ditchwizardry

[ditchwizardry]

Don't Fuck With Mr. Midden

(Editor's note: this was collected by my apprentices from the account of a tourist to the town of Craig, Alaska; the individual's name has been anonymized for privacy)

[He] was looking up at dark clouds, and he heard waves. The back of his head and his left hip hurt. He was laying on the beach. He'd slipped on something. Seaweed? He'd landed hard and hit his head. He wasn't holding his phone and it wasn't in his pocket. Shit.

Something smelled bad. Not just like low tide, but like if someone lovingly poached rotten oysters and old Birkenstocks in seaweed, then let that concoction dry in the sun for a few days. It was so strong that he almost didn't notice the noise that came with it; thousands of shells, rolling over each other, collectively rattle-scrape-plinking into a strangely tonal rush. He finally felt his phone on the sand next to him, and raised it up.

The beach had moved since the last time he had looked at it, he thought. It was moving now. A house-sized dune of empty shells, old and battered by the surf, was rolling towards him like a self-propelled rockslide. The smell was so incredibly intense, now, that his eyes were watering and bile was rising in the back of his throat in response.

He scrabbled away on his back, keeping his phone pointed at the horror in front of him because not seeing it was even worse. "What the fuuuuck!"

There was a sound behind him, now: soft but fast footsteps, then a thump into the ground, and something dark and massive flew over him and smashed into the shell-heap with a snarl that was somehow even worse than the thing he was scooting away from.

There was a voice behind him, in a thick Russian accent. "This beach is dangerous for your kind," it growled, deeper than a human larynx was capable of. "It would be even more dangerous if you told anyone what you thought you saw in parking lot."

He didn't turn around. In front of him, a powerful feline shape -- a leopard or tiger, maybe? -- thrashed wildly among the animated shells, sending them everywhere. The shell-mound lifted tendrils, but the huge cat-thing batted them each down viciously.

He couldn’t remember anything in the parking lot, or where he was, or who he was, in that moment. His head was pounding, too.

"I hit my head," he said, sputtering. "I don't know what you're talking about!"

"That is spirit," the deep voice agreed.

He turned around. There was a grizzly bear within casual mauling distance of him. He screamed. The bear grimaced.

"Hey," the bear said, in the same Russian-accented voice, "you saw fucking nothing, okay?"

His whole body was shaking. "What the fuuuuuck!"

"You hit head," the bear said, forcefully, "going on night-time fun jog. You did not see any money change hands in parking lot, you did not see Kalashnikovs in back of van next to your very impressive Toyota Hilux." The bear mimed scales with its two dinner-plate sized paws. "Unless you want to join crew of our crab boat."

He didn't know to nod or shake his head 'no,' so he just gave the bear the thumbs up. It grinned and mirrored the gesture. The cat -- finally visible as a tiger, now -- leapt up out of the churning mass of shells and pirouetted behind it, if you could say it had a front, and batted down more shell-tendrils with apparent glee.

"What the fuuuuuuck!"

"Mr. Midden," the bear said, gesturing at the mass of shells. "He is asshole. You fucked with Mr. Midden, Yuri and Alexi, we don't like to see you get chewed up. Gets wrong attention, gives even Yuri PTSD, if Yuri is honest."

He shakily put his hand to his chest. "I saw nothing," he promised.

[ditchwizardry]

Newly Engoogleated tractor familiar, who dis?

Their name is 'Kubota-Sama' apparently, or more precisely '[I] [am] to call [them] [that]' and I'm not one to argue with a diesel machine spirit.

Little guy won't fly loops like a broom, but their payload is ridiculous. Sky-towing is absolutely how the apprentices and I are going to move camp next time.

Well worth the Engoogleate charge from the Googlystick to avoid a repeat of the six-hour recreational aerial dogfight that 'somehow' ended with my favorite Engoogleated jukebox, Charles, being mercilessly vaporized by a 'rogue lightning bolt stirred up by too much negative charge generated by imbalanced mana usage inside the thunder cell.'

(Charles' essence was shunted directly into a Zune phylactery I had for such a contingency, otherwise my apprentices might have been guilty of a devious assassination of an unpopular up and coming rival. Which would be ridiculous in our non-hierarchical self-governing research group.)

Anyway, Kubota-Sama is made of sterner stuff than Charles, and the apprentices don't seem nearly as threatened for whatever reason. Hopefully K.S. won't feel infantalized or like a *pet*, because my intention is to start teaching them spells and beginning their apprenticeship as soon as I figure out how to give a tractor thumbs.

[ditchwizardry]

My very own future self: my greatest adversary?

"You look familiar," the grizzled fellow said. "I swear you looked older back then. Do wizards have kids?"

"It's important that you not recognize me, actually," I lied, still reeling from the crash. "The timeline will implode. Leave me alone for like five minutes?"

"Shit, it is you," he said, scrambling up from the folding camp chair there on the little lawn in the town square. "Look, I don't know when the last time you were on Earth was," he said, gesturing around at the town which, to my eyes, looked more or less the same but perhaps grungier.

