on magic and less on tech maybe there were more things I could have learned. You'd think that a geek who grew up reading fantasy and watching sci-fi, who lived for SCA and role-playing games, you'd better believe that an isolated small Midwestern college had some lively role-playing communities, you'd think I would be all over the idea that I had my very own pipe-line into real magic. You'd be wrong and I was stupid. By the time I graduated college with my BS, computers and technology were exploding and seemed like the "real" future. Magic was all about doing boring menial chores in my Mom's shop. I had a choice of being part of a glowing high-tech future or being a lotion maker in a small, dingy shop in nowhereville. Guess what I chose. In my defense, I'll say that I thought I could come back later, but life decided to teach me a lesson about never knowing how long you get with the people you love most.

I do have a few advantages that I understand are rare among human magic users. As I understand it, most serious wizards have a tough time around technology. My Mom didn't like anything higher tech than her mechanical cash register. She didn't have any electric kitchen appliances beyond her fridge. The range was gas. She could listen to the radio or phonograph, but if she walked into the room with the TV, one must remember this was the age of rabbit ears, the signal would collapse.

I didn't notice any problems myself, and I watched a lot of TV, until I turned ten. That fateful birthday, my Dad brought home a computer terminal from work that probably cost as much as our house and had less capability than a decent calculator would a decade later. But for the day, it was super high tech and unheard of to have in someone's private home. My Dad was excited to show it to me and I was excited to see it.

My Dad spent hours getting that terminal set up all just right, everything plugged in and a finicky 200 baud modem finally working. Only then was I finally invited in to behold. The second I walked through the door into our parlor, where Dad had set the machine up, it started having problems. The look my Dad gave me was the same one my Mom got when she wandered through the living room in the middle of a TV show my Dad liked. I knew I had only seconds before I was told to leave the room and I was desperate just to touch it. I lunged for the keyboard as my Dad yelled, "Don't touch it!…"

I had literally pressed just one key when there was a pop and smoke came out the back. I don't know how pressing just one key could have broken the thing, but I was in deep mud. Somehow, I was held responsible. As much as I sulked and declared, "It's not my fault!" I had touched the thing when I knew I shouldn't have and I knew it was the magic in me that killed it, so really, deep down, I knew it was my fault.

For years I had teased my Mom about her technology troubles. Now I knew I was in trouble myself. I knew I could accept it or fight. I chose to fight.

The next day, I walked myself down to the hardware and mercantile with my collected savings and bought a quartz action Timex watch with blue simu-leather band for the princely sum of ten dollars. One must remember, this was in early 1970s dollars, equivalent to over $100 in post 2015 dollars. The mark that takes a licking and keeps on ticking lasted less than eight hours. I went back the next day and was informed by the proprietor, Mr. Kolchak, there would be no refund or replacement. This was in the days before 30 day no questions asked Wal-Mart returns and the assumption was, as I heard Mr. Kolchak say to one of the men lounging about as I left, "It was something that fool kid did that done broke that watch so quickly."

It took me 19 days of doing every chore I could get and every odd job anyone on the block needed done to assemble another $10. One must remember that people in those days thought twenty-five cents was princely remuneration for mowing a large lawn with a manual mower. That watch lasted seventeen hours. Eighteen days later and watch number three lasted fourteen hours. I have to admit, at that point I was discouraged. I think my Dad, who would never admit openly that there could be such a thing as an anti-technology magic field, but who clearly believed in it, sat down with me, put his arm around my shoulder as I wept openly over the dead watch, and said, "Nothing really valuable ever comes easy."

It helped. My determination was banked and re-readied. I would love to say the next watch ended up working fine. I can't. It lasted 26 hours. But that was enough. Things were moving in the right direction and I was getting a sense of how the power moved in me and affected the watch. It would be watch number nine that lasted. That watch sits, still running, on the mantle in my study next to a picture of my Mom and Dad.

Having the ability to interact with electric appliances, cars, TV's, Computers and Cell phones has been very valuable.

