The Sorceror's Apprentice
"All the fears which bind you are animal in nature. Don't you wish to be free?"
Rubbing his head somewhere by the base of the nape of the neck, or other adjacent appendage, Addam sat up, and then realized he had already been standing.
"That sounds incredibly contrived. Who are you?"
"I am the wizard Minoth."
"A wizard? What on earth...?"
"A wizard, on earth." Minoth adjusted his cape so as to reveal his shoes apparently planted firmly on the ground.
"Yes, but why are wizards active in this sphere- no, in the realm, I suppose," Addam corrected himself, recalling several road signs he had passed. "There are wizards in the realm. What is their function?"
"Oh," Minoth said, "what is the function of wizards? Wizards often have familiars. Wizards are familiar, but also strange. Very strange, but it's tremendous what we're doing with the wizards and the warlocks - and even the witches, we're doing very well with witches, very popular."
"Ah...right," said Addam. "Very well."
Minoth waited pleasantly, saying nothing more.
"So what you're saying is..."
"In the realm," Minoth suddenly enunciated, "Wizards are the underpinning of the ontological fabric. Wizards wear safety pins in order that they might not come unstuck. Wizards are very safe but also very dangerous."
"To be around, or personally?" This prompted Addam to wonder whether or not he felt safe at the moment.
Minoth ignored the question. "Wizards are omens of both good and bad luck. Wizards are charming."
The lowly farmer boy (if a boy can be a man in his mid-20s, and if a farmer can be a man from the modern world summoned hence by means unknown to him) found himself charmed by a wizard, cognizant of danger but unable to quite discern it. How curious...
The wizard was incomprehensible and capricious. "Go away," he said, all at once. "You are too pure to be enchanted by a wizard. There is no darkness in your heart."
But the layman, consternated, replied, "No way! I'm human, we- you do have humans here, don't you? We all have darkness in our hearts. It seems to me that's how you function in the realm."
No government structure nor freemasons' group could exist without human nature. Not to say that government was human nature, but bureaucracy at times was.
"You must leave."
"Well, but I can't! I haven't the faintest how it is I arrived here. I've no way back."
"Of course I know that. Who do you think summoned you here?"
"...I see."
"Wizards' mail is, as I described earlier, made of safety pins. So consequently the wizards also control the mail."
Addam found now that he wished to leave whether the wizard had ordained it or not.