Mood For the Day
Today's Mood on Sun, 22 Feb 1998
When one walked into the room, it seemed normal. Normal, that is, for a high-school auditorium-sized room with one hundred twitching bodies, all on their feet on a slick tile floor. The room seemed normal. Well, the music was certainly loud, but after that nothing seemed out of place in the room.
Like a group of dots that suddenly form into a picture, so did certain scenes in the room. A social group in the corner suddenly transformed into a lemonade stand, with Bart Simpson himself at the table, selling free beer to the local constabulary.
A group of dancers winked into an otherwordly circle to summon the spirit of St. Vitus. The summoners were all talented, but also unskilled at otherworld summoning, so the spirit rose and fell some twenty times an hour. Another blink and it was just a circle of dancers again.
Even the people themselves would hop from form to form: always it was that of an animal but some were alive and some were not and some were trays of wild, luscious food being served to a rural carnivore's association.
The magic is behind each molecule and permeates the air: it rifles through the crowd like forks of lightning, touching every member in the room -- witting or unwilling, the magic touches everyone.
The spells are cast not by one, but by a group of, wizards: they each know their posts well and operate together seamlessly. In their concert and harmony they become one.
This Technology and Magic used modern approaches to traditional methods: although, like ancient hypnoses, the spells were useless against one's convictions, the conclave made sure that everyone was at least exposed to the spell's song. And of course magic is often more effective en masse than it is to the individual.
Anything not born of conviction was fair game. Emotions, attitudes, and even a general predisposition to smile or sweat was fed to the receptives throughout the crowd in a pattern that a stroboscopic camera might uncover. The lights in that room, though, were mercifully constant: dim enough to trigger one's night vision but light enough to distinguish primary colors.
Thousands go out of their way at every opportunity to relax, to shut off their brains, to allow background noise to lose them in a sweet haze of overstimulus: the very condition in which hypnosis is most effective. The wizards' conclave was kept so busy it could hardly keep up with emergent technology.
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