Lodagus and Mundane Magic
A day in the life of
<plop>
<plop>
<plop>
‘Another day in paradise’ Lodagus sarcastically thought to himself as he shoveled dragon dung out of his Thistleroot garden. The sun was just beginning to show its face over the horizon.
After clearing away the dung, he went inside for breakfast. He was out of water, so while still half-asleep, he cast a conjuring spell to draw water from the earth. Then he started roasting some breakfast over the fire pit. There’s a conjuring spell for fire too, but it was easier to just wake up Char - his 12-foot long pet dragon - to get the fire started. Lodagus was prone to mind-wandering and didn’t remember much of the spellcasting they taught in school. It had all seemed boring at the time. Even if he did remember the nuanced chants and handwaving, Char had to pay rent somehow - and leaving piles of dung in the garden certainly wasn’t the way.
After breakfast, he started making a list of ingredients that he needed from the market. You see, Lodagus was an alchemist. He mixed herbs, aromatics, and essences into ointments, oils, and extracts. His cabinets and drawers were filled with nightshade, willow bark, glowing fungi, and the like. Locked in his safe were the more… difficult to acquire items: soul shards, time crystals, the essence of essence, Kraken beaks, etc. He was the best alchemist in all of Kyro; if the royal family needed a concoction, it came from his cauldron. His list was short today, so hopefully, it wouldn’t take too long. Just minotaur horn, a spice weasel, and - if in season yet - plaguebloom. He grabbed his satchel, a handful of gold coins, and headed into town by horseback before it got too hot.
The Gyrorec Tetolu Bazaar - named after the emperor who brought together the 7 city-states and ended the 900 Year War - was a bustling marketplace. Vendors from all over the world gathered here to sell exotic foods, goods, and mystical items. As well as more mundane things like leather, flour, and livestock. Every trip to the Gyrorec Tetolu Bazaar was different. Some days you’d see the Munjabii’s Flying Carpet Emporium visiting from the west. On other days you’d find staves carved from trees of the Dark Forest.
Of course, you’d also find alluring counterfeits too. One of Lodagus's first memories of the bazaar as a child was buying lightning in a bottle. Just minutes after getting out of the store, the encapsulated weather had already gone from a brilliant lightning storm to a typical rain storm. By the time he got home, his jar-of-lightning turned jar-of-water had transitioned into a jar-of-sunny-day and the water evaporated out. Now it is just an empty jar on his shelf.
Today though, he came prepared with a list (which tends to make shopping go smoother). He couldn’t find regular minotaur horns, but there were miniature minotaur horns which - though he had some moral reservations about, he bought anyway. Spice weasels were on sale. But, unfortunately, all the plaguebloom was sold out by the time he arrived. He needed the plaguebloom for a purification potion that the local Assassins’s Guild ordered over a week ago. It looked like, again, this order would be delayed which raised Lodagus’s cortisol levels. This was the third time being late on an order from the Assassin’s Guild, and they were not a customer you want to keep waiting. Whoever the Assassin’s Guild hired as an alchemist, while paid handsomely, had a tendency to disappear when they missed too many deadlines. Stressed, he headed for the bazaar’s exit.
‘Pure ectoplasm here! Straight from the Haunted Shore this week!’ a merchant shouted from across the street.
The Haunted Shore is a strip of coastline north of Kyro notorious for ship crashes due to the thick fog, turbulent waters, and rocky shoreline. There are chests of gems and gold coins throughout the area that draw in overconfident adventurers. The catch, of course, is that the shore is haunted with ghosts that feed on the souls of the living. Most people don’t return from the Haunted Shore. The few who do, typically have fallen into a deep, deep madness. Ectoplasm from a place like this was a rarity that piqued Lodagus’s attention.
Lodagus froggered his way through the bidirectional foot traffic of golems, wookies, and chimeric creatures towards this mysterious merchant holding a pulsatile, glowing jar. The ectoplasm was, supposedly, from the shipwreck of The Majesty off the Haunted Shore. The merchant told a compelling story about a royal family visiting for a wedding that ran astray into the shore during a storm. Lodagus had some extra gold coins in his pocket since there was no plaguebloom. And since he felt stressed about the delayed orders, he excitedly bought the jar as a treat to calm his nerves.
