u/5k17

I (1591M) recently took on a new apprentice (208F). Certain wizards have since started spreading rumours that I only take young, attractive women as apprentices to use inappropriate clairvoyance on them, or worse. Let me be clear: this happened just once and was plainly an accident. I apologised – and since I happen to have Gvindack's Minor Honestifier in my tower, I can prove my apology was sincere – and provided her with runes to ward her room against divination magic and keep it from happening again.

Now, I won't deny she's attractive, although as long as the paradox keepers believe there's still hope my wife will regain her dimensionality one day, I won't affirm it either. In any case, her looks are not why I took her as my apprentice. I took her as my apprentice because her talent for wrath-affine xylokinesis greatly aids me in my current research. All I want from her is her assistance in it and in a variety of tedious and mundane tasks, and all she wants from me is knowledge and mana. It's entirely normal for apprentices to be much younger than their masters, and my field of study has been rather witch-dominated in the last few centuries, so there's really no reason to suspect any ulterior motives behind my last five apprentices having been young women. I'm fairly sure she isn't interested in me sexually, either; after all, I could be her great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather! Well, I'm probably not, but it's hard to tell with the amount of offspring I've fathered; I was quite a rascal in my younger years, and didn't fully consider the consequences of casting a widened *Disperse Sperm*.

But I know there are those of you who won't believe me no matter what I say. Fine then, believe what you want, but at least leave us be. If there were something to those allegations, why would you care? Who made you her guardians? She's young, sure, she is an adult by any conventional metric: She has had an apprentice of her own, she has developed her own Fireball variant, and she was once nicknamed "The Terrible Crone" in a certain village which has since moved into the Realm of Unending Lumbago. She can make her own decisions and doesn't need wizards who only know about her from vague rumours to stand up for her in these matters. If she's uncomfortable with how I'm treating her, she can voice whatever complaints she may have, and if she doesn't feel I'm receptive to them, she can bring them before the Slightly Lesser Council. Of course, she's also entirely free to quit her apprenticeship, walk out of the door and teleport across the all-devouring void that has been growing around my tower since my gardener had to quit on account of his lycanthropy-induced moonbriar allergy.

I suspect those who gossip and call me a creep and pedomancer behind my back are simply unable to imagine having an attractive apprentice and not doing to her what they claim I'm doing, which speaks volumes about their moral character ‒ not that there isn't enough other evidence for their depravity. Unlike them, I'm not going to name names, but if you know my neighbours, you can probably guess who keeps summoning archdemons suspiciously frequently, and who has been seen consorting with knights-errant.