An Afterward from the archivist:

    Well, that was the story.  Trouble is, Redstar, having come in in the
middle of the story and therefore having missed the beginning, didn't really
understand the original intent of the story.  After the fact, I provided him
with the beginning messages and he looked at them and commented, essentially,
"Oh, yes!  I see what you MEAN now!  Oops!"
    Trouble is, he hadn't seen the previous stories, either, and so didn't
know the details about the Three Mages and the Staffs.  In the two stories
before, it HAD been established that the Staffs were purely technological, not
magical.  They just LOOK like magic, sorta.
    Part of this mixup, I suppose, was MY fault.  I mean, by all rights, I
SHOULD have had those stories already cobbled together and put in the transfer
section for reference, but I was so far behind on them all it was rediculous!
    Anyway, I commented about the nature of the Staffs and the Mages just
after Redstar's ending, comparing the Staffs with the spheres in the Starman
TV show, or the transmutor in Star Trek episode "Catspaw."

    Course, part of the problem, probably, was that we always refered to the
guys as Mages... which is a synonym for magic-users.  I wasn't originally aware
of the meaning, and so kept using the term exclusively throughout the stories.
But, of course, we really didn't HAVE any other terms we COULD use to refer to
them.  Or at least I couldn't come up with one. I still haven't been able to,
except for "adept" and such words, words which don't really rule OUT magic.
Grrrrr...!
    In fact, I've just done a quick check of two or three dictionaries I have
on hand here and didn't see the term "mage" there.  I'm fairly sure, though,
that THX-1138, the guy who originated the Mages in their first story, probably
took the concept from D&D.  I mean, mages feature prominantly in there, and
magical staffs do, too.  Never having encountered them before, though, it was
completely new to me.
    I mean, I don't LIKE D&D, too occultic for my blood, so I tended to avoid
it like the plague.  Not that I JUDGED others for playing the game, I simply
said "Nah, not interested!" if they asked me to play.
    Mind you, when he put the first Staff into that earlier story, he at one
point said it was an "amplifier of mind energy," and a little later mentioned
"psionic power," and talked of "emissions" of power.  These are terms that
sound purely science-fictiony, not at all magical.  The rest of his opening
text, although having the words "magic" and "magical" sprinkled throughout,
*could* have, with just a little bit of reading between the lines, easily been
read as science-fiction rather than fantasy.  It was, in fact, entirely
ambiguous, but strongly pointed towards science fiction, and so I decided to
treat it as such, and he had no problems with this.
    I have treated it this way ever since.

    Now, back to "Chessmen..." and its ending.  Actually, I had been building
towards a different ending, and assumed everyone else understood this plot
thread.  The big bad idol was supposed to be an inanimate object, an alien
artifact that had, for some reason, been placed in the ruins long long ago...
and the bad guys simply had the bad luck of making these ruins their base of
operations, unaware that this dangerous device was there, feeding off their
mind energy or some such.
    Actually, though, I should have been putting in paranthetical remarks about
this intended plot thread, since the other participants, you will notice, had
put in similar comments about, for example, the "Ratsder 7" signals and the
nature of Redstar's... erm... craziness towards the end.  They had wanted to
make sure the other participants didn't mess it up.  I should have followed
suit, but it simply didn't occur to me.  >Sigh<

                                        --Nomad of Norad, December 1993