The Great Dark Wizard

For a brief time, the man in the suit named Everett was a successful stage magician. Nobody in the audience realized the part that Everett played in the act. The suit found it quite easy to conceal scarves, birds, and sundry other things. It could see while the man was blindfolded. It could extricate itself from handcuffs and manacles. The man really had very little talent otherwise. Everett drilled him in the snappy patter, which the man reeled off practically by rote. Together, they made a great team, which they billed as "The Great Dark Wizard", a name which Everett hated but the man was quite fond of.

Everett persuaded the man that they needed a shapely assistant. After an extensive series of interviews, they settled on Catriona, a slender redhead who had decided that this would make an ideal stepping-stone to a possible career on a TV game show. What Everett liked best about her was the way that she had too little imagination to improvise on stage and throw the man off his spiel.

Unfortunately, as they discovered too late, she was prone to fits of clumsiness. One evening she spilled wine on Everett while the man was resting from having fed it(Everett was necessarily parasitic on its host). With the best of intentions she took it to be dry-cleaned, and even provided a replacement which was all but identical in appearance.

"The Great Dark Wizard" was booed off the stage, kicked out of his dressing room by an owner irate at having refunded an entire theatre's worth of tickets, and ended up having to break in to the dry cleaner's to recover Everett, since Catriona had disappeared with the ticket. The man shaved off his mustache, and they made their way quietly to the next town by Greyhound.

Based on the words: Suit Together Presto Dark

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The Den of Ubiquity/ Aaron V. Humphrey / alfvaen@gmail.com