Jason just stood there, staring blankly at the spot in the middle of the road while considering the reality of the old man actually, truly being a sorcerer from another Earth. Fucking wow! Then he saw the broom handle lying in the road, and he dashed to retrieve it before heading for his car with many things to think about! What he really needed was a coffee! Fortunately, he spotted a Xendo drive-through coffee place and satisfied his craving.

He returned home, sipping his drive-through coffee while he thought about everything and then thought some more. He ran the recording again and could still follow every word, so the spell Urasmian had thrown on him so he could understand other languages was certainly still working! Well, he wasn’t magic himself, so he couldn’t make the spell work but imagine if he could! There really was a multiverse. Multiple versions of Earth where things had gone differently. And he couldn’t do anything about seeing them. Oh, man! But at least he knew! And magic! Like fucking hell, man!

Chapter 4

Study, study, study… wait, what?

Jason strolled into the post-grads study room or office and was surprised to find he wasn’t the first one there, despite how early he was. The title of the room varied, depending on who was describing it and for what reason. When the denizens were interviewing students about tutorial papers and such, the room was the post-grad office. If a senior academic or any university administration staff referred to the room, it was the post-grad study room.  Sharyn Williams was never usually early, so it was with some astonishment that he saw she had beaten him to school for once.

As he walked in, she glanced up from from her left-hand corner desk, where she was reading something that was large and heavy looking. She smiled at him briefly while giving him a small nod of recognition, and then she returned to the tome she was studying. As Sharyn wasn’t usually one to get in so early, he was tempted to ask the reason for this unusually bright and early start to her studies. In the event, he refrained from interrupting her, noting the intentness she was displaying in whatever it was she was perusing. He hated being interrupted when he was deep into some complicated tome, and he refused to inflict unnecessary distractions on his colleagues.

He flopped down into the chair at his desk and surveyed the small area he called home during the days he spent at the University. It was kind of nice to be back to the usual University round after the unsettling and very strange break he had experienced. Nothing seemed out of place from how he had left it two weeks before, which was just as it should be. The cleaners knew better than to touch anyone’s desk! Even so, he always left a few specially placed items here and there whenever he left his desk at the end of the day, which meant he’d know if anyone did anything at his desk. A bit paranoid, but he had once been on the receiving end of someone pinching a book he was responsible for and then leaving him to pay for a new copy when he could not produce it for the irate library people!

“Do you remember where you arrived?”

Urasmian grunted assent. “Very near where you found me. I will know it when I see it.”

This left Jason imagining they would spend the next hour slowly driving around a succession of downtown blocks, looking like a pair of drug dealers trying to score. He actually wasn’t sure he could remember where he had met the old man until they got to the near vicinity and then had no trouble finding the spot again! Urasmian made him pull up, and they piled out, looking around.

“That way.” Urasmian said and started walking.

Jason jumped back in the car and found a spot a hundred yards up the road where he could legally park till six am and then followed Urasmian on foot.

The sorcerer turned a corner and looked around for a minute, and then he stepped into the middle of the street! He studied the buildings on either side and moved maybe twenty feet further along and slightly towards the right-hand sidewalk.

 “Here.” He announced.

“It has to be exactly there?” Jason asked, eying a car coming down the road towards them.

“Yes!” Urasmian exclaimed, and then he saw the reason Jason was heading for the sidewalk, so he followed suit to let the car swoosh by where they stood. “I need to return to the exact spot I was sent from.”

Jason shook his head as they moved back out into the road again. “Is that some trans-dimensional requirement or something?”

Urasmian snorted. “No. It just means I am sure that area is clear of obstacles and the ground level is the same as here. Actually, it is a little higher. Quick, go find something I can stand on that is maybe a hand width in height.”

In his agitation, the old man’s request was more of a demand than a request. Jason was put out by the peremptory nature of the command but headed up the road where there was a likely-looking alley. A bit of searching turned up a brick about the right height, and he returned triumphantly with it to the impatiently waiting Urasmian. After retiring to the sidewalk to let another car go past, they got themselves set, and Urasmian, balanced on the brick, looked at Jason and smiled.

