Magic Trick (novel)

On one fine morning in the Cupid Homeworld, Pessimist-242 is predictably failing to enjoy a day off from the Blue Feather, spending it wandering around the Mainland Cloud trying to think of things to be cranky about. He suddenly stumbles upon a top hat, and, picking it up, looks up to find himself standing before a faceless magician, whom he assumes appears as this hazy, faceless phantom because of improper dimensional travel. The magician, strangely demonstrative in his performance, makes a show of bemoaning the loss of his magic hat despite appearing not to see Pessimist, to the point of ignoring him when the Cupid tries to hand it back to its apparent owner. The magician then disappears. Deciding to put the confusing incident out of his mind, Pessimist buries the Hat in the celfoam of the cloud and leaves.

Chapter 2: The Things

In the Cupid Post Office, Chief Mail-Sorter Lord Thymon is working on what he does best when he is suddenly beset by a large number of fluffy white creatures which a human being would recognise as ordinary, and rather cute, rabbits, but which, to an eldritch entity like him, logically appear the other way round as horrible and otherworldly. The sight of one of the creatures hopping proves too much for him and he runs out of the building, screaming in sheer terror.

Chapter 3: The Rabbits

In the Cupid Parliament building, the Cupid Parliament has been arguing for nine days straight about “whose responsibility it was to replace the ink in Stenographer-123's typewriter”. Just as the verbal fight is devolving into an outright brawl (despite Pythagoras-858 and Optimist-411's attempts to calm things down), one of the Copper-Colored Council of Elders, Cupid #004, finds a strange white rabbit creeping up on him and nibbling on his papers. It proves the first one of a veritable swarm of rabbits, who even brea down the contentious typewriter. Acquaintanceship-982 suggests that everyone abandon the building and make a run for it, which they do.

Chapter 4: The Exodus

It's a quiet day in the Euclidean Plane, and elderly Orbicularia Bubble is having Square Root Tea on her balcony overlooking the Geometrical Citadel, mulling over what a strange threat the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids represents for her kind. To her shock, a Fog Ship suddenly materialises down in the square, and a large number of Cupids file out, all unarmed. Soon, it is followed by a number of other Ships, all filled to the brims with weaponless Cupids. Unsure of what is going on but deeming herself too old to care, Orbicularia rolls back inside her apartment and onto her bed, determined to wait out whatever this is from under her bedsheets. Outside, unbeknownst to her, something unprecedented happens as the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids' Council of Elders “walk humbly into the Geometron Pentagon, waving a white flag, and ask for asylum”.

Chapter 5: The Siege

Three days later, in the Cupid Homeworld, the only C.I.I. Department left is, of course, the Department of Problem-Solving, whose members were ordered to stay in the Homeworld and solve the problem by the Cupid Prime himself, “just before [he] hopped into his personal Fog Ship with all his entourage and made an interdimensional beeline for the utterly rabbit-free beaches of Hawaii”. Indeed, though Pythagoras-858 had to stop Juliet-178 from running off in the Department Fog Ship, the five Problem-Solvers have been sitting around that warehouse with Lord Thymon for these three days, trying to think of a solution. They have discovered that the rabbits are illusion-creatures which vanish in a puff of smoke when hit too hard, but this is of little use as more keep appearing to take their place. Pythe is starting to consider the possibility of deeming the Cupid Homeworld a lost cause and tackling the problem of “making another one” when Valerius protests and states that, although he doesn't have a good idea, he does have an idea.

Chapter 6: The Summoning

Having retired hundreds of years ago, the goddess Aphrodite has been spending her time watching soap operas to satisfy her ongoing craving to preside over intricate love affairs. As she's doing so, she suddenly feels herself being summoned across universes, and, to boot, through an amateurish demon-summoning ritual rather than the proper ceremony. She identifies her summoners as Copper-Colored Cupids, and even recognises Pythagoras-858 personally, but this does nothing to lessen her outrage at having been summoned without warning, and in her pajamas at that, prompting her to turn Valerius-1497 into a (mechanical) parakeet. Undeterred, Pythe does his best to humbly ask for her help with the situation at hand, explaining that “to tell you the truth, a Deus Ex Machina is about the only way we could see of ending this mess, and you’re the only Dea we know personally”.

