The magician drowsily woke up to a sunbeam shining directly into his eyeballs. Rolling out of his tent, he picked up his wand and conjured a single dollar, then he headed to the dollar store like he did every day.
It was a long walk, and he almost got hit by a car. He walked in the dollar store quietly and picked up a bag of chips. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a group of teenagers watching him and giggling at his purple and white magician spandex. He summoned a flash of blinding demonic light to scare them off; it did the trick. He then walked to the cashier and put the bag of chips on the table.
“That’ll be a dollar,” the cashier said.
“Thanks, Billy,” the magician said, handing him the dollar.
“How do you know my name?” the cashier respond.
“I come here every day. And by the way, that dollar is going to evaporate in an hour,” the magician responded, turning away.
“What?!”
“You won’t remember this,” the magician said finally, waving his wand with a flash of light and exiting.
It’s funny how even magic obeys the laws of thermodynamics. The dollar turns back to air because you can’t get more than what you put in. The magician strutted to his next destination, the side of the highway. There he collected a bag full of rocks while people speeding past gave him weird looks. Every once and awhile, someone would throw a cigar or something out of their window at him. He always responded by cursing them with the eternal wrath of the half-demon half-god Maerceci the Vengeful, who would slowly and painfully devour their souls while tormenting them with their greatest fears. It was the magician’s way of taking out his anger irrationally.
After collecting a sufficient amount of rocks, he headed of to his final destination. With pain in his heart, he saw that his work had been vandalized and destroyed again. His blessing had come with a curse because the devil never gives more than he takes. For 42 years he had been trying to build a house by converting rocks into bricks, but every time he got somewhere, his humble creation was mercilessly destroyed, as was his curse, forever keeping him in his sad and insufficient tent. Holding back a tear, the magician sighed, salvaged what he could from the wreckage, and began rebuilding.