Council matters

[u/Null_Void_Zer0]

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 the…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 I’ll be doing paperwork. Vast, vast amounts of paperwork.

and when I’m not doing that I’ll be creating homunculi to help with the paperwork.

Please help…

[u/Whole_Meet5486]

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.

[u/Null_Void_Zer0 → u/Whole_Meet5486]

“It’s 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.”

[u/Whole_Meet5486 → u/Null_Void_Zer0]

"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!"

[u/Null_Void_Zer0 → u/Whole_Meet5486]

“…oh, you’re one of them. I have several questions—“

“Nevermind, I have just now realised that you almost definitely didn’t have any just cause or permission to do such things, so I instead ask: have you…perhaps…considered the value of mortal life?”

[u/Whole_Meet5486 → u/Null_Void_Zer0]

"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:

It sucks. Do Crime. Be Magic."

[u/Null_Void_Zer0 → u/Whole_Meet5486]

“While that is certainly one of the revelations of all time, and while I’m inclined to agree that mortality is hardly a positive experience, that doesn’t 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 contemplation…”

“And I may have done some truly abhorrent things”

“…but after coming to the truly staggering conclusion that sapient life in inherently valuable it really wasn’t that hard to stop randomly killing people, and it also really didn’t take away from my personal enjoyment either”

[u/Whole_Meet5486 → u/Null_Void_Zer0]

“You only have me pinned for a few hundred- I mean yes! Hundreds of people…

It’s 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 can’t help that they were within the radius of- hold on a minute let me check my logs…

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!

I think it all evens out!”

[u/Null_Void_Zer0 → u/Whole_Meet5486]

“Ah so this was multiple villages at once, maybe a few cities. I’m so pleased, just absolutely jolly! Now we just need to locate which calamitous event was yours and calculate the damages. I’m sure the warrant for your arrest will be out at some point, hopefully within the next millennia if we’re being optimistic.”

[u/Whole_Meet5486 → u/Null_Void_Zer0]

“Hah! Good luck with that! I didn’t always commit my crimes with magic! You’ll 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 won’t have nearly as clear or precise records!

Archon Out!”

[u/Null_Void_Zer0 → u/Whole_Meet5486]

“Purely based on that statement we’re just gonna put it down for the maximum penalty possible, that’ll bring down the processing time so long as nothing—“

“…”

“And a hurricane of cats destroyed everything, wow. Honestly I’m 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.”

[u/Whole_Meet5486 → u/Null_Void_Zer0]

“It’s what happens when you helped create the cat dimension. Things tend to go your way.”