The crystal ball had been ringing off the hook ever since the release of Wizards '95. The suite of original spells, incantations and magic potions had been sold as "The most powerful tool kit a practitioner of the Dark Arts will ever need!" and "The most sophisticated set of Sorcerer programs devised by Man!"
Okay, perhaps the town criers had overstated the package's merits a little. The twelfth century had seen rapid advances in sorcerous technologies. Who could really say that this year's spell for turning princes into frogs was really more efficient, or the ubiquitous term "user-friendly," than last year's release? When you factored in the cost of upgrading the spell, well, it certainly wasn't the most economical way of getting revenge on a disrespectful royal family!
Not only that, but Wizards '95 had been rushed to market by Micromoss because somebody from head office had announced at a Necromancer's convention that it would be available by a certain date. Apprentices had worked 20 hour days to perfect the spellware, but, well, if you don't allow enough time for debugging...
Merlin D'Lonergan (not THAT Merlin -- a distant cousin) had been taking angry calls all evening. They never seemed to end! With a sigh, he wearily waved a hand over the crystal ball. An old hag's face appeared.
"I'm having problems with Wizards '95," the hag croaked. Obviously, Merlin thought, but he just nodded politely. After several months on the Micromoss help line, he had learned that sarcasm never helped. "I was using the spell which poisons a well," the hag angrily explained. "I mixed the ingredients perfectly according to the installation instructions -- I only use top of the line Saint John's Wort, you know. But when I tried to implement the spell, all that happened was that the villagers' hair fell out! What the hell is that all about?"
Merlin had been coached on how to respond to this problem by an apprentice at head office two weeks ago, when the problem was first reported. "It's a feature of the spell," he half-heartedly answered.
"A feature?"
"Yeah. Poisoning a well only makes the survivors suffer. This way, everybody in the village suffers..."
"I don't care about that! I want them dead!"
"Yeah, well, maybe they'll die of embarrassment." The hag heaped invective on Merlin for 15 minutes. As instructed, Merlin had offered her a free update of the spell when it became available, but this did not appease her. Eventually, she ran out of curses and hung up. Merlin was protected by the beta version of Wizards '97, codename Canterbury; but, for some reason, this did not comfort him.
"I seem to be having a problem with a love potion," the next caller, an old but distinguished sorcerer, politely stated. "Lorelei Song? When I tried to install it in my cauldron, I'm afraid the whole thing exploded."
"What system are you using?"
The sorcerer blinked. "System? Why...Wizards 3.1, of course."
"There's your problem, right there. Lorelei's Song was designed to work on Wizards '95. It's not backwards compatible."
The sorcerer looked befuddled. "So, it...it won't work?" Merlin required over half an hour to explain why the sorcerer could not run the spell on the system he had. The sorcerer was as unfailingly dense as he was unfailingly polite. Merlin preferred the abuse.
Let's face: the older generation (at this point in history, anybody over the age of 16) would never understand the new sorcerous technologies. Merlin's next caller was a Maiden who swore a blue streak at him. She claimed to have hacked Wizards '95 and found that Micromoss was using special files called "scones" to keep track of every spell a person used. She threatened that if she ever received unsolicited messages on her scrying glass, she would reverse engineer the scones and invade the system at Micromoss' headquarters!
Well, at least she didn't ask any dumb questions.
Merlin paused before checking his scrying glass messages. Only four more hours to go before his 12 hour shift ended. Was this really where the bright young things of his generation were supposed to end up?