As I finished my breakfast Diane walked in. Diane also lives with me and does the gardening. I have large grounds with lots of grass and plants that need to be looked after. We also have extensive gardens which provide a large amount of the fruit and vegetables for the table, not to mention a few hens which provide the eggs for our breakfasts. Diane is in the Grounds Management program at a local college. She's also quite attractive, long and lean with skin lightly tanned in that authentic way it does when the tan comes from real work in the sun and not from a bottle. Diane was also wearing crazy short jean shorts and a tied-up t-shirt that left a lot of slightly shiny skin exposed. Diane flopped down into a chair and I started thinking that a delay before I got to the bolts might not be so bad.

My Dad attended all my graduations and was particularly proud when I got my doctorate. He was never the same after Mom died. The college put him into "research" out of teaching as they eased him into early retirement. The fall after my final graduation he passed as well.

He lived long enough to see I got a good job with a firm in Omaha. Omaha's main industry is agriculture and as food prices went up in the nineties, Omaha did well. Omaha is also the home of an amazingly large piece of the financial industry. Berkshire Hathaway lives in Omaha as do many other Fortune 500 companies. They were ready to pay big for my skills and I was ready to take it. I got a job earning a high five figure paycheck, and very likely big raises each year after. With some money my parents left, and some I had saved, I put a down payment on a fancy loft apartment in the best part of town. I was paying down the mortgage fast with lots of money left over for buying fancy toys, eating out and partying hard. I'm not now, and I wasn't then, particularly good looking, but I wasn't fat, I worked out and I had nice things, so I did have some success with the fairer sex.

My hobby was making me the real money though. I hadn't forgotten what I'd learned about magic. I traveled at least two weekends a month. There were casinos opening all over the US back then. At first, I would just win at roulette. But that attracted too much attention. Eventually, I figured out that it was best to win at slots. I'd walk into the casino wearing a wife beater t-shirt and board shorts. Have only keys and wallet in pockets. Spend a few hours losing a few hundred dollars, then bang, hit some five-digit jackpot. I could then, generally, parlay the win into a nice free suite and some comps at the hotel bar. Cheating at roulette and slots was very simple with some basic magic. I was averaging over fifty grand extra. A month. So yeah, I had some money.

I didn't really need the money, it was just piling up in bank accounts. I told myself that I was saving to open my own business or retire early, but really, I did it because it was fun. Winning attracts a lot of female attention. Taking those winnings to the bar and buying Crystal attracts more. I planned to just keep playing as long as I could.

Magic is very rare in the real world. If it was common, why would every medium be fake? Why wouldn't there be real magic stage shows? If there was, say, a pack of fifty werewolves hanging out around Denver, that would mean there would be thousands in just the US, not to mention the rest of the world. Don't you think one would have shown up on Jerry Springer by now? There is magic, but real magic is rare as hen's teeth. Which is why the mundane world is not prepared for it and someone with even a small gift can really play with it.

That's when I got the wakeup call.

I was in Las Vegas. I loved Las Vegas. It's a quick hop from Omaha. There are lots of Casinos so I could win at slots once each night at a different place and maybe a fourth if I woke up early enough on Sunday. After gambling, Las Vegas was the best place to play. Sexy shows, cool bars, big suites and a let loose and live life attitude.

That Saturday night in Vegas I was playing slots in a big strip casino when I noticed two people, a man and a woman. The man was taller than my six flat and buffer, though not overwhelmingly so. He moved like he'd had some training somewhere, but that was a just a guess. The woman was petit with red hair. He was wearing a t-shirt and jeans. She was wearing a baggy top and sweats that hid her figure, though she had a pretty face and hair. To a casual glance, they were any two of the tens of thousands of tourists Vegas attracts everyday playing slots.

Except for two things. They looked worried. He kept scanning like he was expecting trouble and she was keeping her head down. Secondly, I could tell they had talent. Remember, I said magic was really rare. I'd been in a lot of casinos and seen a lot of people and these were the first two non-muggles I'd ever seen. To keep using my dumbed down analogy, her talent was somewhere around torch size and his was, maybe, big candle? We both won on our machines, I had won twenty-six grand and they had won over fifty. We cashed out together and were walking out. I was walking maybe 30 yards behind them and wondering if I should say something. We both left by a lightly used rear exit into the garage. It was, maybe, one am.

