"So if it's someone's pet," Skyler interrupted Mulligan's enthusiastic speech, "Should we try to find her owner?"
"Oh... yes, certainly! Not only they'd be missing this cutie but also, a pet lizard like this probably wouldn't survive out here on its own for long. The college grounds are so different from the forests she would live in that finding food would be hard, since they typically eat-"
"I think I'll leave her in your care," she interrupted again, gently placing the lizard on his hand. "You clearly know how to handle this better than I would."
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Yesterday was Mulligan's birthday, and I had "Skyler showing a lizard to Mulligan" in my list of ideas to draw for so long so I decided to sketch something in between some commissions hehe
Seir is very often a condescending little bastard to everyone, but he's kind of worse towards Mulligan specifically. He thinks that someone getting to his age without ever bothering to learn any kind of magic whatsoever – not even the most basic cleaning spell or healing potion – must mean they're either really stupid or an anti-magic freak. So a guy like that getting a magic-adjacent job? Absolutely unacceptable.
Though it may also be because he's slightly jealous that Skyler can sometimes get along with Mulligan pretty well. He hates her, of course, but she's somehow the only person he enjoys working with, so it's disappointing that she's willing to give any attention to people like this loser. Where are her standards?
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Something quick I had to make because I'm suddenly feeling exactly like in 2015 again (picking up Seir's story after not thinking about it for ages and then immediately getting massively sidetracked with mr. normalguy Mulligan, the background character I have a hard time keeping in the background...)
And uhh... extended lore under the cut I guess...
A big part of why Seir is so judgmental of non-magicians is that he doesn't realize just how much difference each person's magic aptitude really makes. For someone such as himself, born of a mother that was highly skilled in magic and was always using magic around him since he was born, learning magic came naturally and almost effortlessly the moment she started teaching him. But for someone like Mulligan, with no magicians anywhere in his ancestry and never significantly exposed to magic at all until he got this job, learning even the bare minimum would take some serious dedication. The organs that control magic – the magis nodes – would be underdeveloped, the flow of magic energy would be dormant, almost null. Awakening one's power even under these circumstances would be possible if they had an undying passion and desire to learn and pushed it really hard, but Mulligan never really cared about magic, so it never even really crossed his mind to learn. He was far more interested in reptile biology and taxonomy... which, surprisingly, happened to be the reason why he ended up working at the Redsky College of Necromagic.
He was just passing in front of the college one day when he spotted a snake in the gardens. The gates were open, so he went in to check it out, and since he knew it was a typically easygoing captive bred species, he just picked it up. Maya saw him and tried to warn him not to pick up random snakes but he told her he had experience in handling those snakes (probably along with an infodump about them). She then told him that these snakes were suddenly all around the gardens and the forest in the back of the college, and she had been tasked with finding someone able to capture and relocate them. He said he could totally do that. So they ended up talking a bunch and he mentioned that he used to work at a research lab dissecting animals, but he was now unemployed. Maya then told him that the college currently had a few open spots that basically amounted to dissecting lots of animals. So after the snake relocation job, he did a test for them, and since he turned out to be pretty skilled with cutting up even small animals with tiny bones and organs, he managed to get the job despite having zero magic skill.
Years of working in a magic-heavy environment surrounded by spellcasting people definitely helps passively increase one's magic aptitude a little bit though, so there could be hope for him if he really wanted to try!
