Confidentiality on the High Seas
Last week I wrote to all you aspiring wizards about my general workload as a Mid-Level Mage at the Grand Celestio Council of Wizards, and our most common nuisance of a client, kings. But kings are not our only clients. At the Grand Council we service anyone willing to pay our fees and abide by our guidelines. We work with all sorts of royals: queens, dukes, lords and ladies, the list goes on; we work with warriors and heroes; faeries, elves, and villains (after lengthy contract negotiations, read and re-read over a thousand times); even the occasional member of the common folk that scrounges up enough coins to afford our rates. But my story today involves a different sort of client who I had the fortune of spending my entire shift assisting yesterday, and that client is the humble pirate.
If my sarcasm in the previous statement eluded you, there is nothing humble about a pirate. They think their abundance of gold and position on the open seas absolves them from all rules made on land. I try to explain that Grand Celestio is mostly enclosed in a demi-plane and only the entrance towers rest on this material plane (mine in the eastern mountain range), but alas, the pirates don’t usually understand the concept of a demi-plane, and even if they did understand that the rules we’re asking them to follow were not written by authors standing on soil, they’d still think themselves above us and our guidelines.
The situation I got wrapped up in yesterday came only thirty minutes after I clocked in and caused me to miss my lunch break. The pirate captain Seymour Scaleward called in irate, complaining about the magic we had issued him only three days before. I quickly found our records of this contract and the magic he requested as he screamed his obscenities, and eventually I was able to parse out that we had granted him a considerable amount of control over water, an expensive package popular among our more notable pirate clientele. Between his whines of “do you know who I am” (yes I have your file open currently) and “I might just have to take my business elsewhere” (we are the only grand wizard council on this continent, but please, take your business halfway across the world, or downgrade to high council, see how they treat you) I managed to catch onto the root of the issue. Captain Scaleward had attempted to use his new water powers while in combat with the rival pirate crew of the Mossy Pearl. Though the captain said no names, only complained about his inability to raise so much as a wave, much less the tsunami he was hoping to crash down on the vessel, the name of the rival boat, the Mossy Pearl, sparked in my mind as familiar. While the captain continued yelling, I subtly pulled out another contract and confirmed my suspicions. The captain of the Mossy Pearl was Tatianna Terrapin, the woman I had set up with an identical water controlling package just two days ago, a package the exact same as Scaleward’s.
As soon as I made the connection, serendipitously, one of my co-workers notified me that they had Terrapin on the phone wishing to speak to me, extremely upset with the quality of her product. What followed was several hours of putting each captain on hold periodically so I could talk to the other, as I attempted to figure out ways to make both clients happy, without letting it slip that we were the magical provider of their opponent, as that would be a major breach in confidentially that the pirates would be guaranteed to exploit as they chased each other across the sea. I can’t get into all the specifics of the solution I found, but let’s just say there might have been a small instance of a mage sending out a couple long distance illusionary ships sailing in opposite directions in order to point the captains towards opponents not yet signed as clients with the Council. A win for everyone who matters.
If you take no other lesson from this tale, take this one at least. A great deal of our job as mages is simply listening, and about half the time, the clients talk through the problem on their own. The other half of the time you create fake pirate ships and call it a day.
May the moon shine favorably and without hesitation upon you,
Alexan Drytus