Something set me off, and, in a rare moment of agreement between animal brain and thinking brain, I ended up under a parked car. The two I had been following were suddenly surrounded. I've reviewed what happened next a million times, particularly in nightmares and when I've drunk too much, it's burned into my brain permanently.

Maybe I could have done something to help them, but remember, I didn't even have a cell phone and I'm not a badass. Another thing I think a badass needs is that they enjoy violence. It's like a roller coaster ride to them. I don't like roller coasters and horror movies. I've had a handful of serious violent encounters in my life. Each one is a trauma that never heals.

The two were surrounded by stereotypical men in black. I'd love to be able to say I counted, that would have been a smart, tactical thing to do. I was too scared. They were wearing shiny black suits, white shirts and black ties. They had short haircuts, but not buzz cuts, and big sixties era looking sunglasses, even though we were in a dark garage late at night. They were all different races and heights. I'd love to say I saw their shoes, but I was too terrified to look. I've noticed, as I replay the memory in my mind that there was something wrong with their proportions, they were maybe a little too thin side to side and too thick front to back, but that could be the distortion of terrified memory. The MIBs handled the two like it was completely effortless, like they were just moving mannequins, though I knew they were fighting for their lives, particularly the guy. In seconds the two were wrapped up in strait jackets that included hoods that covered their heads and some sort of leg wraps that immobilized their legs. Only then did I notice the White Man.

The White Man had been lounging on a car on the other side of the two and the MIBs. He slid down gracefully, walking over to the two with a cigarette in his hand. He moved with an air of privilege long held and taken for granted, like a young James Spader character. His suit was all white as was his shirt, tie, shoes, everything. His skin was inhumanly pale white as was his hair. He was pretty in a Euro male model way, only more so. I swear he had a faint, white, nimbus all around. However, his long hair was curly and rolled and his suit looked a little rumpled, but in a studied Italian designer sort of way, as if to announce, "Yes the suit is worth more than you make in a year, but I'm so cool and rich and entitled, I don't really need to look after it." The group of them had an intense, menacing aura that I know left me terrified so badly I couldn't move.

The White Man walked up to the two and briefly touched the man on the head and the woman on her breast. I could tell then that the two were still fighting with all they had but were each held completely motionless by two MIBs. The White Man said with a tone of amusement but crazy menace, "A deals a deal. Did you think you could run?"

Then the White Man raised his arm and snapped his fingers twice and two large people mover vans pulled up from somewhere, each driven by an MIB. They had the rear doors open and threw one of the two into the rear cargo section of each van. Then they loaded into the vans fast, like it had been practiced. The White Man was sitting in the front passenger seat of the first van, and, I swear as they drove away, he looked at me and winked.

In a good story, I'd talk about how I had a long feud with the White Man and, after many backs and forth, and close scrapes on both sides, I had finally hunted him down and put paid on his bill. What I actually did was flee to my rental car, drive back to my hotel, barricade myself in my room and not come out until it was time to leave on Sunday. I won't say what condition my pants were in when I got to the hotel room. I stayed in big groups of people until I was on the airplane and I have never been back to Las Vegas. Mostly, I thank god I've never seen the White Man or the MIBs again.

Up to that moment I'd been floating along like a bug on the thin surface tension of water. My surface tension was the idea that the world was a safe place. The incident in Las Vegas showed me there were largemouth bass just below the surface ready to demonstrate just how unsafe the world was. Below those bass was a bottomless ocean with larger predators each level down.

There's a second basic reality that was also made apparent. There are fates worse than death. In the mundane world, there are some fates worse than death. In the magical world, there are many, many fates worse than death. If some buggity boo out of fairyland shows up and decides to drag you back to it's cave for a few millennia of whatever torments it's superhuman mind can think up, you'll be begging to die, and NO one is going to dig you out of that hole. I'm sure by the time those two hit the floor in those vans they were praying for death.

