The Wash Replacement

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Palming cards is one of the scarier moves in card magic. It’s not that it’s difficult to do, but it’s easy to get busted and there’s no talking yourself out of the situation if you are. If someone catches you doing a double-lift you can sometimes say, “Oh, whoops, I accidentally turned over two cards.” If someone spots something funny when you’re culling a card you can just be like, “Huh? What? No… I was just spreading the cards.” You can play dumb.

But if you’re spotted secretly removing or bringing in cards from a palm, you’re pretty well busted. You can’t really be like, “Huh? I have cards in my hand? Oh wow. That’s what that feeling was. Thanks for telling me.”

A lot of the time, you can change your routine so it doesn’t have to use a palm. And that’s what I did for the first 10 or 15 years of performing. Then I tried palming one day and it wasn’t really that bad. There’s still a decent chance to get busted, but it’s usually worth it.

Regular readers will know I’m a huge fan of John Bannon’s Directed Verdict effect and have come up with many different presentations for it. In its basic form, it’s a Spectator Cuts the Aces effect. Although it can be used for so much more. And I’ve learned that palming out the aces and then adding them back in elevates the trick to a point where I can’t justify not doing that. From questioning people, I’ve found spectators only have a couple of guesses for how that trick is done. First, they think there are a whole lot of aces in the deck. And when they see it’s a normal deck they think that maybe the Aces were set up at certain spots making them likely to be cut to. As if that would work.

But when they shuffle the deck, they are truly left without even the beginning of an understanding of what could have happened.

So, for me, that trick needs to start off with them shuffling the deck.

If you don’t like palming, this is a super easy alternative and one that I think is actually better than palming if the situation allows for it. I use it all the time. Certainly, others have done this before. I’m not suggesting I created this. Just pointing out the benefits for the amateur. It’s ideal for when you’re sitting on a couch with someone.

First, you don’t palm out any cards. The cards (let’s say the Aces) are already out of the deck and in an easily accessible pocket or—in my case— they’re usually stuck behind a pillow or between couch cushions on my end of the couch.

The deck is on the coffee table in front of us, in its case.

I ask my friend to take the deck of cards and spread them all around the table so they’re completely mixed up.

This takes all their focus. Nobody does this while also staring at me. So I have all the time in the world to get the Aces into this position in my right hand (or whichever hand is furthest from them if we’re side by side—for this example we’ll assume they’re on my left).

You don’t have to clip them like this, you can palm them if you prefer.

Now, with the cards spread on the table, I say, “Let’s just gather these up.” And I will go to help them scoop up the cards.

I reach forward with both hands. My right hand is palm down. My left hand is at a 45-degree angle, fingers spread. If you draw a straight line between my friend’s eyes and my right hand, my left hand is directly on that line, obscuring my right hand. They’re not looking at my right hand. And they wouldn’t really see anything if they were. But the left hand is just an extra bit of obfuscation. From their perspective, it just looks like two empty hands reaching for the cards.

If I’m opposite the other person, then my empty left hand reaches forward and up a little while my right hand hovers low over the table. As if I’m going to scoop some cards back toward me.

From there, my right hand deposits its cards on the table and I start gathering up some of the cards and coalescing them under the cards in my right hand. I don’t gather up all the cards. I let the other person help.

Once the cards are straightened up, I take the packet the other person gathered up and push it into mine, below the Aces on top.

Then I go into whatever the trick is.

One of the advantages of this over giving someone a deck to shuffle is that you can “palm” in a huge chunk of the deck. I’ve done up to a third, regularly. If I’m doing this with more than 6 cards, I will usually dump out the cards out of the case and onto the table myself and start to spread it a little. This way the other person never sees the deck in its coalesced stack until the other cards have been palmed in and it’s a full deck. A normal person who doesn’t handle cards frequently can’t tell the difference between a scatter of 38 cards and one of 52 unless they’re Rain Man or something. This allows me to do tricks where very significant set-ups have been removed from the deck. Far larger than you’d feel comfortable palming out of and into a deck and allowing a spectator to shuffle with that many missing cards.

Washing the cards across the table is also more memorable than a shuffle and feels like it’s less predictable. And the percentage of the population who can shuffle a deck of cards gets less and less every day so this technique matches perfectly with that decline in dexterity.

No Questions

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There’s a mindset I think you need to adopt if you want to take your magic to the highest level.

