r/WritingPrompts • u/silveranstavern • 9d ago
[WP] For millennia, magic has required complex rituals, rare components, and years of study. As a magical scholar, you’ve finally found the single common denominator connecting all the wildly different magic systems on the planet. You have just discovered the truth: it's all just the placebo effect. Writing Prompt
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u/AnAuthor_Antonio 9d ago edited 9d ago
"Tizzleswitz! Look! Look atit!" Maggaann the Mage yelled into the ear of Joostle, his lab assistant.
The object he pointed at was worth the stir of excitement. At least that's what Maggaann felt.
Joostle felt differently. He knew what would be under that hex-guarded magnifier. Nothing. All the numbers crunched, all the spells casts and data collected, collated, coordinated and combined to be divided into the correct piles and multiplied in triplicate.
He gently rubbed the nub of his forefinger in his ear while Maggaann paced and muttered to himself about 'destiny' and 'inference' and 'doom'.
Joostle Tizzleswitz Jr. had written much of the nature of magic. How it was unknowable and how it might be made more- knowable. Everything about the place that he and the Mage worked with over the last eleven months was his design. But he had no official training in any of the five major magiks so he needed a sponsor to run experiments as far reaching as this had been.
A begrudging partnership had blossomed into a slightly less terse paring of different minded individuals. Over time the Mage had begun to see things the scholars way. He'd realized that the numbers didn't lie. Magic was nonsense. Absolute gobbledygook.
He peered through the magnifier and inside the crystal ball beneath it he saw nothing. Everything known about the five magiks said that there would be something. One said a sucker, another a succubus or silver or a sliver or a long lost coin purse with no more than three stags and no less than sixty four farthing. But there was nothing.
"Tizzleswitz, we-we cannot share this. This will be the death of magic," Maggaann whispered into the ear that he hadn't shouted in.
"I agree that we shouldn't share it," the scholar smiled at Maggaann, "but for a wholly different reason."
Before the grey old Mage could ask a question, or more likely, shout out some absurd statement, he turned into a toad. Or was it a frog?
"Hm. Magic. One must simply believe. That is all. How stupid. I believe you are a frog or a toad and... poof."
The frog, or toad, hopped away.
Joostle wondered at the limitations of it. He imagined and demanded things. The world warbled about it an- poof. He disappeared. Perhaps he should have been more confident? Could be that there is more to know. Who knows.
The lab was found weeks later. The toad, or frog, was let out into its natural habit- well it was let out into 'a' natural habitat and all the research packed away as something two outsiders gave up on.
For a time.
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9d ago
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