June 28, 1979
Last night’s venture beyond the pale of shackled man has provided much flesh for the tempers of my carnivorous mind. After being subjected to the most rigorous battery of pterronomic askoto tests, the so-called “magic beans” sold to me by an ill-garbed street performer revealed themselves to be dormant fain wasp eggs. Elated with my fortuitous purchase, I promptly turned to my sheets to best determine how the great masters employed these curiosities.
In the words of Yezchek Phesans, the following is true:
When mixed in a certain solution, the egg of the fain wasp becomes as glass – open to the possibilities of the universe, eternally resonant. Placing a handful of such treated shells within a hollowed beaker of the purest lead and shaking it has produced the most startling results: particles of what I refer to as “raw possibility” flake away, as if treated with grit in a tumbling rock apparatus. The remainder? Scenes such as could never be imagined by the mortal mind, engraved in miniature upon the crystalline spheres!
Repeating Phesans’ experiment in all particulars, I was treated to a similar sight: eight flawless globes the size of a child’s marble, each bearing a scene from my past that has assuredly never occurred. Cross-referencing them with my unearthly doppelgängers through the Mirror of Shalzum revealed what I had suspected all along: these images were of my life, had I not to engage upon on the vaunted Path of Thoth. Truly marvelous, in all its resplendence that man can prove to himself that an objectivly superior choice can be reached in any situation.
Result: Treated fain wasp eggs interact with the Aeolian rings emanating across the unshackled expanse, presenting images of what might have been if not for decisive chronosemetic restructuring.
(Source: The private journal of Dr. Orlando Laswell)