Wizards, man. Nobody trusts a Wizard. It's way too easy to learn just enough magic to cause problems. Cause lotsa problems, even. We got all these low-effort, magical used-car salesmen equivalents, just... loose in the world. Waving their hands and effortlessly getting what they want, regardless of the consequences. Nobody trusts a Wizard.
Think about it, though. We live in a world where any average joe can learn spells like "Rapid Deconstruction (inanimate objects)", "Power Phrase: Shit Yourself", "Rigby's Overclocked Lemur Blast", or even shit like "Rapid Deconstruction (animate beings)". Only takes a couple weeks, on average, to learn a spell. But, how many people actually end up on the receiving end?
Look at this, here. Some shmuck at a national paper really ran this story last week: "A Deadly Legacy: One Hundred Years On, Fifty People Still Die From 'Coxwain's Unethical Flower Arrangement' Every Year". Point one: that's an awful head and subhead. Fire your editor. Point two: Are you serious? Only fifty people, on average, are killed by a totally untraceable and deeply humiliating murderspell, per year, worldwide? That, right there, is proof of the intrinsic goodness of humanity.
Makes me feel good about the world, you know? Anyone can take a class like "Wizarding 101: Definitely Not Just A History of Doing Cool Murders" and come out an untraceable killer - yet, somehow, if you run the numbers, the total number of Wizard Murders worldwide isn't just less than firearm crimes, or knife crimes; it's less than deaths by wild animal attacks. Untraceable murder is the ultimate litmus test of the soul - and it turns out that the human soul is, on average, a blessed field of goodwill and self-restraint. There's not even that many Wizard *misdemeanors*! Hope springs eternal.
Not that I did well in Wizard Tech. Hell, I didn't do well in school, point blank. I'm not "bright" or "gifted". Definitely not "a pleasure to have in class". Not even any of the things people usually say about otherwise-hopeless cases: I was never called "creative", "driven" or even "lively".
Drove my folks to despair, it did. They'd fret and wring their hands about my future. Where was I going to take my life? When was I going to figure out what I wanted? In his more sarcastic moments of despair, my dad'd say "One day, that boy'll find a job what makes good use of incuriosity, laziness, and a lack of skills. We'll look damn foolish then, won't we?"
Nothing took, though. Got bounced through a dozen trade schools and regular community college classes without learning a thing. And yes, they even dragged me to that dingy Wizard Technical College out East for a semester. Me, who'd never shown a single spark of magical aptitude, surrounded by my city's least-gifted aspiring Wizards.
Soon as I got there, I knew I wanted nothing to do with magic. Loud, noisy, confusing. Did what I usually did - checked out. Slept through the lectures, skipped the hands-on tutorials. Didn't even buy the textbook.
Six months, and all I learned was one single bit of magic - Counterspell - and only so's I could rebuff my dorm-mate's irritating attempts at "pranking" me. Magic's funny like that, though. Has an affinity for people. Spells that match who you are kind of... stick to you. And 'Counterspell' is nothing if not the magical equivalent of saying "oh, fuck off, I don't want to deal with that".
Most people can't actually pick up Counterspell easy. Lots can't do it at all. Turns out, out of even those Wizards who can, pretty much nobody can cast it reflexively. Or in their sleep. I could, right off the bat. To me, it came as natural as breathing. That's a valuable skill in a college full of shithead Wizards-in-training. I made it through that semester without learning anything, sure, but also without getting casually levitated or launched into a tree, without a single flower growing out of any orifice, or without, god forbid, having some ambitious second-year spell-slinger grow me a new set of tastebuds inside my asshole.
Once I decided I'd had enough of pretending to learn magic and dropped out? Word had gotten around. Turns out, lots of people will pay top dollar for someone like me to sit around and Not Let Magic Happen. People might be good, writ large, but you only need one magical asshole with delusions of grandeur to ruin your wedding, you know? So you hire someone like me. An anti-Wizard. I don't need to be creative, or tricky, or even particularly fast. Hell, most of that would make my job harder.
What happens is simple. I sit around at your gig, drinking cheap beer and keeping to myself. If Fuckass Mc Lightninghands pops up and conjures a twelfth-level dimension-tearing horror? No, sorry. Counterspell. I don't care what it is, or what its existence implies about the underlying nature of reality. Get Counterspell'd.
Or, you know, maybe it's less direct. Yes, sure, you've shifted space around itself and now the floor is the ceiling and also one of the walls. That's great, but I'm not trying to go anywhere. I'm sitting here with my beer, casting Counterspell. Yes, that'll work just fine, regardless of floor topology. No, I'm not going to listen to your explanation. Oh, a grand master plan? More like "I mastered Counterspell", dickhead. Get outta here.
