"Jim the Immortal Goat" by J. Pedestal Guy Swanson

Jim was a goat.

He had always been a goat, as that sort of thing rarely changes, and he enjoyed his life in his big field of flowers. He didn’t have a care in the world. He had all the food he could ever want, a babbling brook for when he got thirsty, and just over the ridge was a farm, for whenever he wanted to see a lady goat.

Life was good for Jim, when something happened.

Jim was having a normal carefree day when out of nowhere, a ball of energy appeared and a young mage fell out of it.

“Whoa! That was sweet!” said the mage, who was not yet a true mage, but only an apprentice. Then, upon inspecting his position, he exclaimed, “Now where am I?”

Jim said nothing, but stared dumbfounded at the mage. This is not surprising, as goats aren’t particularly smart to begin with, they don’t talk, and people popping out of thin air is not a exactly an everyday thing.

The apprentice, unfazed by the lack of a response to his question, continued to interrogate his new surroundings.

“This is a pretty nice place. I wonder who owns all these fields. Is that smoke? There must be a village or something over there.” And with that he went off in the direction of the farm.

Jim watched him go, and seeing that everything had returned to normal, went back to eating.

Suddenly, another energy ball appeared, only this time, it appeared around Jim. Jim was notably agitated at this and justifiably so. He also wasn’t too keen on the clocks, cars, phone booths, and other miscellaneous debris that were whizzing by him.

Then, he stopped.

He was in the center of a large room, standing on some sort of platform under a large stalactite with a variety of arcane symbols written on it. A dwarf, standing behind a control panel, turned to his right and whispered to a tall sage looking elf in long flowing robes, “That’s not Nhoj.”

“It appears that way,” said the elf, “Why not.”

“I don’t know,” the dwarf replied, “This was the only living thing within a mile of the place, besides the grass. That little pyro must have wandered off.”

“Well, I shall have to inform our employer,” said the elf, and with that he walked out of the room.

The dwarf resigned himself to fiddling around under the control panel.

Jim was confused. As he saw no immediate danger, he did what he usually did when he was confused. He went to sleep.

When he woke up, he was refreshed and, after mulling it over in his sleep, reached the firm conclusion that this was not his field.

It lacked the flowers and grass of his field; the brook was nowhere in sight, and what sparse light there was, was definitely not his sun. He also held serious doubts that there was a farm over the ridge, because of the marked absence of a ridge.

This realized; he came to the startling revelation that he was hungry and there were no flowers or in fact any greenery at all.

In his search for foliage, he went over to where the dwarf had been when he went to sleep. There he found some wires and as they were the closest approximation to his standard snacking material he had seen since waking up, he began chewing through the wires. This was not good for the wires, and soon proved to be equally bad for the goat. Mouths are wet for the most part, and being so moisture inclined, they are adequate conductors. Adequate to fill the gap in a circuit recently broken by teeth, which also happen to reside in said mouth.

At this point, the author feels the need to digress a moment and discuss some of the properties of magic.

Magic, being a form of energy, can be neither destroyed nor created; only transferred. This transference can be in the shape of a spell, the release of magic from a living entity as it dies, the utilization and reformation of magic within a living entity, or as the motion of magic as a wave or beam while in a constant state. The latter of these transferences is very similar to the activity of a bolt of electricity, and while in this state, magic has many of the same properties. Whereas electricity passes through metal, which has readily available electrons, magic passes through wood or other organic matter with relative ease. They will both travel through air if concentrated enough, and will both really hurt if they shock you. The only difference is that electricity makes you convulse and die, while magic’s effects are much more interesting.

Jim found this out first hand, or, rather, first mouth.

In his case the sudden rush of magic granted to him immortality, invulnerability, and immunity to all ailments but thirst, hunger, and pain. At that particular moment, Jim very much regretted his susceptibility to pain. If not for his immortality, he would have been very much dead.

Upon returning and finding a smoldering goat under the controls, the dwarf quickly cut power and removed the wires from the unconscious goat’s jaws. He then fixed the machine as quickly as he could and sent Jim back to his field, hoping that PETA had not witnessed the incident.

Jim awoke to see the cloud of smoke coming from the farm was a little more immense then usual but everything seemed in order

Jim sat in his field, soaked in the sun, and enjoyed a nice mid-morning snack.