The wizard had a difficult problem to solve, and not much time to do it. He needed to learn to play the guitar like a rock star before a concert that was being put on the following night. He'd accidentally cast the wrong spell the wrong way, and he'd been serendipitously called by a desperate rock band's manager who had mistakenly double-booked the band in two different cities to play in front of two different stadiums filled with 10,000 people each. Miraculously, the manager had managed to keep this double-booking hidden from the press. However, they knew that soon, it would be leaked to the internet. This would surely happen before the night of the concert, and the fans in both cities would be scrutinizing both bands to figure out which one was the real McCoy. In twenty-four hours, the wizard had to learn to play some bitchin' guitar licks, and he hadn't picked up a guitar since he was ten years old. The last time he had played the guitar, he'd been stumbling through "The Camptown Races." Do-dah!
He also had to think about another important aspect to this puzzle. If he pulled it off and they thought that he was the real Mick Tyroga (the Angry Termite Cadavers' lead guitarist), then the other band would be called out as a fake. In other words, if he did his job too well, he could get the real Angry Termite Cadavers run off the stage, tarred and feathered, or worse. He had to make the two performances indistinguishable from each other, so that even the most die-hard fan couldn't tell which was which. His best strategy was to get the audience doubting their own senses. That was a puzzle for a later time. For now, it was time to start practicing the guitar, and it was time to get really good, really fast.
He didn't actually have a guitar to practice with. He figured he didn't really need one anyhow.
He sat on the chair and started strumming the air guitar. He figured if he did this long enough, he could learn to play a real one and pick it up, plucking its strings effortlessly. Unfortunately, that could take years or decades. He had only hours. There was only one solution to this. He needed to stretch time. He pictured a piece of taffy, and saw a rubber band going around in a circle. He stretched it back and forth, and noticed that it made a sound like a guitar string. He understood that time made an echo, and that learning the guitar was really about learning to stretch time. He wondered how he would solve the time stretching puzzle that normally took guitarists years to learn.
He pictured a rubber sheet with a ball gravitating to the center of it. He could see that there were two ways to stretch time; to stretch it lengthwise, or stretch the depth of it. He could make long time short, or he could make it disappear altogether. He believed that the latter trick was what guitar players learned to do. They made the music so loud that the ticking of time couldn't yell over it.
He tried several things. He tried meditating. He couldn't stop thinking. He tried casting a spell to send himself backwards in time. He never had gotten the hang of that one. He tried casting a spell to make himself quickly learn the guitar. The spell took time to learn, and casting it took just as much skill as learning the guitar did. He realized that learning skill was only half of the problem. Forgetting skill was the other half. If he could forget everything he knew, he'd have a fighting chance. He thought of casting an amnesia spell on himself, but then he wasn't sure how he'd remind himself of the task at hand.
Maybe, he thought, he could forget that he didn't know how to play the guitar. What if someone informed him right now that he'd never actually learned to walk? What if, he learned, he'd been a fraud all these years, having never legitimately earned the right to stand on two feet? People might get angry. But he didn't know the difference. He was as the cartoon coyote, oblivious to the gorge under him, having run across air without knowing what he'd done.
But he still didn't know how to emblazon this mindset into himself in the next twenty-four hours.
He knew that he had himself convinced that skill has to take time. He had to beat this if he was going to rock the house tomorrow night and have groupies all over him. He also knew that he'd have to lose his time-bound self very quickly. He also saw that he'd put himself into a snag. He was trying to solve a timeless puzzle, and pin the solution to a period of time. He didn't know how this would work.
He shrugged, and got himself a cup of coffee. The answer would come to him, right when it needed to. He got on about his day.