Elaborate heists and week-long setups and all sorts of deeply cursed artefacts are pretty standard fare, too. See a lot of 'em. Don't care about 'em. A clever, curious, or (god forbid) ingenious anti-Wizard would probably have all sorts of strategies to try out. That's how you get Wizarded so hard you have to be cleaned off the walls with a paint scraper. Not how I roll. Unstoppable force, meet the laziest object. I don't want to deal with it, so I won't. Counterspell.
Honestly? You start to hear the same old hubris and bravado after a couple dozen foiled Wizard Plots, anyhow. No, you can't tempt me with forbidden knowledge. Did you know that my seventh-grade geography teacher described me as "terminally incurious"? The gnawing gods at the fringes of truth can't tempt me: I got my beer, I got my chair. And you? Well, you got a Counterspell. Have fun.
Wizards get pretty irate about all that Counterspelling, though. Lots of effort been put, over the years, into counter-strategies against Counterspell. All those Wizard conferences, Wizard technical papers, Wizard theory... thousands of work-hours. And it ain't worth a damn. Unfortunately for them, not a single Wizard has ever managed to come up with a good defence against the million-years-old strategy of "Counterspell plus a fast-moving heavy object". I have knocked out something like seven hundred Wizards so far. It is very satisfying. And it pays well, as I said.
I live a simple life, so's most of the money just goes to my parents. Take 'em out to dinner once every few months, just to keep 'em quiet. They seem happy enough with my life, but I can't imagine it really sits well with them. Deep down, you know.
Spent their lives working to provide, to instill good values and skills. It worked on all my siblings. High-powered, strongly driven, ambitious over-achievers. Donate to charity, humanitarians, the lot of them. But me? Tried real hard on me. Yet, after thirty-four years of begging me to scrounge up a single ounce of motivation, it turns out my singular marketable skill ends up being "being completely disinterested" - and it makes me rich.
So, you know. There's a little bit of despair in their eyes when they look at me. Not just "where did we go wrong with this one", but... "we went wrong with this one, and somehow, he worked out the best". That's gotta sting. Undermine your sense of the world, your ability as a parent to say "trust us, we know best". Or, I guess, probably. I don't really know. I'm not a psychologist. I'm not even an anti-psychologist.
Anyhow, sorry, gotta cut this short. Some dork in a brimmed hat's lurking over in the trees. Gotta go Counterspell in his direction for a bit. Nice talking to you, good luck with marrying whats-his-name. Try not to get Wizard-ed on the honeymoon, I'm only here for the wedding and reception!
Think about it, though. We live in a world where any average joe can learn spells like "Rapid Deconstruction (inanimate objects)", "Power Phrase: Shit Yourself", "Rigby's Overclocked Lemur Blast", or even shit like "Rapid Deconstruction (animate beings)". Only takes a couple weeks, on average, to learn a spell. But, how many people actually end up on the receiving end?
Look at this, here. Some shmuck at a national paper really ran this story last week: "A Deadly Legacy: One Hundred Years On, Fifty People Still Die From 'Coxwain's Unethical Flower Arrangement' Every Year". Point one: that's an awful head and subhead. Fire your editor. Point two: Are you serious? Only fifty people, on average, are killed by a totally untraceable and deeply humiliating murderspell, per year, worldwide? That, right there, is proof of the intrinsic goodness of humanity.
Makes me feel good about the world, you know? Anyone can take a class like "Wizarding 101: Definitely Not Just A History of Doing Cool Murders" and come out an untraceable killer - yet, somehow, if you run the numbers, the total number of Wizard Murders worldwide isn't just less than firearm crimes, or knife crimes; it's less than deaths by wild animal attacks. Untraceable murder is the ultimate litmus test of the soul - and it turns out that the human soul is, on average, a blessed field of goodwill and self-restraint. There's not even that many Wizard *misdemeanors*! Hope springs eternal.
Not that I did well in Wizard Tech. Hell, I didn't do well in school, point blank. I'm not "bright" or "gifted". Definitely not "a pleasure to have in class". Not even any of the things people usually say about otherwise-hopeless cases: I was never called "creative", "driven" or even "lively".
Drove my folks to despair, it did. They'd fret and wring their hands about my future. Where was I going to take my life? When was I going to figure out what I wanted? In his more sarcastic moments of despair, my dad'd say "One day, that boy'll find a job what makes good use of incuriosity, laziness, and a lack of skills. We'll look damn foolish then, won't we?"
Nothing took, though. Got bounced through a dozen trade schools and regular community college classes without learning a thing. And yes, they even dragged me to that dingy Wizard Technical College out East for a semester. Me, who'd never shown a single spark of magical aptitude, surrounded by my city's least-gifted aspiring Wizards.
