Free Genie and Engineer 1: The Engineer Wizard by Glenn Michaels

Nothing.
    For a couple of seconds, Paul felt a surge of panic. It
should have worked! His brand-new magical powers should have worked! Why hadn’t
they?
    He wrung his hands silently as he began to pace back and
forth, his brow furrowed in concentration. Suddenly, he realized that being a
wizard just might be a shade more difficult than he had first anticipated. The genie...ah,
wizard, had made the casting of spells look incredibly easy. And unless Paul
started casting his own spells...well, without the other wizard’s help, he might
end up stuck here on this rocky summit, where there was no food to eat or even
water to drink. He had already gone more than a day without water while he was
asleep. Therefore, he needed to solve this problem quickly.
    Paul forced himself to put aside his emotional reactions,
focusing on his predicament as if it were an engineering problem, one to be
solved with logical thinking. He could feel the power inside him; ergo, he must
be doing something wrong, possibly multitudes of things, in trying to use his
new abilities.
    The wizard/genie had told Paul that he had everything he
needed to be a fully functional wizard of his own. The implied assumption was that
Paul could work his magical powers without difficulty, that he would know how
to do so or that the processes involved were intuitively obvious.
    As Paul began pacing again, he realized that such was
probably the case. Sure, the wizard/genie had been regularly using magic for
centuries. Moreover, he had come from an age when people commonly believed in
magical powers. So it wasn’t a stretch of the imagination at all for the wizard
to assume that Paul would know how to implement his newly acquired abilities, employing
methods that were widely known by the general public, promulgated through
legends and myths.
    But Paul wasn’t a product of such an era. In the modern day,
a belief in magical powers was scoffed at and ridiculed. Yes, the concept of magic
was sometimes used for entertainment purposes, perhaps as the basis of a movie
or for a magician to use in front of an audience. But no one took it seriously.
    Not only that, but Paul was less informed about magical
powers (i.e., stories of sorcerers, wizards, genies, etc. and their spells and
methods) than even the general population. He wasn’t an aficionado of fantasy
at all. Science fiction, yes, but he had never really been enamored with
fantasy. Magic, knights, damsels in distress, and all of that seemed a little
bland in comparison to starships, time travel, and black holes. But given his
current situation, it might have helped him a bit more if he had read a few fantasy
stories and seen a couple of movies. What could that have hurt? Maybe, if he
lived long enough, Paul could redeem that mistake.
    However, he needed to focus on the here and now. The
question before him at this moment, assuming that he wasn’t using his magical
powers properly, was how to figure out how it should actually be done.
    Continuing his pacing back and forth on the plateau, Paul
considered how to acquire the knowledge he needed. And after serious
deliberation, he came up with three possible avenues of approach.
    The first and most effective option was to have someone
teach him how to cast magical spells. The second was to somehow acquire the
necessary reference materials (books, operational manuals, YouTube videos,
websites, etc.) that he could study and learn from what he needed to know. The
third avenue, and without a doubt the least efficient one of all, was to
experiment, to try a variety of different methods and learn through the process
of trial and error how it should be done.
    Obviously, the best person to teach him was the
wizard/genie. But he had said that he had places to be and things to do, so getting
his help...well, that idea was busted. And to call on anyone else—or to access
any textbooks, manuals, or the Internet—also required the use of magical
spells. It was a classic case of a