It took a month of just living in my apartment, using up some of my vast stockpile of sick time, for me to recover and figure out what to do next. The first thing that was obvious was no more gambling trips. That was Done. Secondly, I was going to learn about self-defense, and at first, that meant just about anything and everything. I learned a lot of basic lessons. The first being, I'd probably never be enough of a bad ass that if one or more really serious anythings came after me I'd be able to stop them. It's like a house in the suburbs, that lock and deadbolt on your front door are not going to keep out a determined criminal. But, if you have enough, they'll probably decide it's not worth it and move on to the next house. The trick is the same for any defense, make taking you more trouble than it's worth. The second was how I was going to make money going forward, because now I wanted a lot of money because I knew I was going to need it.

While I was reading about everything from how starfish defend themselves to how grandmas do their assertive walk to martial arts to guns and alarm systems. I started also thinking about something else.

The Men in Black and the White Man could have been a lot of things, but they clearly exuded an intense sense of menace. It was likely that their appearance was at least partly an illusion, which I had not made any effort to break because I was much too busy being terrified. In that was a subtle, but useful, detail I began to work on immediately.

The detail, or as I would call it myself, a "seeming," wasn't an illusion in the normal sense. I wasn't making myself look like Frankenstein or something outlandish. Seemings are subtle, but I found could be quite powerful. To imagine a seeming, imagine what you might do on an evening when you're going out to see if you can convince a member of the opposite gender (or the same gender, if that's your thing) to come home and play. You shower, put on scents and makeup, shave the parts that will help, put on nice clothes and jewelry, etc. You are trying to seem as appealing as possible. Each item conveys a message about how desirable you are as a mate and makes you seem like a good catch. With a relatively small amount of magic, one can strongly turbo boost such seemings. It was, I realized, how my Mom had done such a good job wearing those dresses over the years. She probably hadn't taught me that trick, with her old-world morality, fearing how I might use it. Or perhaps she was waiting for a later when she thought I would be mature enough to handle it that never came. As, let's face it, I have used seemings on the girls I've convinced to come live with me. With a well-made seeming, an average looking guy like me can walk into a bar and convince some remarkable women that they want to come home and cook and clean as we have already seen.

I could also use accumulated contacts and go visit 20 or so of the local big fish companies and convince them that my consulting services were absolutely critical to their computer security and worth $1 mil to start plus $1 mil a year and, incidentally, access to their computer systems. More valuable than the pay has been the management. These are some of the best money management firms on Earth. Berkshire Hathaway has consistently been THE best for half a century. Most financial service companies have two levels of service, one for normal peons like I had been and one for their "preferred clients."

Preferred clients get better opportunities and guarantees that normal people never get. It means I make more now from the money already sitting there than I do from the new pay, which generally just gets thrown on the pile.

I used the pile of money to figure out a more permanent and safer place to live. Omaha, with it's magical barrenness, still seemed like a good spot, particularly since it was now near my "clients." I did some searching and found an aging neighborhood near 72nd and Dodge. From that intersection, one would never know that huge, opulent, but slowly declining mansions were nearby, just north of the University of Nebraska. I could have picked a spot somewhere out of town and had more land and more extreme defenses. I would also have been easier to cut off from communications and farther for the police to come in case of emergency. The neighborhood I chose was in the middle of the city.

Basic home defense strategy is the same if you have a small shack or are a multi-millionaire magic user. Try and hole up and survive until help arrives. Make the attack as expensive and unpleasant as possible to slow down and deter a potential invader. I figured they would have to be some very powerful players if they were willing to continue once SWAT showed up, in which case I'd be done anyway.

At the center of the brick street neighborhood in question was a hill. The top of the hill was split between four homes. The one to the northwest, with the best position, was unoccupied and apparently had stalled some time back on a renovation. It was easy to buy. The house to the northeast, with the second-best spot, was occupied and didn't want to go, but a high bid moved them along. The home just south of the hill's peak was inhabited and they really didn't want to go, even for a lot more than what their home was worth. I was about to start a campaign of dirty tricks when they suddenly caved and took my offer. The home to the south east was inhabited but in need of a lot of deferred maintenance which meant the family living there was under financial strain. A fair offer if the home was in good condition moved them right out meaning I had no direct neighbors, I was surrounded by street. I demolished all four homes. I saved some lights, chandeliers and some great mahogany paneling, but otherwise re-built from scratch.

