Ok, so I read this one, and read the comments, and I laughed so hard my coffee came out of my nose, by the way that hurts! PLEASE, my friend, write more about what happens to this harmless idiot once Wraithvine helps hir, and then kicks hir tail? Did ze learn from hir mistake? Did the kolbold and the bugbear get a chance to kick hir tail for hir stupidity? Did Wraithvine force the kid to go back and apologize, sincerely, and make hir work to earn hir place instead of trying to do shortcuts again? I'm dying to know!
@internutter/challenge-03150-h241-an-idiot-in-the-dark -- Anon Guest
[AN: Sorry about the coffee, Nonny. Let's see what I can do with the gormless wonder...]
When it comes to curses, there are certain guaranteed cures. True love's kiss is always preferred for such things. Unfortunately for Yngvar, ze had all the social appeal of a sponge found at the bottom of a cleared-out sink[1]. Even hir mother, apparently, hadn't loved hir. Ze was a child-of-the-basket, left on the doorstep of a particularly prestigious school of magic.
No friends. No family. A self-imposed curse... It was all giving Wraithvine a headache. Well. A worse one. "And since you have effectively vanished from your previous place of shelter," ze said, "you now no longer have the hospitality to which you were once accustomed. So. No home, either. There's a special kind of genius that arrives at stupidity from the other side. You have it, as they say, in spades."
"I can't exactly stay in a magic circle my entire life," Yngvar was making notes about it anyway. "But if I could make a sufficiently large circle..."
"No," warned Wraithvine. "And none of that cursed-castle business. It's not a cure when it's kidnapping and taking a hostage."
"It worked for the L'Bettes..." mumbled Yngvar.
"According to the legend they paid a Bard to write," said Rawr. "Only one person could know what the real history was, and ze wasn't there."
"Some king wanted immortality and had me in an oubliette," summarised Wraithvine. "Long story." Ze paced around the campsite, echoing hir circling thoughts. "Do you have the notebook where you put your cursework down?"
"It won't do you much good. It's as invisible as the rest of me and my stuff." Nevertheless, Yngvar produced it anyway. "I can barely read it."
"True Sight," sighed Wraithvine, invoking the spell. A third eye erupted on hir forehead and read the spectral book as Wraithvine shut hir normal eyes. "Ah. Hm. Yeah... this is a mess. Tied to the Astral Plane? Really?"
"Astral things are more likely to be spectral? Visible at will? Material when necessary?"
A long, deep, suffering sigh. "You've managed to curse yourself into being half ghost, with no true body to return to. I could break this now, but there's a fifty percent chance you could die with nobody to love or mourn you. You know what happens to souls like that."
A slow descent into the Plane of Torment, and from there, a transformation into a demon. "I'd rather not do that."
"I don't think anybody would," said Anthe. "That's horrible."
"That's usually the wages of evil," said Wraithvine. "I'm going to have to copy this, and then work on the remedy by incremental means. In the meantime, you can learn to be a better person."
"Starting with," said Anthe, "Why spying on otherwise innocent people is Wrong."
[1] The sinks that get filled up over a passage of weeks, with the truly desperate adding water as they rinse off only the things they need. You know. College sinks.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / logoff]
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