It’s a mindset about what you’ll accept and what you won’t accept in the material you perform.

I’ve noticed on the Cafe and on some Facebook groups that when someone asks how people handle the suspicion that a certain prop or technique might generate, often the response will be something like, “No one ever questions ______.”

No one ever questions the cards. No one ever questions the coins. No one ever questions the fake receipts, or the unusual book you’re carrying around with you, or your coin purse, or the gimmicked lighter. No one ever questions the weird process you went through to tell them their star sign… they just think it’s real mind reading!

Imagine I made a movie and I showed it to you and when the aliens were attacking the White House, it was very clear that it was just people wearing masks made out of paper plates. And you said to me, “Don’t you want to make a more convincing costume for the aliens?”

And I said, “Oh, no one ever watches the screen at that point.” You would rightfully think it was a terrible movie and audiences were disinterested in it.

That’s because watching is how people experience films.

And QUESTIONING is how people experience, interact with, and appreciate magic.

That’s literally the defining aspect of magic: its ability to defy the questioning of the spectators.

If something incredible happens with an object that’s slightly unusual… then people will question that object. Also, if something incredible happens with a completely normal object… people will still question that object. That’s precisely what you want them to do. And then, hopefully, the routine is structured in such a way that their suspicions evaporate because you’ve anticipated and accounted for their questioning.

“The magician changed the red deck to blue. It looked amazing. I thought there must be something funny about the deck. But he let me look at it and it was just a normal deck. I have no idea how he did it!”

That would be the type of reaction you’d hope for from a color-changing deck.

“The magician changed the red deck to blue. I was amazed and had no further thoughts on it.”

That reaction only exists in the minds of people who are trying to sell you magic and morons who have no understanding of how humans think.

“No one ever questions….”

When people say this, what they really mean is, “No one ever verbalizes their questioning to me.” But most questioning takes place in the spectator’s head. So just because they don’t explicitly ask you about something, doesn’t mean they don’t question it or think they know what’s going on.

The mindset I find most helpful is not to think about what things the audience won’t question or what things I can get away with, but to just assume they will question everything. And then placing a high value on methodologies and presentations that go towards answering and defusing those questions.

Mailbag #89

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So, I’m using the [Jerx] app with some ideas, specially one that I just developed and I wanted your help to improve some details on it.

Is it possible to implement the fake home screen, like Earworm, Wikitest etc? Just to have the icons like the “NOTES” for us to “open notes” in front of the spectators, rather than opening “The Jerx “ or having to navigate through the tabs? —GV

Sure, I’ll put this on the list for possible updates to the app.

One thing to keep in mind, however, is the fact that no one needs to watch you get into your magic app. If you’re bringing up a magic app that is supposed to be a browser, or a drawing app, or a calculator, or notes app or whatever—then the most natural thing to do is to open your phone and bring up the app with the phone facing you. Maybe saying something like, “Let’s Google that,” or whatever the fake thing is that you’re bringing up.

If you’re like, “Okay, I’m just going to go into my calculator,” and you’re showing them the screen as you navigate to your calculator—that’s actually more suspicious than going to your calculator with the screen facing towards you.

To be fair, I know GV—the email writer—is a professional performer, and there are going to be different considerations in those situations. But in a casual performing environment, you want to handle your phone like a human. And that means opening it up, navigating to where you need to go, and then showing the phone to the person you’re with. That’s what people do all over the world, millions of times per day. What they don’t do is say, “Look, I’m just going to go to open my phone. Look… watch… I’m just opening my photo app. Now look, I’m just navigating to this folder,” etc. Whatever you gain in transparency in that way you’ll lose by acting weird. It would be like passing someone on the sidewalk and saying, “Notice I’m keeping my distance. I’m too far away to sexually assault you.” That’s weirder than just acting normal.

Do you remember the first real magic book you bought? And do you still perform anything from it? —CS

I assume by “real” magic book, you mean the kind that couldn’t be found at a library or bookstore, and instead needed to be purchased from a magic shop or sent away for from a magic publisher. If by “real” you mean a book of actual magic spells for witches and warlocks, then I don’t have an answer for you.

My first “real” magic book was Simply Harkey.

From that book I regularly performed:

Body Language - A four-coin production

Handiwork - A chain of paper dolls that goes from separate dolls to linked

Over the Edge - Coins to glass

Jazz Band - Linking rubberband

Dirty Pool - Small black balloon is slightly inflated. You pluck the nozzle off and it turns into an 8-ball.

