Fuck that was awesome. I kind of figured out Samel's power early on, but that wasn't the fun bit.

Also, Dimitri totally spoke in my head with the voice of Kevin Michael Richardson.

Radical Vegetarianists killing to make a point...yes, they do sound like a zany bunch.

This reminds me of old, old Piers Anthony Xanth books...didn't the main character have a similar magic talent?

I don't know. I've never read any Xanth books. From what I'd heard I wouldn't be surprised, though- it's a magical talent that could be put to good use in a comedy.

It seems likely that there would be troubles between meat-eaters and leaf-eaters in a mixed society. There's a certain species of ape-descended tool users I know who have all sorts of "race" problems when the difference between the people fighting each other would be invisible to an outside observer. Surely if there were REAL differences, there'd be even worse problems.

Or maybe not. There's another story I posted not too long ago where the different characters got along so well because they were so very different from each other. They didn't compete.

Anyway, this is all fiction- I'm sure nobody could come up with an example of vegetarians going crazy, or people killing each other in the name of the God who is Love, or starting wars in the name of peace, or anything like that, in the REAL world.

The "protection from magic" talent in the Anthony book was a little more devious; the talent somehow decided that the best defense was to make the character seem to have nothing special about him at all...it somehow arranged for him to have just the right friend or tool on hand to explain away what should have been an overpowering magic attack, or to have accidents that made him "just miss" being zapped or transformed...and it even purposefully failed to work in cases that weren't life threatening, but that would give its action away.