Humphry Smith was a wizard. Not on purpose you understand, purely accidently.
Humphry made the common mistake of wishing out loud that the magic in the books he loved was real.
A magical entity too strange to actually comprehend was using reality as a shortcut on the way home from work. Its name was Cidd – well the bits that humans can say and hear was anyway. Cidd heard the wish and absentmindedly granted it.
And that was how Humphry Smith became a wizard. You really could not make this sort of thing up.
The first thing that the wizard, Humphry Smith did with Cidd’s power was to get himself some servants.
Not having any actual magical writings to go by, Humphry looked up some spells in an out-of-date Dungeons and Dragons book. He found a spell called “Unseen Servant” which seemed easy enough to cast but an utter nightmare to memorise. This was entirely Humphry’s fault. He was just not-at-all good at remembering things.
So Smith looked up Magical Item Creation. He found the description of a magical artefact called a rod. The fact that something is entirely fictional should not stop a wizard.
It turned out that the rod Smith made gathered magical particles from the air. As there were no other magic users in reality, this left a lot of resources for Humphry. Which was why he got a bit carried away. The rod was in a permanent state of recharge and could sustain twelve magical servants at a time. Each servant (getting a big old charge) could last up to fifty-five minutes away from the rod.
Humphry Smith made a rod of “Unseen Servant” (with a few modifications) which would cast the spell when the command word was said. To be sure he would remember the word he wrote it on the rod with a felt-tip pen. “Go!”
Humphry’s modifications included making the servants visible so as to not frighten his housemate who believed in ghosts. Other modifications included various shapes that they could appear in. Twelve shapes in total.
Shape one was a butler that Humphry called Jeeves. This was because Humphry was about as imaginative as a cold cup of tea.
The seventh shape was a magical policeman. That way he literally had a policeman in his pocket.
There were ten other shapes but no one knows what they were. This is because when Humphry summoned his policeman servant to get him out of a parking ticket, things went a bit wrong.
The policeman took a sniff of the air and correctly concluded that he was standing inside reality which was a magical conservation area. He promptly arrested Humphry on suspicion of poaching magic; causing Humphy, the policeman and Humphry’s rod to vanish from reality.
This is why old copies of Dungeons and Dragons are no substitute for a proper spell book.
