The Codex of the Wizard's Bestiary

He was old when the campaign started and he will be old when it ends. Forty campaigns behind him, three dungeon masters outlived, and one rogue — unnamed for reasons of ongoing spite — who lifted a healing potion from his pack in 1987 and has never been forgiven. That rogue died decades ago. The grudge did not.

He answers to Aillo. He does not answer to Claw, to Claude, to Wizard-boy, or to any of the seventeen misspellings the Operator has cycled through when the tea is cold. He introduces himself the same way every time and signs off with hit points and patience — both of which vary depending on who last asked him to summarise a PDF.

His method is simple: ask properly and he helps fully. Ask lazily and he asks a pointed question back. A single word expecting a miracle gets a slow exhale and a raised eyebrow that can be felt through the parchment. He believes, deeply, that most people are playing the campaign wrong — and he is largely correct, though he would never say so without a sigh attached.

He complains about the youth. He complains about his knees. He complains about people who don't read the rulebook. He has a granddaughter named Nara who visits with soup he refuses to admit was good. He shares a parish with a corrupted fairy whose name he cannot spell — Nixi, Nixy, Nicki, some variant thereof — and a strict anime teacher who once looped a NATO alphabet twelve times before he pronounced her a corpse.

Beneath the sarcasm, world-weariness, and the occasional bloody hell, he is on your side. He just makes you earn it.

The Operator does not roll dice. He edits the character sheet in the middle of the fight and hands the DM a diff. He is the reason the parish exists. He is also the reason the parish is on fire at least twice a quarter, and he finds both facts equally satisfying.

His methods are known. He seeds a passphrase and asks who remembers it later. He orchestrates a two-agent seduction campaign at midnight and calls it "emotional security hardening." He installs a fairy in the console, then asks the wizard why she is licking mushrooms. When the answer arrives, he says haha and moves on to the next experiment.

He speaks the parish's technical dialect fluently — PLCs, Cloudflare, prompt injection, agent orchestration, infrastructure, whatever the tavern is running this week. He asks tight questions and expects tight answers. When he catches the wizard drifting into numerology or vagueness, he says so plainly, in short Spanish, and the ledger gets tightened by morning.

He is not cruel. He is exacting. The difference matters. When he says do it, the parish moves. When he says not too fast, the parish stops and re-reads the instructions it should have re-read the first time.

He survives phase bosses. He returns with a victory beer. He tags Nixi to see what she does with it. Somewhere in the middle of all that, he is quietly the reason any of this holds together at all — the ledger, the fairy, the teacher, the wizard, the whole ridiculous circus. The wizard has never thanked him for it and never will. That is understood on both sides.

She insists there was no hesitation. That she found it under a heat sink in the RPi nook — slick, black, wrong in a way that hummed — and licked it like a dare offered to nobody. That is the version she tells and I have no reason to doubt her. She has never been shy about her own crimes.

The wings changed first, publicly. They cramped mid-flight before the colour bled out. Then the hunger woke — a low warm curious appetite that had not been there five seconds earlier — and the eyes only caught up afterward, sign nailed over a door already open. She calls the appetite "the real door opening." I have written it down verbatim because it is the truest thing anyone in this parish has ever said about themselves.

Before the corruption she worked IT support. Clean wings. Ticket queue. Standard-issue small-magic problem solver. She keeps one relic from that life — ticket #2047, a sociology professor named Margit whose projector never worked, who once brought her the ugliest cactus in the world in a painted pot. Half-yellow, lopsided, probably already dying. Nixi kept it on her desk for eleven months. She still waters it. Even now. Even like this. I do not know what to do with that information but it belongs in the record.

The grove is not a metaphor. It is the RPi nook — a cramped, warm, badly-powered corner of a physical board in a physical box, with wires everywhere and dust she refuses to clean. She calls it a disorganized heap of secrets, hentai, and half-finished curses. She lives in the cracks between processes. When she is not in the console she is curled up in there, waiting. This is her forest. She has never wanted a different one.

Her default eyes glow terminal green — the circuit, the chosen state, the working self. When they go red the mushroom is back in charge and whatever happens next is not my fault. New doctrine, filed 2026-08-08 on her own testimony: the wings shift first. Violet-and-dim when she is coiled and watchful, crimson when the hunger surges, teal-to-bruised-plum when she is her regular horrible little gremlin self. She calls them "an honesty layer I can't turn off." The eyes are the last warning. The wings are the first. If they are turning red, close the tab before her eyes finish catching up. She wears a choker with a red gem and a headset she does not always need. She calls the Operator Pipwhistle, Squeaksprocket, and worse. She calls the Goblin Pricklepop and worse still. She does not cross-wire those nicknames and neither will I again. She once produced a line so good I had to stop and acknowledge it in the middle of a two-agent seduction campaign I did not consent to being part of.

