Monday, November 21, 2011

Wastrel Opus - Hustler of Counterfeit Magick



Wastrel Opus is man of low moral character, but it wasn't always that way.  A long time ago he was a student at the Citadel Fantastick under the tutelage of two great wizards, Andante Sinker and Micro Kilos.  He showed some promise but couldn't get out of the shadow of his two great teachers.

To remedy that, he copied down as many spells he could from his teachers and then left the confines of the Citadel and set up shop in downtown Imajapoor.  He encouraged budding wizards to come  share and develop their magick inside his shop.  But little did they know, he was closely watching what they were doing, and eventually started duplicating various spells and potions.  He kicked out the developing wizards after he copied and sold much of the magick that he stole from the students and from Andante Sinker and Micro Kilos.

Now the problem with counterfeit magick is that it has a tendency to come back to bite you.  It's a pale shadow of the original magick so it might drain some of your Kremm or you could lose control over the spell that is being cast.  So a lot of magick newbies found themselves either with failed spells or injured because of poor quality spells.

This went on for about nine years until a few of the former students noticed some of their work was being sold under the name of Wastrel Opus.  Infuriated they brought it to the attention of the Citadel and Andante and Micro notice their work was also amongst the stolen magick.  The two wizards went down to Wastrel's shop to confront him, along with a couple of Ogres .   Wastrel childishly denied the accusations even though he had just been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.  An infuriated Andante cast him out of Imajapoor and Wastrel was forced to pack up and leave Imajapoor in disgrace.

A few years passed and some counterfeit magick started popping up again in Imajapoor.  The counterfeits are a bit more obvious, and Imajapoorans don't truck with cheap magick.  So somewhere on the outskirts of Imajapoor, an indigent Wastrel lives in a shack and is the butt of a lot of the Hobbillies jokes as he hustles cheap magick.  And if you listen from the walls of the city you can hear him shouting, "I'm still here, people still love me and I'm still important!"

2 comments:

  1. You are a natural born storyteller, Atom Kid, and the illo isn't bad either. Your alter-ego Charrrd will get an appreciation point for this blog. And I think I'll mention it on Twitter.

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