Zamboni
Ice doesn’t remember what’s been drawn on it, but I do. Most of my job consists of taking the zamboni over the rink’s surface to remove all the sigils that the local ice mages leave behind.
Most of the mages are decent enough, they’re just exhausted after they’ve done whatever they’re doing, and unable to do more than the minimal cleanup that ensures they get to keep using the skating rink rather than wait for a pond to freeze over. If it ever does. Global warming’s hitting that sector hard.
But there is always one jerk in any bunch, and my local one left enough discarded junk (including a plastic toy horse just big enough to wreck things if the zamboni went over it) alongside the sigils that I was seriously considering getting him banned. At least his sigils weren’t anything special, just a load of good luck and swift travel crud that most mages grow out of before they were halfway through their apprenticeships.
Heck, even I knew they were crud and I wasn’t even formally trained, I just eavesdropped on the real mages getting lessons.
What I didn’t expect was for said jerk to have failed to remove the magic in the sigils as well as his trash. So when I brought the zamboni in and golden magic settled on us rather than the caster? Yeah, that was a surprise. Cleaning’s been quicker and easier ever since though, so I’m not repining.
Though that zamboni only works for me now. Who’d have thought getting magicked would give a machine opinions?
