I blinked as the room came into focus.

“...can’t leave this one alone for two minutes.”

I was standing beside the upholstered high back chair where I’d enjoyed my meal earlier. Claeffen stood in front of me, his gaze stern, save for a glint of curiosity in those inscrutable eyes of his.

Uncomfortable would be the best word to describe how I felt. Uncomfortable, and awkward. I’d snooped around where I didn’t belong. With everything that had been going on I had let my inquisitive nature run wild and now I was being stared down with a look that I couldn’t quite decipher, one I definitely wasn’t a fan of receiving.

“Heeeyy Claeffen.” I said, my greeting sounding awkwardly high pitched.

The moment stretched out in silence as he regarded me. His gaze was intense and I found myself unable to just sit in the silence.

“Sorry for being in your.. maze..”

His expression softened slightly,

“Curiosity is a good thing Mal, though you would be wise to restrain yours until you have the tools to ensure it isn’t something that leads to.. Undesirable consequences.”

The idea of my curiosity leading to mysterious “Undesirable consequences” was a sobering thought. Though, realizing I wasn’t being punished for my carelessness, my discomfort eased slightly.

“Thank you, uh.. sir, that’s.. good advice.”

He smiled, “Just call me Claeffen. Well! Since you’ve clearly recuperated from your transport, how about having a drink with me?”

“Huh?”

The question caught me off guard and I just gaped at him for a moment before shaking myself out of my stupor

Claeffen gestured at the dark wood table with a smile.

“Oh! Yes, I’d love to!”

Accepting his invitation we sat across from each other. Claeffen took his chair gracefully, like he’d spent a lifetime in the presence of aristocrats and bigwigs.

Well duh, he probably has.

Still, something about the sheer elegance of his motions despite the armor he wore was mystifying. It made me realize that I’d never seen someone move with such care and precision. Taking my own seat made me feel uncoordinated in comparison, primitive even. I couldn’t help my curiosity despite the recent warning and asked the question that immediately came into my head.

“How do you do that?”

Claeffen’s expression shifted ever so slightly for the briefest of moments before answering my question with one of his own.

“Hm? What are you referring to?”

“That,” I said, gesturing broadly at him.

“You know, the way you move. I’ve never seen anyone move like that.”

Registering my meaning he let out an “Ahh.” of understanding.

Then he laughed. It was a laugh of genuine enjoyment and I could sense no malice in it but I still felt a bit embarrassed.

“Sorry, that was probably a stupid question.”

Hearing my words his laughter eased and he shook his head at me.

“No, Mal, it wasn’t a stupid question at all. In fact, I’ll let you in on a little trivia. Across the multiverse there is a well known cliché that can be found in nearly every culture; there are no stupid questions. It is a ubiquitous maxim because it is true, on more levels than one.”

Well at least he doesn’t think I’m an uncultured idiot or something.

That I knew of, anyway. I suppose he could think I’m an uncultured idiot but at least it wouldn’t be because of my questions.

“In.. that case...”

“What was so funny?”

He said, asking my question for me as I struggled to find the right way to do so. His smile broadened and he folded his hands on the table between us, his ornate vambraces making a light tapping sound on the wood of the table.

“You are in a different world sitting across from a mage who, if I may say so, is fairly accomplished. All that and one of your first questions has nothing to do with magic at all, remarkable.”

Well, I hadn’t thought about it like that, obviously, and to be honest some part of me had assumed his grace was a result of magic, how could it not be?

“Wait, so you can move like that without magic?”

I asked, incredulous.

“You’ll be amazed at the things one can do without magic. Though magic has its uses as well, of course.”

Then he reached out over the empty table and mimed picking something up but as he drew his hand back I was shocked to see him holding an etched glass filled with a purple liquid. He had just conjured a drink out of thin air!

He gestured towards me and I discovered there was now a matching glass in front of me as well.

“Woah.” I exclaimed under my breath involuntarily.

