After days and years of brooding over the perfect spell, the wizard decided that he was human, not perfect, and that it was time for him to start taking some clients on board. He set up a humble little shop on an offbeat New York City street. Little did anyone know that he hopped like a bunny between there and his home in Wake Forest, North Carolina in seconds. He'd created a neat little doorway portal to make the jump easy to manage. He'd had to fly into LaGuardia on his way up, and the taxi ride had cost a fortune. But once things were set in motion, the legwork was over with.
The sign outside read "Unusual solutions for uncommon problems." He was disappointed with the turnout at first. He'd rented a space in a high foot-traffic area, and few people stopped in. There wasn't much to see inside, and he supposed they were looking for something glamorous. But the best magic wasn't glamorous at all. The movies had conditioned people to expect glamor, and he was paying the price for their expectations. He wondered how to move things along. He set a spell in motion, then another, then another, and soon, it worked. People started to appear.
His first customer was a police officer, wanting him to solve a murder mystery. It was just the perfect whodunit. A mundane case, but he pulled it off. Turns out that the prime suspect had been the unlucky guy on the scene when it all went down, and he was about to take the fall for it. The wizard figured out that the "victim" had committed suicide. Case dismissed. Yawn.
Next, an interesting young woman, probably in her early thirties, entered the shop, asking the wizard how he could help with her journalism career. He eyed her up and down. He asked what news she had to share. She said that she wasn't interested in reporting news, but with making news. The wizard saw potential for her. They sat down and got to work writing the breaking news story that they needed to make happen. They surprised themselves with how it all worked out. The wizard started to realize that the woman looked somewhat like Charlie, only in a vague sort of way.
They decided that it would make fun news if all the cell phones in the world stopped working for a day. Then, they thought it might be fun to rig election results. Or lottery results. Or start a new fanatical religious cult. Or evacuate an entire state, just for the fun of it. What news these things would make!
They decided to evacuate the state of New Jersey for a month. Her story would need to cover it just at the right time in order for her to become a famous journalist, without falling under too much suspicion.
The wizard laid out a strategy for casting several strategically timed spells that would work in their favor. They set up attractors in several other states, designed to entice the residents into taking long vacations. It took about three months to pull off, and they only managed to empty out about 70% of the state, but it was worth it. The young journalist covered the emptiness of the streets in nearly busy towns.
Things got interesting after that.
