Random stories

Clotch stepped into her shared burrow with a singular goal of drinking every last drop of glormjuice in their cellar.

Alas, Jag was home and looking stormy. Literally. The wizard's hair was half-levitated in a frizzy red cloud and lightning zaps ran in sparking rivulets along the planes of her face.

Clotch eyed the mess surrounding her, most of it unidentifiable junk. "Rough going? I thought I had it bad today."

Jag glared down at a mostly uncovered summoning circle painted on an oversized sheet of parchment. "I am going to summon a revolution. Don't try to stop me."

Clotch waived a permissive hand. With some difficulty, she refrained from then asking Jag to make sure she cleaned up when finished. If Jag forgot, it was just a few snaps of her fingers to remedy. Wizards were useful like that.

"If you're going to revolt against the Spellmaster," Clotch said, "make sure the rebellion starts outside."

"Sure." Jag's eyes began to glow a uranium green as she chanted in an arcane language.

A book thudded down into the center of the summoning circle. Jag groaned and kicked the junk pile.

Clotch, however, liked books. She reached for this one and found it in a microscopic foreign language. She rifled through the pages and found many of them held intricate diagrams of mind-boggling mechanisms.

She flipped to one that, upon further study, appeared to be a mechanism for vertical conveyance of people and large loads. Without magic.

Maybe Jag's summoning had worked after all. The concept was revolutionary.

The shape of the parts would be simple for a journeyman craftsman like Clotch. It would take only the better part of three days to draw up the full ownership claim for the Dwarven Bureau of Patents.

No more working for grouchy Thimbleflame. No more intricate tinkering of chain mail. No more meals of yesterday's mush. All the glormjuice she could drink.

Now she just needed some seed money for the metals and then the gold would be flowing in.

"Say Jag, how much revolution can you buy with a cave full of gold?"

---

Submitted by Bubblesnaily on Thu, May 11, 2023 to /r/WritingPrompts/

The prompt

Due to a wizard's botched summoning attempt, an engineering college student's textbooks wind up transported to a fantasy world, whereupon they're found by a dwarf craftsman who's down on his luck.