Tuesday 16 February 2010

The Cure

It hadn’t taken Mervin long to work out where Hans had gone. He simply had to imagine he had the intelligence of a senile goldfish, the curiosity of a small child and had no understanding of magic whatsoever. Perhaps, not so simple after all, but Mervin knew Hans had just found out how the magic door worked on one side, so he’d probably tried the other. It didn’t take too long to find Hans, and when he did, Mervin began a long and particularly loud shouting session. Admittedly, this was mostly due to Mervin wishing Hans hadn’t brought that annoying Canadian along with him, not that he’d messed around with complex magic technology, but it felt good to finally relieve that anger.
There was a more serious reason to be yelling at Hans apart from the therapeutic ones. The castle has thirteen separate libraries that technically exist, but only the physical space for four of them, so that most of them exist in some limbo like state. As you may have by now guessed, Mervin decided to stop shouting and speak very slowly to try and help get the message across, it didn’t help. He tried to explain that anyone stuck there would not physically exist. Not physically existing is rather a traumatic experience for a human, especially when you get an itch on a neck that doesn’t exist. Some cases have been reported where people have been stuck in there for days, however most last for a few hours which is still enough time to drive most people completely mad. So it wouldn’t probably do Hans any harm anyway.
Mervin decided the best thing to do in this situation was probably to ignore the author’s rants and get on with the story. He sat Hans down and prepared to cast the spell. He took out his wand, outstretched Hans’ arm and rubbed the wand over the burns. To say this hurt Hans would be an understatement, but just before Hans was about to snap and hit Mervin, he shouted, “Flamenco deus.” The spell began rejuvenating Hans’ damaged cells immediately, the healing sweeping up his arm like a Mexican wave of skin.
“Whoa!” yelled as he jumped back, half in awe, half in fear at the wriggling of his skin. The pain had gone, so had the black burnt skin, if it was someone else you could have said it was back to normal.
Hans was more than impressed, he stood there for what someone with no sense of time would call aeons with his mouth gaping wide open like an imbecile. Mervin looked back at him, scanning up and down, searching in vain for some magical side-effect explanation for the behaviour he saw in front of him. Seeing nothing, he asked Hans if he was alright.
With all the excitement of a giddy school kid, Hans sprung to life. “How did you do that?” he asked Mervin.
“Well I used magic, dinna,” said Mervin, wondering how Hans managed to be rich enough to buy this place, but still dumb enough to not spot the obvious.
“I know that,” said Hans, “it’s just, well, how?”
“Well, it’s got a lot to do with other dimensions, micro-particles and a hell of a lot of other science mumbo-jumbo?”
“You do know you’re rubbish at making stuff up when you don’t know what on Earth you’re on about!” exclaimed Hans.
“Well, yeah,” said Mervin. He could see that he’d have to explain this in some explicit way that Hans could actually understand. “When you were at school did you get really excited in science class when you dissected the pig’s eyeball, but then proceeded to just chop it to tiny little pieces without listening to why you were supposed to be doing it?”
“Erm… no.”
“Oh, just me then; well you get the point anyway.”
“That you’re more of a practical man.”
“Just a little,” Mervin retorted sarcastically.
“Oh,” said Hans. “Can you please teach, me, please?” he added sounding like a small hyperactive child.