Discworld: We're Off to Find the Wizards...

Unending BE - episode 146583

"You see," Ponder explained the story to Commander Vimes, "Jim appeared in our library, and accidentally was forced to read a spell from one of our most powerful spellbooks before he quite knew what was happening, or could stop himself. Only the Librarian and Rincewind know quite _what_ the spell was, however."
Rincewind became uncomfortably aware that all eyes in the room were on him: Jim, Ponder, Vimes, Nobby Nobbs, who paused briefly from nicking some pencils in the corner, and Fred Colon, who had been frowning over paperwork. Rincewind gulped. "Um, I'm not real good at this stuff.." he wavered, "but the Spell that Jim read seems to have been some spell for making gates into pocket dimensions where you can throw your garbage and not have it pile up. The University is lousy with little gates like that already. They haven't spread outside the University and caused entire city blocks to disappear, before, though!"
"That's it!" Ponder snapped his fingers. "You are worried about activating the spell, Jim, but it seems you already did, without meaning to. And you activated it in a random place, because it was uncontrolled. You can see into the octarine, which seems to indicate that you're at least a proto-wizard, but your power is COMPLETELY wild and random. And sometimes...the magic just wants....OUT. I should know. I was accidentally throwing fireballs in my sleep for a couple of years before my parents caught on and sent me to the University. Went through a LOT of drapes when I was 13, I did..." He shook his head. "But that's neither here nor there. The point is, Jim, we now know what kind of spell it was and who cast it."
"Great. Fine." grumped Jim. "But how do we UNdo it? And make it stop spreading? And what's with the time-difference?"
"If your garbage is made to rot quicker, it'll go away faster?" guessed Rincewind.
Ponder nodded. "Probably something like that. Let's just hope that you didn't accidentally make an EXIT hole from the pocket-dimension in some random place, too, Jim."
"Why not?" asked Jim, who was getting intrigued despite himself.
"Because the last thing we need is for an entire city block to come crashing down on top of our heads."
Vimes rolled a hand-made cigar out of old dogends and started smoking it in black puffs as he thought over the predicament. "Okay. You're sayin' you know what this was?"
"Yes, we're pretty sure, anyway--" began Ponder.
"And it's a wizard-only affair, not the Alchemists or the Assassins' Guild or anything like that?"
"Well, yes, but--"
"Then you wizards can handle it yourself." Vimes tilted his chair back, put his feet on the desk, and blew a smoke-ring at the ceiling. "Un-spell it or whatever, and bring the city block back."
"Um, we kind of, can't." said Rincewind miserably. "You see the three of us here? We're probably what remains of all the magical talent in the city. Save for students."
"Well, gather together ALL the students so you'll have more power, or something, I don't care, just don't bother US with it!" growled Vimes. "The Watch has enough _real_ crimes to take care of right now, unliscenced assassinations and Dwarf/Troll riots and such, without--"
Just then, a bird flew in through the open window. Vimes' window was _always_ open, he was an outdoors kind of guy. The bird, a pigeon, landed on the desk and cooed at the Commander of the Watch.
"Shoo! Shoo, you stupid bird! I said--oh." Vimes just then noticed the small white paper scroll attached to the bird's right foot by a piece of wire. He undid the wire and went to shoo the bird away, but Nobby grabbed it, grinning a scary yellow-toothed grin. "There's good eatin' on them things." said the Corporal who had to carry papers to prove that he was even a human being.
Vimes unrolled the paper and ignored Nobby. "To: Commander Vimes, City Watch, Ankh-Morpork. Re: Missing wizards. You are to give any assistance you can to Mister Ponder Stibbons in this matter. Signed, Havelock Vetinari, Patrician."
Vimes stared at the paper, half in disbelief, half in resignation. "How does he always KNOW these things so damn QUICKLY...?!" he asked the world in general. "Okay. Fine. Much as I'd hate to do this, you can have...two Watchmen. No more than that."
"Fine!" blinked Jim, who had half expected to be in jail by now, let alone have these people actually _helping_ him, at all.
"I can spare Constable Angua and Sergeant Detritus." said Vimes. "That's all. But you'll find they'll be enough."
"That will be excellent, sir, thank you." said Ponder.
"I'd like to stay here, if it's all the same to you," said Rincewind. "It looks boring around here right now. I LOVE boring."
"No loitering on Watch property." said Vimes. "Nobby? Get Angua and Detritus in here. And PUT down those pencils!"
The strange-looking, filthy, hunched little man ambled off aimlessly, (without putting down the pencils) and a few minutes later, the troll they had met before on the street appeared in the doorway. In fact he appeared OUT of the doorway, too--the frame was too small to let him through and he had to take out a good chunk of the wall as well, in order to enter the room. Behind him was a tall, shapely blonde woman in watch armour. There was something slightly _odd_ about her, but Jim couldn't quite figure out what it was...
"Reporting for duty, sir." said Angua, lounging into the room. "What did you want me for, Commander?"
"You and Detritus are to act as body-guards to these three wizards here." Vimes indicated Ponder, Rincewind, and Jim--the latter two of which, especially Jim, were rather SHOCKED to hear themselves referred to that way. "They're on an important mission of some kind to undo a dangerous spell or something, and Vetinari gave me orders."
Angua gave the three a sidelong glance. "Oohhhkaaay..."
"Sure. I can do that. No problem."
Detritus looked around the room, down by his knees, until he could see what Vimes was talking about. "Oh. You. Pointy-heads. Detritus help."
"Thank you again, sir." The three, now five, left.

