[NOTE: Mage: The Ascension WAS NOT created by me I simply play the game, the REAL thanks for the whole base of this story should go to Phil Brucato, and Jess Heinig. AND all the people at White Wolf! – Fever]

Amanda knew instinctively that the patterns formed by psion structures underlay all material reality and that a conscious mind, if it was fully aware of its powers, could manipulate key points of the pattern that would be reflected by physical changes or manifestations. Thus the essence of reality could be rewritten by a command from an "Aware" mind. Amanda’s head swam from the implications.

Amanda picked up the newspaper she had left laying beside her bed two days before and turned to the entertainment section, "Ooh, the Faculty…. I’ve been wanting to see that," she said aloud to herself in the high-pitched timbre of her girlhood. She looked out the window at the clear afternoon sky that presaged a slightly chill but dry December night and decided to forgo a jacket. She’d be warm enough as long as she got back before sundown.

Amanda giggled like the teenaged girl she had become when she realized she would have to sneak in the R-rated movie to see it. She also realized that she’d have to sneak back in before he daughter came home so she would have time to invoke her powers to revert to her natural pattern. As she prepared to leave the house, she told herself, "Yes! This will definitely be a night to remember!"

What Amanda had forgotten from playing the game of Mage was a very simple rule; reality can only take so much strain before it fights back. If she had thought about it, she would have realized that the psionic structure that underlies the Universe is a cumulative effect of multiple consciousnesses. The formative reality that is constituted by both consciousness and psionic fields are holographic in nature. While small local changes in the probability of a certain event can be effected harmlessly, large scale events like major spells distort the matrix of the Universal psionic field itself. The larger the change, the larger energy that is required to enforce it against the combined energies of all the conscious beings in the Universe. Since that number approaches infinity in realistic terms, the forces preventing major changes to the Universe are also infinitely large.

Even though the change in herself was, on a Cosmic scale, relatively small, extremely large forces had already begun to counteract the changes she had made. The only known exception to the rule was when a change was effected with an absolutely pure motive of love. Since love is a type of non-linear binding force that is strictly applicable to only psion particles, it can cause a state change in the psionic field without perturbing the rest of the field. In layman’s terms, a spell that had been cast with pure love as the energizing force has no Karmic or psychic backlash. All other spells, whether intended for good or ill have some sort of Karmic or psychic backlash as the psionic field attempts to re-achieve a stable state.

Since Amanda appearance didn’t match her driver’s license, she decided to call a cab. A few minutes after she telephoned a taxi company, the cab arrived. She opened the back door of the cab and gave the driver an address that was barely one block away from the theatre where the film she wanted to see was playing. After she paid off the cabby, she walked to the theatre and loitered around the side entrances, looking for a chance to sneak into the building. When the movie ended, the door opened and she passed back in like a teenager looking for her family.

Once she had sneaked into the movie theatre unobserved, she went straight to the woman’s bathroom to wait until the next showing of the film. After her watch showed that the film had just started, she left her hiding place and purposely bumped into one of the teenaged ushers that was attempting to keep out of management’s sight so he wouldn’t be tasked with a quick cleanup of the floor of the next film to end. The fifteen-year-old’s raging male hormones had made him incapable of the logical analysis of the pretty teenaged girl’s hastily contrived cover story. Within minutes, she was guided to a seat in the movie of her choice by a flashlight-equipped, unbearded, pimply-faced lad powered by high-octane testosterone. (High-octane testosterone gives more bangs to the buck!) As he left her to watch the movie, the young man kept asking himself just where he had seen that girl before. She looked so much like a classmate of his named Kimberly that she could have been her sister. He shook his head as he reached the back of the theatre. If he was to avoid the hated floor cleanup detail, he had to appear busy.

"Maybe I should go and ask Shirley if she needs the trash from the snackbar taken out to the dumpster. Olddumpster," he thought to himself, "Old man Farley can’t object to that if he catches me, and maybe she’ll say "yes" to a date with me if I do something nice for her. After all, it’s really the job of the people in the snackbar to clean their own area."