Leaning forward I tentatively reached out to touch it but I jerked back reflexively when my hand made contact, as my nerves were struck by simultaneously hot and cold sensations. Taken aback I clutched my hand by the wrist defensively. It took a moment for my conscious mind to catch up to what happened and that I wasn’t in any danger, probably. Prepared for the experience I extended my hand towards the drink again. When my fingers brushed the textured glass the bizarre sensation returned and spread upwards into my forearms. I sat with it for a moment before grasping the thin handle on its side and raising the glass towards my face.

I noticed movement on its surface and paused, adjusting my grip on the handle, I examined the object. What had felt like a textured pattern turned out to be a pattern of a colorful school of fish swimming in a coral reef of vibrant blues and pinks. However what really stuck out to me was the fact that the design seemed to be moving slightly, the whole thing rotating around the surface in a slow hypnotic fashion.

“Woah.” I repeated, not for the last time today, I was sure.

Pulling the enchanting chalice towards me I went to peer into it but was rebuked by a burst of wind that buffeted outward, tossing my hair back and almost making me spill its contents all over myself. Despite the surprise the gust had an indistinct and comfortable quality to it that somehow reminded me of a nice day at the beach and made me smile involuntarily.

I looked up from the baffling cup to find Claeffen hiding what could only be described as a mischievous smile behind his own drink. Having done everything but actually drink.. whatever it was.. I decided to just go for it.

Here goes nothing.

I grabbed the glass and took in a mouthful of the liquid. My eyes widened and I felt an electric vibration race across my skin as my mind tried to establish all the sensations and flavors. I could taste, see, smell, hear and feel the impressions of salt air, ice cream, sun screen, sand, ocean, cool nights, sunshine, and breeze, my whole body tasting the flavor of a long overdue vacation. I stared down in utter shock and was doubly amazed to see a two dimensional scene flowing across the top of the purple beverage. I gaped as a surfer, made of the liquid, rode through a huge wave and turned his head to look right at me, though the details of his face were too small to make out. Then he threw me a “hang loose” gesture before doing a sick flip at the crest of a wave.

Claeffen asked, “How do you like it? It's Newt Milk Hooch.”

“Newt Milk?”

“Hooch, yes, quite delicious. I always make sure to pick some up anytime I encounter a Newt armada willing to trade.”

I looked up at him, dazed. The drink being called Newt Milk Hooch, while a surprise, was the least out of the ordinary thing about the concoction.

Absently I shook my head and stared back down at the surfer again and asked myself in a whisper, “How does it move? It’s like watching a drinkable gif.”

“Alchemy, of course. Newts produce some of the finest concoctionists and when they aren’t brewing for war they brew for enjoyment.”

The casual way in which he spoke reminded me of what I really wanted to know and, since he seemed willing to answer my questions, I decided now was the time.

“Can you teach me?”

He quirked his head slightly at my question before responding,

“Certainly, I’m an excellent teacher. Will I though? That I cannot say. Let me ask you a question, Mal. Why do you think you were brought here?”

Not having my request outright rejected gave me hope. However, his question stumped me.

“I.. don’t know. Honestly, everything has just been so…”

“Overwhelming?” He asked, a touch of sympathy in his voice.

“Yeah, definitely, it has definitely been overwhelming but no, I was going to say exciting. I mean this is all so… awesome.” I said the last word slowly, feeling foolish saying “awesome” in front of the powerful and graceful spellcaster. He nodded,

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

Claeffen rubbed his chin thoughtfully his demeanor regal,

“Mal you have been brought here because I am looking for an apprentice."

I felt my pulse skyrocket at the words and my mind raced at the revelation.

"However, it's not a matter of simply accepting someone to be an apprentice. Apprentices, or I should say potential apprentices, are required to prove their worth. Thus, I have designed a program to find those worthy for such a position.”

I leaned forward as my curiosity reached new heights, “Like a test?”

“Something like that, and you are not the only candidate.”

This was perfect. What were the odds that an immortal mage of nigh godlike power was looking for an apprentice within my lifetime, and within such a short time of my only success at magic. It was a mindblowing coincidence. Then again, the existence of magic put the very concept of coincidence into question.

