A City Dreaming

It helps if you don't think of it as magic. M certainly had long since ceased to do so. He thought of it as being in good with the management, like being a regular at a neighborhood bar. You come to a place long enough, talk up the chick behind the counter, and after a while she'll look the other way if you have a smoke inside, let you run up your tab without scowling, maybe even send over some free nuts on occasion. Magic is like that, except the bar is existence and the rules being bent are thermodynamics and weak nuclear force.