Amanda made herself comfortable and waited patiently for the movie trailers to end before the movie proper began. About halfway through the movie, Amanda had lost patience. It wasn’t that the movie was bad, far from it; the horror flick was really quite well done. Unfortunately, the three teenaged girls who were sitting directly in front of her would simply not shut up no matter how many times she shushed them.

From the minute the theatre lights were dimmed, they began and continued an ongoing dialog about the their teachers at school and the boys they had dated and intended to date. Amanda found their mindless meaningless drivel so infuriating, she wanted to scream. In a fit of pure hatred for the sophomoric inanities to which she had been subjected, she decided to take vengeance on the loud-mouthed chatterboxes.

Amanda sat quietly after the movie had ended, waiting patiently for her time to come. As she had guessed, even after everyone had left the theatre the three teenaged girls were still engaged in their babble about boys. Amanda looked at her watch and saw that it would be at least ten minutes before the movie was shown again. She grinned tightly to herself as she saw her chance to teach the three inconsiderate airheads a lesson in manners.

As Amanda stood up, she was already reading their patterns and forming new ones in her mind. She called down to them, "Hey, chatterboxes! I’m trying to watch this movie. Would you mind keeping your chattering down to a dull roar so the rest of us can watch the show in peace? I can’t hear the movie over your incessant yammering!"

One of the girls looked up at the silly twit who looked all of sixteen-years-old who had the temerity to reprove a Senior in High School for her misbehavior. "Listen you piss-ant! I don’t know what your malfunction is," she huffed, "Butt out of our business! Go find your mommy and complain to her! From the looks of you, you aren’t even old enough to be in this movie alone! One word from us to the manager and you’re out of here! Get it? Now shut the fuck up!"

Amanda’s temper flared as the three girls giggled at their leader’s comeback as they stood up to leave.

"Sit down!", Amanda commanded.

The leader of the three turned back and sneered at Amanda, "Or what? You’ll tell on us?"

Suddenly, the three of them were turned around and forced into their seats by unknown forces as Amanda seized the lines of their existence and twisted their patterns.

Amanda smiled at their helplessness as the three girls struggled like strapped-in toddlers trying to leverage themselves out of their high chairs. The pattern that Amanda had created had taken complete control their bodies.

"What the fuck did you do to us, you psycho bitch!", spat the snobby looking red-headed girl.

"Children should be seen and not heard, ‘Red’," Amanda said as she manipulated the girl’s pattern a tiny bit and removed her ability to vocalize.

"You! You’re apparently their leader," Amanda said viscously to the blonde High School Senior, "You talk about me being too young to be here! From my viewpoint, you’re barely out of diapers."

"Barely out of what?? What the fuck are you talking about? I’ve been…," she stopped as an embarrassing warm sensation began in her groin and crawled down to her bottom to wet the burgundy-colored velour fabric of the theatre seat. The blonde looked down in abject horror as a huge dark spot grew between the legs of her jeans and spread outwards down her inner thighs.

There was a loud ripping sound as the seam of her jeans parted at her groin, followed closely by the small sound of the bottom seam of her nylon panties separating under the power of Amanda’s spell. The cloth of the material covering the girl’s pubic area rolled itself up and drew back to the girl’s speechless terror, revealing her curly-haired privates for anyone to behold. The girl’s pee continued to burst forth in a terrific stream, even though the poor girl did her best to clamp her legs down and control the outflow. All the girl managed for her efforts was to completely soak her jeans and her T-shirt. The rush of pee was too powerful to contain; it split into a half-dozen high-pressure jets that spewed everywhere, soaking the blonde’s ensemble completely. Once she saw the futility of attempting to hold back the flow, the girl opened her legs and let the gush of pee overrun the straps of her brown leather sandals and began to pool behind a waterproof dam of crushed, butter-flavored, oil-sodden popcorn on the concrete floor. One-by-one, the blonde’s pubic hairs died under the enchantment and were completely washed away by the spray of the girl’s cursed urine. Within seconds, the blonde teenager’s pubis was as naked as the day she was born.

