Off to Be the Wizard - 2 - Spell or High Water Read Online Free PDF Page A

snoring.
    Martin roused Roy just long enough to get him set up to sleep on the couch. As he tucked a sheet set into the cushions, Roy asked, “When do I get to meet the guy in charge?”
    They guy in charge, Martin thought . There’s a thorny issue. For a moment, Martin considered telling Roy about how the current chairman had only held that position for a short time, and how the chairman before had changed his name from Jimmy to Merlin , and then tried to reshape the entire country according to his whims, which included trying to kill all of the other wizards .
    Nah, Martin thought, that’s a little too heavy to drop on him on the first night. I’ll explain the whole thing later, when we talk about banishment.
    Martin answered, “I don’t know when you’ll meet the chairman . It’ll happen at some point, but it’s hard to say when. He’s a busy guy.”

4.
    Some would think that Phillip enjoyed being the chairman of the wizards in spite of the busy schedule that came with the job. Phillip would tell you that he enjoyed being chairman because of the busy schedule. Many people found this hard to understand, but those people hadn’t actually seen the schedule .
    Phillip rolled out of bed at his official residence, the same hut he’d lived in for the last ten years. He stretched his back and regretted for the thousandth time that he hadn’t gained the ability to freeze the aging process until he was in his forties, and predictably thick around the middle. He pulled some breakfast out of his hat and ate it in a bleary haze. When breakfast was done and he was mostly awake, Phillip grabbed his wizard staff, put on his pointy hat and light blue robe, and commuted to work. Some days he’d make a show of flying to his shop in public , but today he simply teleported there. He had a full agenda, and he wanted to get to it.
    He appeared in front of his building, entered right away, and walked through the storefront that was just there for show. He went straight through the séance room, with its fake crystal ball. He climbed the staircase at the back of the building, and reached his goal, the second story, which was decorated with the finest furnishings and entertainment devices that 1984 had to offer.
    He pushed a button on the massive Sony stereo, and the room quietly filled with the resonant sounds of The Alan Parsons Project. He walked to the chrome and white plastic bar and looked at his official schedule.
    Item one: get up. Done!
    Item two: eat breakfast. Done!
    Item three: think up some busy work and delegate it to a wizard who’ll make a lot of noise about it.
    Phillip thought for a moment about the busy work, and about whom to make busy with it. His eyes drifted around the room, past his Commodore 64 computer, past the mint- condition Pontiac Fiero he kept inside as if it were a work of art. His gaze lingered on his original stand-up arcade GORF cabinet. He remembered how he had carefully dismantled it and transported it back in time one piece at a time. He saw the scratches around the cabinet’s coin box, and remembered seeing Magnus, the younger of the two wizards who resided in Norway, trying to pry it open. That answered the question of who , but he still needed to think of a what .
    After a few moments he called Magnus on what the wizards euphemistically called the hand phone. He raised his right hand in front of his face, as if imitating a Shakespearian actor reciting the “Alas, poor Yorick” speech. Phillip said, “ Komuniki kun Magnus two .” Almost instantly, Phillip’s raised hand was filled with Magnus ’ place-holder icon, a flickering, semi-transparent image of the devil sticking out his tongue. The demon’s left hand held the neck of a white, V-shaped guitar. The other hand was making a devil-horns gesture.
    It’s redundant for the devil to make devil horns, Phillip thought. He could just point at his horns and send the same message .
    Finally, the image of the devil was replaced with a