“To be honest, I didn’t ask questions,” I said. “Morgan handed me a magic jewel and said use it and I said okay. I’m easy like that.”
“And in other ways too,” Gary muttered.
“What?”
“What?” he asked, batting his eyelashes. My heart instantly melted because a unicorn batting his eyelashes is precious.
“Gah,” I said, unable to help myself. “Your face. I love it.”
The crystal started pinging and glowing again.
“Randall?” I said.
A voice responded, but it came out muffled and intelligible.
“Randall, you’ve got to move your hand off the crystal,” I said. “We can’t hear you.”
The muffled voice grew louder and angrier.
“How old is he?” Ryan whispered to Gary.
“No one knows,” Gary whispered back. “They say he rose up when the world was created and was formed out of ash and rock and—”
“He’s almost six hundred and seventy, and he was born in a village in the east,” I said. “His parents were mill workers.”
Gary scowled at me.
“Sam of Wilds!” Randall shouted through the crystal, voice clear and cracking.
“Randall.”
“Are you there?”
“Yeah. Can you hear me?”
“Barely. These stupid things never work. You kids today with your toys and your crystals and your exploding corn. Back in my day, we didn’t need summoning crystals. If we wanted to hear from someone, we wrote a letter and got a response in three months. That was considered fast. Now, everyone is all about now, now, now. Tell me, Sam. Why is everyone in such a rush?”
“Rhetorical,” I muttered to the others. “Don’t answer it. It’ll never end.”
“I heard that, Sam of Wilds!”
“Of course you did.” I sighed. Leave it to him to be able to hear whispered sarcasm.
“Don’t you get snarky with me, you baby wizard,” he snapped. “I know how to turn your little pecker into a chicken and you will never be able to change it back.”
We all gaped at the crystal.
“Randall?” Gary said.
“Yes? Who’s this?”
“This is Gary, Sam’s friend.”
“Are you the giant or the unicorn?”
“The unicorn. I just have to say that you’re my new hero. ‘Baby wizard’ is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard. And please teach me the chick-dick spell. I have to know it. Immediately.”
“A unicorn tried to kill me once,” Randall said, completely ignoring Gary. “Well, I’d just tried to kill it myself, but only because it’d come down with a case of Raging Hubris for which there was no cure. I thought I was doing it a favor, but instead, it saw it as an act of violence. Of course, this was back in my younger days when I was a bit more fit than I am now. I could run a three-minute mile and still have enough endurance left over to have relations with…”