Brian Murphy - The Search For Magic

“A what?”

“Is it peculiar, to your knowledge?” the gnome attempted to elaborate.

“Most peculiar,” the kender answered. “You see, he’s broken, and I’d like to get him fixed.” He leaned closer and whispered, “I think he’s been afflicted.”

“Anafflictedkenderohhowmarvelous!” Dr. Palaver exclaimed as he led them through his alchemical laboratory.

Several large pots galloped atop a small stove, which caused the whole contraption to rock and scoot slowly around the room. Morg stood on his toes to see what was cooking and very nearly set his topknot on fire. Meanwhile, the doctor led Whort through a door that opened into an examination chamber.

“I’ve never had the opportunity to study an afflicted kender before. How did he come by it? I have heard that it is caused by expostulation to some source of vaporous fear, like that induced by dragons or other… do you mind if I measure his skull?”

He took down from the wall a device that looked like a giant nutcracker and approached the younger kender. Whort backed away, shaking his head and moaning “Erngh!” most emphatically.

“What is he afraid of?” the gnome asked.

“Everything!” Morg groaned.

“Everything?”

“Everything.”

“Mostpeculiarindeed!” the gnome squeaked with a little gleeful spring. “Renderareafraidofnothingbuthe-isafr iadofeverythinghowmarvelous!”

He began opening cupboards, of which there were perhaps three score, and drawers numbering in the hundreds. In the middle of the room stood a squat white marble examination table covered with what looked to be the same paper a butcher uses to wrap pork chops or whatnot. The large drain in the floor also did not bode well.

Dr. Palaver rattled about the room, gathering his instruments onto a large wooden tray and spilling various gleaming metal contraptions in his wake. Morg dutifully followed behind him, picking them up, but most of them somehow ended up in his own pockets rather than atop the doctor’s tray. The gnome did not seem to notice, so intent was he on his “unprecedented opportunity maybe even an article in the MMGGMN semi-quarterly annual,” and with running about, snapping his fingers and exclaiming, “Yes, I shall need that too!”

Whort crawled onto the examination table and curled up into a ball of dirt. His rat poked its head out of his hair and watched the doctor with growing alarm.

Finally, Dr. Palaver stood beside his patient and fingered through the instruments on the wooden tray. He picked up a small yellow card and held it at arm’s length from his face, peered down his nose and through his spectacles at it, reading aloud, “Now then, what seems to be the problem?” He dropped the card, lifted a device that looked like a flat piece of wood, and shoved it into Whort’s mouth. “Say ah.”

“Erngh.”

“He can’t speak,” Morg said.

“Cannot speak? Tch-tch. What a shame.” The doctor sympathized while trying to maneuver the beam of a bullseye lantern into the kender’s gaping mouth.

“It’s a tragedy!” Morg exclaimed.

“Erngh,” Whort agreed, choking on the stick.

The doctor removed the stick from Whort’s mouth and snapped the lid on the lantern. “Repeat after me. Big brown bugbear biting blue bottleflies.”

“Erngh.”

“You have been living with gully dwarves,” Dr. Palaver noted.

“Erngh.”

“That’s remarkable!” Morg said in awe. “I found him in the sewers in the company of about forty gully dwarves. You see, his mother sent me to look for him-”

“Elementary. The smell alone testifies to his modus homunculus,” the doctor said.

“Yes, I had noticed that. You see, his mother sent me-”

“The prognosis is obfuscated,” Dr. Palaver announced.

“She sent me- It’s what?”

“I know what is wrong with him.”

“You do?” Morg asked excitedly. “Can you fix him?”

“I am not a surgeon, and even if I were this boy’s cure is not to be found at the point of a knife,” Dr. Palaver said, as he dumped the tray of instruments on the examination table. He lifted a long butcher’s blade from the mass of metal and held it up to the light. “Not this one, anyway.”

“Erngh.”

“Whortleberry is suffering from acute panic psoriasis,” the doctor pronounced.

“It sounds horrible!” Morg cried. “Is it catching? Does it itch? Will he live? What is it?”

“It means that he is afraid.”

The elder kender’s face hardened. “We already know that! Are you sure you are a doctor?” he asked. “Don’t you fellows carry a badge or something?”

“There is the name on the door if you care to look,” the gnome answered, somewhat miffed. “In any case you did not allow me to complete my diagonal, concerning the gully dwarves. You see, the laborious odor of these creatures has permutated into his speaking glands, interrupting their normal effluvia of sound, while his fear-whatever its cause-has conscripted the muscles around his talk bone, preventing its ability to swing freely.”

“So what is to be done?” Morg asked.

“There is only one cure, and of course I have only just invented it today. That is why I was so late leaving, or you might not have found me on the floor,” the gnome said as he helped Whort from the table. The rat retreated back into Whort’s hair.

“The cure,” Dr. Palaver said as he led Morg and Whort down a low, dark, odiferous tunnel, “is to face the fear that produced the affectation, while at the same time indigesting a special formula-of which I am the inventor and which should evacuate the speak glands. Since I speculum that the source of the fear originates down here in the sewers, where you first found your nephew, the cure for the fear must also lie in the sewers.”

“If you only just invented it today, how can you be sure it will work?” Morg asked.

“There is an old gnomish axiom which states that something will work until it doesn’t,” Dr. Palaver explained. “And since we don’t know that it doesn’t work we must assume that it does. It really is elementary if you think about.”

“I see,” Morg sighed, though he really didn’t see.

When they had reached a certain section of the tunnel that seemed significant to the gnome, but which was no different than any other they had passed along the way-except perhaps that there was a particularly vile smell wafting from a nearby passageway-the gnome paused and removed a strange-looking device from one of his coat pockets.

“This inflatable sleeve monitors the thickness of the vines in the arm,” the gnome said, as he wrapped a thing around the kender’s arm that looked like the air bladder of a large fish. A long tube ending in an onion-shaped bulb of similar material depended from one end of the device, while from the other hung three tiny brass bells of varying sizes and tones. “It is believed that the thickness of the vines in the arm is directly provisional to the state of health. Any sudden changes could indicate a converse reaction to the potion, but we will be alerted to such changes by the ringing of the smallest bell. This middle bell indicates that there is a problem with the first bell, and this largest bell indicates that there is a problem not associated with either bell.”

Next, the doctor removed a strange set of spectacles from the upper-middle breast pocket of his white coat. They were not ordinary reading spectacles like the ones perched on the tip of his own very large, bulbous nose. Instead, they seemed made of some kind of thick, dark, opaque material through which no light could possibly pass, and which wrapped completely around the face. “How marvelously hideous!” Morg exclaimed, as the doctor slipped them onto his nephew’s nose and wrapped the arms behind his pointy ears. Once on his face, the lenses magnified to grotesque proportions the size of his eyes behind them. He blinked, and it was like someone quickly opening and closing the shutters of a pair of dark windows.