I sighed. It was a heck of a way to come out of my self-imposed retirement.

The impetus had come from a conversation I had had a couple of months before with Big Julie

He had asked me why I left M.Y.T.H., Inc., the highly successful and profitable business I had founded with my former mentor and partner, Aahz. I admitted I felt as though I wasn't living up to the hype surrounding me. I thought it would be better if I went away for a while. I felt that I had had to get out from my all-enveloping support structure and educate myself so I could live up to the hype that I had enjoyed as Skeeve the Magnificent, Magician to Kings and King of Magicians, Businessman and Problem-Solver Extraordinaire. The truth was not so glorious: at the time I had departed, I could do very little magik. Most of what I had accomplished, Big Julie pointed out to me, was by thinking—no, more by feeling—out the correct solution to the problem I had been set. He encouraged me to take that talent and run with it.

From the time I had returned to the inn, I had been on fire for the idea of establishing a new business, one in which I helped people, not necessarily with applications of big-time magik, for, as Big Julie pointed out to me, big-time magicians were a dozen to the silver coin, but with the application of the kind of attention that I had always given problems without really realizing it. It was a natural extension of my instincts. I felt relieved, since I was never going to be a master magician. I had been getting my magikal butt kicked regularly by the equivalent of six-year-old girls. But when it came to finding a solution that just felt right, and did the most good for the most people, that was what I did best.

Oh, I am no altruist: I intended to get paid for my expertise. That was one of the reasons that I let Bunny put the line at the bottom of my card. I had found out a long time ago that people don't prize what they don't pay for. If I offered my services for free, I'd be looking for lost firecats and missing spectacles from now until the end of time. I wanted meaty problems, the kind I could really sink my mental teeth into. I loved a challenge. Now was the time to see if I could handle one. And if I didn't, well, I was young. I had time to make a lot more blunders in my lifetime.