June 15, 3:03 pm, Nevada, USA
I stared at the absolute mess in front of me. I was sitting cross-legged, on the floor of my throne room, dabbling in a way I hadn't in what felt like centuries. If I were honest, it was probably more like a decade or something since I really tinkered with magic concepts like this. But still. It was nice to just dabble as I had in my youth, wax melting at the side as I rifled through human bones, hand-crafted parchment, a couple of burner phones, one mac and one windows laptop, and just a few liters of orange juice.
Actually, no, I created the pseudo-core earlier this year. How did I forget about that?
Well, if I was honest, I did remember. It just felt like I had done that a lifetime ago. Seriously, had it only been a few months? Did we only start this in March?
Then again, the preparations for this had actually taken a few years. Maybe it wasn't completely unwarranted that it felt like this all started long ago.