Chapter 1: Johnny

In life, the distance between where you start out and where you end up may be long or short, and the distance traveled may vary enormously, but the most important thing in any life is the journey. My journey started when I met Freya and fell in love. But nobody just wakes up one morning and falls in love: that trip requires steps backwards, forwards, and sideways.

The start of falling in love is sort of like jumping over a wall. To get over the wall, you need to run and jump; but first you take a few steps backward, before you can run. My backward steps brought memories of when I was just a teen, with an interest in science fiction and magic. The science fiction provided unlimited worlds to explore: this helped my curiosity and imagination; it also gave me reasons to study sciences and math — to see if the worlds I imagined were even possible. Some of the worlds I imagined had people who were able to perform magic, so I also studied magic.

It turns out that there are actually two very different things which are both called 'magic.' The most common is more correctly called 'prestidigitation' or sleight of hand — this includes magic tricks, which fool the watchers into believing that something wondrous is actually happening. The second, where words, signs, or potions change the world around, seems to exist only in old books, or in new books which are labeled 'fantasy.'

I had collected many books about stage magic and taught myself to perform a great many of the tricks contained in them. Stage magic requires trained hands and strong bodies. If you want to hide a coin, you need to train your hands to hold it tightly but still look like it isn't there, so it doesn't fall and give away the trick. If you want to escape from handcuffs, or from a straitjacket, you need a strong body, to make the seemingly impossible actually possible — without killing yourself. So, I trained my hands and strengthened my body. As useless as these skills seem, they actually turned out to be very practical.

I had also collected a few books, as many as I could afford, about real magic, but was only able to teach myself to do one bit of real magic. The problem with real magic seems to be that you can't even understand the instructions unless you have the power to make it actually work. Since most people have no aptitude for real magic, they can't understand the instructions, so the books are labeled 'gibberish' or fantasy. My library contained several ancient books which cost a great deal of money and were supposed to contain real magic potions and spells, but from them all, I was only able to decipher one single simple spell.

That magic spell seemed, at first, to be rather a waste of time. It promised that any thing belonging to one person would become my property, if the owner said aloud three times that they gave it to me or that it was mine. I interpreted this to mean that, if someone gave me something and said three times the thing was mine, then it would be mine. For a boy raised in a land of lawyers, this seemed a waste of good magic, since I could just sue and get the property anyway if the owner said three times in public that it was mine.

It wasn't until I was in college that I realized there are types of property which are intangible, but still valuable. And it was several years after college that I realized this spell could help me get girls. (I was actually looking for sex, but to me it was impossible to have worthwhile sex without a girl, and once I had gotten the girl, I could continue getting the sex. What can I say? I was not too bright where females were concerned, as well as being a late bloomer in the maturity department.)

Oh, by the way, my name is Johann B. Rocker — my parents had a very strange sense of humor, because the 'B' stands for Bach — but my friends call me 'Johnny'. At the start of this journey, I was 26 years old, out of college for a little over two years, living in my home state of California, and employed by a medium-sized computer company. My studying of math and science books had given me a head start in college and I was able to get a double degree in EE and CSci. (electrical engineering and computer science), which made me immediately employable, with a great salary, at a computer company.