Showdown - Like a bullet catch, but you catch the streamers from a party popper.

East Meets West - Pencil thru Bill

Transpose - A folded and unfolded card visibly switch places.

Le Ricochet - Coins Across

Spotweld (released as The Sizzle by Penguin Magic)

Two to Tangle - Rubberband penetrates a matchbox

Persuasion - A version of Paul Harris’ Re-set

Those were just the ones I have concrete memories of performing. But I played around with at least twice as many.

The most recent trick from that book I performed (and this was well over a decade) was a trick called Budge, where the spectator can’t remove a deck of cards from a card case but the magician can.

It was a very different time when I got that book, of course. This was an era where you’d read Genii magazine cover to cover every month because that was your monthly dose of magic content. And when you bought a book like Simply Harkey—especially if you were a kid with not a lot of money—you didn’t just read it through and pick out a trick or two. You sat with it for months and tried out everything you could.

In a way, I was spoiled by Simply Harkey because a lot of the tricks in the book sounded completely incredible. I didn’t perform them because I didn’t have the items necessary, but they were fascinating to read. Like a trick where you visibly change a glass marble into an hourglass, or one where the label on a mini bottle of alcohol penetrates the bottle, or one where a black crayon splits into three different colored crayons.

Since that was my first book, I thought that’s what most magic books would be like. I thought they would all have some totally unique effects with a variety of premises. I didn’t know it was more of an outlier until I started getting more magic books and thinking to myself, “There sure are a lot of ace assemblies in here.”

Dustings #85

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Pete McCabe, sent along this idea which I like quite a bit…

A student of mine had a “nano beauty spray device” in class. It’s a plastic cylinder maybe 5 inches long. Rechargable. Put water in it and turn it on, and it emits a tiny cloud of fine vapor.

I think this has great potential as an Imp. You can spray it in someone's face very safely (that’s pretty much what it’s made for), before they read someone’s mind. I’ll bet you can put a drop of flavoring that would create an interesting smell. You can mist the deck before covering it with a bowl in your haunted deck routine. Runs hands off, which is a plus.

And it just looks cool.

About ten bucks at amazon.

I would definitely add some sort of essential oil scent to it. The best place for these sorts of things is the Demeter Fragrance Library. They have oils in every scent from Crayon to Graham Cracker to Funeral Home to Puppy’s Breath. You can get a scent that evokes childhood to bring someone back to that time in their life. Or you can just get some exotic scent that supposedly unlocks certain abilities in your spectator.

With the oils in it, I wouldn’t spray them directly in anyone’s face. But you can safely spray them near people to be inhaled.

In The JAMM #6, I had a trick called Faith which involved a spectator removing her ring (ideally a priceless family heirloom), tying that ring to the ribbon at the end of a helium balloon, and then letting the balloon go into the sky. The spectator themselves does all those things. They tie the ring to the ribbon on the balloon and they let the balloon go. They can see their ring go off into the sky. The ring then reappears in a locked box or wherever you’ve set it up to reappear. It’s the same ring. No duplicate rings are used.

It’s one of the strongest tricks you can do. The set-up to do this trick is extensive, so I don’t know how many people have ever actually performed it. I would guess probably about 15 or so, because everyone who does try it, seems to write me afterwards to tell me how it went because it’s such an intense trick for people.

A guy called, The Falcon, wrote in to suggest doing a similar effect using the ISO app and the Serial AR feature. In his words…

Replace the ring with a bill. Tie the bill to the end of the string/ribbon and take the photo with serial ar. Then let the balloon legitimately fly away.

Obvious cons are that you would lose a bill every time and not as impactful as using someone’s cherished ring. But it’s 100% impromptu and the conclusion could be instant and limitless.—The Falcon

Yeah, it’s not going to have the same intensity of convincing someone to let go of a ring they treasure that’s tied to a helium balloon, but it would still be a pretty strong trick and the set-up is super easy. So if you’re willing to lose $20 or whatever as it flies away, this is a much simpler alternative. You could do it with a $1, I guess, but then it’s really low stakes.

This…

Has got to be fake, right? I mean it’s just a reworking of this, right?

