There was one place where there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of magical ley lines that gathered and writhed like snakes. It was destiny that this should be the greatest city ever built: Frostford.

Meet Myer, an absentminded young mage who works for the Ministry in Frostford. Now meet Myer's helping hand: Stepwise, the daemon he creates so that he can find the things he misplaces. Myer is about to discover that giving humanity the ability to search for anything, at any time, can lead to catastrophe.

Part 2 of 2.

Written by: Jonathan Cohen

Narrated by: Trevor Schechter

A Faustian Nonsense production.

To read the full transcript of this episode, go to https://thelavendertavern.captivate.fm/episode/myers-helping-hand-part-2

Transcript

According to Myer’s tracking spell, there were now nine Stepwises – eight of them outside of his control. Now it was time to panic.

Myer tried to slow his breathing and thought of his lesson on Runaway Magic. How could he not think of it? It was the highlight of every Ministry student’s first year of study. The magister who taught the course showed them how a magic spell that simply doubled objects would lead to disaster. He started with a copper coin and kept doubling it with a simple incantation. The single coin became two coins, then four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and by the tenth doubling the magister showered the podium in copper and told the students that there were now over a thousand coins…before he made all but one of them disappear with a flourish.

Any magic that was not properly cast could lead to runaway magic. There were rumours that this was one of the reasons the Ministry had been formed in the first place, but the magister would neither confirm nor deny this. He had scraped the chalk across the large slate at the front of the class, then tapped each syllable, emphasizing the word: “Cat-tas-stro-phe!”

Myer re-read the spell he’d written to conjure the first daemon. There were no flaws that he could see. No, Stepwise had been copied by human means, at least at first.

He bit his lip. “Stepwise, double yourself,” he said with some dread.

Stepwise stretched and split down the middle. Now there were two Stepwises in front of him. Eleven red spots on the line symbol. Cat-tas-stro-phe.

He could duplicate enough Stepwises to catch the other Stepwises now, but since at least one other person knew how to duplicate the rogue daemons, there was no stopping them.

And each daemon used a tiny bit of manna…unnoticeable at first, but once it became a case of Runaway Magic, the manna would start adding up.

Myer was a clever young man. He often had many clever ideas and brought these clever ideas to Alastair or the lower magisters. This time, he felt that the cleverest thing he could do was to…say nothing.

It would have been simple to deconstruct the Stepwises. All Myer needed to do to make them disappear was to reverse the spell inscribed on the sheet of parchment he now kept locked in the bottom drawer of his chest of drawers. He could even tear the parchment into pieces, if he did not mind the thought of every Stepwise suddenly deconstructing violently.

But the moment Myer broke the spell, all of the accumulated manna that animated the daemons would instantly flow back into the manna reservoir at the end of the street, and from there into the neighborhood’s ley line. The Ministry would not fail to notice an *increase* in the supply of manna…especially when a young, clever minister resided only a short walk away.

The next morning Myer noted with a dull resignation that there were fourteen red dots on the symbol. On his walk to the Ministry, he spotted at least two Stepwises flitting about the buildings above him: one had a hammer in its mouth, and the other carried an apple.

If Alastair...