Chapter 7: The Dea Ex Machina

The Problem-Solvers explain their aggravating situation to Aphrodite, including their guess that a malfunctioning magician's-hat buried somewhere under the mass of magic rabbits is to blame. Wanting to see matters for herself, Aphrodite opens the doors of the warehouse before anyone can stop her, causing a tidal wave of rabbits to pour in for a few seconds until Thymon uses his powers to reverse the last few moments and undo Aphrodite's rash act. Barely apologising for her miscalculation, Aphrodite jumps into genuinely solving the problem, clapping her hands thrice and making all the rabbits vanish. Pessimist-242, who had been lying near the hat the whole time, underneath the mass of rabbits, watches as the hat disappears as well, and, deciding that “he might as well draw some sort of wry conclusion from all of this”, comes up with simply this: “I hate hats, and rabbits”.

Epilogue

Fearful of her losing her temper again, the Problem-Solvers bid Aphrodite goodbye without asking her to reverse Valerius-1497's transformation, resolving to think of another way by themselves later. Juliet-178 locates a Psychic Broadcasting Cone in the headquarters of the Department of Communication and uses it to call the other Cupids back to the Homeworld; and thus, everything goes back to normal — save that the Cupids now have a dislike of cute white rabbits they didn't have before. Somewhere out there, the faceless magician, clearly more than an accidental visitor, laughs at how well his plan worked — but “that's another story”.

Worldbuilding

Universes

The story principally takes place in the Cupid Homeworld. Chapter 4 takes place in the Euclidean Plane.
The Prime Universe and the Void Between Worlds (known to Aphrodite as the Howling Void) are mentioned.

Other

There is no day and night in the Cupid Homeworld owing to the fact that “the Department of Celestial Bodies had long since been shut down because its members all found better things to do”. The Department of Chronology is no help with keeping track of Homeworld time, as it's usually “busy enough sorting out timeline errors in the various universes the Cupids watched over, without having to be bothered with such nonsense as maintaining the Cupid Homeworld’s own timeline”. This leaves the Department of Sleep to “tell Cupids who liked to rest their fluid links now and then when it was appropriate to sleep, and when it was appropriate to wake up and get back to work”.
The Department of Problem-Solving are working on romanticising anthropomorphic eigengrau eggshells.
Pessimist-242 is on vacation from the Blue Feather.
Pessimist is also known as “the Negatronic Cynic”.
The Department of Psychology would like to study Pessimist, but he has not let them, reasoning that they couldn't help him anyway.
Dandy-432 is a Mark V. He sometimes wears top hats.
Pessimist has seen pictures of stereotypical Prime Universe stage magicians in “the Courier”.
One of the defences placed by the Creator to keep intruders out of the Cupid Homeworld is that “the atmosphere and the clouds were all saturated in frankly unreasonable amounts of Love Potion which would make anyone but a Cupid fall deeply in love with the last person they’d met before coming to the Homeworld”. Authorised visitors are immune, and “powerful psychic entities” can also fight it off sometimes.
Lord Thymon has “666,666,667.6667 dexterous arms and as many quintessential neuron clusters”. When he breathes heavily due to making an effort of strength, his breath “stains the ceiling electric-blue”. He tries to impress a rabbit with his foreboding aura, focused using his eye, and is unsettled when realises that the creature is “so foul and degenerate that telepathy [is] beyond its mental reach”. He is described as a “lovecraftian demon”, a “time demon”, and “an Abomination”.
The Cupid Parliament building is a repurposed spare warehouse.
The Copper-Colored Council of Elders is “composed of the first ten Cupids ever created, the very first Mark Is, lead by Cupid #001, the Cupid Prime. The proliferation of Cupid Intelligence Institute is due to the fact that ordering the creation of a new Department to discuss a given problem is the only reliable way the Elders ever figured out of breaking up the sometimes days-long arguments in the Cupid Parliament.
As well as C.I.I. Prefects, the Cupid Parliament also includes “the head operatives of the Scarlet Wings” as well as “various other Cupids of Importance”. This technically includes Acquaintanceship-982 as head of the Blue Feather, although he is rarely listened to.
Bartleby-853 is the Prefect of the Department of Scrivening.
The Geometrons refer to the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids as “the Enemy”.
Orbicularia Bubble is old enough to remember the “first five Cupids who had stumbled into their universe in one of their Ships through randomising their coordinates”, and how, “tripping over themselves in the unfamiliarly-dimensional environment, they had smiled awkward smiles, tasted the food the locals had offered them, watched television with them”, before they'd remembered their mission and started romanticising people.
Orbiculara's door is made of euclidium and “ten inches thick”, which is enough to stop a “rampaging Ambagesque”, but not Cupids, who can just materialise on the other side using their Fog Ships.
Nothing short of the lasers of a “healthy Octaser” can do much damage to the copper Clockwork Cherubs.
Pythagoras-858, Juliet-178, Carter-1277, Valerius-1497 and Edwin-750 are referred to as “the five foremost members of the Department of Problem-Solving”.
Pythe explains to Lord Thymon that “the Cupid Homeworld’s reality, and that of anyone in it, is… anchored… (…) Our essence run on more than just gemstones and positrons. As long as we’re within the Homeworld, or return there often enough, it’s — stabilized, I think is the word. Whatever else we may be, we remain Cupids”.
Valerius-1497 once belonged to the “short-lived” Department of Philosophy until the Cupid Intelligence Institute's Supreme Quaestor shut it down for “daring to ask if, really, there was such a thing as absolute knowledge”.
In the Christian era, Aphrodite half-heartedly posed as a sorceress or demon. She considered pretending to be an angel or the Virgin Mary but neither option panned out because she found the costumes required too far afield from her usual style.
Eventually, around the 7th century A.D., the Gods of Olympus “agreed to call it quits” and all retired, with Hades notably moving to a villa on the French Riviera.
Gods know when their name of image is invoked, however casually. Because of this, Aphrodite is constantly bombarded with fairly unflattering images of herself as an armless cracked statue despite never even having visited Milo.
Aphrodite met Pythagoras-858 before, and was also familiar with the man from whom he took his name, although she didn't like him much, describing him as a heretic.
When she sees Lord Thymon, Aphrodite reflects that in “the good old days” she'd “have had Zeus throw him into Tartarus”.

