When a magician (second class) chooses to do Christmas duty in the City of London, it's because he's hoping for a nice, quiet, seasonal time, not for ancient magic to break loose and the enchanted city to be filled with ghosts, monsters, wonder and danger. Not on his watch. Not when he's going to have to deal with it all on his own. That would be an all too magical Christmas.
An All Too Magical Christmas is a seasonal adventure story of magic, mayhem and mystery told in 24 instalments. It is written by Tobias Sturt and read aloud by Jon Millington.
Incident report YUL-XX/12
A report on the incident codenamed Fimbulwinter, from the City of London duty operative and first responder.
Introduction
I have been told to make this report in my own words, which strikes me as a mistake. I’m more used to my Head of Department telling me to shut up, or at the very least write what I’m told. More to the point, I’m not used to my own words. The higher-ups want a full picture; apparently, there is talk of briefing the Minister. But I’m not sure I’m the man for a full picture. I didn’t join the civil service to be a writer. I don’t mind filling out a form, recording the daily observations, following the bullet points; but I’m not the creative type. They should have sent a poet.
I’m not convinced I can do justice to this: how Christmas came early to the City of London; how more than Christmas came; and what was done about it.
Well, it was me who did the doing, of course, which is why I have to write this report. In my own words.
However good they are.
Section One
December the first is probably a good place to start. It was the beginning of the month, for one thing; the beginning of Christmas, for another - which is important, of course. And, more to the point, it’s also when it all started. It was the day I was woken up by kids shouting at me.
I should note that this isn’t entirely unusual. Not even in the City of London, where there aren’t many teenagers. I, personally, seem to have spent most of my life having kids shout at me. Mostly when I was a kid, of course, but it still happens. I’m one of those people whom people shout at in the street. It must be my face. Or possibly my clothes. Either way I’m used to it and it wouldn’t usually bother me, but it was what they were shouting that gave me concern.
“Yer a wizard, Hairy,” yelled a male voice.
“Yer a lizard, Harry,” said another: “Show us yer wand.”
I looked out of the bedroom window. A small gaggle of teenagers were standing out in the street, outside the front door to the Tower, staring up at the windows.
“Let down your hair,” shouted one when he saw me.
“Oi, Gandalf,” shouted another, “Where’s yer moth?”
Deep cut, I thought.
I have been told that I ought to explain everything, because this report might be seen by people who don’t know much about the Ministry, so I should probably tell you that our offices in the City of London are in an old tower that used to be part of a church before the Luftwaffe tidied that away, so that now the tower stands, all alone, on a traffic island up a side street. More importantly, and the reason why you might not know much about the offices: the Ministry likes to keep them secret. Which probably includes not having teenagers shout at them from the street. I supposed I ought to go down.
I opened the front door to discover another teenager on the doorstep, evidently trying to peer through the keyhole. It was a girl, dressed all in black, with messy hair and a chrome Egyptian ankh threaded on a shoelace round her neck. She looked up at me as I opened the door, with eyes rimmed enthusiastically with black.
“Are you really a wizard?” she said.
“Am I what?” The other teenagers were loafing closer, trying to hear.
“They said you were wizards, but it’s been covered up. Secret wizards everywhere. This is your secret Tower,” she paused and then said, with an eager nervousness, “I want to be a witch.”
Now I was really concerned. Not just because I had a bunch of possibly crazed teenagers on my doorstep but also because I am, of course, a wizard.
Well, to be more accurate, a Magician, Second-class. ‘Wizard’ is a term reserved for the senior management. If I was a Wizard, I wouldn’t be doing Christmas monitoring duty. Although as a Magician, Second-class, I at least got to choose where I worked: somewhere like the City of London, where it’s usually nice and quiet. Usually.
Anyway, the point is that yes, while the girl was right and I am a wizard, she was not meant to know this. The Ministry doesn’t just like to keep its offices secret; it likes to keep its wizards secret, and it likes to keep itself secret. Secret very much doesn’t include having teenagers shout it in the street.
“Who on earth told you that?” I said. “Who’s ‘they’?”
“There’s a video on YouTube,” said the girl. “There were lights,” she added dramatically.
“TikTok, mate,” said one of the boys.
“There’s a whole sub-Reddit,” said another.
The Internet. Oh boy. This was bad. Someone in IT had made a mess and here it was dumped on my doorstep. I thought there were supposed to be whole legions of demons scrubbing this stuff off the Web. Once the existence of the Ministry was on the Internet, it was there for all the world to see and know about.
Fortunately, so was the sum total of human knowledge and, more importantly, the sum total of everything humans could make up, which amounted to a lot more than all the facts.
“And you believed it?” I said.
“What?”
“You believed something some random told you on the Internet?” I said. “And I thought kids were supposed to be smarter about that stuff.”
“It’s everywhere,” said one of the boys, with doubt creeping into his voice.
“Botnets” I said, trying to sound like I knew what I was talking about. “Sock puppet accounts. Spam factories. You’ve been trolled.”
The girl’s face fell. I felt a little guilty, but then, I consoled myself, perhaps one day some professor of comparative religion would tap her on the shoulder and suggest a mysterious government job.
“So why don’t you all go home and just” - I made a little sweep with the wand I was hiding behind my back - “forget about it.”
There was a brief moment while they tried to remember why they were there in the first place and then they just sloped off to not go to school somewhere else.
Back up in the office, trying to decide whether this warranted a report, I thought I better check with Brassneck.
I am given to understand that these days people have smart speakers that they can talk to, which then search the Internet for them, but I instead have a medieval robot. Normal people have Alexa, I have a thirteenth century mechanical brass head made by Roger Bacon. I mean, what’s the point of being a magician if you can’t have things like that? I think, technically, we’re supposed to just be storing it as a museum piece, but why have an enchanted mechanical head sitting around the place if you can’t make it Google things for you? He doesn’t like me calling him Brassneck, though.
“Oh, it’s everywhere, Master,” he said in a voice like grinding gears. Somehow he always makes the word ‘Master’ sound like an insult.
“The messages are enchanted to hide them from the demons.” He sounded inordinately cheerful about this. “But I think they’re originating in the City of London. So they’ll blame you for this.” So that was why he was enjoying it.
“You want to watch your attitude, Brassneck,” I said, “Or it’s no oiling for you.”
But he wasn’t wrong. I was the duty magician and this was happening on my patch. It wasn’t the kids being trolled, it was the Ministry, and with magic, too.
Trolled.
Aha, yes: trolled.
I might just have had an idea.
An All Too Magical Christmas #1