Wells (from Wells)

Black hole image – https://phys.org/news/2018-01-black-holes.html

First time at this blog? Check out Home for details on the project and the Character Index for an overview of the projects and characters.

Note: I’ll return to the world of Mizfits at some point (they need villains, after all). But, the time constraints on the 100 days project means I might have to jump around a bit to where the creative juices are flowing freely (e.g., I need to think about Mizfits villains more). So, hoping over to Wells for a bit.

Wells (8)

Project: Television mini-series (graphic novel?)

Known as: Wells

Real name: Helios Gandalf Wells

Group affiliation: None

Physical description: Wells is of average height and above average weight. He looks every bit of the late nineteenth century Englishman that he is. He has a big, bushy mustache, a full head of wavy hair, and can usually be found wearing a period-appropriate suit with many accessories in various pockets (watch, spectacles, pipe, etc.).

History: The late 1800s was not an ideal time to be a practical, gentleman magician. The rules of magic had begun to change with the barrier between England and the Fae growing ever stronger. Meanwhile, marvels of science such as steam and air ships were on the rise (at times literally). Magical creatures and people becoming rarer, though persecution (witch trials), hunting, and the general waning of magic. The most powerful wizard in England was a shadow of his forebears.

That wizard was Helios Gandalf Wells. Of tremendous magical pedigree, Wells possessed Fae blood and some of the most formidable magic-users in his family tree. He was knowledgeable of spells and artifacts, and as a gentleman with means consistently increased his magical collection.

Yet as functional of a spigot as he was, the water of magic simply didn’t flow the way it once did. Wells had many theories as to why, but chief among them was the rise of science and technology. Seeking save magic, and perhaps realize his true power, Wells sought to mix magic and science (becoming the first “technowizard”). His hope was that if he could position magic and science as complimentary, the former would not need to decline with the rise of the latter.

Wells had some mixed success creating devices that mimicked the principles of science but were powered by magic. He had a pocket watch, for example, whose gears cast a spell of time tracking, rather than tracking time mechanically. Yet these small successes did little to ebb the general decline of magic.

Belief and narrative had always been cornerstones of magic, so Wells sought to bind magic and science together with the telling of stories. Wells knew of several remaining magical creatures and magic users, and he used their stories and abilities to inspire stories of fantastic science. Beyond just written stories, these were magical writings that bound the magic of these beings within their pages (without their permission, unfortunately). If his spells were effective, those reading his stories would believe that science could create magic. He aimed to retell tales that once drove magic with a sheen of science; essentially “hiding” magic as science.

Thus he was one of the inventors of science fiction. Yet his tales of voyages to space, invasion of aliens, and invisible men were retellings of fantastic voyages, attacks of magical monsters, and heroes of mythic power. Readers were having spells cast upon them without their knowledge, and he hoped that their belief in the magic of science would restore magic.

Unfortunately, while his works were extremely popular, they did not produce the desired effect. He became more desperate and decided that his explorations of time might provide a new solution. His thinking was straightforward while science was beholden to time, magic may not be. His hope was to open a portal to the past when magic was a tremendous force and create a stream of magical power to his current time.

His experiments, however, had an unexpected outcome. He found himself transported to 2018, hundreds of years into his future. He had thought magic was limited in his own time and found it nearly non-existent in his new time. This all but removed his ability to undo his spell. Additionally, he found not only magic changed but science as well, as many theories of his day had long since been disproven.

Now his future is uncertain. His personal magic is enough for him to get by, but whether he can somehow meld it with the technology of today is unclear. Will he ever get home, or perhaps will he change the world of 2018? Neither is known.

However, one thing is known. Some of the entities he wrote about in his magical stories were bound to him as a result. Caught up in his time travel, they too have arrived in 2018. Not all of them have had their powers reduced in the same way as Wells and not all of them are nice.

Role in the narrative: Wells’ story establishes the setting and drives the adventure. Though I am introducing him first, he is not the true protagonist nor hero of the story (that would be Detective Morgan Fayd). In fact, who Wells is and what happened to bring the fantastic into 2018 might be a mystery drawn out over the course of the first season or early issues.

Abilities: Wells is a wizard. However, where the most powerful spells in history tended to draw upon external sources of magic, Wells is limited to his own personal magical reserves. So no summoning of lightning bolts, no transformations, and no teleporting. Instead, he can do interesting but unimpressive feats such as making his watch glow in the dark, make small objects move without touching them, and the like. Nothing that the observer wouldn’t think was a trick or not have some mundane explanation.

This means he is substantially less powerful than the beings he has brought with him (as virtually all of them have greater magical reserves than him or have ways of tapping power in modern times). His greatest asset is his knowledge, as he is easily the most knowledgeable person in the field of magic in 2018.

Inspirations: Hopefully one inspiration is fairly obvious ;-). H. G. Wells was one of the most prolific and influential writers in history (and all-around impressive individual). Steampunk has always been a fun drama, and I love retro-futurism. Seeing how people of the past envisioned the future is always interesting both because of how often they were right and how charming their ideas were when they were wrong (I also love the fiction of the 1950ies in this regard). Of course, being public domain, this will hardly be the first retelling of Wells’ work.

I’m heavily influenced by comics, and a major theme of the Silver Age of comics was companies using scifi origins (DC rebooted a number of classic characters with a scifi origin where they once had a mystical one; see Green Lantern, Hawkman, etc.). It always tickled me that this seemed to be in the interest of “realism” but in retrospect was just fantasy in a new form (e.g., getting spider powers from a radioactive spider bite somehow seems more likely than them being bequeath by a spider god).  With the characters of Wells, I’m doing the reverse (retelling scifi stories/characters as secretly being mystical ones). Likely I will be unable to come up with all my influences here (a bit of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norris in the return of magic; or even the old cartoon the Visionaries in terms of ages of magic/science).