And, there were a lot more solar panels. And the water was covering some of the buildings that used to be on the waterfront. Just roofs sticking up, now. And there weren't any of those metal carriages with the rubber tires, just several bicycles and flimsy fabric-and-tubing carts with skinny wheels like the bicycles. The harbor was full of floating gardens and more solar panels on rafts, along with every variety of small vessel, and one of the old ferries seemed to have its own area cordoned off.

On more prolonged gazing, I deduced that the ferry wasn't in shadow, but had in fact been covered in plates of armor and painted a dull grey that matched the sky and sea almost as well as it clashed with them at the same time. Hundreds of little cannon barrels poked out from the armor plates, like warships in the age of sail.

"Oh, forgive me," I said with an appropriate level of sarcastic smarm. "I didn't realize wizards needed to make special arrangements if they're gone for more than….how long ago did the big earthquake happen, actually?"

A look of deep and bitter sorrow played across the crags of the man's face. He looked away, wistfully. "Forty-five years in March."

"Thirty-eight years, then," I said. "Time flies when you're not in it!"

He glared at me. "Everyone here who was around back then lost somebody."

I glared back, now. "How many people do you think I've lost to tsunamis? Tsunamis I hold myself responsible for? Don't play grief chicken with an immortal with a headache."

He seemed more confused than chastised by this, but age and rough times had given him the grace to brush it off. "Why are you here, Ditch Wizard?"

I picked myself up from my own tangle of limbs on the ground amidst the pieces of the broken broom. "I told you, the timeline, it might collapse if you keep -- "

"You were aiming for a different time, weren't you?"

I sighed. "Yeah."

He patted me on the shoulder. "It's okay, your future self warned us about the possibility of this happening almost a month ago, now. There's a care package."

"That doesn't sound like me," I said, immediately suspicious.

"He said you'd say that. Now you're going inte--"

"--rupt, yes, of course, because he remembered how irritating he was to me right now, that bastard!"

I spat on the ground. A tiny oak tree grew up from nothing, sprouted tiny leaves, turned from green to yellow to orange before they fell, and the whole business collapsed into ash.

The grizzled man jumped at the sight. "What the fuck?"

"Sorry," I grumbled. "I just hate how condescending his 'kind' and 'knowing' gestures end up feeling. I'll literally never be able to catch up to him." I growled. "I hate him with every fiber of my being."

"Wow, that's really weird and fucked up," the grizzled man said, patting my shoulder again. "I'm sorry, buddy. He didn't tell us about that part."

I wiped away a small, extremely manly tear. "Can you…take me to the care package?"

"Sure, buddy. Come on." He gestured at the ferry. "It's on the Kulshan, under the Commodore's care."

"I'm sorry for yelling," I said. "What's your name, young man?"

He chuckled. "I'm surprised you don't recognize your apprentice's little brother."

I squinted at him. "Nope, nothing. Which apprentice? One of the Earth ones, right?"

I couldn't tell if he was mildly offended or disturbed by my apparent senility. Regardless, he answered only after a long, awkward silence. "Ethan's brother? You pulled me out of a….truck monster thing? Saved my life? And you wrote my letter of recommendation for college? You came to our house every night for a whole summer?"

I plumbed my memories, magnet-like, and belched out what noises I could dredge up in any relation to the context I'd just been given. It wasn't nothing, but it wasn't a lot. "Stevon? Strem? Steeb? It's Steeb, right?"

He sighed. "Kevin. It's Kevin. Our dad was Steve, though."

"Steeb was a good man," I offered. "Raised good sons."

"He lost all our money on bitcoin and died trying to sink his fishing boat for insurance money a month before the Big One made all of that stuff stop mattering ever again."

"Oof," I said, "'Big oof.'"

Kelvin looked at me oddly, then, and his expression seemed to soften. "Pretty big oof, yeah. You didn't know. How's my brother?"

"Alive and intact," I answered reflexively. "I mean, he's fine. It's only been a couple of years since we left, in our timeline. Probably shouldn't bring them here, huh?"

He nodded. "He…he doesn't need to know about what happened with dad. You have no idea how it makes me feel to know he's okay, though. He kind of…disappeared for my whole life. And then dad did the boat thing. Then the Big One happened and half the town got washed away. I know you told us he'd be okay, but still."

"I'll see what I can do about the…what was it, buttcoin? Next time I'm back then, I mean."

He looked at me oddly again, and then his whole expression and posture softened even more. "I suppose you will. Tell him I miss him, though."

"Of course," I lied. "I'll make a special point of remembering."

[ditchwizardry]

Recruiting Apprentices, Part One

"No," Merrlott gasped. "This isn't possible! We were just playing a game!"

I let out a deep belly-laugh. "Of course it's impossible! A wizard did it! With magic!" I snorted and took a few breaths, then continued with glee. "It was me! I'm the wizard!"

