Growing Pains; Or, On Daniel Obrove’s Discovery of the Hither and Thither and the Demon Räum’s Meddling; Or, A Matter of Perspective; Or, Curiouser and Curiouser; Or, Revenge Served in Large Portions; Or, Hell Hath No Fury like a Literal Denizen of Hell Scorned
Count Räum sniffed the air.
He was greeted by the characteristic aroma of brick and mortar, of soil and soft clay. Thickly layered over those was the smell of too much burning incense. Someone was trying too hard to make a good impression.
Count Räum opened his eyes.
As he suspected, he found himself in the basement workroom of some upstart human sorcerer. Shelves stocked with pickling jars and shards of crystal lined the walls where the stone hadn’t fallen apart, and a quill and inkwell sat on a desk opposite him. But where was the summoner?
Count Räum tuned his ears.
He turned around, stretching his legs and flexing his wings and getting used to the constraints which this mortal plane placed upon him. Räum faced his summoner with a look of disbelief on his face. The idiot fool had summoned him backwards. How does someone screw up something as simple as getting your demonic thrall facing the right direction? The boy didn’t even recognize his mistake! He was too concerned with completing the words of binding, not that they would do him any good now. Räum arriving all turned around meant that there was a flaw in the summoning ritual’s runic matrix.
Not only did this place the summoner at risk of retaliation from his summon, but it was also just poor form. It was rude. Räum was a Great Earl of the B’low, after all. It was very impolite to meet a demon of his stature in any position other than face to face. Räum stood at attention and idly preened his feathers while the boy finished his babbling. He quietly searched over the summoning circle for other errors. Maybe he could get back at this fool mage for slighting him...
Daniel Obrove had never been the most...refined magician.
His professors at Suinaegoiters Academy for Spellsling and Ensorcellment praised him on being powerful, at least--Daniel seemed to be naturally proficient at empowering his spells for greater effect with a relatively low input of energy. Daniel demonstrated a certain clumsy mastery in single combat, able to decide the outcome of a duel with one simple spell when other mages would have to resort to more complex magicks. While the opposition prepared to trounce Daniel with careful strategy, he just ploughed the other guy over with an over-large shard of ice.
Unfortunately, Daniel couldn’t regulate the increased force of his empowered spells, making him a little less useful during collaborative efforts. His unwieldy combat magic risked the lives of friend and foe both, and the one time that Daniel tried his hand at healing magic ended...messily. His lack of finesse meant that something minor aways went awry during summoning rituals; the campus officials had to ask Daniel to stop trying when property damages ran high due to all the escaped monsters he invoked.
Upon his graduation, Daniel Obrove was advised to pursue a life of quiet independent study. The institution even offered to fund his endeavors, if only he promised to practice far, far away from the school. Sadly recognizing that his powers placed others at risk, Daniel accepted and began a life of isolated scholarship in his (fire-proofed) home outside Wisteria Duchy.
What Daniel could not have anticipated was his rediscovery of the ancient rites of Ur-Goblin portal magic. He had been browsing a grimoire one day when he found a stained kerchief hidden between the pages. The grimy rag spelled out exactly how to go about creating the Ur-Goblin warchief’s cross-dimensional worldgates. Daniel saw this as an opportunity to prove himself to the magical community--he didn’t immediately tell anyone else in order to make strides towards the mastery of the forgotten art.
Somehow Daniel managed to create a portal arch without making it 20 times larger than it needed to be. Which was lucky, seeing as he had chosen to make the first attempt in the basement of his home.
Daniel had the portal, but what he needed next was a way to decipher the glyphs and sigils lining the stone arch’s circumference. He knew that it was only by activating them in a specific sequence that he would be able to venture to new worlds. Daniel didn’t want to get the order wrong and wind up on a world consisting only of fiery acid or something.
There were many texts detailing the horrors of the war with the Ur-Goblins and the endless armies that passed through their gateways, but none of them mentioned how to
operate the portals. The magicians of Daniel’s world, when faced with knowing the unknowable, always turned to summoning a demonic informant. The magician was extra careful in preparing the ritual of binding and summoning, since infernals of the B’low could cause a lot more damage than an escaped behemoth if anything went wrong. He checked and double-checked the components of the spell, to be completely sure all was in order.
It’s a testament to Daniel Obrove’s clumsiness that, even after all the careful preparation, he still managed to balls it up.
Count Räum paused in his scrutiny of the flawed summoning circle and deigned to actually listen to the demands of his hapless ‘master.’ What was it the boy required? The correct sequence of coordinate runes for...a Fate Gate? How had this bumbling novice managed to gain access to the Ur-Goblin’s magic? The warchiefs were renowned for their shamanic abilities, respected even among archfiends, yet somehow this human boy had reclaimed their greatest secret: A structure that allowed not only traversal across space or time, but an infinitely branching combination of both at once. What was worse, this idiot mage intended to use the portal not for conquest, as the warchiefs had, but for exploration. The boy had the breadth of causality at his fingertips, and rather than raising an army and staking his claim in this widest frontier, he was using it for idle tourism.
