'The only thing to do is amputate!' said Sir Kissalot, and he promptly lopped off the man's leg.
'Thank you!' said the man, kissing Sir Kissalot. He then picked up his leg and the bear trap and hopped off into the woods.
'Actually, I suppose I could have just hit the release on the trap,' Sir Kissalot realised. 'But, no matter. He seemed quite skilled at hopping on one foot.'
Sir Kissalot visited the local geologist to learn about volcanoes. 'I need to stop it,' he told the geologist.
'Well, you can't,' said the geologist. They kissed briefly and then went their separate ways.
Sir Kissalot went to the volcano at what used to be Pikesville to examine the phenomenon. The volcano was no longer spewing out molten rock, but steam still rose from the nearby river.
'This is just a big hole in the ground!' said Sir Kissalot. 'All we need to do is cover the ground with a good solid floor and the volcano will be stopped! He looked around and noticed that there was a toothpick factory smouldering in the distance. 'Yes! Toothpicks. We'll floor the nation with toothpicks.'
So Sir Kissalot instructed all the villages in the land to floor their entire village in toothpicks. This put a great deal of stress on the recently-crippled toothpick industry, and by the next afternoon, only one village had managed to procure the necessary toothpicks and construct their floor. By sheer coincidence, this was the village stuck by the evil sorcerer's volcano.
The toothpicks did very little to reduce the destruction. In fact, many people claimed the sharp flying bits of burning wood actually increased the death toll.
So Sir Kissalot examined the volcanoes some more. Then he pondered and thought. 'I know! All we need do is put a enormous nozzle around it to aim the lava somewhere out of the way.'
'But you'll have plant the nozzle before it destroys the village. How will you know where to place it? And where will you get enough nozzle material to produce nozzles for every village in the realm?' asked a passing author surrogate.
'Good point,' said Sir Kissalot.
'And another thing,' continued the author surrogate, clearly having trouble with the way things were headed, 'won't most things melt?'
'No,' said Sir Kissalot. 'We have an amazing way of treating metals that prevents them from melting. It's the other issues that are most bothersome.'
'Well work those out, would you? They're really stumping me,' said the surrogate.
'I think I'll conduct a geological survey of the area,' said Sir Kissalot. And he did just that.
The geological survey revealed that volcanoes don't just appear. The magically-caused ones have markers that pre-date the eruption by a good bit of time. 'So what we can do,' Sir Kissalot explained to the author surrogate, who was still following him around, 'is find these markers and nozzle them.'
'But the nozzles will be expensive to produce. You can't put them everywhere.'
'Indeed. But if my hypothesis is correct, no sorcerer could possibly put markers below every village. He must be marking them only a day in advance. What we evil fiend must be doing is marking each village a week in advance, meaning he has seven markers. We need just a few nozzles. We'll have villages check for these magical markers on a daily basis and whenever one is spotted, we sent the nozzle to direct it on a harmless path. After the eruption is over, we can take it to the next location. So long as our nozzle count is higher than our travel time, we'll be fine.'
'Brilliant!' said the author surrogate. 'Whoever came up with that should win the Nobel Prize in literature. He stood waiting for the phone to ring.'
'We don't have telephones,' said Sir Kissalot.
'Drat!' said the author surrogate, and he promptly left without even giving Sir Kissalot a kiss.
So the nation built seven giant nozzles and examined their villages for magical markers. The army spent its time rushing the nozzles to affected villages, resulting in an extended period of peace. Eventually the sorcerer, unable to blackmail the kingdom, died of boredom.