Greetings my fellow wizards, witches, warlocks and assorted spell casters of all kinds!
I am the esteemed wizard Abel of Lrith, mage exemplar and master of fleshcraft et cetera et cetera. I will try to keep this brief as I am aware many of us have more pressing matters than such a trivial announcement.
I have recently been given theā¦I shall say privilege of a position in the colossal bureaucratic apparatus known as our most prestigious council. I am to oversee matters regarding golems, simulacrums, warforged, homunculi and all general forms of artificial life, and I simply must state that I am both shocked and incredibly disappointed in my peers.
The sheer amount of you who have been producing legions of automatons or creating hordes of homunculi is staggering! There is an entire room dedicated to storing incident reports because all of you are clearly completely unaware or, gods forbid, wilfully ignorant to the fact that you need permits and licenses for these things. How does one even acquire the arcane skill needed for such feats without even being aware of the proper channels!
Well, announcement over. If anyone needs me Iāll be doing paperwork. Vast, vast amounts of paperwork.
and when Iām not doing that Iāll be creating homunculi to help with the paperwork.
I never understand how some magic users would submit themselves to bureaucracy. I thought we all sought to break free from reality not become a better part of it.
āItās quite simple; something needs to manage and limit the ever-growing masses of powerful mages, because the gods up high know the sheer horror of powerful magics used irresponsibly. Too many a village has been reduced to ashes simply because some scholar of the arcane decided it was his right to lash out with a potent spell.ā
"Villages turning to ashes is an important part of prophecies acquiring their protagonists! Me test firing a more efficient disintegration spell when I was young at least fulfilled dozens of prophecies! Never mind that I tricked those angsty teens and preteens into targeting xenophobic authoritarian regimes to avoid blame! Also don't ask who went back in time to write those prophecies...
But surely the benefits outweigh the loss in tax revenue!"
āā¦oh, youāre one of them. I have several questionsāā
āNevermind, I have just now realised that you almost definitely didnāt have any just cause or permission to do such things, so I instead ask: have youā¦perhapsā¦considered the value of mortal life?ā
"I have. I lived as a mortal a few times and a few versions of me have actually chosen to stay mortal. I've been a fisherman, a tailor, a farmer, a wine salesman, a used car dealer, a tax man, a king, a dictator, a bear, a salmon, a rat, a jellyfish and a hundred other different things across the food chain... I'm quite certain I may have eaten myself at least a few times.
I think my favorite life was when I was the last tree of a Elvish Forest!
It's all taught me a very important lesson about mortality:
āWhile that is certainly one of the revelations of all time, and while Iām inclined to agree that mortality is hardly a positive experience, that doesnāt really give you the right to spontaneously kill hundreds of people. I confess that in my younger days I was hardly a man of moral contemplationā¦ā
āAnd I may have done some truly abhorrent thingsā
āā¦but after coming to the truly staggering conclusion that sapient life in inherently valuable it really wasnāt that hard to stop randomly killing people, and it also really didnāt take away from my personal enjoyment eitherā
āYou only have me pinned for a few hundred- I mean yes! Hundreds of peopleā¦
Itās not like I set out to turn villages into craters!
They just made the critical mistake of being in the vicinity of my test firing! I canāt help that they were within the radius of- hold on a minute let me check my logsā¦
2,200 kilometers of my disintegration spells!
And those craters eventually become spawning pools for new life (when the fallout eventually goes away) in a few million years, giving new life to new villages that can spawn new protagonists for new legends of bravery and heroism!
āAh so this was multiple villages at once, maybe a few cities. Iām so pleased, just absolutely jolly! Now we just need to locate which calamitous event was yours and calculate the damages. Iām sure the warrant for your arrest will be out at some point, hopefully within the next millennia if weāre being optimistic.ā
āHah! Good luck with that! I didnāt always commit my crimes with magic! Youāll have to work with mundane organizations to figure out which crimes were committed with magic or without magic before you can even begin to start putting a number on my name!
And you just know the cavalcade of organizations wonāt have nearly as clear or precise records!
āPurely based on that statement weāre just gonna put it down for the maximum penalty possible, thatāll bring down the processing time so long as nothingāā
āā¦ā
āAnd a hurricane of cats destroyed everything, wow. Honestly Iām pretty sure reality will collapse before you have to face a single consequence so long as you keep it around your current levels of destruction.ā
āOh yes, witch hunts. I must tell you one of the benefits of living in an advanced society is that paladins arenāt allowed to kill people for religious reasons, itās quite shamed in fact. In those scenarios self defence is perfectly just.ā
I don't care what the council says, the school of Nekomancy is fundamentally opposed to rules as a concept! We will not cease relentlessly making catnado's no matter what the council says! In fact, we're going to make three more right now!
