Time to Work

Perhaps in my last letter I was too hasty to lament the slow days of work in my position as a Mid-Level Mage at the Grand Celestio Council of Wizards. We have not had one of those days where time moves as quickly as a turtle, where boredom races around us like a rabbit, in many, many moons. The trade off for having a busy, entirely too stressful work day at the Council is that your brain is so occupied by the various magical requests that you hardly notice how the time flies by, and before you know it, you’re racing out the magical doors into the cold mountain night air, ready to begin your trek home. However, sometimes in these moments of stress, a mage can get sloppy as they try to move their tasks along, and sloppiness can lead to all sorts of magical disasters. Take the situation I experienced a couple days ago, and also yesterday.

I was about halfway through my shift when the problem first arose, but I’d estimate I’d already done roughly three days of work. The client requests were flowing in, both literally and figuratively, and even I was feeling the frustration to balance the quality of my magic with the quantity of requests I wanted to complete. As I looked down at my parchment, scrawling out magical symbols and incantations for a client who had thrice expressed their dissatisfaction with the love spell they ordered, out of the corner of my eye I saw a different sort of magical spark than I was used to seeing from my colleagues’ desks. Where normally the flashes I see are small, colorful bits of magic that flutter around like fireflies before quickly dissipating, this spark was more like an all-encompassing flash that lasted only for a second, but something about it was burned into my eyes even as the flash seemed to “end”. 

I looked around to my coworkers to see if they’d also reacted to the flash, but from their faces I realized we had a much more pressing issue to deal with than I’d first realized. Half of my coworkers were staring up at the birds frozen in the air above us, and at the normal magical sparks halted in their paths, hovering around the projects they had emitted from. The other half of my coworkers were still looking down at their desks, because they were frozen in time just like the birds. It wasn’t long (presumably) before we identified the culprit wizard whose time spell had just gone awry.

After some brief professional ridicule, us unfrozen wizards got to work searching for a fix to the problem. Time stopping spells are strictly forbidden to clients per our guidelines, so it took quite a long time to find anything in our books about how to even cast them, let alone undo them. The culprit wizard, a newish Mid-Level Mage but more tenured than I, desperately tried to explain how he’d done time spells like this all the time during his school days when he needed to catch up on assignments, and how it never went this bad. That caught the attention of some of our colleagues, who were suddenly very interested in taking advantage of the time stop to get their work done, and despite my protests, the search for a way to undo the halt was abandoned.

It took me roughly half a day to find a way to undo the spell after being forced to search on my own, and another half a day was wasted arguing with my colleagues who wanted to remain frozen. “Finally we have time to finish our work,” they whined as they slapped the magic wand from my hands, and I complied. For another day or so, I took many naps and caught up on some reading for pleasure while my brilliant coworkers toiled over client projects. When they were all satisfied with the amount they were able to get done, they asked me to unfreeze them, which I did, and the chaos of the work day swirled to life around us once more.

I and my colleagues explained to our superiors the conundrum we’d found ourselves in for the last several days, and everyone who was not me explained all the work they were able to get done despite it. The superiors showered them in high praise, and offered them an extra break given the circumstances. No extra pay, no going home early. Just an extra fifteen minutes.

My colleagues slunked back to their desks, and I got back to work on my love spell.

May the moon shine favorably and without hesitation upon you,

Alexan Drytus