I've rejected my diary during the past few weeks due to all the extra work I was behind while I ducked life with my snakelike appearance. Nobody seems to think it's a huge deal, except me of course. I guess it's not a huge deal, just ego-blowing. Michelle told me to let my backlash heal naturally, but I couldn't deal with it anymore. Yes, I took a huge risk, but I managed to heal my forked tongue at least to a lisping level, which is far more tolerable.

The lisp took place only a day before a successful drug deal. It seems that they like our stuff, and we now can expect a decently steady income if the crop stays in good shape. I now fear rituals a bit though...both Carmen and I suffered a decently frustrating backlash from our ritual of changing the "hyacinths" back to the natural form. We both have nice little viney tatoos on our hands. I can't help but think if the ritual was done by one of us, only one of us would have suffered. It's not that I'm upset about it, god, I might as well have done it since I was messed up anyway, but it seems that mistakes in rituals effect everybody, which is a little scarey.

Meanwhile, I did get the house for 1M, minus any amount the insurance offers the owner for a "cracked" foundation that "magickally" appeared during the inspection. Beowrryn rocks. He may be a little depressive and dark, but he certainly has his good qualities! My house is sold, and these past weeks have been getting work caught up, getting my Lockerbie house empty and in storage, and preparing for decorating the new house. I've discovered the helpfulness of Coorespondance magick in this matter. Simon seems to like the node, and our plans to take over the island. He was pointing out the power we could maintain being so near one. I can't say I like his style, but he does know his Prime, and I've learned quite a bit from him.

Speaking of Simon, our next due date for mass life endangerment is December 21. Apparantly during the stalking of Robert's place, Simon has deduced a massive ritual that Robert's planning for Winter Solstice....a good time to strike. Guns seem to be the best source of attack, so I plan to be in a tree with my elephant rifle in hand. The others have been practicing as well, so we should be in good shape. Not everything in life has to be handled with magick, after all.

The group took to Simon more than I thought. As paranoid as our group is, I was a bit surprised. I'm just glad that Azit was my mentor, not him. Nice guy at heart, even apologised for his snippy derogatory manner last night, but I just can't get over the feeling I'm sitting in Oxford's hallowed halls, dying for a drink. I really don't even know how I survived that place...the great pubs, I guess. It helped being a zoology major rather than philosphy major. I'm VERY surprised Camen took to him. I mean, we hadn't even finished our meal and she was trying to learn. I felt like she was betraying Michelle some, especially since Michelle didn't trust Simon, but Carmen's pretty bitter about Michelle. I've actually talked to Michelle about it, and she swears that Carmen had already awakened and had stumbled across her, but Carmen still seems to hold it against Michelle for whatever's happened since. I try to not even bring up the subject anymore. One way or the other, it would seem that Simon's now a part of our little group. I think he's a cold hearted fish though. We were talking about the node, and while I understand we should try and protect that amount of power from children and anybody, for that matter, his attitude really rankled me. According to him we are sooo much better than everybody else. My philosophy on life differs quite a bit, and I can't stand that arrogant assery, so we had our first little tiff. I have a feeling that I'll agree with him to a measure on most things, but his approach is going to usually piss me off....I'm betting.

Back to me.

Michelle and I have been working hard and long on my knowledge of life effects in the magickal world. She has really opened my eyes to potential abilities, such as completely mutating animals, or even myself, and affecting the psychological awareness within people. I'm getting more comfortable with my understanding of this realm of knowledge, but I do miss Azit's more direct training. I do understand know the difference between a mentor and just a helpful friend, so I am having to practice my new concept myself to become better acquanted with the nuances. I'm pretty sure I succeeded on my first try, mutating a lizard into a chameleon, but changing a Rhinoceros snake into a Rainbow snake did NOT work so well, as I now have a forked tongue and rainbow qualities to my skin.

Carmen was kind enough to provide me 56 hours of movies, and I emailed everybody I would have to be in contact with over the next few days that I was down with larynitis. I just know Tom's going to fuck up my experiment at work. At least that miserable feeling of impending doom is washing away. I feel pretty good, other than ugly and unable to speak.

Edwards! Robert's last name is Edwards. Our little Cabal (I'm learning supernatural terms) decided it was time to step up the drama into some true excitement, so we have surveillance on Robert, and plans to dig into Robert's background.