Räum couldn’t allow such a waste of power, nor could he allow the disrespect dealt to him to go unpunished. There had to be some way he could sabotage the magician’s plans. The summoning ritual was botched, but the demon Earl sensed that the spell was enough to hold him physically at bay. Stepping out of the circle and ripping the boy apart was out of the question, as satisfying as that might have been. What about slipping magic through, though? If Räum could find a break in the circle wide enough to place a curse on the mage, then that would be enough to satisfy him.
The simpleton halfwit had stopped talking, so Räum disguised further analysis of the summoning circle as a long contemplative pause. Where oh where did the spell fail?
Ah ha! There was the fatal error that caused the demon Earl to arrive on this plane facing the wrong direction, and there was the passage for his grim hex to be cast. The boy wanted the key to unlocking causality? Fine, Räum would grant it, but not without a cost. The demon wove a spell to manipulate and alter the boy’s destiny, and his interactions with the Fate Gate. Any time Daniel Obrove made use of the portal, any portal that lead across dimensions, be it one he encountered or one that he created himself, Daniel would be brought to a world in which the inhabitants and scenery were about a third his size, regardless of the coordinates used. He wanted to follow in the footsteps of the great warchiefs? Then his physical form would reflect such lofty ambitions. Räum shared a selection of coordinates for the mage to try, but laced his words with magic which would always send him on a path suited to his hubris.
The demon granted Daniel the knowledge he sought. He dismissed his summon, and inputted one of the rune sequences he had been granted. He had been told they would lead him to a world not too much unlike his own, so the magician supposed that it was a good place to begin. The portal sprung to life, its interior flooding with a pale green light, and Daniel Obrove stepped through.
Daniel quickly discovered that something was wrong. The exit portal was too large, and he was too large to match. The poor mage's face was scraped and bruised after finding himself amidst the forest canopy. He went home and tried a different set of coordinates
This time, the inflated exit portal had sprouted from a cobbled city square, and Daniel’s inflated feet had kicked over a market stall. He went home again, and, while picking the splinters from his toes, tried to call his demon informant for an explanation. There was no answer to this second summons. It appeared that not only had the nefarious Count Räum cursed Daniel to be eighteen feet tall whenever he travelled to new worlds, he had also worked a clause into the spell that meant he would no longer have to answer the mage’s summons. Daniel Obrove was left with a perplexing hindrance to his interaction with the populations of the multiverse, and left without answers as to why.
Walking Catastrophe: Side Effects to the Earl’s Meddling; Or, Bull in a China Shop; Or, Addtional Information
As well as being fated to always stumble into a causal line in which he’s bigger than he should be by comparison, Daniel Obrove’s uncontrolled magicks grow to match with each crossing over. This was not part of Räum’s intention in cursing the young man, but when he found out later that that was the case, he laughed himself to tears.
On traveling through the Ur-Goblin gateways, Daniel invariably finds himself in a universe where his equivalent size is three times that of his surroundings, leaving him at around eighteen feet tall by comparison. His magic, by comparison, grows about three times more powerful. Most of the time this is not in Daniel’s favor, since he can’t control his spells at their normal level of potency. A small luminary cantrip becomes blinding, teleporting short distances takes a good chunk of the scenery along with him, and incendiary spells set wide areas ablaze. It’s very inconvenient.
A note on the mechanics of the demon Räum's curse: Upon passing through a dimensional gateway, Daniel Obrove is not changed himself; multiversal travel doesn't somehow render the young man 18 feet tall. Rather, the world he arrives on happens to exist in an instance of reality in which everything is three times smaller than it is on Daniel's world. Nothing actually changes other than the young man's intended destination. Räum fitted the curse to always carry Daniel to 'smaller' versions of the worlds he intends to visit, no matter what.
Conversely, anyone traveling back to Daniel Obrove's homeland will find themselves suddenly in a realm of giants. They are still, of course, their natural size, it's simply that Daniel's native dimension is 'bigger' than their own. Comprende?
The Hither and Thither Expanded; Or, Drawing Back the Curtain!
The magician Daniel Obrove is the alternate universe analogue of the...magician Daniel Obrove. He is not the latter Daniel’s past self, his blood relative, or a close acquaintance. He's the Dan possessed of uncontrolled magical potential who has been cursed to view the multiverse in miniature, whereas
his near counterpart, while in full command of his magicks, still has his own
troubles.
It is not outside the realm of possibility that the two have attended group therapy together.
Additionally, this Daniel Obrove is not the same as the other Daniel Obroves you may have seen getting into shenanigans. Their timelines run parallel to each other, rather than consecutively. The subject at hand is one
possible present (Or past or future, depending on your point of view) for the young man. Savvy?
More Obroves, some of normal size and others potentially larger or smaller, can be found on their alt list,
here.
There are more "Danalogues" to come, eventually, so we kindly ask that you...
STAY TUNED!