“You have been a good friend Jason. I wish you well in your future. Maybe one day I will return to your strange world, but now I must go. I will cast the spell and when I drop my hand like this.” He paused to hold his hand up vertically in front of his chest before dropping it dramatically. “When I do that, say the spell words I gave you while aiming the staff at me. You understand?”

“Yes, sir. All set. Good luck.”

We’re going to look pretty silly if this doesn’t work, he thought to himself. He should know better than to fall in with the plans of someone who could simply be deranged or a charlatan of some sort.

“Thank you.” Urasmian offered.

Then he composed his features, took a deep breath, and began the spell in a subtle, almost whisper. Jason watched fearfully, and then the sorcerer dropped his hand, and Jason said the words to trigger the spell in the makeshift staff. Almost immediately, there was a rush of displaced air, almost a wind, and Urasmian was gone. Jason had not really been expecting anything to happen and the broom handle slipped out of his hand as he stood there gaping for a minute before the toot of a car horn recollected him to his surroundings, and he grabbed the brick before scooting over to the sidewalk.

The structure of the language was more Russian than Greek, he decided, and the guttural slant to the sounds made it sound even less like Greek, but the more he listened, the more he was convinced it was somehow related to Greek although with a lot of Slavic additions or perhaps an underlying ancient Slavic base. Maybe there was a small Slavic population overrun by ancestral Greeks or the reverse, and the end result was a Mediterranean equivalent of English in the way English was like French or Frisian but not really all that similar. Regardless of the history, it was long before he understood the whole thing from start to finish, thanks to the spell Urasmian had thrown on him.

The spell was in a sort of rhyming meter. The closest thing he could think of was a limerick, only it was several limericks long, and the limerick analogy only went so far. Basically, what the spell did was to collect the power of the four winds, combine that power with the power of the earth, and use that combined power to move the object defined fifty Earths to the east. Presumably, the original version that sent Urasmian here sent him fifty Earths to the west. Finally, he gave up as he was becoming mentally exhausted from struggling with the strange language, and after checking Urasmian, he staggered upstairs and went to bed.

He hardly seemed to have closed his eyes before Urasmian was shaking him. “Wake up, young man. We need to go.” Came his deep voice in Jason’s still asleep ear.

“Huh? What? Ugg. What? It’s still dark!”

“Yes, yes, my boy. But this is the right time. We need to return to the exact spot I arrived at, and if we leave it till later, the whole area will be far too busy! All those metal vehicles you people love. So, come on now. Get yourself dressed.” The man’s urgent tones were reflected in his earnest expression.

“Mmm.” Jason struggled to sit up. “Yes. Yes. All right.” Causing Urasmian to back off and give Jason some room. After throwing the covers off, he swung his legs out of the bed and stood up.

“Give me a minute, and I’ll be right with you.”

Urasmian took the hint that Jason wanted privacy, and with Jason now sitting up and clearly awake, the old man left the room. After a visit to the bathroom, he replaced the boxers he had slept in with fresh clothes and then  Jason wandered down to the lounge room where Urasmian was impatiently waiting. Jason would have preferred to make himself a coffee, but the agitated look on the old man’s face convinced him that he could survive till this matter was dealt with, so he grabbed his keys, and Urasmian followed him into the garage with the broom handle. Jason’s family all used the garage to enter or leave the house as the formal front door was set back and away from the road. Out in the street, he unlocked the car, and after clambering in and starting it up, he checked the garage door was back down before heading off downtown.

Sorry – late again. My apologies.

Urasmian seemed quite happy with the converted broom handle once the aluminum was attached to both ends, and he settled on the couch, cradling it. He began to recite a long thing in the guttural Keftios that he said earlier was used for spells. As soon as he began saying the spell, Jason turned on the video camera on his phone. He wasn’t sure how much would show up on the camera, but he would be damn sure to record the words of the spell. The Keftios words were almost making sense in his head by the time Urasmian ran through the spell three times. If the sorcerer hadn’t been half muttering to himself, Jason thought he might have actually started to understand the words! Then Urasmian stopped muttering and motioned Jason over. He put his hand over the back of Jason’s right hand.

“You will hold the staff in this hand and repeat this spell.” The man commanded.

Jason took a firm grip, and Urasmian then enunciated three words and waited for Jason to repeat them. Jason reached for the staff, but Urasmian grabbed his wrist and stopped him.