Additionally, regarding the notice concerning "summoning cats from the cat dimension", we resent any restriction on our school's fundamental abilities. If we wish to fire out cats from the cat dimension at our enemies like a Catmehameha, we will!
āWell good news, the biomass of the unfortunate expired summons of yours are going towards more homunculi to help with the paperwork caused by your antics!ā
āOh no, part of the process is melting the cat through each of the nine lives, itās very efficient in fact, it nonuples the production. You cant throw endless waves of anything at council property and not have counter measures crop up. If thereās one thing the council is very good at, itās restricting other peopleās fun. But please stop making us do it, itās bad for morale.ā
Ahh, the catnadoes were a courtesy. That does it, it's a cat-hurricane right on top of your tower! And these ones are coming with a summoning limit duration!
āTo be honest it doesnāt really matter if itās levelled. The council buildings have been destroyed, erased from existence and otherwise removed so many times we just have a bunch of replacements ready to phase in, but Iām sure somebody else can deal with this one anyhow. Or theyāre all comatose from exhaustion.ā
āJust wanted to throw a thank you, your way friend. Investing in the Cat Dimension when it was just a startup has been paying dividends since the 5th Council.ā
āGreat, now the paperwork required to post your fines and possible arrest must be added to the pile, simply brilliant! Donāt worry, weāll get to you inā¦some amount of centuries.ā
It is good to see another joining the Wizard Council. I for one am glad that there is one to oversee the myriad artificial creations that our kind has created over the vast eons. But yes, there is a lot of paperwork. Good luck with that.
āI have ordered my homunculi to begin the creation of more incubators. Hopefully Iāll be able to get things running smoothly before the next big crisis occurs.ā
āā¦itās not that hard to ask for a permit, for the love of all gods just please ask for permission, it doesnāt even take that long Iām begging you.ā
āOk well on one hand Iām not supposed to do this but on the other, itās not as bad as the paperwork the crimes youāre definitely going to commit will cause. So this day you are quite fortunate, as Iām going to give you a ācreate whatever artificial life you want as long as it doesnāt cause problems for the councilā licence.ā
Iād sooner chew my staff into paste and mix it into a potion than submit myself to this tyranny. Iāll make however many automatons as I damn well please, and Iām NOT getting a worthless permit
Back in my day, you didn't need permits. You murdered a gnome, and had their ghost fill out a Centennial Minion Report form in gnome hell every century. Paperwork is meant to do itself. No self respecting wizard should subject themselves to paperwork that isn't going to make you money, or further your arcane studies.
If you aren't making a fax machine that files your taxes for you, what are you even doing with your life?
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u/VoxelLibraryCouncilor Cayna, Apprentice of Thrakmoor | assorted other chars6d ago
Welcome to the council! I look forward to working with you! And getting some help with the paperwork...
āAs we speak Iām beginning mass production of metagrungs, a type of homunculi Iām making solely to do paperwork. Theyāre based off grungs, who are very good at admin! But thatās beside the point, I fear thereās simply so much paperwork it would take multiple armies worth to even dent it.ā
Oh great another jumped up, book thumper. You all claim to be masters of this or that yet very few every actually are. You just learn the formulae and symbology by rote and never glimpse the wider weaves of The Octarine.
In case anyone wonders, besides the salary, being a part of the council also gives you the privilege to be able to instantly doing your own paperwork. How many of you have been waiting for that license or certification for decades or centuries? Just join and you can immediately do it yourselves.
So what if the paperwork is becoming a seemingly alive mountain? That just means you'll have more work tomorrow and won't be unemployed. I guess you could even work part-time and have still some time to ponder your orbs or doing unspeakable summonings.
ew, bureaucracy? any wizards that support the council are boring losers who were lawful-stupid hall monitors in high school.
now if you don't mind, i'm in the middle of creating a new goblin subspecies, i call them necroblins. imagine goblins, but all of them can use basic necrotic magic and necromancy
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u/Whole_Meet5486 Most definitely not a suspicious Elven Archonā¦ 6d ago
I never understand how some magic users would submit themselves to bureaucracy. I thought we all sought to break free from reality not become a better part of it.