For as long as man lived magic was real, feared and revered, with the exception of an imperceptibly short period of time which was ironically named after light.
Light had nothing to do with it!
This book chronicles, in no
enlightened
fashion and with too much focus on the carnal, the return of the human race to its magical roots.
1
Close your eyes and the world will become real. Open them and you're staring at but shadows and illusions. Listen to your heart and you'll be free. The only way out of the abyss is to stop thinking.
Elijah Jones had to double-check the book's cover to make sure it wasn't a cheesy fiction of some sort. It wasn't. It rather stated matter-of-factly its name and objective:
Fifty-three Steps to Unlock the Mysteries of the Universe
. Even its writer's name seemed serious: Nazarhak Shagardan.
He hesitated for a second... then grabbed a pen and underlined the "stop thinking" advice. A highlighter would be a better option but what young man owns one of those. He then added in the white space next to it: "This explains a lot."
In thirty seconds, his sister's smile as she receives her returned book will dissipate when she notices the sacrilege... and the insult. Elijah would laugh at her reaction, and insult her book some more. Their mother's asking them--alarmingly and urgently--to "
come see this
" was the only reason Ashley didn't completely go at her brother.
In the living room they found their mother staring at the TV. Dumbfounded. They too became dumbfounded after staring at the TV. The reputable anchorwoman had just announced the arrival of some unusual guests. Humanity had received guests for the first time, and one of them--a very tall and ethereally beautiful woman--was being interviewed on live television.
"This has got to be a prank," Elijah said when he came back to his senses. "A modern-day
War of the Worlds
' drama."
His mother looked at him incredulously. She pressed a button on the remote, and one channel after another was showing the same event; the only difference is the channel's logo and the text at the bottom.
"A bigger effort than I initially estimated, then. Still, a large-scale prank is much more probable than interstellar travel. Only a dimwitted person would thin-"
He didn't get to finish his rational remark, for his mother--for the first time in his life--took him over her knee and spanked him!
2
All over the globe, people started rejecting the friendship offer of the Paendans: the alien species visiting Earth. Some people even rejected their mere existence, and insisted that the whole event was one psyop or another.
The first confrontation was a political one. The spacecraft had landed in New York in front of the UN Headquarters, and was appealing to the myriad nations of Earth to collectively bargain with them-- one species to another. This was clearly a gargantuan mistake on their part. Using 'collective' and 'bargain' this close to one another caused the host nation of the UN Headquarters to undergo what historians of the future will label as
the Red Scare 2.0
. Consequently, the People's Republic of China offered the visiting race, who intended to collectively bargain, an eager invitation to land and temporarily resettle on their turf. This open invitation moved the Doomsday Clock up to 0.5 minute until Midnight.
To add holy salt to injury, heads of organized religions--separately and with great animosity to one another--asked of Earth's visitors to confirm the one and only universal truth (which happens to coincide perfectly with each speaker's own dogma) if they truly wish to gain humanity's trust. It didn't help that the Paendans' response was this:
"For the sake of furthering the friendship between our two species we're willing to tell Earthmen what they want to hear, provided that they reorganize in one clearly-defined, superstitious belief-system first. Otherwise, this white lie business won't work."
One Reddit user by the name of Rationalist_Elijah divulged in detail the personal suffering the arrival of the extraterrestrials had inflicted on him. He would interrupt his typing at intervals to rub his still sore bottom.
Between the impending nuclear destruction, the theological jihad and Elijah's red bottom, the Paendans had no choice but to skedaddle back to the solar system from which they came. Leaving only one cryptic message to whomever may listen:
"
The only way out of the abyss is to stop thinking
."
3
Things returned to normal.
Some works of sci-fi were moved to the drama genre. But that was it.
Rationalist_Elijah joined a local Femdom Subreddit in a quest to find a reasonably-pricing Pro Domme to spank him. But that was hardly the Paendans' fault; they would never have willingly inflicted such an unbearable situation on a young mind as finding a reasonably-pricing Pro Domme.
Some daring linguists tried their hand at decoding whatever hidden message in the aliens' cryptic sentence, but there wasn't much to go about. Finally, they heeded the literal meaning of it and ceased their attempts.
The Doomsday Clock was back to 10 minutes until Midnight.
Ashley Jones was masturbating herself to sleep every night to the memory of her brother's naked ass over their mother's knee, getting gradually redder as it writhed about with no rhythm or purpose-- a poor little tush with a mind of its own trying comically to escape its long overdue medicine. She would feel terribly guilty about the subject of her fantasies shortly after her toe-numbing orgasms. Helen Jones didn't feel guilty at all, but that might be due to the fact that she only masturbated to the memory of that event twice a week or so.
On one eventful Thursday, late in the evening, when the three Joneses happened to be hand-deep in their respective underwear, milking the exact same mental imagery of their shared domestic discipline experience; something magical happened. Ashley sensed it first. An otherworldly source of nourishment coursing through her veins. Was she imagining it all? She thought about if for a second but then realized that she was too far gone in her lustful trance to care. She stopped what she was doing, stood up, looked presentable--as presentable as possible under the circumstances--and headed to her brother's closed door. The river of power flooding into her was intoxicating. She somehow knew what she had to do. Ashley could see her younger brother behind the closed door. His hand and his erect penis were clearly visible despite the door, the dark room, the duvet and his underwear being in the way. She should be freaked out but she was pure instincts at this point.