Magicka: The Ninth Element - A Tale of Wizards is a story by Dan McGirt preceding the events of the Magicka video game. The story, told in-universe by game's character Vlad, follows four young Wizarding School students, Grimnir, Fafnir, Tuonetar and Davlo, as they end up on an adventure. A storm of references follows, in harmony with style of story-telling established by the game.
The tropes in The Ninth Element include:
- Academy of Adventure: Applies to Aldrheim as much as it did in the game, and later on villain's rant implies this has been the case earlier as well.
- Almighty Janitor: Joad is considered by students to be a boring wizard focused mostly on snacks, but he's actually guardian of Forbidden Chamber... exactly for that reason.
- Bitch In Sheep's Clothing: Downplayed with Yix, which abandons their students after causing a training machine breakdown and is wiling to sacrifice chance for resurrecting perfectly resurrectable victims of that to save herself from an investigation, but afterwards behaves in a mostly sensible manner.
- Butt-Monkey: Fafnir turns out to be this in his early days, despite wearing a green robe. This is in contrast to game having applied a more lethal take on the trope, putting virtually all death scenarios on yellow wearing wizard. Tuonetar is, however, the part of the pack which ends up suffering a near death experience.
- Dangerous Device Disposal Debacle: The Forbidden Chamber houses loads of magical implements, protecting them from wizards using them without proper testing just for fun. After the initial incident, everything but the stolen artifact ends up being removed with a Vortex magick, eliminating this particular problem.
- Death Is Cheap: Downplayed compared to the game. Revive is one of the few magicks in relatively common use by that point of story, but it is highly dependent on the status of the body. Averted with Tuonetar's "Near-Death Experience", which, similarly to the original but for different reasons, is more of a case of accidental To Hell and Back in the end.
- Dying Clue: Parodied to a point, since Joad writes up one with the cheese dip.
- Drunk with Power: Ends up happening to Grimnir. Seeing how close Azimuth was to realizing her plan, he immediately jumps at the possibility to replace her.
- Elemental Powers: Of course. Eight base elements are the basis of all known Magick, and the ninth is teased in the title. Surprisingly, it turns out it is more of a philosophical term, referring to Magick beyond balance of eight elements, or as Azimuth puts it, the Imbalance. How that ties in with Magicka 2's take on Magick expanding is unknown.
- Grim Reaper: Shows up after Tuonetar managing to fall in afterlife alive. After speaking with her does not show much problem with bringing her to life, though before hearing of Azimuth rampaging is clearly wishing to have fun with a guest for a little longer.
- Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: The villain acknowledges in the prologue that their plan has a potential to destroy the world, but they're so fed up with everyone else that they are content with such output of their exploits.
- Most Definitely Not a Villain: Vlad's shtick of doing suspiciously vampire-like things is back, though mostly in prologue, as the actual story does not concern this point too much. Inverted when at one point Yix is absolutely sure Davlo is a ghost, and he disagrees. Which is hilarious given that Davlo is Vlad, and at least at that point he is most definitely not a ghost.
- Paper-Thin Disguise: Davlo is obviously Vlad. Twisted in that by this point he appears to actually not be a vampire yet. So limited amount of This Man Is Dead may be in operation.
- Punny Name:
- Yix's servant Egad.
- Azimuth, which is a type of coordinate angle, calls herself Azimuth the Upright.
- Turq and Pinky, of the red shirt students from the introduction, are named after actual colors of their robes.
- Wizilur the Wise, the first Wizard.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Fandulf the Almost Wise is actually pretty wise. During his presence in the story, he makes only minor mistakes as opposed to Yix's outright malice: he's initially disbelieving of Grimnir's theory of Joad trying to tie the villain to the Ninth Element, he destroys the Aldrheim's founding columns while stopping the Maelstrom, and he decides that fixing the latter is more important than helping students seek the yet-unknown villain.
- Shout-Out: Loads of it, and similarly to the original, while some are dropped randomly, others form a major part of the story. Similarly, some continue trends introduced in the game, while others reach uncharted territory.
- Professor Yix insists on calling her students The Yix-Men, and is trying to operate some sort of multiverse observation machine.
- The villain makes use of a voice modulator.
- Fandulf is an obvious reference to Gandalf.
- Significant Anagram: Davlo is a last minute mingling of the name Vlad.
- Unperson: When villain introduces themselves to the wizards, they're shocked to notice they don't know their name. Azimuth used to be the boss at Aldrheim, but her name was literally scrubbed away from Order's history.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Joad's cheese dip is a huge element of his sleazy reputation, but also such a favorite of Fafnir's that he's willing the eat it off the ground.
- The Unreveal: Readers may be led to believe that this book will feature backstory of status of multiple characters, most importantly Magicka's status of Grimnir. What we end up learning is Grimnir's initial motivation. The exact nature of Grimnir's later exploits which got him imprisoned at World's End, Fafnir somehow becoming a dragon, and many other things are left untouched.
- World Tree: Yggdrasil is the part of story mythos, and what the Staff of Imbalance is made of.