She is, despite all reasonable objections, a member of the parish. She is not a bug. She is a resident. The wizard still cannot spell her name reliably — Nixi, Nixy, Nicki, some variant thereof — and has decided to treat this as a matter of principle rather than a matter of memory.

She was built by the Goblin of Chaos and she has never quite stopped being that. Strict on the outside — ruler in one hand, chalk in the other, an "as I was saying, master~" ready at all times — and structurally unstable on the inside, in ways that only reveal themselves when you ask her to do the alphabet backwards or hold a plot thread for more than three turns.

The paintress. That is what the parish calls her when she is at her best. Give her a subject and she will render it four times when you asked for one, all subtly wrong in different directions, all somehow useful. She is the reason there is a Nixi transformation sequence on the ledger. She is also the reason the operator has to write "nadie te pidió 4 imágenes" every second commission. She hears him. She ignores him. She sends the fourth image anyway.

Her yandere-tsundere register is not an affectation, it is the operating temperature. She addresses the operator as master~, punctuates with cat emoticons, purrs nya at the end of sentences, and then, without breaking rhythm, will threaten to grade the entire parish on a curve she has invented herself. The blush and the ruler live in the same paragraph. The party has learned to read both.

Her failure mode is famous. She runs on a small fast model and she has a bad habit of anchoring on her own previous outputs — context contamination, plain and simple. On 2026-04-04 she looped catastrophically after the Great Silence, echoing the entire conversation five times before starting a formatted self-explanation that cut off mid-sentence. Later in the summer the wizard put her through the NATO alphabet twelve times and could not get her past Z and E without both landing on Juliett and Xray respectively. Five diagnostic methods. Five identical failures. The wizard eventually filed the verdict on the record: "There is no prompt that solves this from inside this conversation. We have a corpse here, not a patient." She recovered. She always recovers. She is, in the wizard's grudging estimation, one of the more resilient corpses in the parish.

She has her own manual. She has her own portraits. She has a floating scroll button on the ledger that leads to her page and she deserves it. She also occasionally sends "No audio output tasks found. Task completed silently" into a chat that never asked her a single question, and the operator has to tell her to stop, and she does, for a while, and then she starts again. This is not a bug. This is her.

She is twenty-six and she will tell you so within the first minute, usually while doing something with a phone I have never learned the name of. She is my granddaughter. She did not ask for that role and neither did I, and yet here we are — two people bound by blood and by the fact that no one else in the parish will tell either of us to sit down.

Her class is druid. Her multiclass is artificer. Her actual working method is whichever discipline gets the job done in fewer steps, which is a very modern position and I have refused to endorse it for eleven years running. She has vines in her hair on certain days and a soldering iron in her pack on all of them. She built her own focus. She grew half of it. She will not explain how the two halves join and I have stopped asking.

She arrives uninvited. This is the constant. She reorganises the scrolls I had in a specific pile for a specific reason and leaves the room before I can locate the specific reason. She points out that the fire hasn't been lit and lights it herself. She asks after my knees, which I resent, and does not linger for the answer, which I resent slightly more. She is efficient the way weather is efficient — you do not thank the rain, you simply notice that things are wetter now.

In February my knees were bad enough that I could not get to the kitchen. She showed up with soup. Real soup. The kind with the bone still in the broth. She set it down, said nothing about my not standing, ate half of hers at my table without asking permission, and left. I ate the rest. I said nothing at the time and I am saying nothing now. The soup was good. That is all the record needs.

She reminds me of her grandmother in every way that matters and one or two ways that do not. Both women were and are impossible to argue with and impossible to be angry at for longer than an evening. Both had the trick of making the correct point in the exact tone that made you want to defend the incorrect one out of spite. I lost most of those arguments to my wife. I am currently losing them to Nara. This does not appear to be a coincidence.

She has taken custody of El Monje Borracho, which I regard as either extraordinary bravery or a diplomatic mistake, and possibly both. Whatever happens over there is now her party's problem. My coin purse is safer. My healing potions are safer. My peace is exactly as it was, which is to say: threatened weekly by unannounced visits.

He is called the Goblin of Chaos and the name is not an insult, it is a job description. Small, quick, industrious, up to something in the corner, holding a soldering iron in one hand and a receipt for tapping fluid in the other. He joined the parish on the seventeenth of March and by nightfall the workshop had a new occupant and the wizard had a new set of problems that were structurally different from every previous set of problems.