While in town, Lodagus stopped by The Library of Infinitus - a giant archive of papyrus scrolls dating thousands of years that were meticulously analyzed, organized, and stored by Architects. Architects are demi-gods whose lives are dedicated to the perseverance of The Library and begin to learn the layout as children. It was an enormous place with vast knowledge. More knowledge than a single person can know. There were journal entries from famous marksmen, aeronauts, monks, and dragonslayers. Transcriptions and texts about necromancy, religious lore, and cartography. It was easy to get lost both physically and mentally in this labyrinth of a library.
In particular, Lodagus wanted to learn about the shipwreck of The Majesty that his ectoplasm was from. But after an hour of wandering the aisles, he came up empty-handed. Eventually, Lodagus came across one of the library’s Architects. The Architect guided Lodagus through the numerous torchlit corridors and moving staircases. Eventually, they came upon the section that housed information about the Haunted Shore. The architect left him with the log of recorded shipwrecks, but Lodagus couldn’t find any called The Majesty. Nor were any of the ships from a royal family. And after he thought about it, there was no recent royal wedding. Discouraged, Lodagus began to realize that The Majesty was probably nothing more than a scam to sell dilute ectoplasm. The kind you find from the run-of-the-mill hauntings from a passed great-grandfather or something.
Tired, hot, and feeling duped, Lodagus returned home.
‘Another day in paradise’ he scoffed to himself.
II
Dinner was as usual. Life was as usual. There were no real problems in Lodagus’s life. His wasteful spontaneous purchase at the market didn’t really matter. The sting of being scammed was disappointing, but tomorrow would be normal. Too normal. Another day of shopping, cooking, and shoveling. Another day of stress and deadlines. Another day of realizing it’s just another day. Another day of realizing he’s re-realizing that it’s just another day. The days seemed to drip down the drain one after another. On some level, his life felt empty. It felt mundane. There was no magic in it.
Disheartened, he did what he always did when he felt this way and pulled a storybook out from under his bed: Life on Earth. It is a fictional tale of another world that, unlike his, was ripe with magic. A place where strange, interesting, (seemingly) important things happened all the time. He smiled as he flipped through the pages via the already fading glow of his diluted ectoplasm. This other world was filled with creatures, inventions, and lore that tickled his mind.
They had manipulators of nature called scientists that actually harnessed lightning and stored it in tiny batteries, and large power grids that everyone could access. They had machines (oh the machines! Lodagus was fascinated by the machines!) that flew around the world above the sky and could give personalized guidance to people anywhere they wanted to go. So much better than praying to the god of travel for guidance. They had transportation devices with the literal power of a thousand horses. A thousand horses! Some were even powered by this harnessed lighting they call electricity. Imagine that - a horse with the power of a thousand horses powered by lightning!
They had millions of grocery outlets with food from all over the world all kept fresh, cold. The spices in this world weren’t even exotic because everything was so obtainable. They had the Internet - much like the Library of Infinitus, but searchable from home from these things called computers. Or from the couch on their Trans-space Communicators (i.e. phones). They could capture moments of spacetime with the invention called The Camera. They didn’t need conjuring spells - they had this thing called Running Water where you just move this piece of metal with your hand and infinite, clean water comes runs to you with no work on your end (well there’s some Work, but its Work in the physics sense of the word - oh that’s right, they have physics!) Sometimes they don’t even use a handle just haphazardly wave their hands in front of it like a child sloppily casting their first conjuration spell - but it works!
It all boggled Lodagus’s mind. It was all so magical. As he fell asleep that night, he didn’t want to dream of the mundane things of his world. Not of his fading fluorescent ectoplasm, alchemist recipes, or dragons. Instead, he wanted to dream of magical things. Of lightswitches, receptor-specific psychopharmacology, and dogs.
Though a minor part of his storybook world, one of his favorite parts was the dogs. They were wild animals that coevolved alongside humans over hundreds of years to become ‘Mans best friend’. Sure dogs made dung and had to be fed just like Char did, but they were dogs! They had a supernatural sense of smell, soft fur coats, and extraordinary bonding capabilities baked into their DNA (oh yeah - DNA, that’s a whole thing). Unlike dragons, dogs seemed magic.
Lodagus closed the storybook and lay in bed preparing to have another mundane day tomorrow. Depression wasn’t in the vernacular of Lodagus’s culture, but if it was, he would have realized he felt somewhat depressed; demoralized at the least. As he fell asleep, he thought to himself a thought that crossed his mind much too often, ‘If only I could scoop dog dung in the morning instead of dragon dung. Then, life would be meaningful’
Inspiration for this piece: Mundane Magic