#necnomancy

Everyone with so much as a single nerdy bone in their body knows what a necromancer is. Basically, a wizard that revives the dead. A little more niche, but still a known term to the average magic apprentice, is the technomancer - a wizard that combines magic with technology. But what if you combine the two? What you get, and this is where we get a bit deeper into the weeds, is... ...me. (Hello. I also dabble in patatamancy.) I will explain with an example. My phone, a Samsung Galaxy A5 (I believe), bought roughly around the time of the Covid pandemic, which happened - hold on to something - roughly 5-6 years ago, already died twice. The first time, it was the charging port. Thing wouldn't load anymore, and therefore was obviously dead. Struck with sudden and overwhelming grief, I took it to the phone store, where a polite and surely highly educated woman agreed: Yes, the thing is dead, so sorry for your loss, shall we look at a new one? Unwilling to give up on my beloved, or the money it would need to get a new one, I bargained. Couldn't we repair it? I can't be fucked to move all my data to a new one, you know things, what do you think, lady? She said that it was probably hopeless, but there was this one man, a floor further down in the same mall, who went by the ominous name of "Mr. Mobile". A scholar of the broken and shepherd of the forsaken. I set out to find him. Dude was nice, polite, didn't speak the language that well. I showed him the corpse, explained the cause of death, looked at him with pleading eyes and a full wallet. He just nodded, said he would clean it. Initially, I thought he had misunderstood - but he just nodded again, said that he would clean it (again), then shooed me away, claiming he needed 15 minutes. I will never know exactly what dark ritual he performed while I was gone - but when I returned, my phone was alive again. You may think this is a joke, but I am being dead serious when I say - I was amazed. I didn't know this could be done! And I paid, what, 15 bucks? What in the actual fuck? As I walked out of the mall that day, I thought back to the polite and surely highly educated woman that had tried to sell me a new phone, and I decided that I would no longer be one of the sheep. I would become a wolf. A loner, a predator, a magnificent beast like Mr Mobile. He had shown me what was possible if you were willing to pay the surprisingly low price. The second time my phone died, I was ready. This time, it was the button that not only turned it on, but also the only button on the whole thing that would even wake it from its slumber. You couldn't so much as draw the unlocking rune on it without first pressing it - unless you lay in waiting to snatch it when it popped a notification. What was wrong with it, you ask? It fell out. Clearly, this had to be the final straw. Or was it? Remembering my old master Mr. Mobile, I cautiously eyed the carcass in my hands. I still HAD the button. In my other hand, but I had it. If I pushed it in, it even worked, but without magic, it would fall out again within seconds of putting it back into my pocket. And obviously, I couldn't just glue it back into place if I ever wanted to press it again. But Mr. Mobile had shown me the ways, or at the very least that there were things my simple mind would not easily comprehend without the right nudge. Of course, my master was long gone, a distant memory of greatness. But an ember of his genius still stubbornly burned within me. Then, after deliberating on the complexity of the problem, lightning struck a second time. Looking up at my dear mother, who at the time happened to be in the room with me, I asked the question that changed my future: "Hey, do we have tape?" All it took was a short stripe, holding onto the front and the back, keeping the button in the little hole where it had been for years. And just like that, I had elevated myself into the realm of Necnomancy, and claimed the earth-shattering ability to bring technology back from the dead. Or maybe Tecromancy? It's a working title.