I’ve never understood the physics of what this trick/prank is supposed to suggest. I mean, if a seat fell down the pole that was supporting it, that pole wouldn’t suddenly JAM STRAIGHT UP YOUR ASSHOLE, you know? Like, I guess if you had a chronically gaping butthole, and your pants were made of wrapping paper, and you centered your anus directly over the pole, then sat down on the seat with all your weight on the surrounding seat and none of it on the pole, then, in that situation, the pole could penetrate through your brittle pants and disappear into the dark void of your rectum. But that seems unlikely. We, as humans, are just so desperate to see some unintended anal violation that we buy into this, despite the impossibility.

This has been: Andy takes an unneccesarily critical look at something stupid.

Next week: You can’t even really fit big snakes in Pringles cans. And if you did, they wouldn’t jump out like that.

The Great Sex Principle

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A couple of months ago I got a mailbag question that asked if I was going to perform three tricks for someone, in what order would I perform them. Start with the strongest to grab their attention? End with the strongest? Build in impossibility? Or the “traditionally” recommended structure of starting with your second strongest effect, going to your weakest, and putting your strongest at the end?

After giving it some more thought, I came up with a good rule of thumb for the amateur. Although this is the first time I’ve crystallized the rule in my head, I can look back and see that when I followed this rule in the past, it always worked out well. And I can remember many times in the past when I didn’t follow this rule and it was definitely a mistake.

There are two parts to this.

Part 1: If you’re going to perform multiple effects for someone on the same day, then each successive trick should be more powerful than the one that came before.

That’s not to say every trick you ever do for someone must be stronger than the last, only that tricks that are performed on the same day should build in intensity.

Of course, you never really know how a given trick will be received, but if you’ve been performing for a while, you should have some idea of the relative strength of the tricks in your repertoire.

It probably would help to categorize the tricks you do (at least in your head) in categories along these lines:

Level 1 - Amusing Trifles - Tricks you enjoy performing and get a nice response, but that aren’t really designed to blow people away. Pleasurable oddities or quick visual effects.

Level 2 - Foolers - Tricks that fool people but don’t do much more beyond that. Most decent card tricks will fall into this category. Think “Twisting the Aces” or something like that.

Level 3 - Strong Magic - Tricks that not only fool people but also engage them on some level emotionally via the presentation. Telling someone the playing card they’re thinking of might be a “Fooler,” but telling them the name of a childhood friend they lost touch with would likely elevate the same basic effect (mind reading) to the level of Strong Magic.

Level 4 - Immersive Magic - Your most inexplicable tricks, paired with your strongest presentations, in a way that pulls people into the effect so it feels not just like a demonstration of magic, but a true experience of something “magical” unfolding around them.

Part 1 of the Great Sex Principle suggests that when showing someone more than one trick on the same day, you should always level up. You shouldn’t stay at the same level or go down.

Part 2: If you get a reaction that you would rate a 9 or 10 out of 10, then you shouldn’t perform anymore for that person that day.

You know the types of reactions I’m talking about. The type of reaction where they weren’t just fooled. Or even really fooled. But the type of reaction where they were strongly affected by the trick they just saw.

You never know exactly what trick might cause such a reaction. For example, one night, maybe eight years ago, my friend Gemma was over at my apartment. I had a few ideas for tricks I might show her that night. One of those tricks was something that Real Secrets had released. It was a variation on The Trick That Fooled Einstein where the prediction was written on the fortune from a fortune cookie. If I had categorized that effect in my head beforehand, I would have thought it was a sort of minor effect. A level one “trifle” using the categories from the previous section. It’s a prediction of pocket change. The prediction is anything but straightforward. It’s a little novelty. I wasn’t expecting a huge reaction.

Yet the reaction I got was about a 9 out of 10.

And I should have let that be the only trick I showed her that evening. Even though I knew the other tricks I intended to show her were technically stronger, I should have just let her reaction be the thing that signaled we’d reach the finish line.

Instead, I tried to chase that reaction with more tricks. And while they went over well, they only ended up diluting the impact of that initial magic moment.

The idea behind these two rules is to let the magic experience for your spectator get more and more potent throughout your time together. That’s why you only raise the level of effect as you go on. But also, once you reach that very high “potency” (a 9 or 10-level reaction) you’re done for the day. Let them stew in that for the rest of the night.

Then, the next time you see them, they will have “sobered up” a little from that previous experience. So you can start back in with something of a lower “potency.”

