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Sometime early in December, Sammy calls Donnie.

After some perfunctory chatter, she gets to the heart of the call.  "I want to find out more about this Djinn stuff.  I figured with your magic studies you might have a decent chance of explaining it to me, or maybe one of the dragons might know something?"

Donnie leans back in his computer chari, clearing his mind of a magical algorithm problem he was working on with his college pen-pal. "Tell you the truth, I did do some research after the whole 'daughter of the djinn' comment. Let's see.."  He begins reciting a text he read by Darren Oracle, a magical cataloguer and who's Guide to Magical Creatures and Beings was a standard textbook in many colleges with supernatural courses.

"The Djinn are air elementals.  They lived on Earth back when magic was common, prior to the Draconic Pact that left earth without dragons.  Djinn have mastery of the air and basically lived in what is now Egypt.  During ancient times they were actually a protector race of mankind, and their arch enemies were the half-dead. Mummies.  During the reign of one of the first Pharohs a great magician crossed over to become a half-dead, he created an army of half-dead soldiers and began the systematic conquest of the Nile Valley.  To battle this, human sorcerers came up with a way to grant vast magical power to a being, but the problem was no human could handle the power. They had a tendancy to assplode.  They needed a magical being for the enchantment ritual to work so they turned to their allies the Djinn."  Donnie taps into his keyboard as he speaks and pulls up the page from Oracle's Guide, emailing the links to Sammy.

"Through the use of artifacts known as Djinn Bands, they could turn a Djinn into a Genie.  The failsafe was that a Genie had to be bound to a human, and could only use their vast cosmic power at the command of the human, usually called the Genie Master.  Together these Genie and humans managed to overcome the evil army and put things right.  When it was over the human Masters commanded the Genie to be free, and the Djinn Bands fell from their wrists, turning them once more into Djinn. Supposedly. The way the human heart worked, I imagine there were a number of Masters that decidd to keep their Genie, since power that readily accessable was a heady temptaton.

When the magic started to falter and the Gates of Myth were forged to regulate the flow of magic into this world, the Djinn vanished.  There are still supposedly Djinn Bands out there, but no Djinn to wear them. Over the centuries the story has been changed with the Aladdin mythos and all that three wishes bullcrap, though Disney did get the whole Genie Band thing right. Someone there did some research."

Sammy blinks several times, trying to digest all of this.  "So...  I'm at least part air elemental.  OK, that makes sense with what I can do.  And I might or might not have to worry about those band things... that's funny, I play in the band, and I'm going to be in Elrod's band this summer, but that's not the same thing.  Maybe its just a natural affinity for the word."  She chuckles, then gets serious again.  "So I guess the full djinn are either gone completely or on the other side of those Gates?  Isn't that where the Dragons live?"
     

Donnie pops a can of coke and takes a slurp. "Well, the Gates are kind of like the earth's magical heart. It's where all the magical energy that suffuses our world comes through, squeezed with a regularity and kept to a minimum of flow. Otherwise we'd be knee deep in faeries, hunted by dragons, and keeping jackalopes out of the garden. Most of the magical races have left, and the Gate is kind of a multidimensinal doorway, leading to the Dragon Reaches, the elemental planes, and a ton of other places. Even the land of the dead. It is powerful, secret, and no one except for really powerful individuals know how to get there.

The Djinni are likely residing in stately cloud palaces in the elemental plane of air or something."


ooc: Kat, sorry this totally slipped my egg.

OOC:  NP.  I figured it was that or else you had nothing more to say.

"So there's no way to get there from here, since we don't know exactly where there is," she says, sounding a little disappointed.  "No way to ask them any questions. No side trips through your dragon realms. "   She returns to the comment about the bands.  "Do you think I have to worry about any djinn bands, assuming any one can find one and knows what it is?  Or should they not affect a mixed blood like me?"

Donnie is silent for a moment, then says "Hmmm. To be on the safe side, I would not accept any bracelets or pretty jewelry from strangers. You never know with old artifacts like that. As far as going through the gates, that would probably be a bad idea. My soul-brother has promised to take me to the Reaches some day, but to tell you the truth, most of the elder races think we are jumped up monkeys, or food. Or both. Scary prospect if you ask me. Humanity was not very nice to many of the older races of magical beings, and their memories are much longer than ours."

"Your soul who?  Do you mean Pip has discovered fried chicken and black eyed peas?"  Sammy has no idea what Donnie is talking about.  She's never met or even heard of Dylan, except in remote terms as the guy that caused trouble between Donnie and Sylvia.  Its not like Sammy and Donnie have been talking much.

"No, smart-alec. The dragon version of me from over there. Dylan."  He goes on to explain what happened with Dylan and his reasons for staying near Sylvia. "..so he gets to be born human, experience all the range of human emotion, and in return I wil lone day get to spend some time there, as a dragon. I dunno how soon that will be though."

That's a lot of information to assimilate.  Sammy chews on it for a minute.  "Boy do I feel stupid.  That answers a lot of questions.  That's really cool, Donnie!"  She doesn't explain what needed to be answered.

"Why would you feel stupid? I was the idiot who blew up without investigating it first. What questions?"

"Just some things that didn't make sense when I didn't know about Dylan.  That's all."

Donnie is silent for a moment, then says "Okay, well, let me know if you have any more questions. If I don't know the answer, I can usually find out with some research. Talk to you later!"

OOC:  thread ends.