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Not being the only candidate makes sense, a mage of his caliber would want the best.

I didn’t know why I was even in the running, given my limited magical success, but I wasn’t about to look a gift wizard in the mouth.

“Count me in.”

Claeffen drummed his fingers on the rim of the glass and we sat there for a beat as he considered me. After another moment the tapping stopped and he spoke, his features grave and his tone serious,

“The process will not be easy. In fact, it will be quite dangerous, you could die.. Are you willing to take that risk?”

Was I?

I could go back to Earth and try to forget about magic, go on with my mundane life.

I snorted mentally at the thought.

Yeah, right.

I nodded at him, a grin plastered on my face.

“I’m sure.”

Claeffen mirrored my nod, his eyes locked on mine and I could tell he was reading my resolve without the need of any magical assistance. This was the type of gaze exchanged by kindred spirits.

“You understand, then, there will be no going back? Even if you survive you would have to make unbreakable vows, and you wouldn’t be able to return to your planet for many years.”

My grin never wavered as I silently acknowledged my understanding.

His bearded face turned up into a beaming smile before he opened his arms wide,

“Wonderful! In that case, shall we begin?"

Eager to get started on this potential new path I agreed enthusiastically,

“Hell yeah!”

That had come out a little more exuberantly than I’d intended.

That Newt Milk was definitely a hooch alright. I wondered briefly if Claeffen had known it would have such a strong effect on me before serving the powerful spirit and I absentmindedly raised the glass, taking another mouthful.

“Oh! One last thing before we get started. Please repeat after me; I hereby verbally consent to having a truth spell placed on me.”

I stumbled at the unexpectedly strange phrasing but parroted the verbal consent form back to him.

“I uh… verbally consent to having a truth spell placed on me.”

I expected to feel something, a tingle.. external sensation.. something, but felt nothing except the faint swirling of the powerfully alcoholic concoction in my glass.

“Do you like pink fairy armadillos?”

“Wait, ‘fairy armadillos’?” I asked,

I was now thoroughly stumped at the direction this interview was going.

“If you don’t know, just say so.”

“Right, uh, I don’t know?”

“Next, How are your warm air current wrangling skills?”

“Unknown?”

“What are your motivations for wanting to be a mage?”

Crap, that’s a big question.

I began taking in a very slooooww sip of the newt hooch.

Claeffen cleared his throat loudly after nearly forty five seconds of continuous sipping.

Clearly my delay tactics needed work.

I definitely shouldn’t be drinking during this interview. Especially not the strongest liquor I’ve ever had in my freaking life.

I found myself taking another sip.

Wait..

What was the question?

“Hmm, I think that was enough.” Claeffen said, as he rubbed his chin,

“Or maybe too much. Did I forget to ask if you drink? Oops.”

My fingers clamped together as the glass vanished from my hand. I tried to figure out who took my hooch by looking around but that seemed to confuse Claeffen.

That’s okay Claeffen, I’ll find them. I thought, they had to be around here somewhere.

“Mal, I need…” I watched as his face went through a myriad of expressions to the sound of waves and people laughing in the distance. Then the sounds were interrupted by the really loud screech of a seagull or something.

Abruptly everything became still and my mind returned to the question.

“What are your motivations for wanting to be a mage?”

I didn’t want to answer “magic, duh” since that didn’t seem like a winning response. Neither did, “mages are cool” or “magic is amazing!” None of which explained my motivation but more how I felt about things.

Did he just un-drunk me?

“I don’t know.” I heard my mouth betray me with honesty.

“Ah! I see we’re back on track. Good. Next question, what is your favorite book?”

“The Chronicles of the Magi Claeffen: Book Eight.”

“Do you kiss the Akshé Queen?”

“ Umm…" I paused, taking in the question before I gasped in realization at his meaning, “Yes!” I replied excitedly.

He smirked as he continued his questioning,

“What do you bring to the Zwelvse?”

“Logs cut against the grain, harvested during the alignment of Two Bright Kings.”