Soon as I got there, I knew I wanted nothing to do with magic. Loud, noisy, confusing. Did what I usually did - checked out. Slept through the lectures, skipped the hands-on tutorials. Didn't even buy the textbook.
Six months, and all I learned was one single bit of magic - Counterspell - and only so's I could rebuff my dorm-mate's irritating attempts at "pranking" me. Magic's funny like that, though. Has an affinity for people. Spells that match who you are kind of... stick to you. And 'Counterspell' is nothing if not the magical equivalent of saying "oh, fuck off, I don't want to deal with that".
Most people can't actually pick up Counterspell easy. Lots can't do it at all. Turns out, out of even those Wizards who can, pretty much nobody can cast it reflexively. Or in their sleep. I could, right off the bat. To me, it came as natural as breathing. That's a valuable skill in a college full of shithead Wizards-in-training. I made it through that semester without learning anything, sure, but also without getting casually levitated or launched into a tree, without a single flower growing out of any orifice, or without, god forbid, having some ambitious second-year spell-slinger grow me a new set of tastebuds inside my asshole.
Once I decided I'd had enough of pretending to learn magic and dropped out? Word had gotten around. Turns out, lots of people will pay top dollar for someone like me to sit around and Not Let Magic Happen. People might be good, writ large, but you only need one magical asshole with delusions of grandeur to ruin your wedding, you know? So you hire someone like me. An anti-Wizard. I don't need to be creative, or tricky, or even particularly fast. Hell, most of that would make my job harder.
What happens is simple. I sit around at your gig, drinking cheap beer and keeping to myself. If Fuckass Mc Lightninghands pops up and conjures a twelfth-level dimension-tearing horror? No, sorry. Counterspell. I don't care what it is, or what its existence implies about the underlying nature of reality. Get Counterspell'd.
Or, you know, maybe it's less direct. Yes, sure, you've shifted space around itself and now the floor is the ceiling and also one of the walls. That's great, but I'm not trying to go anywhere. I'm sitting here with my beer, casting Counterspell. Yes, that'll work just fine, regardless of floor topology. No, I'm not going to listen to your explanation. Oh, a grand master plan? More like "I mastered Counterspell", dickhead. Get outta here.
Elaborate heists and week-long setups and all sorts of deeply cursed artefacts are pretty standard fare, too. See a lot of 'em. Don't care about 'em. A clever, curious, or (god forbid) ingenious anti-Wizard would probably have all sorts of strategies to try out. That's how you get Wizarded so hard you have to be cleaned off the walls with a paint scraper. Not how I roll. Unstoppable force, meet the laziest object. I don't want to deal with it, so I won't. Counterspell.
Honestly? You start to hear the same old hubris and bravado after a couple dozen foiled Wizard Plots, anyhow. No, you can't tempt me with forbidden knowledge. Did you know that my seventh-grade geography teacher described me as "terminally incurious"? The gnawing gods at the fringes of truth can't tempt me: I got my beer, I got my chair. And you? Well, you got a Counterspell. Have fun.
Wizards get pretty irate about all that Counterspelling, though. Lots of effort been put, over the years, into counter-strategies against Counterspell. All those Wizard conferences, Wizard technical papers, Wizard theory... thousands of work-hours. And it ain't worth a damn. Unfortunately for them, not a single Wizard has ever managed to come up with a good defence against the million-years-old strategy of "Counterspell plus a fast-moving heavy object". I have knocked out something like seven hundred Wizards so far. It is very satisfying. And it pays well, as I said.
I live a simple life, so's most of the money just goes to my parents. Take 'em out to dinner once every few months, just to keep 'em quiet. They seem happy enough with my life, but I can't imagine it really sits well with them. Deep down, you know.
Spent their lives working to provide, to instill good values and skills. It worked on all my siblings. High-powered, strongly driven, ambitious over-achievers. Donate to charity, humanitarians, the lot of them. But me? Tried real hard on me. Yet, after thirty-four years of begging me to scrounge up a single ounce of motivation, it turns out my singular marketable skill ends up being "being completely disinterested" - and it makes me rich.
So, you know. There's a little bit of despair in their eyes when they look at me. Not just "where did we go wrong with this one", but... "we went wrong with this one, and somehow, he worked out the best". That's gotta sting. Undermine your sense of the world, your ability as a parent to say "trust us, we know best". Or, I guess, probably. I don't really know. I'm not a psychologist. I'm not even an anti-psychologist.
Anyhow, sorry, gotta cut this short. Some dork in a brimmed hat's lurking over in the trees. Gotta go Counterspell in his direction for a bit. Nice talking to you, good luck with marrying whats-his-name. Try not to get Wizard-ed on the honeymoon, I'm only here for the wedding and reception!