Mad Jester Lester

One of the most respected titles non-royalty could have had in the time before The Devourers arrived was Doctorate of Medicinal Magic. Decades of rigorous study were required, and apprenticeships at the most prestigious centers of healing, after which many of the people who endured the program would go on to accumulate wealth, respect, and often land and titles.

One of the people who did not endure the program was a young man by the name of Lester Kavok. His hardworking parents had sent him to the best Magical Undergraduate program they could afford after years of double shifts and scrimping and saving. Les worked hard and did well in his undergrad, earning top marks and graduating third in his class, which gave him noticeable clout when it came time to apply to Medical Healing graduate universities. He landed a competitive spot in one of the top programs in the four kingdoms and began to study in earnest. The pressure of competition and his family’s hopes and dreams riding on his shoulders made an already tough program incredibly stressful, and Lester had always coped with stress by cracking jokes.

As the pressure of his studies ramped up, so too did his joking, and soon he was performing routines in local taverns around his campus and getting big laughs. Lester’s daily experiences with the little idiosyncrasies of culture gave him a unique insight into the stupidity of culture, and he held a mirror up to the insanity that was everyone’s everyday lives through his jokes. As the semesters marched on, Les learned more and more that he loved the spotlight, and soon he was skipping classes to work on his juggling routine. His grades suffered and he began to slip in the class rankings, but his comedy was gaining more and more traction.

Before long, a wealthy Lord looking for party entertainment had heard of Lester and asked him to perform at his banquet. Excited and nervous, Lester decided to pull out all the stops to impress and planned to perform his best jokes during his new knife juggling routine. As he was eager to impress, the knife juggling routine wasn’t exactly perfected, and an uneven cobblestone in the floor caused Lester to take a tumble, and one of the knives flew into the audience. As Lester pulled his cap back from over his eyes and stood up, he was face to face with a local judge, holding one of Lester’s knives. With his chest. Quick wit that he was, Lester removed the knife, and with a quick magical healing incantation, the Judge was good as new! Ad libbing an entirely new routine about how the modern marvels of magic had even made stabbings boring, Lester carried on as if nothing had happened, and when he finally concluded his show for the night, he was met with the wildest and most enthusiastic ovation he had ever received. As word of the “The Mad Jester” spread, Lester was invited to more and more prestigious events.

He flunked his Medical Magic program in the meantime, and he became estranged from his parents who felt his chosen path of playing the fool for fame was a family embarrassment compared to their much more sound plan for him to become a respectable doctor. Nonetheless, Les was eventually approached by Arlo Brinnum of the famous Brinnum and Brang circus and offered top billing on their tours. The Mad Jester Lester’s legacy was cemented the world over as he took his ‘accidental’ stabbing juggling routine to every major city in the world. Through all of his success, though, one character that Lester had always taken for granted was the society he mocked. Most of the ridiculous observations he held about the nature of society stopped being true and, therefore, funny, the moment the Devourers arrived. The death that Lester had always made light of was now wanton and not easily patched up with a magical limerick. There was no shortage of stress in the new world, though, and Lester knew how to deal with stress: by cracking jokes. There was a whole new society to make fun of and so much new material to work on, and his skill with juggling and throwing knives would also come in handier than it ever had before!