"So, where do we go from here?" asked Jim. "You sure we can't just get all the student wizards to chant the same thing together at the same time, something like that? That idea of...what's his name...Vimes's, seemed to have some merit."
Ponder shook his head. "No, we need _quality_, not quantity. I think anybody who is sufficiently adept at spellcasting will be able to help us, if we can tell them the right words to say and the right gesture to do. The nearest people I can think of are the three witches in the Ramtop mountains. Four, if you count the one who recently got married and became Queen of Lancre. But, I'll bet she hasn't forgotten everything _yet_."
"Wait a minute, I thought you wizards looked down at witches!" said Angua, who had never much liked pointless, sexist rules. "Said that it wasn't 'real magic' or some such."
"The OLDER wizards think that way." Ponder corrected her, gently. "I do not. I think many if not all of the rules we have at the University are pretty outdated. Anyway, the witches of the Ramtops are just about as powerful, in their way, as the senior faculty of the University. If someone's going to be able to help us, it would be them."
"We go to Ramtops? Detritus like Ramtops! It cold there! Troll brain get smarter when it cold." said the troll, happily.
"But how do we get there?" said Rincewind, who, due to his many, many "adventures"--although HE would call them a terrifying, dirty, deadly, bloody nuisance--had seen most of the Disc by now, and therefore had a pretty good grasp of geography. "I mean, we have to cross an ocean! Do we have enough money for a boat?"
Detritus and Angua checked their pockets. "I got thirdy-two pence." said Detritus.
"I have two dollars on me." said Angua. "Sorry, I was just coming off-shift, and didn't think to bring money along today."
Jim of course had nothing that the people on Discworld would even vaguely consider legitimate currency. Ponder Stibbons had all kinds of tools and writing utensils in the many pockets of his strange robe, but the only money he had on him was the change left over from last night's coconut and herring pizza. Rincewind, of course, as always, travelled light. Poor, but light.
All together, the money pooled was about enough to buy ONE person a boat ticket on the very cheapest, nastiest kind of boat, but no more. It was a long trip. It would naturally cost a lot.
"Well, that's just great!" said Angua. "How are we to get there, then?"
"Guess we won't." said Rincewind. "Seeya." He was stopped by Detritus's standing surreptitiously on the hem of his robe, and when you're a troll, it's quite a feat to be surreptitious. Rincewind took several steps forward without going anywhere, like a car spinning its tires, then realised what was going on and stopped, feeling foolish.
Jim turned to Ponder Stibbons. "You're a wizard. _Magic_ us there."
Ponder rolled his eyes. "Why does EVERYBODY always assume that wizards teleport everywhere the way ordinary people walk down the street? Listen, it takes a great deal of magical energy and concentration to do a teleportation spell. Secondly, you have to do careful studies of the place you wish to end up at, because something or someone of roughly the same mass as the thing you wish to teleport, will _exchange_ places with you. And unless the two things, you and the object, weigh about the same, then you or it will arrive at the new destination moving REALLY REALLY FAST. Like, nothing but a multicoloured splat against the nearest hard surface, kind of fast."
Rincwind shuddered with recollection. "He's right. I materialised going about a hundred knots an hour downhill on a snowy mountain, took out almost an entire regiment of an army, and caused an avalanche before I managed to slow down, when THOSE guys--" he glared at Ponder--"sent me to the damn Counterweight Continent"...
Ponder ignored the glare and finished, "Thirdly, one wizard is not enough power to teleport five people all the way across the Circle Sea, especially if one of them is as large as a troll. The principles of inertia and conservation of mass mean that it takes more effort to lift something heavy instead of light, even if you're using magic instead of your body. A troll would take more energy than I have in my entire body. Rincewind has never cast a real spell in his life as far as I understand it, and Jim seems to have some raw magical ability but he's COMPLETELY untrained. The end result, Miss," he turned to Angua, politely, "is that it would be far more effort and worry to use a teleport spell than it would be to WALK across the ocean. Never mind get a boat somehow."
"We still don't have any money, though..." muttered Jim.

Go back - Go to the parent episode.

Magrat

Thu May 24 22:37:37 2001