Once there was this wizard who thought she was soooo smart, because she was. I mean all wizards are smart, but Ezmerelda was especially extra smart and everyone knew it. She was always correcting people’s spelling mistakes and their spell mistakes. She said she was just trying to help but for the most part, everyone found it annoying.
One day Ezmerelda was sitting around trying to figure out a way to make her cat smarter so it would stop pooping outside the box, when it occurred to her that she should just make herself smarter, that way it would be easy to figure out. For a second she almost felt dumb for not thinking of that before, but then she realized no other wizards had thought of it either and that made her feel better.
So she got down her biggest caldron and started putting all the smartest things she could think of in it. She put in owl feathers, a pair of glasses, a Rubix cube, a signed copy of a Malcolm Gladwell book, and a fancy watch that told you what time it was in a bunch of different kingdoms. She poured in some blue fairy dust, some green fairy dust, and a pinch of red fairy dust just to add more color and a little bit of spice. She stirred the whole thing up using a slide ruler and chanted Pi to as many digits as she could remember. Once it all looked fairly homogeneous she drank it out of the skull of the cleverest enemy she had ever defeated (A manticore who wore a monocle).
Ezmerelda was surprised to find the brew tasted exactly like Earl Grey Tea that you drink while watching a Ted Talk. “Yup,” she said to herself “I’m definitely smarter.”
And she was too. For instance, she immediately figured out that the best thing to do was get rid of her current cat and get a new one. Cats, after all, are free. Then she reorganized all her potions by the atomic weight of their main ingredient and then did it again by color since it looked better.
“This is great!” she cried as she flew threw her house reorganizing and redecorating everything. Soon her cottage was not only the very model of efficiency but also put the fun back in feng shui.
What she didn’t notice was that the whole time her head was getting bigger and bigger. It was all swollen and lumpy on the top and green brain slime was oozing out of her ears. She began seeing everything as a math equation, including the angle of her hat to her robe and where she placed her foot each time she took a step. By the time she tasted the spicy brain ooze dripping into her mouth, it was too late. She kept thinking of different ways to save herself, but every time she thought of one, her brain came up with a better one. Eventually she collapsed into a heap on the floor, where she lay gibbering like a very very smart baby. Her cat came by and licked a little of the brain ooze off of her head. It was a really diluted version of the original potion, but it was enough to make it realize it needed to get the fuck out of there.
The moral is that intelligence is not the same as wisdom. That’s why they have different saving throws.
Stories About Wizards 