Necromancer Billy in the Shadows
Billy The Necromancer was born into the shadows, destined to maintain the balance of the scales of justice as his forefathers did before him. For millennia his family have hunted down the bad guys and hauled them in to be tortured by the good guys. Morality and justice were frequent topics of conversation around the family breakfast table and there was never a time in his life when Billy wasn’t somehow preparing to fight evil.
Billy’s mother Hellen was a hard hearted woman raised by hard hearted women who believed that showing affection was showing weakness and that compliments should be kept to oneself. When Hellen turned 18 she considered enlisting in the Order of the Fisty Sisters, a nomadic clan of warrior nuns who take vows of violence and spread God’s message by pounding it into pagan skulls, but instead she chose to follow her mother and grandmother into the Feminarchy, a top secret all female intelligence order that has secretly been controlling the levers of power from behind the peens for hundreds of years.
Billy’s father, Bill Sr. The Necromancer, was a highly accomplished hunter of ne'er-do wells, and even after all of the monsters and villains he’s tangled with he only ever truly feared one creature, and he was married to her. Hellen always wore the horns in the family, and she could end disputes with a simple glance, because everybody knew what came after the glance, and it was really not great. Billy hated to see his dad, who was so highly respected in the outside world, cowed by his wife at home, but nothing ever seemed to change in their dynamic so he let it be.
Billy left home as soon as he was old enough to dimension hop, embarking on a lifetime of adventures that would teach him who he really was and what he was really capable of. He conjured the spirits of the most powerful Necromancers in history to learn their greatest incantations. He collected magical items and technology from alien worlds that made him even more powerful. He learned to navigate wormholes, eventually mastering time travel. And most importantly he curated an amazing crew of ass kicking evil hunters who lived with him in his giant castle.
Bill Sr. The Necromancer was killed while pursuing a mass murderer (who remains at large to this day, despite Hellen and Billy’s best efforts to hunt him down). After Bill Sr. died, Hellen moved in with Billy and the crew at the castle, and her shadow looms large in its corridors. The crew is always on their best behavior when she’s in the room but she knows exactly what they’re up to. She’s obsessed with whether anybody’s hungry, and won’t let them leave the castle unless they swear to Void that they ate breakfast. On the rare occasion when Billy gets completely stumped by a case, Hellen will put her secret Feminarchist spy talents to use and leave little breadcrumbs for Billy to follow so he thinks he solved the case on his own. Even though he’s a grown man living in his own castle, Hellen rides Billy like a jockey: “Brush your fleece Billy!” “When’s the last time you took a bath Billy?” “Stand up straight Billy!” He gets mad when she treats him like a child but he definitely does what he’s told with no lip because he doesn’t want the belt. “Yes Mother, I heard you mother... love you mother.” Hellen is NOT playing games and she doesn’t like a lotta bullshit. She lives in the tallest tower of the castle and somehow, no matter what, if anyone looks up there she’s always sitting in the window. Even if she’d just been down in the stables thirty seconds earlier, someone could look up to the window and there she’d be, staring directly into their souls.
Deep inside Billy’s castle’s vast library is a life sized marble statue of a lesser demon which, if one twists the left horn clockwise, opens a secret door behind which is a warmly lit chamber full of every manner of game: Chess, Ring Hook, Putt Putt Golf, Darts, Backgammon, Marbles, Teetotum, Gluckhaus, Knucklebones, Nine Men's Morris, Niddy Noddy, Shove-Groat, Piquet, King of the Bean, Shinty, and PS5. Games help Billy relax. The rules can be comforting when you know that in the real world there are no rules. The walls of the game chamber are adorned by tapestries woven by Billy and his pet bats depicting all of his adventures and brave acts.
Billy is a peculiar goat with peculiar habits. He loves going to the dentist because the pain helps him think clearly. He has no taste buds so his favorite food is yellow. He’s polytheistic and knows that he’s right. He will conjure dead experts to settle petty disagreements with his friends. He’s very sensitive about people jinxing things and if someone says anything remotely optimistic he’ll drop everything to make them find some wood to knock on. He always has to go back into the castle three times to make sure he blew all the torches out. He doesn’t like goat milk because the notion of his kind being milked is highly offensive to him. He refuses to ride his horse Bubaloo because he considers it demeaning.
Billy loves Bubaloo more than anything in the worlds, and he talks to him in a cutesy voice when they’re all alone. If someone walks in Billy immediately switches back to his normal voice and if they ask him why he was talking like that he will deny it. Billy and Bubaloo bond while they watch old John Wayne and Burt Reynolds tough guy movies and that’s Billy’s favorite time to brush Bubaloo’s hair. The thought of any harm coming to Bubaloo (or any animals (except the evil ones)) makes Billy’s blood boil, and if he catches someone hurting an animal he will hurt them three times worse. Glue outrages Billy because it’s made from hooves. He insists that all of his letters be wax-sealed because when he thinks about licking an envelope he wants to throw up. If he meets someone whose clothes or belongings have any glue in them he will silently lose his shit before calmly asking, ‘Do you have any idea where Glue comes from’ and flashing the murderous gaze he learned from his mother. Whether they know the answer or not, whether they care or not, when they see that look they apologize immediately, usually while tiptoeing backward until it feels safe to run.
Billy absolutely hates it when people ask him about the logical paradoxes of time travel and yet EVERYBODY asks him about the logical paradoxes of time travel EVERY GODDAMN TIME he does it. He acts like it’s too complicated to explain, but it’s obvious he just has no idea how to explain it. “Hey Billy it’s cool that you’re going back in time to stop the Soul Reamer’s parents from falling in love so she’ll never be born, but doesn’t that create a grandfather paradox?” “It would take days to explain and I don’t have that kind of time so don’t worry about it. Who’s hungry?”
Billy’s favorite place in time and space is ancient Japan. He spent decades living as a samurai, traveling the land to protect the weak and avenge the aggrieved. Billy is fluent in Japanese and the culture features heavily in his castle and in his soul. He wishes he could go back and live that life again but that would create a causal loop in the timeline which he doesn’t have time to explain so don’t ask.
Billy is a leader’s leader and he knew exactly what he was doing when building his team, filling it with creatures who are strong where he is weak, who would put their lives on the line to save each other, and who were considered outcasts in their homes. They were perceived as monsters even though they had the hearts of heroes, and remained on the fringes of society until Billy found them and brought them back to the castle. One of Billy’s greatest powers is that he’s an impeccable judge of character.
Billy is an exceptionally versatile wizard, but it all starts with Necromancy. He uses it to gather ancient wisdom and current intelligence from the spirit world, raise the dead, and harness the power of the deceased to use in the world of the living. People think he’s telekinetic because he can move objects without touching them, but he has to say what he wants to move out loud and it takes a few seconds because he’s actually just telling invisible ghosts what to move for him. Like If he wants to disarm a pirate he says “take away the pirate’s sword” and just waits patiently for the nearest invisible dead guy to knock the sword out of the pirate’s hand. So it’s like he’s sort of telekinetic in a way if there happens to be a ghost in the area.
After thousands of years porting through thousands of eras and dimensions, Billy has gathered an amazing collection of powerful and exotic magical and technological objects which add to his already considerable wizarding abilities.
Written by Rob Anderson with Tim Smith
Entered by: 0x279c…43cd