“Not yet. I am not ready to release the transport spell. Just repeat the words.”

Jason nodded and repeated the words as he thought Urasmian had pronounced them.

“No. No. Like this.” And Urasmian said the three words again.

Jason could almost understand them. Like listening to a short sentence in French that used a lot of similar words to their English equivalent. He repeated the three words.

“Better.” Then Urasmian said them again, and Jason was sure the three words meant

“Release the spell.”

He repeated the three words again, and this time Urasmian smiled.

“Yes. That will do for now. Embedding the spell in the wood has taken its toll, and I am not as young as I once was. I need to lie down for a few hours before trying to cast the spell myself. Thank you for doing this for me, Jason.”

The old man smiled and looked as if he would hug Jason but then turned and took himself off to the couch he had slept on the night before and lay down. In seconds he showed the truth of his statement by falling fast asleep.

Jason went into the kitchen for a drink and sat there listening to the video he had made of Urasmian casting the spell into the broom handle. His hurried placement of the phone had managed to get him a lovely view of the other side of the room and part of Urasmian’s right shoulder, but that didn’t matter as the words came through clearly. He ran them through three times before the words started to make sense. He broke for a snack, and then he rested by relaxing in one of the lounge chairs, but unlike Urasmian, he couldn’t fall asleep. Giving up, he returned to the recording about an hour later. Every time he ran it through, the meaning of the words became clearer in his head.

“You see, the problem is power. Even though I am more powerful than either of them separately, I am not twice as powerful, certainly not as powerful as the two together. And I am fairly sure I would need a second person to help me cast the translocation spell strongly enough to get me home. But!” And he smiled with a fanatical gleam in his eyes! “If I crafted a wooden staff and then imbued it with the spell, reinforced several times over, anyone could trigger it! Even you!”

He smiled wolfishly over at Jason, who struggled with this idea.

“I’m not magic.” He muttered.

Urasmian’s eyes gleamed. “No. Well, actually, even you have a little magical ability, everyone does. But you don’t need to be powerful or trained! There is a trigger spell that is tied to whoever the sorcerer wants that enables that person to activate the spell in the staff and make it discharge. The low-magical person just has to say ‘geroos’ which is the Keftios word for release or launch, and the spell in the staff is released. All I need is a long shaft of well-seasoned timber, and I can imbue the spell into the wood. Do you have any long wooden poles around?”

Chapter 3

Real magic

Jason thought fast and held up a hand. “Perhaps in the garage. Give me a minute.”

He stood up and headed that way. He vaguely remembered that there had been an old broom handle leaning up against the wall in one corner amongst other odds and ends, and, once he’d moved some crap out of the way, he saw that he was right. He grabbed his trophy and returned to the sorcerer.

“Will this do?”

Urasmian held out his hand for Jason to hand the wooden pole to him and then appraised the broom handle.

“It’s a bit short. If we had some metal to cap the ends, I would be happier. Stops the spell from oozing out, you see.” He pointed at the top end.

Jason thought about that for a minute, then headed into the kitchen and returned with the aluminum foil box. He pulled out a long piece, folded it a couple of times, and then wrapped it around the end of the broom handle, making a silver cap.

“Will that work?” He asked the old man, who watched his actions with fascination.

It was clear from his boggled expression that thin metal stuff that could be rolled in a tube and ripped by hand was beyond his experience. The sorcerer felt a bit of the aluminum foil and studied the pole.

“This is a metal I have not seen before, but it feels magically inert, so it should do. Do you have some way of securing it to the pole?”

Jason nodded and raced out to the garage to grab a hammer and some nails from his dad’s work area. He saw a plastic container with tacks and grabbed them instead. Returning with his prizes, he quickly secured the foil to the top of the pole and then repeated the process for the other end finishing with a nice silvery capped broom handle like something out of someone’s el-cheapo costume for a fantasy con. It was the sort of cheaply made thing you frequently saw at conventions, particularly the smaller ones, and it had always made him cringe. Many years ago, at his first con, he had seen someone wearing a pathetic cardboard Cyberman outfit, and he had made a firm promise to himself that if he couldn’t afford a realistic costume, he would not wear one!