If Magic Worked Like Insurance Underwriting

Zartok's mage sense reminded him of a task. To supply his staff with wool, he would need a sheep. He had left the project with his assistant, a move which seemed logical at the time but which left troubling thoughts as he tried to study. He stood up from his desk, donned his robe, left the candles burning, and headed down the winding stone staircase.

He entered the laboratory in the subbasement of his manse. Assistant Mage Klipthak sat on the floor with his grimoire open and an overturned vial next to him. A group of distracted sheep wandered about, sniffing various magic paraphernalia.

“Klipthak, didn’t I tell you to turn a single cow into a sheep?”

“Why yes, Senior Technical Mage, sir, but I did!" the lad blinked. "At least, I started with a single cow?”

“Oh, no no no, Klipthak. Don’t tell me you didn’t follow my exact instructions, down to each subitem? Verbatim?!” Zartok stroked his long white beard and furrowed his great brows. He couldn’t blast his assistant for this sort of error but wished he could.

Klipthak was apprehensive but not exactly contrite. “Well, Senior Technical, I followed them almost exactly -“.

“ENOUGH!” came the roared answer. Zartok paused for effect. Klipthak cowered behind his grimoire, waiting for the lightning bolts. Instead, his master continued. “Recite your spell in its entirety, with all the hand motions. Pray be exact.”

After three minutes of timid but exact recounting, Zartok sighed. “I see what you’ve done, boy. An easy mistake to make, but easily avoided if you had followed orders. First, when you referred to the target animal as four-legged creature, the universe thought you wanted four sheep. You don’t need to specify number of legs for a within-phylum transformation spell. So now we have four sheep.”

Klipthak mistook the pause for a chance to speak. “So we’ll eat mutton," he offered.

“SILENCE! We eat no mutton! You know how you added permancy to that spell, so your sheep wouldn’t change back to a cow at sundown?” Klipthak nodded. “Well, you added it to the spell’s object level. Permanency is a meta-level item if you only want the spell’s effects to be permanent. On the object level, it makes the object permanent. We shall never eat mutton because … you … have … made … me … FOUR ... IMMORTAL ... SHEEP!”

Klipthak turned pale and began to cry.