"You were saying?", Amanda smiled down in maternal superiority at the spreading puddle of pee beneath the girl’s seat as she continued, "From the looks of it, I think that ‘Little Miss Potty-Mouth’ isn’t even potty-trained! Honeybunch, from my viewpoint, it looks like you have the hairless pee-pee of a baby! You should be ashamed of yourself! Just look at the mess you’ve made! You’ve wet yourself like a baby! Frankly, from the way you act, I doubt that you have the bladder control of a two-year-old toddler! If you were my little girl, you’d have to wear overnight diapers and plastic panties twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week!"

Once the floodgates of blonde’s bladder had been magickally forced open, she was helpless to stop the seemingly endless torrent which sluiced out between her legs and over the waterlogged seat cushion in a yellow waterfall to inundate the gray concrete floor in front of her seat. Within seconds, the rising level of pee crested the popcorn dam and carried the dam away to rush down the inclined bare concrete of the theatre floor in a three-foot-wide yellow flood.

Amanda smiled at the blonde girl’s discomfiture as she witnessed her spell’s effects. The slightly pudgy girl seemed to deflate slightly as sixteen pounds of water weight were converted into two gallons of urine that streamed from her groin as rapidly as possible to prevent her bladder from exploding. Amanda’s maternal experiences while raising her daughter made the smell that issued from the center of the first three rows of seats in the theatre immediately recognizable to her. The odor of warm, fresh human urine was as natural and normal to a baby’s mother as the ammoniated stench of a spoiled overnight diaper.

Amanda shook her head quietly to herself in the habit of jaded maternal understanding that all women of all cultures acquire when they become mothers. Obviously, if the public behavior of the three hellions in front of her was any clue, they probably didn’t bathe that often privately either. If that was the case, then it wouldn’t be long before the bacteria on the blonde leader’s skin began converting the urea in her pee to ammonia. Just to be sure, she "tweaked" the spell a bit to foster the conversion process. Within fifteen minutes, "Miss Potty-Mouth’s" clothes would reek as if she had wet them early that morning. By the time she was discovered, she’d have a horrible case of ammonia-induced diaper rash from her pee-sodden clothing. With any luck, the effects of the spell on the growth of her dermal bacteria would cause an immediate infection, resulting in the painful purulent pustules of true diaper rash rather than the easily treated petechiae of a local irritation of her skin due to soured-pee induced ammonia burns from a fermented, urine-soaked, diaper.

Amanda sneered at the girl’s distressed look as she said mockingly, "I bet you wish you didn’t have that giant Coke during the movie, don’t you? Don’t worry, you’ll only need diapers for six months or so, at worst it will only be a year or two." Amanda laughed scornfully as she continued, "Of course then you’ll have to sleep in training panties until you stop wetting the bed! I’d say it will be about two to four years before you’re ready to sleep in a bed without a waterproof plastic mattress cover under the bedsheets!"

Somehow the annoying brunette called Cynthia managed to move in her seat a bit. Apparently, the pattern she had laid upon the girls was beginning to slip. Amanda suddenly realized that the concept of vulgar magick from the rules of Mage had a real meaning. If the patterns were shifted too far and too fast, the "inertial mass" of the total psionic field would dissolve the pattern before it had time to "settle" in place and become part of normative reality.

"Shit, she’s getting out of control! If I’m not careful with the number of changes here, it could backfire on me! Subtlety is the key here rather than outright magickal vulgarity. " Amanda thought cautiously.

Then she saw Cynthia get out of her seat and lost her temper. "Oh, screw it!", she thought to herself, "I can deal with a little Paradox."

Amanda gave the girl a sickly sweet smile as she quietly called to the girl in a trilling maternal tone before Cynthia had moved five steps away from her seat, "Oh, Cynthia! I wouldn’t run if I were you."

Cynthia turned at the sound of Amanda’s voice. It was a fatal mistake. The pause in Cynthia’s flight gave Amanda enough time to alter her pattern as well. A second later, Cynthia’s legs folded beneath her as she crumbled to the floor. Amanda smiled and said to the fallen girl, "You, my dear, have just had all motor responses reset to that of a one-day-old infant."

