Sometimes when an evil guy tries to make an evil thing, the thing that he ends up making comes out good instead. Like how the guy who came up with mustard was trying to poison people, but then everyone liked it on hotdogs.

This isn’t a story about hotdogs though, it’s a story about a wizard who made a robot.

Vendersquirm wasn’t just an evil wizard, he was also lazy. In fact, the whole reason he became a wizard was so he could cast spells instead of having to do any work. You can imagine his disappointment when he found out learning magic was way harder than just doing the dishes or cleaning out the hamster’s cage yourself. “Why even bother?” he would say whenever he tried to learn how to levitate a spoon, and then he would go over and stir honey into his tea by hand. Of course, a real wizard would know that sometimes a harpy or a gorgon will capture you and put you in a cage, and then if you want tea, you have to levitate the spoon and the honey and the cup and everything out of their kitchen, or otherwise you are going to dehydrate and die. This didn’t occur to Vendersquirm because he wasn’t the kind of guy to think ahead.

Instead, he hatched a plan to make a robot wizard to do his bidding. You’re probably thinking that building a robot is also harder than stirring tea, but Vendersquirm wasn’t very smart either. In fact, if anyone ever says you have “The Three Follies of Vendersquirm” that means they think you are:

Stupid

Lazy

Evil

And also they are probably a wizard, so if you think of something smart alecky to say back, you’d probably be better off just shutting up and forgetting it.

Anyway, what Vendersquirm ended up doing was just grabbing a robot that a scientist had thrown in the trash. Then he dumped every magic thing he had laying around into it’s head-compartment. At first nothing happened, so Vendersquirm shook it a bunch and said “Hocus Pocus,” which is such a dumb cliche that I can’t even think about how stupid it is.*

*For the record, “Hocus Pocus” was part of a joke spell made up by a really powerful wizard several hundred years ago. If you know the whole thing, and do it right, it makes a magical invisible finger that goes around poking people in the butthole. It’s actually a pretty funny spell, but one time the finger got loose and ended up making its way to the castle, where it poked all the fancy lords and ladies and even the king. As you might imagine, it’s not legal anymore.

Anyway, all the shaking ended up causing one of the magic rubies in the robot’s head to fall into the gears, where it got crushed into a powder that went all over the inside of the robot and brought it to life.

Its eyes filled with orange light and it sat up.

“Hello,” said the Robot Wizard, “I am the Robot Wizard. How may I serve you?”

“Oh man!” said Vendersquirm. “My life is about to get awesome!”

And it really did for awhile. Vendersquirm would sit around all day and make Robot Wizard do all the work. It would clean the house and do the laundry (which was actually pretty cool to watch because it would just put the clothes insides itself, drink a big glass of water, dance around for a few minutes, and then they would come out clean) and it even called Vendersquirm’s mom on her birthday for him.

One day Vendersquirm was sitting around eating some bananas that Robot Wizard had peeled, when he decided he wanted something to drink.

“Hey Robot Wizard,” he said, “I’d love some tea right about now.”

“Love?” said Robot Wizard. “What is love?”

“Oh shit,” said Vendersquirm. “It’s nothing. Nevermind, just make some tea okay?”

And Robot Wizard did make the tea, but it also couldn’t stop thinking about love. It started looking through Vendersquirm’s books whenever he wasn’t home. It learned all about love, and it could see that both the scientist that made it and the wizard that brought it to life didn’t love it, and that made it very sad.

One day, Vendersquirm came home and said, “Hey Robot Wizard, will you go over to the hut on the top of the big hill and kill the wizard who lives there? He told me my robes were gauche, and I’m not going to let that stand! Also after that, look up what gauche means.”

“But that would not be very loving,” said the Robot Wizard. “We must try to spread love so that the world will be a better place.”

“What?” said Vendersquirm. “No. Who told you that? We are evil. We do what we want! That’s what being evil means!”

“No,” said Robot Wizard. “I am not Evil. I am loving. I want to love. You are evil, and must be stopped.” With that it picked up Vendersquirm like Darth Vader picked up the Emperor at the end of Return of the Jedi, only instead of throwing him into a pit, it used its magic robot eyes to cast Disintegrate and turned its old master into dust. Later, when it had a more nuanced understanding of good and evil, it wondered if maybe it had been a bit hasty.

Well, no one else had a problem with it. They all hated Vendersquirm and were glad to be rid of him. The whole town threw a party for Robot Wizard. They hoisted it up on their shoulders and shouted “Huzzah!” once, because it weighed like three-hundred pounds, and that was all they could muster.

Anyway, it’s a good thing that Robot Wizard turned out to be good, because by now, with that robot brain, it’s probably memorized pretty much every spell ever, including Universe Restart… which, now that I think about it, may have actually been cast like a bunch of times in history. It’s not like anyone would know, I guess.