I haven't written this week because it's been a rather mundane (ha, mundane) week, with only the slight elevation of adrenaline trying to make a direct offer to the seller, breaking every realtor contract rule in the book. Unfortunately, it failed miserably, and I'll have to work with the bitch, but I have a realtor friend to do my work so she doesn't get all 7% of the sale. I do have plans to avenge her untolerable rudeness to my friends as soon as the dotted line is signed *smirk*.

Anyway, back to my improved knowledge of magick-terminology-that-probably-doesn't-matter-anyway. Apparantly a Cabal is a group of people. There's a Chantry, but I already forget it's meaning. Another unimportant epiphany is that Hermes isn't just a piece of Greek mythology, as there seems to be a bunch of mages running around imitating Greek gods, specifically, the Order of Hermes. I ran into Simon, the educator of all-unimportant words, while changing the surveillance tapes at Robert's. SIMON is the dude that informed me of Robert's last name....Robert Edwards. Very English. Anyway, we had seen his car earlier pulling out of Robert's place, but we couldn't locate him; instead he located me, as it seems that he also a mage appraising Robert's library and suspecting something amiss. I'm willing to take him at face value right now, considering somebody THAT tight assed about magick in general would never dream of going undercover for a marauder, so I took him to the Wellington and filled him in...Luka and Michelle saw him, and there was some rather tense moments as I started to realise that I had never heard of the formal Order of Hermes from Michelle because she apparantly despises and distrusts them.

Simon gave me his card and wished to speak to the rest of my "Cabal." I haven't bothered to explain to him that my Cabal consists of a pot smoking depressed artist, reckless occultist guy, and a rather paranoid mother, but a good developer of pot. I told Ramses of my little adventure before heading to bed. Tomorrow's Sunday, so hopefully my Cabal *chuckles* will agree to meet him. While he does seem crazy formal, I do think another mage would be helpful in the development of Robert EDWARD'S death :)

Today has indeed been very very busy! Drama from all sides, from Leedy to Robert, to house, to new product business....

Leedy seemed fine this morning; I thought I'd bother checking since he seems a little concerned about the whole Frank incident. He seems to think somebody in the Techno's are on to him...but for what? Is he a Mage? That's my bet, but I can't prove it, damn it.

I really got very little done regarding all the breeding paperwork that I am waaaaayyy behind on due to the house drama, and believe me, there's a lot of it. I have no idea how dear 'ol grumps Dad did this for a living. I'm starting to understand why needed whisky on the rocks every night. The bank's happy with my paperwork, and of course I'm doing everything to sell my house except standing on street corners handing out pamphlets. I did take some time in the afternoon to "check" in on the owners of my future home, and was pleased to discover that they seem desperate to rid themselves of the house due to financial constraints. I'm feeling a bit guilty screwing them over; I hope we can convince them to take a cheque so Beowrrn can "fix" the numbers. That would be an even better way to screw over the bank, which is my personal goal. I do need to bring that realtor down a peg or two though - I caught her trash talking Carmen on the phone. Bitch.

The biggest accomplishment today was setting up our future distribution for our "product". We all went to the Wellington to meet Luka, and my mention of our product possibility led to a car ride, due to the touchy nature of the subject. I explained Carmen's and my ability to produce the finest of quality weed, but that we need a good distributor, so he provided the biggest one. Since he's so big, I think our best approach will be to his more expensive clientele with smaller batches of fine quality product. Luka said he's a bad ass, but I'm sure that's nothing to a bad ass marauder. We just now have to develop a development process for the end product and make contact.

Let the drama continue!

Busy weekend...busy week to come! I got the bank loan approval for the difference of my home and the 1.2M home I want on the lake. I know that is still a huge difference between my house value (575K) and the new house (1.2M), but we also plan to fuck over Bank One, the sorriest excuse of big banking in existance. Our plan, with Ramses and Beowrrn's help, is the "fix those final numbers" on the mortgage...it will make the new house much more affordable for me, and hey, why not? Banks have clerical errors all the time, right? Especially THAT bank. Ha.

