I meet a lot of strange folks in my line of work. When you're a journeyman healer, part of your training is a rotation in home health. You go around to the old folks, the hospice patients, people recovering from injuries, and you do the basics.

You'd think that healing magic would have supplanted most medical practice. After all, it is a cure for damn near everything. And the things it can't cure it's really good at helping be bearable. But that "damn near" covers a lot of ground, and Healing isn't easy.

It's possibly the most demanding form of magic for the practitioner. Unlike what elementalists or necromancers or whatever do, the majority of the energy used has to come from yourself, and the person being Healed. Typical magic, you pull up maybe ten percent of your total wellsource for the average high end spell, if you've a good bit of juice to begin with.

A Healer? The master Healers that can do things like genetic repair, they'll use their entire wellsource on one treatment. Cancer eradication can drain your tanks enough that you might be able to swing two or three patients a day.

Journeymen like me end up doing the stuff that's less intensive energetically, but we do a lot of it each day. At my level of training, I can't permanently cure arthritis (which is a very difficult procedure that's actually harder in some ways than a cancer), but I can give a person a week or two of improved movement and reduced or zero pain while they wait for a Master specialist.

That's how I met Millie. She's a crusty old bag. That's not me insulting her, that's how she introduced herself.

"You're the new flunky? I'm Millie, the crusty old bag you're here to keep the crust from turning lethal."

"I didn't know being crusty could kill you."

"Oh, it ain't me it would kill."

That's Millie, summed up in the first few seconds of meeting her. She's in her late sixties, and was a kid during the God Wars. She grew up seeing mountains crumble, the seas boil, and miracles be thrown around like candy. But don't ask her about the God Wars. If you want to keep her crust off of you, it might be wise to not use the term god at all. You might get by with calling them deities, and calling the Wars just that, though she sometimes balks at deity as well.

See, Millie is an atheist. No, not a non worshipper, those are a dime a dozen. An actual atheist. She doesn't believe the gods are real. Oh, she recognises that something did all those horrors during the Wars. And she freely admits that they fill the role of what gods are supposed to be doing.

She just thinks they're a shared hallucination of sorts.

"Glen, right this second, you're channeling your juice into me, strengthening cartilage, scaling back inflammation and selectively tuning my immune system. That's fuckin' magic. You. A human. A regular asshole."

"I'm not a regular asshole, Ms Millie."

"Bull tits you ain't. You're as regular an asshole as anyone. And that's my point. They's what? Four billion of us on this rock?"

"Yes'm, about that, though we're supposedly getting closer to five."

"Well, there you go. Magic came back hard and fast, like my third husband.

You ain't gonna ask about that?"

"No ma'am, you already told me about Lawrence. Big ol' tallywhacker and he could work magic with his hips."

"That's the one! Damn shame healers weren't as established then, I do miss his tallywhacker.

You ain't gonna ask about that?"

"No ma'am, I know that's all you miss about him. He was the one that couldn't keep it to him and your self."

"That's the one!

You see my point though?"

"Lawrence's johnson was god?"

"Smartass. No, magic. It came back first. If the gods were real, why'd they go away in the first place, and why'd they not come back before magic?"

"I'm not a metaphysicist ma'am, I just tune up crusty old bags."

"Well, you oughta think about it. It tells you more about how magic really works than a fancy certificate and being called Master Healer ever will."

"The pay would probably be better too."

"Pssht, ain't no such thing as fair pay. Capitalism sees to that.

Shush and listen boyo.

Magic ain't some kind of woowoo bullshit any more. It's real, I can feel it plumping up my cartilage."

"That's not exactly..."

"I said shush, boy! Magic is just as real as gravity. Shush! Don't you lecture me on inverse cubes and thaums per unit of vaccuum! I'm talking important shit here! Damn over educated whelp!

No, magic is right part of everything. It's like sand in your cooch at the beach. It gets in and it's there to stay. So you might as well just get nekkid and have fun."

"Okay, but what does that have to do with gods?"

"Everything! If we ain't doin' somethin' with it, magic just sits there like gravity or the electromagnetic force.

Gods ain't nothin' but our wet dreams gone wrong."

"Well, Aphrodite is rather dreamy."

"Pull your dick outta your ear and listen, boy.

Humans dream big. We always have, look at all the shit we got that goes back at least thousands of years. Myths and legends, that's what sets us apart from the rest of the animals."

"And animals don't have gods."

"Now you're usin' that brain for somethin' other than a spank bank!

That's exactly right, they ain't got gods. Them assholes in philosophy like to debate about why animals can have souls, but don't always, but everybody knows they don't have gods.

That's cause they ain't got imagination neither. And what's the first rule of magic?"

"Ahhhh, are you talking about Crowley again?"

"Weren't his idea, he just parroted it. And no, I ain't talking about them thelma-ites. I ever tell you about my old hemorrhoid Thelma?"

"You name your hemorrhoids? I can take care of those, by the way."

"No, she was a human. My neighbor, round about thirty years ago. She was a pain in my ass, Glen. Try to keep up."

"You never told me about her, no."

"Oh boy, do I got stories! But that's for later.

Them thelma-ites.. Shush! I know it's Thelema, let a woman have her fun, dammit.

But they have their little "do what thou wilt" thing, with all its corollaries. But them ain't what I'm talking about.

No. The first rule of magic is: magic is the process of altering the universe by harnessing will and thought.

You can't magic completely by accident. There's always a kernel of will behind it. S'why young'ns can sometimes do really scary shit, but cain't repeat it. They want something really bad, and their will shapes the universe. They just ain't trained their will like you have."

"I think I'm starting to see what you're saying."

"Good! Means you ain't hopeless after all! You might even get laid some day!

Shush! I ain't done!

Magic comes back like my Lawrence after a third go-round, hard and fast, but sloppy.

People were like kids. No focus, no training, no way to control their new access to a fundamental force of the universe. And what kind of shit is in human heads?"

"In your case..."

"Shush boy! That were rhetorical!

Myths and legends. That's the shit in our heads. Ain't no surprise a bunch of damn hippies manifested Gaea as the first deific entity. All of them whacked out of their heads, tripping balls on acid and weed, their collective imagination channeling their will go something they thought of as better.

That's why I'm an atheist. Well, that and pure-t stubbornness. I ain't about to believe in any Johnny-come-lately shit like some of them gods. Cthulhu weren't ever a god to begin with! And here he is ruling the ocean deeps and nightmares! Now, how can you think any of the rest are real when Cthulhu is right there among them!?"

"Okay, you've got a point there for sure. But does it matter, if they do the job of gods, and have the power of gods?"

"Of course it fuckin' matters boy! You cain't give them fuckers one more bit of will and power than they already have, or we'll never see the ass end of 'em!

And they can all fuck right back off into the collective unconsciousness, the way they fucked this whole world up when we gave 'em a door into reality."

"Yeah, the Wars sucked. Even the good ones struggled to keep it from being worse."

"Ain't no "Good Ones", Glen. They're all the same one. They're all us. And that's bad enough, Glen, that's bad enough."