What do the two brightest of the five Zwelvse moons have to do with anything? I continued wondering at the cryptic questionnaire.

“What do you feel about the color orange?”

“Feel about - ” I stopped myself from asking the question back,

“I feel.. the.. juice?”

You feel the juice Mal, seriously?

Despite my asinine answer Claeffen nodded sagely, as if the reply meant something to him, before he slid his chair back, and stood exclaiming,

“Let’s get you to the next stage.”

With that he started walking toward the fireplace, he glanced back at me still sitting in the chair, flabbergasted, “Come now, no time to waste.”

Stepping to the right of the fireplace he just walked right.. through the wall.

What the hell?

Unwilling to be left behind I rushed out of my seat and towards the wall but ended up stopping before reaching it, the same bundle of neurons that kept me from falling out of bed at night, no doubt, telling me that hitting the wall wouldn’t be fun.

Just breathe. You're going through a wall. No big deal.

I pressed forward, taking a step and flinching despite my mental preparation as the surface of the wall came to greet my face. With my eyes squeezed tight I took another step out of Claeffen’s bedroom and opened them to an oddly.. mundane.. auditorium. It looked straight out of my high school’s morning assemblies.

I could see Claeffen at the rostrum addressing the crowd of people occupying about half of the dingy folding plastic seats.

“You have all passed the introductory stage. There are about fifty of you vying for the available positions, and I have high hopes that most of you will make it past this next stage.”

He paused to let everyone absorb what he was saying before raising a ring jeweled index finger. With the simple gesture the stage was populated with several rows of hiking packs which all seemed to be stuffed full.

“Each of you will take one of these packs,” he said, gesturing to the newly formed paraphernalia.

“After you have grabbed your supplies, make your way backstage and choose one of the items presented. Once you have done so you will be transported to an ideal learning environment, giving you the opportunity to awaken your mage’s calling and pass into the next stage of trials. Ah! and do refrain from opening your packs until you have arrived.”

Without waiting for fanfare he pointed at a seemingly random person,

“You.”

The person in question pointed at themselves as if to ask, “Me?”.

“Yes, come up here and take a bag, then make your way backstage.”

The person he’d called on, a seemingly average gentleman with russet hair, stood, and made his way to the side of the stage where he began walking up the steps. Then, as he reached the final step, he ceased looking like a dude entirely and I watched as a hulking cyclopean man, one eye and all, stomped towards the bags and grabbed one between two huge meaty fingers. He looked a little disappointed at how small it was, then turned and headed to the velvety red curtain at the back of the platform before exiting stage right.

This process repeated several times, the variety of creatures growing more staggering with each new arrival to the auditorium’s stage. Hell, several of them weren’t even humanoid, some having insectoid qualities while others still were more like prismatic amorphous oozes. I watched in amazement as each one subsequently used their particular variety of locomotion to ascend the platform, choose an item, and disappear somewhere off stage. I was particularly impressed by the prismatic ooze man who just shoved the whole thing in his chest, or what I assumed was his chest, anyway.

Realizing I was still standing and it would probably be a few more minutes before it was my turn I took the nearest seat in the back of the aisle where I’d arrived. Only to have Claeffen call on me as soon as I’d settled in the uncomfortable foldy plastic bucket seat.

Standing and making my way to the platform I glanced at the nearby people still sitting and noted that they all looked human. This had to be a deliberate tactic to put our minds at ease or smooth along the proceedings.

When I neared the steps up I realized I didn’t have any of the stuff I’d arrived with, my backpack, phone, and watch were all missing from my person.

When did I lose my stuff?

I thought about when I woke up and none of it was on the bed next to me. I had been so caught up in what I was experiencing that I’d totally forgotten about my belongings. I looked closer at everyone near me to see if anyone else had more than the clothes on their backs. It looked like we were all in various states of unpreparedness but, then again, these facades were all illusionary so who’s to say what they had on them.

Once I was up and passing the rostrum I caught Claeffen’s eye and he gave me a wink before turning to scan the seats. My gaze followed his and from this new vantage point I could see the people as they really were.

