OMAKE: A Discussion of MagI
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Two soldiers sat nearby a beautifully crafted, and extremely lifelike statue.
"Hey, Val, you ever think magic makes people into idiots?"
Valistan turns to regard his neighbor. "Considering both of us, along with every other person we know is a mage, you might want to rephrase that, Ren."
Renil sighs "Well, I'm pretty sure that this incident is a case in point. If I dropped that book in front of some random farmer, or a knight, what would their reaction to it be?"
"Probably run away screaming? I mean, can't get much more evil than Void black, and ominous feeling and clearly cursed ground, at least for the uneducated man." Val shrugs. "Maybe find a priest to try to chant the book away?"
"EXACTLY. That book does not exactly scream 'I'm harmless', right? And yet our idiot sergeant decides it would be a great idea to pick it up and bring it back home. He even ignored me when I said we should do some divination into its purpose, or maybe check it for other magical dangers. But nooo, let's just pick it up, from where it is surrounded by pitch black stone, and without any safety measures, and show it to the Archmage." At that point, Renil buried his face in his hands.
Valistan looked at his friend sympathetically. "Well, to be fair to the sergeant, he was fully warded. It should have stopped most magical attacks on him. And he is the best mage in our squad." He looked more closely at his friend. "...You're going to say something that will make me doubt the sanity of our fellow mages, aren't you?"
Renil nodded. "My sister... Our mother was teaching her cooking yesterday."
Valistan looked pained. "I can kind of guess where this is going."
"She was learning to bake bread, and mother had let her off the leash for a bit. 'She can't learn to do it for herself if I hold her hand forever.' Chal was a bit... impatient, I guess. She was on the verge of some breakthrough on some spell or whatever, so she wanted to speed up the baking process."
"Of course she did." Val sighs. "Gods Dammit."
"Oh, it gets better. So, as you can probably guess, she assumed that more heat means faster bake times. So she pulled out a flamethrower spell..."
"OH COME ON. That's past overkill, and into 'let the world burn' territory. How much in a hurry was she?!"
Renil nods glumly. "Which leads to the predictable result of the kitchen turning into fire. Not being on fire, since that would imply that there was something left of the kitchen, but being fire. Mother, of course, comes running and panics. Some of the neighbors ran over too. Problem is, they all started casting at the same time, and all of them threw the highest powered water evocation spell they could cast on short notice. Any one of them would have been enough to dampen the fire, but getting hit by no less than six water spells... We went from worrying about the fire spreading, to worrying about flooding damaging our house."
Both of them look at the other, and at the same time, sigh. In another place, a certain god sighs as well.
Renil sighs, "And then, think of the stories we heard when we were kids. All those stories about mages were divided into two types. One, you get the wise mentor, who teaches the prince, or knight, or random farmboy, gives some magic artifact that will save the world or whatever... and completely ignores the fact that it would take all of five minutes to use said artifact to save the world himself. And then you have the evil wizard, who sits in his castle and sends his evil army to conquer the world, or torture some random person. I mean, yeah, they are legends, but there has to be some truth to them, right? So why are those two the ones that people remember? Especially since both stories almost always end with the wizard dying?"
"Well, those are stories that the common people want. They don't want to be a mage, and most of them don't have the talent for it anyways." Val shrugs. "That's why the story always focuses on the plucky farm boy."
"Well, the other explanation, the one that I'm convinced is true, is that magic makes people idiots." Ren says.
"Well, that's probably why the gods want us to meditate and learn, so we don't do stupid things." Val says after a second of thought. "If we know ourselves, and understand the dangers of magic, we won't do stupid things that get mages killed off. And we get the side benefit of faster training, and occasionally godly help."
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Wrote this partly to balance the darker tone of Satar's thing, partly because of my exasperation that someone picked up a spooky book, instead of running to get the Archmage.
And partly because I like little slice of life things, and this amused me.