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Cryptomancer Aleister of the Obelisk (#1143)

Owner: 0xaC3B…074F

State of Play

I used to be part of a cult. It was pretty fun for a while. We would hang out and talk about how we were better than other cults, how we’d help our cult, and what the future would look like for us as the best if not one of the better cults. It was loads of fun! Anyway, eventually we decided we should start a basketball team since a few of us were pretty decent ballers and I myself was pretty good. I personally found that opponents struggle to play when you light a fire under their ass.

Eventually, I got bored of the basketball. I didn’t quit when they banned the use of magic on opposition players, that seemed pretty fair, I actually quit after a time in which the league got really competitive. At that point most teams had established frameworks for approaching the game of basketball. The introduction of new structures and rules taught us to play within those limits until everybody was kinda playing the same game, not only every team but every player had also figured out what to do, where to move and how to make the best use of the space. For a good time we were all playing this boring game in competition with each other, until some new dude joined the cult and started a lot of us on an entirely different direction.

I have no idea who this wizard was or how they even got into the cult. Sure, I’d seen them around. I might even have seen them around before the basketball playing days, but regardless; this wizards name and face escape me even to this day.

This wizard had noticed that wizards appeared to execute at a higher level (at least in basketball) when they were more organised than a bunch of wizards passing the ball around a circle, shooting the shit. He decided that we should use our magic for good and if we just became more organised we would eventually work out how to fix all of the problems in our lives. Not only that, we would find true recognition as the best cult out there.



I wasn’t sure how to feel about this proposition at first. I felt like we did pretty good. Anyway, by this point I had become friends with a few of the guys in the cult and I didn’t think too much about helping them out to do some cool stuff, I thought maybe it’d even be fun!

I remember a conversation I had with a wizard around this time;

“Pretty fun being in this cult huh! It’s a pretty freaking good cult, haha!”



“Yeh! haha, I guess it is. You know what would be even more fun?”

“I don’t know how we could have more fun! Sure, I want to know!”



“We could make sure that everyone who joins the cult promises to have fun!”

I didn’t really know what he meant by that, I was having fun without anyone telling me to have fun. I didn’t see why we might need to enforce fun on people. It was a nice thought at least. What could be wrong with more fun?

I remember thinking that if fun was a responsibility rather than a choice, it might slowly begin to feel like work, inauthentic, or something entirely different than fun had ever been in the first place. I tossed and turned over this but the decision was eventually made because some of the cult members had been doing volunteer work already anyway so we might as well help them out, for the cult.

It was a new dawn for the cult. The cult was no longer just about fun.

There had been a shift.

It was now about helping people too!

It was also probably a bit about being the best cult around and maybe also about some of the wizards being able to tell people that they weren’t just goofing around doing magic all the time. For me, it was “FOR THE CULT!” as we liked to shout after a few ales at Ye Olde Taverna, and to be honest I have never been sure about what will happen in the future, so what was I to do? Tell them it was a bad idea? How could I know?

Anyway, as the years went on the cult became more and more organised. We got really good at paperwork, we got really good at cold-approaches, we got really good at making deals, we even got really good at telling people how good of a cult we were. By all intensive purposes we were succeeding at our goals. At a certain point, although we were a cult i.e. organised differently than a traditional business, we were meeting targets, having board meetings, and reading bottom lines like a corporate multi-national.

It was sometimes fun but I think over that time we forgot magic for a little while. It seemed that there was less space for magic when we filled our wizard brains with ideas about what the people wanted from us, what we could do for people, and how to best represent the cult to the world. 



Eventually I grew old and after a time of service for the cult it was time for me to take a step back. I looked back fondly on all the good work that the cult was able to do, I even made use of their services from time to time, but I found fun again in doing things without protocols, meeting notes, or god-awful start times. I had more freedom to do what I wanted with my own time. Sometimes, it was fun to do nothing. I did continue to attend some cult meetings and I even made some remarks at a few of them. Though truly, I found most of my fun in doing the thing I had been too preoccupied to do with all my energy focused on the goals of the cult:

Magic.

Don’t get me wrong, there were still some wizards doing magic in the cult, just not in the same way as it had been used before. We had harnessed the power of magic like a dog that was now held back from sniffing all the poops in the park even if it wanted to. Occasionally there’d be something interesting happening but many places were left unexplored. There were places to go and people to see. We were busy wizzies.

In reflection, I think I began to take all that cult business a bit too seriously at times. What had started out as a few wizards sitting in a circle telling each other fun stories and musing on the twists and turns of life, holding space for each other when it was needed, and generally just sitting around doing nothing(or magic), had turned into a venture, a resource allocation, and an opportunity.

Now, after it’s all over (another story completely), i try my best to help wizards remember the runes that started us off on the whole magic cult thing, albeit with questionable success.

Sometimes I pull out the box of memorabilia from over that time, just for kicks. I think my favourite piece from that period is the joke plaque someone had given me after I lost 4,000,000 gold coins in a trade deal with a talking mirror that had told me I was ugly and that all I had to do was give it’s owner the coins to get a new set of eyebrows.

Even if there was less magic in the cult then we hadn’t lost our sense of humour and I did get the new eyebrows:

I knew they were just playing.

play; verb ; engage in activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose.

Entered by: 0x71c5…3a61 and preserved on chain (see transaction)