No kidding... Just thinking back to all the stories I've read/seen/heard, I get a jumbled mess of thought trains. I still don't think I fully understand the details of the Prophecies in The Belgariad and The Malloreon.Julie wrote:...In the end, you're probably right about being careful about prophecies when we don't know the full prophecy...and even then people have to be careful about prophecies.
Hell, the Mrin Codex has two separate possible reasons for why it was so cryptic: A) the Mrin Prophet was totally bonkers, but that was all the Light Entity had to work with or B) because the Light Entity knew it really annoyed one of the main characters and thought it would be funny.
So, when dealing with prophecies, I wouldn't be too surprised if they turn out to just be an elaborate troll on Monica and Co. by a bunch of trickster gods and etc, possibly including Nudge, Hermes, and Loki.
Or, it could mean exactly what it says, but just sounds cryptic to mess with our heads.
...
That's the thing with Prophecies... The future has infinitely many possibilities, all of which could be caused by the most infinitesimal differences. Monica buys crunchy peanut butter instead of creamy by accident, and finds out at the counter. She spends an extra 60 seconds in the store getting creamy peanut butter. Because of this delay, she begins her drive home a minute later, by which time the temperature outside has dropped just low enough to begin freezing a particular puddle on her way home. She drives over it, skids ever so slightly, causing a tiny pebble to be dislodged from the asphalt.
A few months later, that tiny irregularity has become a pothole. A non local businessman is driving along at night, hits the pothole, and damages his tire more than he would have. This extra tire damage makes him get a flat on the way to an important business meeting the next summer, and is thus late. His boss decides to promote the businessman's coworker instead, who runs the company into the ground instead of building it up into a successful enterprise. Hundreds of thousands of people are not hired. A portion of them go into crime instead, one of which happens to be a particularly twisted ursamorph, who becomes an assassin specializing in infiltrating high-security hideouts. They eventually get a contract from some very rich people who want the President of the United States killed in a manner that would incriminate his cabinet. The people's trust in their government falters and fails. Revolts, riots, and revolution tear across the nation. The weakened state of the Union invites foreign attack, and the USA is no more, replaced by a war-torn place that looks more like Somalia than anything else. As a result, interplanetary colonization technology is not developed in time for the catastrophic failure of Earth's climactic system, and the last dregs of humanity perish as their planet becomes ever more hostile to life, culminating in a Snowball Earth, killing everything that doesn't live off deep-ocean hydrothermal vents, and immortal beings.
All because Monica accidentally picked up the crunchy peanut butter instead.
muahaha.
how a *very simple* shape ( a bent line) can make a complex thing like a tree 
