Vaarsuvius gets served.
Cast
Transcript
- Panel 1
Vaarsuvius pins down the wizard with Bugsby's Grasping Hand.
Process Server: At this point, allow me to retract my thoroughly objectionable statements, and add that I personally regret any inconvenience that I may have caused you with my rash invectives.
- Panel 2
Vaarsuvius: "Inconvenience" does not begin to describe the situation, you pompous windbag.
Vaarsuvius: My dwarven companion and I require that diamond dust for a task of literally universal significance—
- Panel 3
Vaarsuvius: —And now I will no longer be permitted to purchase it!
Process Server: How is that MY fault? YOU attacked ME!
Vaarsuvius: Subsequent to your deliberate provocation.
- Panel 4
Blackwing: Hey, hey, look: Mistakes were made all around, but the important thing is that this needless conflict is now over WITHOUT the loser's entire family line getting totally eradicated.
Blackwing: So, you know.
Blackwing: Progress.
- Panel 5
Process Server: Please, let me go and I will give you this scroll as tribute. It contains several rare and powerful spells.
Process Server: All I beg is that I be allowed to know the name of the one who has defeated me so thoroughly.
- Panel 6
Vaarsuvius: Very well. When your peers ask who so soundly thrashed you in the market this day—
Vaarsuvius: —you may tell them that you were humbled by Vaarsuvius, former student of—
- Panel 7
Vaarsuvius takes the scroll.
Process Server: Served.
Familiar: And witnessed. *ribbit*
- Panel 8
Process Server: Teleport!
The wizard and his toad disappear with a "pop!"
- Panel 9
Blackwing: That was weird. Are the spells any good?
Vaarsuvius: It is not a scroll.
- Panel 10
Vaarsuvius: My mate is suing me for divorce.
Vaarsuvius: And full custody of the children.
- Panel 11
Blackwing: But you were only back home two days ago! How did the legal papers get filed so quickly?
- Panel 12
Scroll title reads "Drawmij's Instant Summons"
D&D Context
- It is somewhat ambiguous which of the various "Bigby's Hand" spells V is using in the first panel, but based on the fact that the wizard is pinned to the ground, a grappling maneuver, it would seem to be the 7th level Grasping Hand, though there is no humorous "Bugsby" or "Bixby" parody of the Bigby name this time.
- The Process Server wizard uses the 5th level spell Teleport to escape.
- The spell Drawmij's Instant Summons was first published in the 1978 AD&D (1st Edition) Players Handbook. It was a 7th level spell which allowed the Magic-User to recall to his hand one specially prepared object from anywhere in the world. In this strip the name of the spell is a pun, playing on another definition of the word "Summons" as a legal document issued by a court requiring a person's presence. Drawmij was a character in Gary Gygax's original Circle of Eight, having been originally played by Jim Ward, for whom the character is named. Instant Summons was the first, but over a dozen other spells in D&D publications bear the name Drawmij.
Trivia
- The title refers to service of process, the procedure by which a party to a lawsuit gives an appropriate notice of initial legal action to another party in the United States. The set of documents delivered is called "legal process" or simply "process".
- This is the final appearance of the Process Server and his toad Familiar from the previous strip.