Rarity: What do you think the odds are that this fellow is our mystery villain?
Pinkie Pie: Venger? Possibly! But I don't think we've seen any tolling.
Merlin: Tolls? You must be talking of the price of magic. The costs that must be paid. A cost I am most familiar with.
Rainbow Dash: Wait, spells have a price?
Merlin: Alas! For all of my power there are still things I cannot change!
Rainbow Dash: Oh, that kind of price.
Rarity: GASP! Oh what a pitiable situation!
Rainbow Dash: ...yeah. Sure.
Merlin: But enough of my woes! Your problems are far more dire.
Applejack: How exactly does he know 'bout our little world-travelin' problem, anyway?
Merlin: This castle is home to thousands of spells. Not even I have cast all of them. Among them is a magic that lets me observe what may be. So that by my will, I determine what the future will be.
Merlin: And in one such future, six guests arrived at my home from another world. And they were hungry! Who wants soup?
Guest Author's Note: "For everything that magic has, there seems to be some level of 'You'll never get what you want.' There's always some amount of 'Be careful what you wish for,' or 'you don't really know what you want,' or 'you'll get what you need but not what you want.' It's not like magic-users are asking for much, just the ability to bend reality to their whim and conquer the incorporeal, and yet the universe always has to have a sense of irony about it. If the universe doesn't want wizards to put this parking lot on paradise, it shouldn't give them access to so many road rollers!
Or, to look at the sentiment in the AN from another perspective: As soon as you can do something, whether by might or magic, that just pushes back the boundary of what you *can’t* do. And just on the other side of that new ine will be that thing you always wanted to do but never thought to yearn for. Give a mouse a cookie…
I find the way he's holding that rabbit almost above the cauldron of soup in the last panel a bit concerning...
Also, not having seen the original cartoon, I have no idea whether this guy is being visually coded as sinister or if that's a result of comic editing, or whether he's going to turn out to be good or bad, and it's all very interesting. I'm excited to see where this story goes.
In the original, the heroes were to know Venger by his white hare. They at first thought the DM meant "hair", and the wizard just revealed he was bald.
Of course, that is no guarantee of where this version will go.
This reminds me of a story a friend told about how the party was tasked to slay a "wight dragon" and they had prepared for the wrong kind of encounter.
Guest Author's Note: "For everything that magic has, there seems to be some level of 'You'll never get what you want.' There's always some amount of 'Be careful what you wish for,' or 'you don't really know what you want,' or 'you'll get what you need but not what you want.' It's not like magic-users are asking for much, just the ability to bend reality to their whim and conquer the incorporeal, and yet the universe always has to have a sense of irony about it. If the universe doesn't want wizards to put this parking lot on paradise, it shouldn't give them access to so many road rollers!
Ah well. At least there's always soup."