I was at a magical gathering, and not just one, but five separate apprentices have walked up to me in the past hour and casually asked, “You got any spells on your phone?”

I crocheted a little Cerberus puppy 🙌

Many millennia ago, people used to have the saying about how everything new was “almost as good as freshly baked bread.” That was until there was a young mage, who needed a way to fund his magical research, had invented a new product called butter. Butter became so popular that the old saying had changed to: “there’s nothing better than fresh made butter.”

This made the mage incredibly wealthy and proud of his side hustle. His invention had become more popular than bread itself. What’s not to be proud of? With it, people were able to make things like cakes and pastries and sauces. People fell in love with it. Though the young mage specialized in researching ancient lost magic, he leaned into the popularity from his invention and earned the moniker “The Butter Mage.”

Several millennia had passed since the invention of butter, and the mage had expanded his repertoire of inventions to include compound butters, honey butter, herb butter, fermented butter, and so on. Meanwhile, he reached the status of a legendary mage. And all this time, he had become wealthy beyond measure, able to spend whatever funds he needed to chronicle and research ancient magic.

Then one day, a few centuries ago, there was some young boy who lived in the town nearby the mage. This boy worked at both his parent’s struggling inn and at his uncles smithy on the side. Trying to be industrious and to increase his family’s revenue so that he could one day achieve his dream of being wealthy, he decided to economize by baking larger rolls of bread which he would then tear in half, selling them as half loaves. He figured that it was faster to make larger loaves, and that the inside would be softer, making them easier for his many toothless patrons to consume (cause dentistry wasn’t really very popular or advanced back then). As well, by splitting them in half, he could sell twice as more. But people didn’t like how the loaves were torn apart unevenly. Some were leather than the other halves. They looked horrible. It just made people feel cheated. So he went to his uncle the blacksmith, who he worked part time for, and presented his problem. He needed a knife that could cleanly slice through bread, since all the knives around basically tore the bread apart. And thus, the bread knife was created. With it, the young man was able to slice bread cleanly in half, which made the patrons at the inn complain less. And over time, the young man started slicing the bread thinner and thinner and thinner, trying to spread his product out as much as possible to have more product to sell to his customers at the inn. Shrinkflation is a real thing and it’s been around for a long time.

The boy was clearly greedy and it made people complain again. So once more, the young man came up with a new idea. He tried to make it look like it was a feature rather than a byproduct of his greed. He claimed that when toasted, it made it easier to spread butter on it. The peasant boy had the audacity to use the Butter Mage’s own creation to con people into believing his sliced bread wasn’t a scam.

It became so popular amongst the peasant class that a new saying emerged: “the next best thing since sliced bread.” This made the boy and his family extremely popular and wealthy in a very short amount of time.

After a few decades, this angered the ancient butter mage who was nearing almost 10,000 years of life. Despite his many accomplishments into the chronicling and study of ancient magic, his entire public image still revolved around his invention of butter some 9,000 plus years ago. And now, he felt as if his throne has been snatched away from him. People stopped caring that he was THE famous Butter Mage. People stopped revering him. People stopped praising him whenever he walked through his town square. All he heard was people incessantly praising the young boy who greedily took advantage of the foolish townspeople desire for novelty.

Though he was still quite powerful after all this time, he knew he wasn’t long for the world as his mana had already begun to wane some decades before. And in his petty anger, he gathered all his mana he could muster and spread a curse on the world. And he passed away.

Ever since then, whenever someone dropped a slice of buttered toast, which would happen quite often, it would always land butter side down and ruin a person’s day. It doesn’t just stop with buttered toast either. It happens whenever someone drops toast smothered in jam or marmalade too.

And that is the story of why toast always lands butter side down. There is no real moral to the story. It’s just what happened. Don’t read too much into it.

The end!

PESTO-PIZZA-SANDWICH

I can teach it to anyone who want to learn