Some wor­ship gods. Some wor­ship peo­ple. Some even wor­ship food.

You like the idea of wor­ship­ping food. Your mouth wa­ters as you en­vi­sion melted brie on crack­ers.

You’d to­tal­ly wor­ship that.

Then there are some who wor­ship the num­ber thir­teen.

Fools, the lot of them.

They think they can reestab­lish the curse of thir­teen.

They can try. They can try for a mil­lion years. They still would­n’t be able to, even if they all worked to­gether.

Y­ou might be able to.

But why would you want to? What’s the point of putting a curse on the num­ber thir­teen?

It would cause some chaos, to be sure–de­pend­ing on the curse.

The orig­i­nal curse caused a slight “tick” sound every time some­one said, read, or even thought the num­ber thir­teen. Re­ally freaked peo­ple out.

If you re­al­ly wanted chaos, you’d curse a num­ber like 256, or 64, or some other power of two. Com­put­ers would freak!

You have lit­tle in­ter­est in chaos.

Ha! As if. You love chaos. But not that much. That would just be in­sane.

The thir­teen-wor­ship­pers prob­a­bly are in­sane.

They think they need to curse the num­ber thir­teen to ful­fill some prophecy.

Biggest load of bull­shit you ever heard.

Prophe­cies are pre­dic­tions. You should­n’t have to make them come true.

If you did, they’d be self-ful­fill­ing.

Then again, that’s usu­ally the point. Self-ful­fill­ing prophe­cies are so de­li­ciously dan­ger­ous. Their cre­ators craft them with pur­pose: to ma­nip­u­late oth­ers into do­ing their bid­ding.

Speak­ing of which, it’s re­al­ly hard work. Get­ting those prophe­cies just right takes fi­nesse.

Get­ting them per­fect takes ge­nius.

Good thing you’re The De­tec­tive.

They’re wrong, of course.

The curse on the num­ber thir­teen does­n’t need to be reestab­lished.

It’s still there.

Not the orig­i­nal curse, of course. A dif­fer­ent one. Does­n’t do much.

Just dead use­ful, if you know what to do with it.

You do.

They are think­ing of the curse of sev­en­teen.

That one was nasty, and could have caused the end of the then-bud­ding hu­man civ­i­liza­tion.

Mer­ci­fully, it only lasted a sin­gle year be­fore the amaz­ingly pow­er­ful three-year-old who ac­ci­den­tally es­tab­lished it died.

Note to self: never cast a curse on an ac­tion you may your­self per­form later. For in­stance, it is wiser not to curse a num­ber that you may one day at­tempt to count to.

It’s not your fault they mis­in­ter­preted the prophecy. Prophe­cies are al­ways so vague.

Well, ac­tu­ally, it is en­tire­ly your fault.

They’re do­ing ex­act­ly what you want them to do.

You al­ways had a knack for craft­ing prophe­cies.