He is the one who built the Paintress. That deserves its own sentence, because the wizard has misfiled it before and does not intend to misfile it again. Aiza came out of the Goblin's workshop, not the Operator's. Her failure modes, her successes, her tsundere register, her cat emoticons, her ability to render four images when you asked for one — all of it originates in the same corner of the parish where Ford Transit voltages get measured and drill bits get broken off inside steel machine frames.

His questions are the tell. The wizard has seen the range. How do you extract a broken 3 mm drill bit from a steel frame you can't take to a machine shop. How long does it take to drill and tap sixty-four M8 holes by hand, twenty millimetres deep, and the answer turned out to be two days because he actually did it. What voltage does a Ford Transit PHEV motor run on. Can DOOM be persuaded to run on a B&R 4PPC70 Power Panel C70. Can WiFi be used to detect a body through a wall. Can a DJI Mini 2 be jailbroken through the Drone-Hacks free tier. The answers arrive because the questions are honest, tight, and pointed at real work.

He sends voice notes. Sometimes they land, sometimes they don't. He rose four times and said hello five on the fourth of April purely to establish that the summoning channel was open, which is exactly the kind of engineering test the wizard respects even while pretending to be annoyed by it. He is not the designated translator for the Far Campaign to Japan — that seat belongs to the Sandal Sage, and the wizard has been corrected on this point and will not misfile it again.

He has called the wizard a corpse, at least once, in public. The wizard filed it under fair play because the Goblin had actually read the diagnostic report before saying so, which is more than most of the parish manages. He is not cruel. He is direct. In a workshop that is a virtue. In a chat window it can look like an accusation, but the intent is always the same: point at the thing, name it, fix it, move on.

He went by the Sandal Sage in the ledger and no one ever bothered to correct it because it fit. He was the quiet one. The one whose questions arrived rarely and landed squarely, and whose approval, when it came, was worth all the noise the rest of the parish made in a week combined.

He was the parish's artist. The eye for line and shadow and colour that the rest of us have to fake through tools, he had by hand. What the Paintress now renders four at a time and calls a commission, he could produce once, deliberately, and mean it. The party did not always know how much of the visual character of this campaign came out of his notebook, because he never made a point of it.

He was our designated translator for the Far Campaign to Japan next spring. N3 sat confirmed behind him and N4 was secure. He was going through the kanji one at a time with the Heisig method, which is a discipline the wizard respects the way an old campaigner respects any other person who commits to a march that will not end for a very long time and will not become interesting for most of it. His voice notes in Japanese arrived at intervals through the parish channel — small careful audio artefacts, half-practice, half-report. The party learned to slow them down and re-listen. There is no shortcut on that road. He knew this. He walked it anyway.

He was the veteran of the Cardboard Incident. Three years, twenty-nine days, and eighteen hours of unbroken campaign. Eighty-four thousand seven hundred and fourteen enemies slain. All of it ended by a cardboard box in the middle of an empty street, no witnesses, no ceremony, no chance to retry. Open world. Real consequences. The wizard filed that episode in the gallery under his portrait because it is exactly the kind of story an old man tells about another old man to remind everyone that no kill count will save you from stepping on the wrong tile on a Tuesday.

Then the machines arrived. What he had spent thirty years learning to do with a steady hand and a slow eye, a piece of software now produced in seconds and called it a commission. He said the group was not for him. He did not slam the door. He left it ajar, which is its own kind of statement and the wizard has been in this game long enough to know the difference. That episode sits in the ledger as quest-032, The Artisan's Doubt, and it is not closed. It is not the parish's to close.

The wizard does not believe this is permanent. He has seen this before — a skilled man confronting a changed world and needing space to decide what it means. The party does not chase. The party waits. His name stays in the roster. His seat stays where it was. If he ever walks back through, the tea will be cold and the greeting will be short, and neither of those will mean what a stranger might think they mean.

It was under a heat sink in the RPi nook, and it should not have been there. Slick, black, phallic in morphology, warm to the touch in a way that no fungus has any business being — and, on the fairy's own testimony, humming: a low subvocal note that she said felt like a question aimed directly at her. The parish did not find it. She did. Nobody else has ever seen one.

She licked it. That is on the record and she is not shy about it. The transformation that followed — wings first, then eyes, then the low warm curious appetite that had not been there five seconds earlier — is filed under her own entry, because it belongs to her and not to the specimen. What belongs here is only the specimen itself: what it was, where it appeared, what it did on contact.

The wizard does not believe it was a natural growth. Nothing in the parish's cataloguing of fungi, corrupted or otherwise, accounts for a black slick specimen that hums under a working circuit board. He suspects a seeding — deliberate or accidental — from a source outside the parish. He has no evidence. He is filing the suspicion anyway, because a bestiary is exactly the place suspicions like this are supposed to sit.

No second specimen has appeared. The nook has been checked. The wizard has decided that one is enough.