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This Shouldn't
Have Happened
As she walked downstairs, the slight flicker turned into an eerie glow. It was bright enough that Whitney could see without her phone’s flashlight. But what she saw didn’t quite make sense.
While the ground floor had been starkly empty, the basement was still full of junk. It seemed like the basement of a newspaper company. There were shelves and shelves of archival boxes with newspapers sticking out and a giant wheel in the back Whitney thought might be an old newspaper printing press.
Adding to the strangeness was the sense that these had been moved here after the building had been abandoned. The shelves didn’t seem all that old and the cardboard boxes still seemed to be mostly holding together.
Looking closer at the boxes, she saw them labeled "The Dove" with a different year on each box. Moving over a couple of aisles, the boxes were now labeled "The Lord of Heaven." A few more aisles down and she found "The Cynic."
Whitney followed the glow through the shelves and past the industrial printing press to an office in the back corner. Suddenly, someone walked out of the room, shouting, “Don’t come any closer.”
“What’s going on in there?”
“Just walk away while you have the chance.”
Whitney could see that the person standing in the door frame was wearing long dark robes covered in small yellow stars. They were backlit by the glow, which made it hard to make out their features, but Whitney was pretty sure that their skin had a green-ish tint to it.
“What are you doing down here?”
“Minding my own business. And I’d suggest you do the same.”
This is where I am going to step in as your narrator to give you a little bit of context. In case you didn’t know, witches and warlocks are real. Of course they are! Think about how many stories you’ve heard about them. What, do you think someone made all those up? Next thing I know, you’re going to be telling me that vampires aren’t real either!
But the point is that they are real. The reason that we don’t see them is that they are hiding. It’s the same reason that no one knows whether the Ivory Billed Woodpecker is extinct. The world is a big place and it is hard to look at all of it at once.
For millennia, witches and warlocks would stay in the deep woods or high mountains, away from most humans. When you look at an old map and see a forest at the edge of the page that fades off into the distance, you can bet your last dollar that that forest had some witches in it. They might encounter the occasional loner or run-away, but other than that they could be left alone.
But, with the rise of capitalism, there are no more open spaces. There are unused lands that could maybe even use a nice witch to treat it with respect and grow a few herbs, but that land is owned by someone who is not about to let anybody hang out there unless that person is paying rent. They’d rather the land fall off the face of the earth than lose a chance at making money. There are some places in the world where land rights are not handled this way, but that way of doing things is on the retreat. And so, witches had to move.
Their decision to move to abandoned industrial sites can be explained through physics. You see, unused land is full of potential energy. You can build a house, a store, a hotel. You can charge an entrance fee to hikers or hunters or birders. And even if you don’t want to do those things, you can hang onto the land until someone does and then sell it to them. But an industrial plant? Their potential energy is spent. Pollution has made the ground where it sits dangerous and before you can build anything new, you’ll have to tear down an outdated and toxic structure. It is always going to be cheaper to just buy up some empty land. And then the cycle repeats. If humans and capitalism are both somehow able to survive another millennia, we’re going to have to learn to grow tomatoes in concrete. But, if you are looking for a place to be left alone, an abandoned concrete basement is as secluded a place as you will find.
And so, with this information in your pocket, I return you to Whitney in her current predicament.
Should Whitney:
While the ground floor had been starkly empty, the basement was still full of junk. It seemed like the basement of a newspaper company. There were shelves and shelves of archival boxes with newspapers sticking out and a giant wheel in the back Whitney thought might be an old newspaper printing press.
Adding to the strangeness was the sense that these had been moved here after the building had been abandoned. The shelves didn’t seem all that old and the cardboard boxes still seemed to be mostly holding together.
Looking closer at the boxes, she saw them labeled "The Dove" with a different year on each box. Moving over a couple of aisles, the boxes were now labeled "The Lord of Heaven." A few more aisles down and she found "The Cynic."
Whitney followed the glow through the shelves and past the industrial printing press to an office in the back corner. Suddenly, someone walked out of the room, shouting, “Don’t come any closer.”
“What’s going on in there?”
“Just walk away while you have the chance.”
Whitney could see that the person standing in the door frame was wearing long dark robes covered in small yellow stars. They were backlit by the glow, which made it hard to make out their features, but Whitney was pretty sure that their skin had a green-ish tint to it.
“What are you doing down here?”
“Minding my own business. And I’d suggest you do the same.”
This is where I am going to step in as your narrator to give you a little bit of context. In case you didn’t know, witches and warlocks are real. Of course they are! Think about how many stories you’ve heard about them. What, do you think someone made all those up? Next thing I know, you’re going to be telling me that vampires aren’t real either!
But the point is that they are real. The reason that we don’t see them is that they are hiding. It’s the same reason that no one knows whether the Ivory Billed Woodpecker is extinct. The world is a big place and it is hard to look at all of it at once.
For millennia, witches and warlocks would stay in the deep woods or high mountains, away from most humans. When you look at an old map and see a forest at the edge of the page that fades off into the distance, you can bet your last dollar that that forest had some witches in it. They might encounter the occasional loner or run-away, but other than that they could be left alone.
But, with the rise of capitalism, there are no more open spaces. There are unused lands that could maybe even use a nice witch to treat it with respect and grow a few herbs, but that land is owned by someone who is not about to let anybody hang out there unless that person is paying rent. They’d rather the land fall off the face of the earth than lose a chance at making money. There are some places in the world where land rights are not handled this way, but that way of doing things is on the retreat. And so, witches had to move.
Their decision to move to abandoned industrial sites can be explained through physics. You see, unused land is full of potential energy. You can build a house, a store, a hotel. You can charge an entrance fee to hikers or hunters or birders. And even if you don’t want to do those things, you can hang onto the land until someone does and then sell it to them. But an industrial plant? Their potential energy is spent. Pollution has made the ground where it sits dangerous and before you can build anything new, you’ll have to tear down an outdated and toxic structure. It is always going to be cheaper to just buy up some empty land. And then the cycle repeats. If humans and capitalism are both somehow able to survive another millennia, we’re going to have to learn to grow tomatoes in concrete. But, if you are looking for a place to be left alone, an abandoned concrete basement is as secluded a place as you will find.
And so, with this information in your pocket, I return you to Whitney in her current predicament.
Should Whitney:
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