I call this the Great Sex Principle because it mirrors what I’ve learned from really amazing sexual encounters. Generally, you want to build the encounters in intimacy and intensity. But, once you experience a truly transformative moment of connection with that person, you shouldn’t push for more during the same encounter. Instead, give that moment time to reverberate and breathe.

When I was younger, and dumber (and fuller-of-cum’er), I would make the mistake of chasing those types of experiences one after another. If I was with someone and we had a sexual experience that was not just really good, but transcendent in some way, my attitude was always like, “Well, fuck, let’s do that again!” And it was almost always the wrong instinct. We didn’t give ourselves enough time to live in that moment. And trying to re-capture it so soon afterward usually brought us back down from “transcendent” to just “really good” again. And “really good” is, of course, still great. But it’s not that peak level of passion and connection we were at.

And I’m not just talking about some crazy, tantric, simultaneous orgasm shit. You can have earthshaking experiences with just a crazy make-out session, or fooling around in the backseat at a drive-in movie.

Regardless of how you reach that peak, it’s not a great idea to immediately try and match or top it.

Don’t snuff the afterglow.

Instead, enjoy that post-sex (post-trick) hazy electric energy. And let the momentum of that experience build anticipation for the next time together.

Influence: The A-Hole False Binary

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Sometimes you can undermine being cast in a potentially negative light by leaning into the negative stereotype so much that it becomes silly.

For example, let’s imagine you’re picking up a woman for a date. You drive a nice Mercedes. The car gives off rich-asshole vibes.

She enters the car and says, “Ooh-la-la… a Mercedes. Well, aren’t you special?”

You could deflect that and be like, “I know what it looks like. But no. This car was my uncle’s. He died unexpectedly and left it to me. I feel a little awkward even driving it. It’s not my vibe at all, but it’s a beautiful car.”

That’s fine. But you can also lean into the stereotype.

“Oh, this old thing? This is just my beater I use for running errands. It drives… alright, I guess. But mainly I just need something with the horsepower and engine thrust to drive over these darned homeless people crowding our city street!!”

Something like that will let the other person know you have some self-awareness and probably aren’t the stereotype they might assume you to be.

You can use this technique with magic and mentalism as well.

The danger with mind-reading/influence types of presentations is that you run the risk of someone who wants to be seen as very “powerful” in some way.

So if you embrace that to a silly level, that subtly suggests, “Yes, I know how this looks. And no, I’m not intending you to take this too seriously.”

Here’s a little line you can use to fully take on the megalomaniacal mentalist persona with an influence effect. In this case, the line works better if there is only one subtle influence cue lying around.

So let’s say I have you touch the back of any card in the deck. You get the 10 of Hearts. I open the prediction that has been on the table the whole time, it’s the 10 of Hearts. “My awesome powers have come through again!”

Your friend might laugh at that. Whether they do or not, you just look at them and say, “Do you not believe me? That the incredible power of my mind knew the card you were going to take before you took it? Well… maybe you’re right. Maybe it wasn’t my mind power that allowed me to know this. Maybe it’s just… well… see that card case over here? The one I placed in your line of sight when you were looking at the deck and then freely touching one of the cards? What card is on the back of that box? Perhaps you’re so persuadable that you saw that card in your periphery and it influenced you to touch that card when I gave you the option of any card in the deck. Maybe that’s what happened. Now you’re free to consider your options…

“Is my mind so powerful that I could predict the card that you would freely choose? Or is your mind so feeble, weak, and easily directed that just getting a glimpse of a card in the distance compelled you to pick that card? It’s your choice, I guess.”

Now, this is a somewhat advanced social interaction. You have to be able to deliver this line with such confidence that it’s clear you’re joking. And it’s a line that won’t work if you have been trying to use your magic as a demonstration of power in the past. But if you have a good relationship with the person you’re performing for, and they know you to be a chill person, they'll take the line in the spirit it’s intended and enjoy this false logic “trap” you’ve set for them.

Mr. Danger

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Back in December I got an email from reader Brandon C. asking what I thought about an idea he had for Tenyo’s Mr. Danger.

If you don’t know the trick, here it is.

Here was Brandon’s idea…

Don't show what's inside. (The plastic man.)

Tell spectators this is a personality exercise. Give them the swords. Whichever area they attack (first) tells something about them. (Works best with group, each sword gets a reasoning....can be altered for solo) Oh, you went for the groin? Interesting. Have someone you'd like to John Bobbit, is it? Or, right for jugular -- pent up murderer are we, yada yada fun.

