A Death's Gate Metal #3

Link: The Writer's Mary Sue Test. Admittedly, many Mary Sue tests exist on this tenuous span of internet, but this one is my personal favorite and I stringently test every character I create before insertion.

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Tobias had timed his approach carefully. The guard on duty, Dirk Feldstone, hated checking in and didn't realize that everyone else knew about it. His commanding officers made him check in every 60 seconds, and therefore he did. Tobias thought of his old magical-dueling instructor at the Academy, Professor Hurple (now a Kommandant), and smiled at the Kommandant's adage, visible to his soon-to-be assassin in light-gray sans serif atop the dark gray of the concrete bricks that made up 89% of the structures in the modern United States (if statistics were to be believed). The passage read "Routine is the lifeblood of the Union," but Tobias remembered a day when a book had informed him that, in fact, "Routine is a trap, and a losing game."

Books tended to inform people about a lot of things, Tobias had noticed. Before too many books had crossed his path, he had earned the nickname "Tack" for his propensity to tack spell-sheets together on the fly. He had spent many days in independent study concerning Chaos Magic, and had copied the idea from G.P. Dowhouse, who had written many books in his heyday and even more afterward. Tack's spell-sheets had a marked tendency to be useless, or produce strange results, but he had applied himself in other areas (such as Witty Banter and Sociomagical Trends) well enough to make up for his deficit in Order magics. He had graduated the Academy at the middle of the class, and noone had really paid special attention to him. He was always amused.

Tack's smile gradually widened. He pulled out a spell-sheet and began to read. Moments later, flowers erupted from the stone pavement below and flew directly into the Kommandant's office when Dirk opened it. Tack knew that time was short, so, channeling the last energies of the spell, leapt atop the guard's neatly combed hair, down the stairs, and off into the night. Thinking of nothing, running with abandon, he found it odd that Dirk had not raised the alarm. As fast as he could scamper, he fled into the humid Southern air but soon fell short, gasping for breath. As a mage, he relied on spells to keep him fleet of foot, but these were scant and he simply did not have the energy. He dragged himself into the forest and fell into a peaceful sleep, undisturbed except by the cries of nocturnal birds and insects. The mosquitoes ate him alive, and the grassy forest was riddled with chlorophyll. "Better itchy than dead," Tack observed as he fell asleep, irritated but exhausted.
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