He turned his sparsely bearded face towards me, his eyes going wide. "Oh my god, you're a weirdo pervert and you groomed us!" He was getting agitated, now. "Where's Ethan?!"

I sighed. This kind of accusation always hurts, but the sorcerers and sun-priests out there enchanting kids make it very awkward to be an ancient wizard recruiting apprentices on the cusp of their inheritance of cosmic power. The optics were horrible and I hate being cornered like that.

I summoned a fig-sized grizzly bear made of flames in my palm, allowed it to rear up and roar, and then I squished it away in a pop of sparks. "I am no such thing. 'Ethan,' if you insist on using his ridiculous Earth name, is trapped in 'HølDÿg' on this personal computhingy as I said. He's been there for about a week by now, since we've been having this exhausting conversation at Earth-time."

He gawped at me. The electrum molar reveled in that selection for my own internal monologue.

"So, if you wish to rescue Zynnfandel, my young Merrlott, you had best trust that I'm going to continue being both a competent and ethical guardian in both the Earth sense and as a wielder of the Ancient Light of Creation and the Entropic Tendrils of Infinite Chaos."

"Jesus fucking Christ," he forced out through his ever congested sinuses. "Maybe you drugged me and I hallucinated that  --" he began.

"-- It would have looked way less cool than that," I interrupted. "My igniphasms are way better than any Earth human's imagination, even with a plant or fungus doing all the heavy lifting. Maybe if I'd given you a lethal dose of Dream Venom from an Elder Mirkbat, but you'd be in an unimaginable amount of pain right now as well. And, usually, the hallucinatory flame creatures are clawing at you."

He just stared at me.

"Good," I said. "Now come on. Put your hands on the keyboard and begin the ritual as performed on your far braver friend who languishes among the simulated volumetric pixels as we speak." I began to recite from the Codex of Manuel, paraphrasing and synthesizing the author's meaning into terms the young fellow could understand. "First, you must enter your truename, 'Merrlott,' into the 'user name' field upon yon scroll. Heed this warning: update thy java or you will know horrors beyond mortal comprehension."

[ditchwizardry]

Welcome to Flapjackinak

"Flapjackinak," the dapper little fellow, in their puffy lime-green vest, corrected, grinning amiably.

"Is there a lord of the Isle of Flapjackinak who I can speak with?" I repeated, indulging them. The Earth-language felt like gravy in my mouth, viscous and savory with spicy bits here and there. I would have hated to learn it the hard way.

My would-be guide furrowed their brow, which was thrice pierced with silver rings. "You talk like a Local, but you don't know anything about Flapjackinak?"

"Local?" The word carried some added weight beyond its neighbors in the thesaurus.

Their eyes went wide. "Oh. You're really not local. Um, welcome to Earth?"

I chortled. "I'm well acquainted with this planet, just not this particular island in this particular one of its many…fjords?" The spirit hidden in my electrum molar, which I had bound therein to translate for me, was particularly proud of itself for that word.

"Okay," they said biting their lower lip. "Okay. So, is this a magic thing you need to see somebody about, or an any-town-on-Earth kinda thing? I can send you to either the Mayor or the Chamber of Commerce."

I narrowed my eyes. "Tell me about this 'Major' of yours."

They paused for a moment and stared at me before answering. "The Mayor is unofficial on Flapjackinak since we're in the Unorganized Borough of Alaska. It's been the same lady for like forty years, though. Fifteen of those have been since she died."

"A ghost mayor!" I said, delighted. "Marvelous!"

"Well, not exactly." The vested fellow stopped to apparently take extra care with their phrasing. "She had a very special relationship with a Grey Parrot when she was still alive."

[ditchwizardry]

Introducing the Ditch Wizard's Personal Orb Log

Greetings, fellow orb-ponderers, doomscrollers, and denizens of all the weird and wonderful otherworlds and pocket dimensions.

This orb log, or blog, is a space for me to, as my Earth therapist calls it, 'Share my truth,' and 'practice my prose writing,' and let go of many lifetimes of traumatic experiences battling against chaos, order, and everything in between (AKA: the juicy bits of existence's sandwich).

Since, as anyone familiar with me already knows, I'm not exactly 'stuck in linear time,' please permit me to tell my story in the order I've currently, in very literal terms, arranged it. Do not, under any circumstances, take me to be a reliable narrator, and any resemblance to real or imaginary persons living or dead shall result in the bestowing of a terrible curse upon anyone to use their imagination so maliciously against me, a confused old man. Shameful, really.

With that proviso, I think you must, under threat of terrible arcane destruction, indulge me to begin these accounts nearly at the most recent loop of the tangle of my nonlinear lives thus far, in the few decades where I intersected with a strange little island inhabited by some particularly welcoming humans on Earth.

Come back soon, friends, as I imminently begin to transpose my memories to the orb. If this gets popular, I may be tempted to post certain passages from the Ditch Wizard's Bathroom Companion, but, please, folks, you can still buy that one, it's in print at your local arcanist shop.