By popular demand!
Well, by K's demand, anyway, and she is popular with me, so what else do you need? She actually wanted me to make a REAL post, rather than just pasting something that I wrote two years ago, but then she made the mistake of suggsting this as a compromise, so here you go. This would be a part of my ever-nagged-about book, which seems to be finally closing in on being completed, as K is now some ways through on The Very Last Round Of Editing Indeed, after which I shall have no further excuse for delay.
The most common feeling after visiting Mage City was definitely one of disappointment. On the average Tuesday, the levels of magic in production was typically on the level of some seriously crooked card games and the odd enhancement of a weapon, horse or other mundane piece of equipment. This is due to the fact that the carrying out of magic and magical rites is largely a waste of time. Nearly all fully trained wizards spend the majority of their time either trying to teach new mages how to handle the basics without causing horrible disasters and paradoxes, or running around trying to settle things down after horrible disasters and paradoxes. A good example, although records of the event are increasingly difficult to come by, is the situation created by a magic-student by the name of Bandular Kenk.
It appears that the young student was too tired to walk up the stairs to his class one afternoon, and instead decided to use a levitation spell. The spell backfired just a little, and brought the classroom down to him, rather than him up to it. This in itself wouldn’t have been much in the way of a disaster, if it hadn’t been for the fact that the classroom was a rather important structural part of the building it was in. The building happened to be The Great Tower of Learning, although after the class room was removed, it wasn’t so much The Great Tower of Learning as it was A Huge Pile of Rocks. Needless to say, this was a source of great embarrassment to the leading wizards of Mage City, as it clearly showed that they couldn’t even control their students well enough not to tear down the very city they called their own.
The tower was, of course, magically reconstructed, but given the size of the task, the process took several weeks, and was an obvious hack job. There were staircases leading into thin air, plumbing with some sensationally unpleasant surprises waiting for the unwary, and, ironically, floors that could only be accessed by levitation, as the stairs seemed somehow to have bypassed them. The archwizard at the time, Moro-Am-Derothon, decided that this sort of public relations fiasco simply wasn’t to be had.
A project was launched where wizards ran around doing a memory-erasing spell on anyone who had been to Mage City or lived in the general vicinity, removing memories of how the tower had looked before and the fact that it had been missing for a few weeks. However, memory erasing being a highly inexact science at the best of times, approximately 100% of those affected ended up either forgetting too much or not enough. Questions were raised, protests were issued, and this led to a second round of magicians traveling around a slightly larger area, erasing memories. Had the wizards responsible been a little more into logic and a little less into the technicalities of memory-erasing spells, they would probably have left things well alone when it turned out that the second round had only served to make matters worse, but egos were at stake, and so a third memory-erasing quest was launched. The debacle it caused launched the monstrously large fourth campaign, which encompassed the entire kingdom and those surrounding.
Records get understandably vague at this point, but somewhere around the eighth or ninth campaign, there was so much memory-erasing magic and confusion floating around that although the campaign kept running for nearly 11 years, by the end of it hardly anyone could remember what it had been all about. At this point, the archwizard wisely decided that whatever the campaign had been supposed to make them forget, it had obviously been a blinding success. He therefore called it off with a party of the type that had everyone attending suitably fuzzy on the details on what they had been celebrating, and just how they had ended up sleeping in the begonias.
It is generally estimated that the cost of the campaigns, (the costs of hidden things forgotten forever, dates not kept and anniversaries ignored not withstanding) came to a whopping 25,000,000,000 peng. A tidy sum, estimated to be capable of purchasing the entire city of Vorn and all the land in within a 50-mile radius.
It was pointed out to Bandular Kenk that next time, it would be appreciated if he would simply walk up the bloody stairs.
The most common feeling after visiting Mage City was definitely one of disappointment. On the average Tuesday, the levels of magic in production was typically on the level of some seriously crooked card games and the odd enhancement of a weapon, horse or other mundane piece of equipment. This is due to the fact that the carrying out of magic and magical rites is largely a waste of time. Nearly all fully trained wizards spend the majority of their time either trying to teach new mages how to handle the basics without causing horrible disasters and paradoxes, or running around trying to settle things down after horrible disasters and paradoxes. A good example, although records of the event are increasingly difficult to come by, is the situation created by a magic-student by the name of Bandular Kenk.
It appears that the young student was too tired to walk up the stairs to his class one afternoon, and instead decided to use a levitation spell. The spell backfired just a little, and brought the classroom down to him, rather than him up to it. This in itself wouldn’t have been much in the way of a disaster, if it hadn’t been for the fact that the classroom was a rather important structural part of the building it was in. The building happened to be The Great Tower of Learning, although after the class room was removed, it wasn’t so much The Great Tower of Learning as it was A Huge Pile of Rocks. Needless to say, this was a source of great embarrassment to the leading wizards of Mage City, as it clearly showed that they couldn’t even control their students well enough not to tear down the very city they called their own.
The tower was, of course, magically reconstructed, but given the size of the task, the process took several weeks, and was an obvious hack job. There were staircases leading into thin air, plumbing with some sensationally unpleasant surprises waiting for the unwary, and, ironically, floors that could only be accessed by levitation, as the stairs seemed somehow to have bypassed them. The archwizard at the time, Moro-Am-Derothon, decided that this sort of public relations fiasco simply wasn’t to be had.
A project was launched where wizards ran around doing a memory-erasing spell on anyone who had been to Mage City or lived in the general vicinity, removing memories of how the tower had looked before and the fact that it had been missing for a few weeks. However, memory erasing being a highly inexact science at the best of times, approximately 100% of those affected ended up either forgetting too much or not enough. Questions were raised, protests were issued, and this led to a second round of magicians traveling around a slightly larger area, erasing memories. Had the wizards responsible been a little more into logic and a little less into the technicalities of memory-erasing spells, they would probably have left things well alone when it turned out that the second round had only served to make matters worse, but egos were at stake, and so a third memory-erasing quest was launched. The debacle it caused launched the monstrously large fourth campaign, which encompassed the entire kingdom and those surrounding.
Records get understandably vague at this point, but somewhere around the eighth or ninth campaign, there was so much memory-erasing magic and confusion floating around that although the campaign kept running for nearly 11 years, by the end of it hardly anyone could remember what it had been all about. At this point, the archwizard wisely decided that whatever the campaign had been supposed to make them forget, it had obviously been a blinding success. He therefore called it off with a party of the type that had everyone attending suitably fuzzy on the details on what they had been celebrating, and just how they had ended up sleeping in the begonias.
It is generally estimated that the cost of the campaigns, (the costs of hidden things forgotten forever, dates not kept and anniversaries ignored not withstanding) came to a whopping 25,000,000,000 peng. A tidy sum, estimated to be capable of purchasing the entire city of Vorn and all the land in within a 50-mile radius.
It was pointed out to Bandular Kenk that next time, it would be appreciated if he would simply walk up the bloody stairs.