Cynthia tried to scream but all that came out of her mouth was the weak puling of a newborn infant. She waved her arms around trying to push herself up, but the motions of her arms were ineffectual; most of her movements were completely random. She had lost all control of her legs. When she tried to move them, her Coke-filled bladder misinterpreted her brain’s commands and loosed itself immediately. To Amanda’s utter delight, a puddle of warm urine formed around the girl’s midsection. Amanda had just chuckled at the thought of how the fiber in the barrel of popcorn the girls had eaten during the movie were going to effect them in the next hour or two. Of course, by that time the manager of the theatre would have called the police, who in turn would call ambulances to take the teenaged infants to the hospital.

Amanda knew that when the staff at the emergency room saw their urine-soaked clothes, they would almost certainly put the three girls in adult diapers in anticipation of further "accidents". The messes that would issue from their loose bowels would be safely contained in the hospital diapers, further humiliating the three girls. Their parents would be called and they’d be held at the hospital for observation and diagnosis. When they recovered, everyone would assume that the teenagers had taken some new form of street drug which had temporarily reduced their minds and/or body control to infantile levels. Just to be sure, she modified the personal patterns of the three girls so that each of them would have an uncontrollable urge to suck their thumbs day and night.

"You know," Amanda said to the three of them, "Cynthia looks so cute lying there that I think that the two of you should join her."

Amanda adjusted the patterns of the two seated girls and they were released from their seats. They had just gotten up to flee, when Amanda finished the new pattern. Instantly, the two of them fell to their knees and began to creep over to their friend on hands and knees. She laughed and called out, "Red! Would you like to be able to talk to your friends? Of course you would, you just can’t contain yourself can you?"

As she called out to the red-headed girl, Amanda made her last change to the pattern. Just as the two girls reached their fallen comrade on the floor, ‘Red’s’ voice was restored to her. Unfortunately for her, her pattern had been adjusted so that she could only babble like a nine-month-old baby. As a further refinement, her bladder control was reset to match her two friends. The red-headed girl whimpered as she too peed uncontrollably in her pants.

As Amanda began to walk off, the blonde shouted, "Wait a minute! You can’t just leave us like this!"

Amanda smiled and said, "I don’t see why not. Who’s going to stop me?"

Amanda started walking to the exit, but was stopped by the shouts for help from the blonde. She turned around and said severely to her, "Naughty, naughty! That won’t do at all! Haven’t you learned to be quiet in theatres? Poor little Cynthia has! Why don’t I just give you the same verbal skills that she has? Since you’re obviously friends with each other, maybe you should all become nine-month-old babies at the same time. That way your mommies can let you play together! That way Cynthia doesn’t have to be the youngest in the group. She’ll be able to crawl around on all fours in her dydees just like the two of you. Won’t that be nice? You can all remain playmates!"

A moment later all that came out of the blonde’s mouth was an excited gurgle. Amada turned and left the teenaged babies on the floor of the theatre to be picked up and cared for by their parents. As she opened the door to the side exit, all she heard from the theatre was the thin fearful cries of three young babies. Amanda smiled to herself as she made her way to a public telephone to call the taxi company. She knew from the nature of the Paradox that they would revert to normal in a few days at most. The level of energy she had used to effect the change was insufficient for it to be permanent. Unfortunately for the three girls, their babbling, thumb-sucking, diaper-messing infantine behavior over the next few weeks would cause their suspicious parents to keep them in diapers and feed them from baby bottles for a number of months after they had recovered control of their bodies. She chuckled to herself when she thought that maybe they wouldn’t be so damned noisy in theatres in the future.

While Amanda sat in the backseat of the cab on her way home, her thoughts turned to her daughter. Instead of staying at her side while she was in the hospital, Kimberly had decided to go home and spend the night with one of her boyfriends. She was angry with Kimberly for leaving her alone and helpless in a semi-comatose state at the hospital so she could rush off to sleep with her boyfriend. She smiled to herself when she thought of how the three girls’ parents were going treat them when they got them home. In their condition, all their parents could do would be to put waterproof plastic sheets on their beds and diapers on their bottoms. The three girls wouldn’t even be able to drink from sippy cups and until they had regained control of their bodies, they’d have to be hand-fed from baby bottles. She frowned when she considered her daughter, "Now Kimberly, on the other hand, won’t get off as easy as those three did." Amanda’s escalating hubris and Hell-bent descent into moral madness which had been augured by the bodiless voice of her Avatar had begun.