“Hades, no!” Jaded yelled with her French accent thick.

“Then your writing was cursed.” Jo said easily, a bit of sarcasm in her voice.

“Who? Why?” Jaded blared, throwing her hands up.

Jo gave her a laconic stare and launched into a stream of French,
literally sprinkled with Merde’s, and ending with “Let me see the code.”

The Rogue opened the executable to QuickView and let Jo scan it, line
by line, the laptop scrolling faster than she could follow. Jaded
blinked, looking over and seeing Jo’s eyes shimmering pure amber and
she swallowed; it made an audible click.

“There!” Jo finally said, pointing to an odd character at the end of
the iterative loop, and then to another, just as odd but not the same,
following the instructions.

“What is it?” The Rogue asked.

Jo shuddered. “Horror, if we don’t find a way to disrupt it.”

“But..butI didn’t write that!” Jaded insisted.

“It wasn’t written at all,” Jo sighed, “It was implanted.”

“What does it do? I mean, it’s programming code, right? It should only affect what runs on the computer.”

“Non,” Jo shook her head, feeling her skin go even colder than normal. “It’s a projector spell.”

“A who what?” Jaded wrinkled her brow; she was so going to get her ass handed to her for this.

“Look,” Jo pointed a slender finger at the screen, scrolling back. You
set up an iterative loop, a random circumstances generator, then it
follows the instruction as to what to do with it take the iteration
and set up a story line or a scene. On the computer. That’s what was
supposed to happen. Right?”

“Well, yeah, that’s how it always worked.” Jaded affirmed.

“The first sigil takes the circumstance iteration and projects it into
reality, three-dimensional space, where it disrupts whatever should
have happened in that place and time to everyone who was there or
proximal to them.”

“Proximal?” Jaded said with a sigh.

Jo rolled her eyes. “Nearby!” Then she snickered. “And you call yourself a writer.”

The Rogue growled, she’d known what it meant, just ticked off that this
was happening at all. “And the second what did you call it?”

“Sigil,” Jo repeated. “It takes the scene generated by the iterative
module, and inserts it into the projected iteration, instead of
scrolling it onto the screen. In effect, it scrolled the scene into
real time and space. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a powerful
curse.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, and she’d seen powerful curses,
since she herself, was cursed.