Then after all of it, reveal inside. The tissue that's been pierced, the solid man untouched. 

Point is, don't we know where we are going right off the bat with the standard routine? Reverse it to have more fun with the perplexing reveal... And, if audiences are one step ahead on their own -- that's okay, I prefer audience superiority over audience boredom.

I thought Brandon’s idea was an interesting one.

I find penetration effects to have an unusual blandness to them. You would think they would be one of the strongest effects you could do because your audience is seeing the actual moment of magic. What I mean is, when you do Ambitious Card, they see you put the card in the middle of the deck and then they see the card on top of the deck. They don’t see the magic, they see the result of the magic. Same with, like, Coins Across or something. You see the coin in one hand, then you see it in the other. Both of these are normal states of being for a coin. It’s just the fact that one state directly follows the other that makes it magical.

With many penetration effects, you’re seeing the moment of impossibility as it happens. But in my experience, they frequently don’t get the best response.

This, I believe, is why many people prefer performing a penetration where the impossibility of the penetration comes as a surprise at the end. Think of the brass block matchbox penetration effect. “I’m pushing a match through this box of matches. But look, it’s not just a box of matches, there’s a brass block inside.”

This type of presentation gives magicians the sort of twist that they appreciate in their effects. But there is a downside to it. And that downside comes from the fact that because your spectator doesn’t know you’re doing something impossible from the get-go, they don’t always pay attention as they should to the match going through the matchbox. Often they think that if they had known what to look for they would have caught you the first time. Maybe you snuck the brass block into the matchbox somehow after the match went through. Well… how else? That must be what happened. There’s almost no reason for them not to think that.

I gave some thought to this issue and offered a couple of solutions in this post (second email in that post). I got a lot of positive feedback from people who incorporated one or both of those ideas. They’re pretty simple and they go towards eliminating the “I must have missed something” answer, without totally eliminating the twist.

Now, what makes Mr. Danger so nice, is that your audience can pretty feely handle the prop and place the little daggers in themselves. And when they open it they’ll see the plastic guy in his compartment and it seems like there’s no way he could have moved from that spot. So that goes a long way towards preventing spectators from thinking you somehow slipped him in there.

But I agree with Brandon that the standard routine (as shown in the demo) is pretty busted. Once they see the little plastic man and you putting him in the case, they know exactly where this is going. And after you’ve put in a couple of the little swords, I’m not sure that more swords becomes any more amazing.

Here are a couple of ways I’ve been enjoying performing Mr. Danger (which is, by far, one of the best Tenyo tricks released in years). Neither of these will turn this little trick into some gigantic miracle (I can’t think of a single penetration effect that could really be described as such). But they’re both ways to allow for the audience not to get too far ahead of the trick, and they both allow for the “twist” ending.

Version 1: I trace the plastic man cut-out on a piece of tissue paper that fits in the frame. I do this before my friend arrives. When I want to perform, I show them the tissue paper with the man on it and place it inside the frame. (They don’t know anything about the plastic guy that is in there as well.) I tell them to take the swords and push them through the holes. Then I have them remove them. They do. “Isn’t that an incredible trick?” I ask. “You penetrated the swords right through the little guy.” They’re like, So what? It was tissue paper. “Oh, sorry. No. I wasn’t talking about that little guy.” I remove the clips holding the prop shut and allow them to open it to see what’s inside.

Version 2: I introduce the prop and the swords to a friend. I tell them I’m going to turn my back and I want them to take any number of the swords they want and put them in any of the holes they like. I turn my back and ask them to tell me when they’re done. When they tell me, I say, “Okay, believe it or not, I made a prediction of exactly how many swords you’d use and where you’d stick them,” I say, and hold up a folded piece of paper. I turn around with a big smile on my face. Then I look at the prop and I’m like, WTF?? “Uhm… okay. I got that wrong.” I open my prediction. It says: Zero Swords. “How the hell?” I start removing the swords. “I thought I had rigged it so you couldn’t put any in.” I pull off the clips and give them the prop to open. I shake my head. “I wasn’t cut out for this. I can’t even make an accurate prediction even when I rig the thing. And look at you! You’re doing magic and penetrating swords through solid plastic without even trying. Hold on… I’m going to think of a number between 1 and 100. What am I thinking of?”

“62?”

“Yes! Goddammit, how are you so good at this stuff?”