Continuity

The Ennead of the Eigengrau Easter Eggs was previously featured in PROSE: Pessimist and the Dromedaries and PROSE: The Strangely-Colored Secret Societies.
The events of PROSE: Lord Thymon and the Department of Problem-Solving are summarised.
Foreman-964 and Conspiracy-1263 are excluded from the Cupid Parliament despite their status as Prefects because “their only contributions to the debates are endless diatribes about warehouses and caterpillars and the like”. The warehouses are an obvious reference to Foreman's characterisation starting in PROSE: New Warehouse To Be Constructed In The Homeworld, the association of Conspiracy with caterpillars references his conspiracy theory cited in PROSE: Conspiracy-1263 Publicly Accuses the Gang of the Green Gorillas that the Cupid Parliament members themselves were “a bunch of literal sock-puppets controlled by an enormous caterpillar”.
Philatel-426 refers to Foreman-964 as Amity-965's brother, referencing the fact established in PROSE: The Resurrection of the Wellsians that Clockwork Cherubs with consecutive serial numbers consider each other “siblings”.
Penalty-534, who appeared at the end of PROSE: The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids in Oz, is confirmed as a member of the Department of Discipline.
The Department of Redundancy Department, first mentioned in PROSE: The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids, is seen in the metallic flesh, with Recursion-462 introduced as its Prefect.
Likewise, the Department of Impossible Things, first mentioned in PROSE: Lord Thymon and the Department of Problem-Solving, is given not one Prefect but — fittingly — two different ones in two different chapters, in the form of Untenable-921 and Barbershop-679.
Taskmaster-523, established in PROSE: The Toymaker's Labyrinth as the Prefect of the Department of Assignments, and Technophile-963, first seen in PROSE: The Mad Cupid of the Euclidean Plane but not previously established as a Prefect, both appear in the Cupid Parliament. Similarly, Optimist-411 of the Department of Motivational Speaking is here confirmed as a Prefect, something not clarified in both Cupid and Department's mention in PROSE: New Warehouse To Be Constructed In The Homeworld.
Miss Bubble and Mr Rectangle, as first seen in VIDEO: The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids, are referenced, with their first names being revealed as Diskie and Quadratus respectively.
Orbicularia Bubble reappeared in PROSE: Multiversal Mischief.
The Department of Problem-Solving once again owns a Fog Ship after their first one was stolen in PROSE: The Resurrection of the Wellsians. The idea that Fog Ships can be locked from the outside, introduced there, is also reused.
Thymon kills time playing with “a plush-toy version of himself”, confirming the suggestion in PROSE: Conspiracy-1263 Publicly Accuses the Gang of the Green Gorillas that he was the one who'd been ordering such plushes to the Homeworld.
The Department of Philosophy was first mentioned in PROSE: The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids, which also established that Aphrodite kept the Cupids supplied with Love Potion.
The Supreme Quaestor was first mentioned in PROSE: Lord Thymon and the Department of Problem-Solving.
PROSE: Family Business elaborated slightly on the mention of the Department of Celestial Bodies in this story, modifying the implied tale from the Department disbanding out of lack of interest, to them having failed in their duties due to gross negligence, failing to operate the Clockwork Sun and Clockwork Moon properly and ultimately misplacing the latter.

Behind the scenes

Read online

This story is available online on the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids website.