Imagine there’s a door in your house and every time you opened it, it lead to a different place. Like one time it would be full of free hamburgers and milkshakes, but if you opened it two days later there would be a bunch of tigers with battle axes and poor attitudes. Would you open the door and check it out or would you keep it locked up like a little baby who still drinks milk out of your baba? You’d open it right? Well guess what, it’s the tigers this time and now you’re dead.

Now you know the conundrum faced by wizards who know the “dimension door” spell. No one ever figured out how to keep that spell from being anything but totally and completely random. Some wizards come back with diamonds, and swords that glow in the dark, others get run over by giant fleas on dirt bikes, there’s really no way to tell what’s going to happen until you walk through the portal.

Anyway, there was this really badass wizard named Chugginthrope, who used dimension door all the time like it was no big whoop.

“You’re crazy Chugginthrope!” all the other wizards would say.

“Whatever fraidy-cats,” Chugginthrope would answer, “try not to get too many hairballs hiding under your davenports.”

Chugginthrope had been to hundreds of different dimensions. He’d seen a world where the sun was a giant beach-ball and everyone had to keep bouncing it up in the air or no plants would grow. He’d been to a universe where the couches were more comfortable than anything you’ve ever sat on but would eat you if you fell asleep on them. He’d even been to The Upside Down, which, despite what you might have heard, isn’t some dark place full of dandruff, it’s just a dimension where everything is flipped over, but it turns out you get used to that pretty quickly so it’s not so bad.

One day Chugginthrope opened a dimension door and saw a swamp full of frogs croaking it up on lily pads. “This is going to be an easy one,” he said to himself. He walked through the portal and started looking for treasure chests and loose gems without a second thought. Well it turns out he should have given it a bunch of thoughts, because as soon as he was like a hundred yards in all the croaking turned to laughter. He looked up and saw all the frogs had put on wizards hats and were standing on their hind legs laughing their little green butts off.

“You’re in trouble now Chugginthrope,” they said. “We’ve heard about you and we’ve been waiting for you to come here. We’re not normal frogs at all. We’re wizard frogs and we’re going to go through your dimension door and take over your world. Enjoy the swamp dummy. It smells like farts, just like you!”

The army of wizard frogs started hopping through the open dimension door like a faucet full of green water.

“Holy shit!” thought Chugginthrope, “I don’t wanna live here!”

He started running toward the portal using his wand to zap frogs as he went, but with each step he went slower and slower as he sank down into the mud, which he was now noticing totally did smell like farts. As if all this wasn’t bad enough, now that most of the frogs were through the portal they started using their magic to close it! Chugginthrope had not only trapped himself in the Frog Dimension, he had doomed his own world in the process.

“Now my world is going to be covered in bumpy gross warts!” he cried as he sank down to his beard.

“What did you just say!?” said all the frogs turning around.

That’s when Chugginthrope realized he had confused frogs and toads, which is a thing frogs totally hate. Quickly he came up with a last desperate plan.

“Oh please don’t lay your long strands of eggs all over my world!” he said.

“We lay eggs in clusters!” shouted the infuriated frogs.

“Oh sorry,” said Chugginthrope, “Don’t let it get under your dry bumpy skin.”

That was it, the wizard frogs all came back though the dimension door and started blasting Chugginthrope with every spell they could think of.

But now Chugginthrope was reinvigorated. He blasted himself out of the swamp and started firing back at the frogs. He was a super high level wizard, but he was badly outnumbered. They almost had him corned between a tree and this giant boulder, but luckily he escaped by casting a new dimension door.

And that’s exactly what he’s been doing for the last hundred years. He actually defeated all the frogs in the first few years, so now he’s just wandering around, going from dimension to dimension, each time hoping the next hop will be the hop home.

Hey do you have friends who can’t read but like Wizard stories? Well you can either read this to them or just play them this narrated version that’s accompanied by some Miranda Britton speed art. Thanks, you are good friend.