While we're on the money topic, we had a rather amazing epiphany for more easy money...drug dealing! All right, that sounds awful, but we're on the innocent end being the simple plant growers. You see, with Carmen's and my ability to grow plants quickly, AND change their shape, we have the best illegal marijuana growing programme EVER. Monday I'm going to hook with Luka to start a supplier line. We'll make money hand over fist. Even if the "clerical error" doesn't work, I'll still get that mortgage down pretty fast with this new income. I just need to come up with a good reason for all this extra money since I do have a paper trail now.

Tomorrow's going to be swamped....dropping off financial information to bank...meet Luka about our future drug supplier line...sell house...buy house...*phew*.

NOW we're getting somewhere!

The day started simply enough. I made appointments to view two houses in the island neighborhood, and another appointment to get my house appraised. I'll miss my cozy little house with the new greenhouse, but it'll be worth it if I can get relocated near that island. The realtor was amazingly rude to Carmen and Ramses, who decided to join me after locating Robert's home since we were together anyway. It turns out that he lives in quite the expensive fortress on Meridian Street. I really liked the houses, and sadly, absolutely fell in love with the most expensive house in the woods. They all have docks though, and that's the most important issue, with the second important issue having room for a greenhouse. The realtor kissed as much ass as possible once Carmen started dropping money numbers and comparisons, so it's basically just finding out if I can afford it.

Later we decided to pick up Beowrrn and hit the Wellington again. I wasn't going expecting anything, but more looking forward to another fabulous drink. We stayed a couple of hours with Beowrrn going back into time trying to find Tiara, the crazy vampire-like chick. Nothing really came of it, but our coniving during that time resulted in two things...the possibility of putting a camera up to watch Robert's place, and going back to the island that night to try and find Frank. We thought the powerful magick on the island would help strengthen our search through time.

What happened was completely unexpected.

Those crazy hollow eyed dogs attacked us! We managed to destroy them while sustaining minor injuries, so we continued our unsuccessful quest to find Frank. Wherever he is, he's definitely not Indiana. We did get a clue though...Beowrrn managed to see Leedy's name on the business card Frank held just before he blinked out of existence. I'll definitely be following up on that with the rat tomorrow morning.

I did get a brain surge and asked Beowrrn to look back in over the past day to discover who created the dogs. That resulted in discovering that Robert had visited the island as well. It looks like the war for Power has started...one way or another.

Paranoia. Unneeded drama. Assumptions.

Those seem to be the driving factors recently, and more poignantly since we left our homes to live in a cramped flat, under the delusion that we're successfully hiding for our lives. Ramses and I seem to be of the same attitude, except for different reasons, Beowrrn just lives in his own depressed world, and Carmen is against anything and everything...or so it seems. Perhaps it's just being cramped together. Perhaps I'm just tired of the quality of my life being diminished by constantly looking over my shoulder. Carmen does have a good point that a lot of bad shit's happened to us...but without getting to the bottom of these attacks, we'll always just be running away.

We did end up going to the island to recharge our strength. Carmen wouldn't go. I could understand that because she was nearly killed there, but she doesn't remember any of it, so it took me off guard that she just acted like we were stupid to go back. Beowrrn and I went over and found it desolate, so I returned to get Ramses, who had stayed with Carmen. She still refused to come, so the three of us stayed the night soaking in the amazing power. We'll skip the unfortunate incident where Ramses decided to jump up and down on the source of power, seriously pissing off the spirits. That wasn't so bright. (sigh)

I had a good day at work today, but tonight was pretty exhausting emotionally. All I wanted was a fucking drink and to follow-up on a lead Michelle gave us about a powerful vampire-like creature that shared our mutual goal of Robert's demise. Beowrrn was pretty rude to me, but Ramses jumped up to follow, then Carmen said she'd watch out for us, so we all ended up going. Nothing came of it except some seriously good drinks, so I broached my opinion of the overrated paranoia on the way home. Ramses and Beowrrn don't seem to disagree too much with my opinion that we should just go home and live our life, but Carmen was pretty adament about disagreeing with our methods, opinions, and that she's only staying to ensure we stay alive. To be honest, I just think we are extremely different. She has Warren to look out for, and she worries too much in general. I'm ready to go buy a house by that island and go after Robert. Even if my life is shortened, I can say that I lived a good one.