I wanted a taller hill, so I brought in a lot of concrete which was pumped underground wherever my ground penetrating radar found vacuums or low density. Then I brought in gravel and earth which was rammed. The east side of the property had been unsupported steep grade desperately in need of a retaining wall, so I had a thick retaining wall built around the property stabilizing everything and giving me maximum useful space. I then surrounded the property with a 2-foot-thick steel reinforced cement wall that was 10 feet high above the retaining wall and six feet down. The wall then had what looked like an ornamental stone exterior finish but was actually made of a drill (and explosive and bullet) resistant ceramic six inches thick on both sides. Imbedded in the cera-stone were chunks of glass that looked very pretty and presented very sharp edges, particularly at the top of the wall just where a hand might come down from someone trying to scale the thing. The glass was also embedded in the wall below grade and one yard out on both sides from the wall the dirt was filled with irregular chunks of glass in a way that would be very frustrating for any tunneler. The top of the wall had a row of very classy 4-foot-tall square black metal fencing made out of solid stainless steel coming to very ornamental, and functional, razor sharp hooks at the top. Woven among the square metal bars was a beautiful metal rose vine sculpture with lots of very sharp thorns and razor-sharp petals functioning as some very resilient and very punishing barbed wire.

I'm obsessive about detail and I had the money to indulge.

The home was a Monolithic Dome, done with outer walls that were over 10 inches of steel reinforced concrete. The dome also had a layer of polyurethane for insulation and which was sandwiched with the same ceramic ornamental stone that was used on the wall. The walls could take rocket shelling. The windows were all very thick, 250mph wind capable (and definitely bullet-proof) and had 3-inch-thick steel exterior shutters and interior bullet proof roller shutters ready to snap shut at a moment's notice.

Despite it's fortress-like construction, I had decorated my home with a very hobbit hole meets Ralph Lauren feel and the first level is a foot below grade at the very top of the hill. There was a large living room, dining room and kitchen. The kitchen was all granite and stainless high-performance pro-grade appliances. There were a lot of bathrooms and bedrooms, including a very large master for me as well as a bar/game room, an office and a really high-end home theater/den. For the girls, I also had a library. On the property, in separate buildings I had a number of shops, labs and a garage.

As time has gone on I have further fortified the home with magic and technology both passive and active.

Have I been able to harness my limited magic for personal defense? Yes.

The first step in self-defense is to accept that you need to be aware of self-defense. In survey after survey, the most typical victim response to violent attack has been passive non-resistance. The most typical answer from survivors to why they were so passive? They were too shocked to believe it was actually happening to them! They were floating along in life chanting the ever-so-comforting mantra of "It can't happen to me."

Until it does.

As bad as my wake-up call experience in Las Vegas has been for me, I'm alive and intact and my blinders are off. I now walk around with the much wiser, though less comforting mantra of, "It can happen at any moment, be prepared."

What have I done?

Any mundane guide to self-defense will continue with some very basic advice, the next step is to be aware. Get your head out of your problems and your smart phones and pay attention to what's going on around you. That awareness might buy you a second's warning, which can literally be the difference between life and death. I've done a lot with tech and magic to get myself more warning time. I'd love to say I have spidey sense or some magic jedi awareness. I don't. But I'm working on it. I have developed the ability to be aware of and resist illusions and seemings. Haven't had a lot of chance to test them. Yet.

Next, there's illusion. I've heard there are some wizards so powerful they can fire a column of flame over a yard in diameter hundreds of yards away and with such force they blow through walls. At one point as a teenager, I desperately wanted to be able to throw some magical attack. The best I could manage, after months of trying, was to throw a bolt of flame a few inches long a few yards without much force, it might scorch a wall or maybe set something flammable on fire, but even my accuracy wasn't very good.

I've heard serious wizards can raise shields that will block bullets. I can do a small shield that probably won't stop anything too high caliber.

However, I can do an illusion of a column of fire pretty good and make it look like I'm standing two feet to my right, most of the time, that's just as good. Most of the time.

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