Just Follow the Directions.
A powerful wizard attempts to make banana bread without magic
It’s just banana bread, this should be fucking simple!
Iglarious stood at the kitchen counter staring at a banana bread recipe and scratching his chin furiously. It was not the most hygienic thing to be doing in the kitchen, but at least he wasn’t standing with his dirty toes on the counter and trying to take a shit into the open oven, although Iglarious would rather be doing that. He hated cooking. He had always been a bad cook, ever since he was nine and gravely misunderstood the directions and meaning of heating up the dog food in the oven. He was left with no dog to feed the dog food to, but he was left with what could be considered ‘dog food’…but not good dog food. I suggest going to Vietnam for that (very tasty!).
He had fallen in love with Elena who was a world renowned chief. She was famous for her ability to cook recipes in the traditional old-fashioned way (without the use of magic), which set her apart from all of the other top chefs. She claimed magic changed the way things tasted. This had yet to be proven, but if the prices at her restaurant Alakadon’t are to be judged as a measure of the truth, well then, her claims were extremely truthful.
“What do I want for my birthday?” she had replied to him a few days earlier. “Well, it would be nice if you made me some food for once. Just make me something easy like banana bread, and please, just for once, absolutely no magic!”
No magic? Iglarious was the type of magician who didn’t have in-door slippers because he had indoor dolphin feet, when the need be (and the need be quite often). He had excelled at magic his whole life, never really putting it to much use, always more concerned with spending his enormous stipend from his parents and falling madly in love with the most wonderful women of the world. Iglarious had decided that Elena was truly the most wonderful woman he had ever met. This wasn’t a fleeting, evaporating emotion like it was so often with him and all his other romantic entanglements.
Magic was the wonderful backbone of everything Iglarious did. He used it at every opportunity and he was a lifetime opportunist. Why open a door when you can travel through dimensions and arrive at the other side? Why clean up the kitchen when you can replace the kitchen with a new one and teleport the old one to Bulgaria? Why pet a cat when you can transform it into a twenty-armed creature-cat-thing which can pet itself and hold nineteen Arabian swords? Bathrooms were for people without magic. When he had to do bathroom business he had convenient bathroom worlds inside of his underwear which were made of the fleece of an extra dimensional yeti named Ghoyb who had challenged Ilgarous to a duel and lost.
The first direction read: cut the banana into pieces. Iglarous held the knife awkwardly like a baby with a (presumably) dead porcupine. He peeled the bananas while still holding the knife. Then he made the first cut which went ok. Gaining confidence he cut more pieces and moved onto the second banana. Now sure of himself that he was a master at this primitive cutting, he began to whistle a little tune while being careful that it wasn’t a magical tune. He stuck to only notes that human ears could hear. As his mind slipped away from the knife and banana, so did his knife from the banana, and he cut into his finger – –not too deep, but blood came out all the same. He let go of the knife and grabbed his finger in shock. Then he began to tense all his muscles for a moment, along with dilating his pupils…..and then he remembered: no magic. So, he simply waited for the bleeding to stop and wrapped a cloth around his finger rather than transfiguring the knife into a sentient lifeform and forcing it to cut itself slowly.
He followed the other directions one by one, holding his hand steady and biting his incantations before they managed to escape his spell-worthy lips. Eventually he got the banana bread into the oven (but not without a fight). He glanced at the clock waiting for it to be done and for his his goal to be over. Forty minutes. He couldn’t wait to unleash his magical might. Fifteen minutes. Oh, he was going to do something really special! Five minutes – –time had never vexed him so (and once a jealous Wizord – not to be confused with a wizard – named Iloo had actually vexed him pretty bad…he is dead now of course). Two minutes, his wand was hard. One minute. The air shook with magical excitement. The timer on the oven went off.
“AlakafuckingZAM!!!!!” roared Iglarious.
The oven exploded outward into silver swans singing a vocal version of a previously unheard of symphony by Beethoven. He floated up and snapped his finger (the one which had been cut) and the knife which had cut him jumped to life and began to slowly cut itself. “Ohhhh whyyyy, why are you making me cut myse-” the sound was silenced by another snap of his fingers as the knife cut off its only lips which fell to the ground and transformed into rose petals which swirled (and twirled) around Iglarious, leaving glowing fragrant trails of flower essence. The loaf of banana bread rose up as the ceiling above parted as did a sea he had added just to have more to part. The banana bread, Iglarious and the flowers rose up to Elena laying in bed.
“No magic?”
“None…while making it my love,” said Iglarious whilst astride a conjured winged centaur floating inside the world’s largest un-popped bubble.
Her mouth opened.
*Snap* went his fingers and what was left of the knife creature floated up like a rag doll in a parabolic arc cutting a small piece of the bread at the apex of it’s height. The piece teleported 3 feet (briefly entering the domain of Fairie) and then gilded another foot to Elana’s mouth. She closed her mouth and chewed the piece. Magic continued, but all Iglairous could do was focus on her, waiting to see if she was pleased.
Elena finished her bite, swallowing, and a smile appeared on her lips.
“Very good.”
Iglriaous smiled as well, snapped his fingers twice and they were transported somewhere private away from the pages of history where they could really be completely alone, even from me. As a consequence of this particularly complicated teleportation magic, four thousand elves now lie dead in the Forest of the Eternal Moon.