Am I seriously the only human?

I walked up like my predecessors, grabbed one of the prepared packs and exited through the obscured opening on my left. I walked through a dim passage for a few moments before I arrived at a metal door standing, hingeless and disconnected from walls or ceiling. The door blocked my path and, taking a second to look behind the door and seeing nothing, I turned the round knob and squinted at the well illuminated interior of the space before me.

Beyond the gloom of my previous location was a small room with all white surfaces and a single glass-top table in the center. Sitting on the table were five peculiar items. Left to right they were: a fist sized chromatic cube, a single yellow flower, one of those temporary tattoos you get out of gumball machines (in a smiley face design), a bowl with a living goldfish, and an origami spider.

Looking out at all the items the one that most caught my eye was the chromatic cube. There was just something aesthetic about its sharp edges and mirrored chrome surface. I reached out to grab it, you know, to gather data, after all how could I make the right choice without all the relevant information, like how it felt in hand? Unfortunately it seemed that just grabbing an object was all that was required as my hand hovered mid-air holding the strange cube, the table it had been on and indeed the very room I had just been in were nowhere to be found.

I was standing at a stone paved crossroads on a small hill overlooking vast, uneven plains covered in what I could only describe as a waist-high carpet of wispy purple hair.

“Woah” I let out for the third time today.

I looked around, seeing only the weird purple hair on small rolling hills in every direction, save for one. There, off in the distance was some kind of structure. I couldn’t tell from here what it was other than it had to be large given the perspective and relative distance. I couldn’t say what direction it was in, exactly, since the glow coming from the sky was omnidirectional, but I could confidently say it was the path on my left.. ish.

That’s when I noticed a kind of signpost. It was about as tall as me and made of the same type of angled chromatic metal as the cube I still held. Atop it was a free-spinning wheel with markers labeled in an indecipherable language that pointed towards each path on the crossroads.

Usually signposts are fixed, aren’t they? I wondered briefly but without being able to come up with an answer to the curious design choice I decided to let it go for now.

“Alright Mal, time to check your bag.”

I sat down in the center of the stone paved intersection I was standing in and made myself as comfortable as I could on the hard surface while I opened the bag to see what goodies I’d been given.

“I wonder what kind of clues are buried in this big ol’ bag.”

Flipping open the top flap I couldn’t see past its opening.

“Huh, magic bag, neat.”

Reaching in the dark opening I began to pull the contents out. Much to my surprise the very first thing that came out was my backpack that I thought I wouldn’t be seeing again any time soon. I immediately looked inside it to discover that everything I had packed was there in addition to my watch and phone, both of which surprisingly were fully charged.

“Did.. Claeffen charge my phone?”

I decided to look around on it for anything out of the ordinary and discovered that all of the history of searching for the bookstore and even the game I’d downloaded while waiting in line were totally gone, as if the past few… how long had it been? Hours? Days? It was like they hadn’t even happened.

That’s when my phone began to ring and the caller ID read, “Bossman”, confused, I answered, “Hello?”

“Mal! Where have you been? I've been trying to get you on shift Friday, Jimmy called out sick again.”

I held the phone away from my face for a moment and stared at the device in confusion.

How the hell do I have service?

“Uhh… I don’t.. think I’m going to be able to make it into work any time soon.”

“Ah come on Mal, I know you’ll just be sitting around your apartment reading those books. I could really use the help.”

I only partially heard what he said as I had to swat at a small flying insect that flitted around my face before zooming off.

“Yeah, look, sorry Bennett but you know all that time off I just took?”

“Look, I know you’re on vacation”, the way he said “on vacation” I could practically hear him making air quotes, “but I really need the help.”

“Well,” I said, looking around the alien landscape before me, trying to find the right words. “I’m out of town, sorry.” Then, not feeling the slightest bit of remorse, I hung up on him for having called me on my day off.

“Alright Mal, let’s go through this pack and have ourselves a magical adventure.” I said as I rubbed my hands together like a greedy little magic seeking squirrel.