A Literary Year - Flag

Flag rubbed at his temples, trying to alleviate the pressure caused from straining his eyes to see the words floating above the pages of his most sought-after possession. The Archimedes Palimpsest is a book containing a number of original essays by the famed philosopher whose name defines it. These were bleached so that monks could later write over the text with Psalms of their own. Flag didn't care for either of these things. His interest was in the words behind the words, strange magical glyphs that modern Earth inhabitants lost the ability to see... and even he couldn't read them all of the time. The magical writing was written in 3(4?) dimensions and could be extracted from the book by changing the angle in which they were viewed. The polychromatic cubes of light that the pages produced were difficult to read and he could only go so far before his head started to hurt. The fact that he had it at all was quite a feat. Almost a full year ago he commissioned Ti-Jean to fabricate a duplicate of the book so that he'd be able to swap it out with the original at an opportune moment. A moment that would have never come if he had not spent years cultivating doubt in Robert Afela - the book's original owner. Through quiet nudgings and subtle hints, Flag had managed to convince Mr. Afela into forming an expedition to the Library at Alexandria in order to find original scrolls that never existed. They did find something and in the excitement, Flag simply swapped out the real book with the fake one that Ti-Jean made. Robert never noticed the difference. The worst part of the expedition was the wait. Even after he got the book he desired, he had to fake interest in the rest of the trip. This kept him in the middle-east for far longer than he wanted and there had been a couple of close calls with the local authorities, who had been alerted to the possibility of VILE criminals in their midst. Eventually the venture ended and Flag was able to return to the tiny city of Jacksonville, Florida. There was no significance to the city, and no reason for any crime syndicate (let alone VILE) to take up residence. It only meant something to him, and the reason behind the sentiment was literally lost in time. Here he had spent months trying to put into practice the spells and rituals he found in his newly acquired tome. However, he was met with little success. At first he attributed this to the mediums he had purchased for creating diagrams. it was caution erring on the side of laziness to use supplies made by someone other than the spell caster after all. However, even when he did make his own chalk and forge his own knife, he still did not have any luck. This period of trial and error lasted until about a week ago, when the drop in the cities homeless population had become noticeable. He was also running out of ways to hide what was left of the bodies. These "disposable resources" did serve him well. He had learned that blood served better than chalk and that (his) magical blood served better than that. The fault then lied in the gems he attempted to craft into amulets. For the purpose of storing energy, clarity and strength were needed. This meant diamonds, though - just like with the chalk - the ones he initially purchased failed catastrophically. The sorcerer eventually learned that this was because they were created in a lab and while they might have been structurally perfect, they lacked the life natural diamonds have. Unfortunately, naturally occurring diamonds had difficulty in acheiving the same level of purity that their dead counterparts did. Flag discovered this after a series of really expensive failed tests. He also discovered that after a point, "pure" diamonds were virtually unobtainable. The tower incident had caused him to want to lay low, but his need for the right supplies has thrown him headlong into the world of theiving again. He was contemplating all of this as he laid his head down on the small table that served as a desk in his modest motel room. He knew what he had to do, but it could wait for now.