The Rewards Of Interdisciplinary Cursology

20250729

Written for the "Kev's Odyssey" series.

Malcom Baker had swept the “Oddest Faculty Member” award in the Cursology Department twelve years running, a fact which amazed people outside the faculty. He was mild-mannered, had no unusual hobbies, and wasn’t prone to accidents or being possessed. You might assume he was nominated for being oddly normal for his chosen field.
However the real reason is that Malcom had a singular disinterest in the practical affects, mechanics, and practice of curses. No, what he studied was how different curses - not curse incidents - historically came to be.
Naturally you had to keep him away from the consulting public; very few parents were willing to hear out an excited ramble about the link between Saxon morphology practices and modern transmogrify while trying to get someone to fix the issue of their three-year-old suddenly having a frog head.
Similarly his papers were never featured in major journals, won no awards, and weren’t even included in most databases on the topic.
Which led many students to wonder how he got tenure.
The answer to that lay not in what his work produced, but what it enabled; Malcom Baker’s quiet dry papers, piecing together how specific curses arose and adapted and were modified, were cited in every single modern anti-curse work. Several students of his had gone on to develop dispelling rituals which affected entire families of curses - families which nobody knew existed until Malcom had delved into archeological fragments and traced magical entomology and conducted cross-studies.
When he was a student curses were simply sorted by effect, and sometimes casting method, with no concern for how related or removed different curses in that bracket were. Indeed, people found it laughable that anyone would care.
It wasn’t until one of Malcom’s friends built on his work and proved that sixteen curses across five different categories could all be weakened with the same tincture that people stopped laughing and started listening.
Now, over two decades later, he was receiving the Merlin Award for Theoretical Study. Usually this was a footnote to the other Merlin Awards, barely attended. Never before had the entire hall been packed for this event.
Malcom’s acceptance speech was as lacklustre as his lectures (though thankfully far shorter). It wasn’t his words which drew the audience to their feet and prompted riotous applause.
It was gratitude.
Gratitude for him taking his nerdy obsession and turning it into an entire field of study which revolutionised curse management. Gratitude for each of the students he’d listed by name, whom he’d taught and mentored and worked with as they developed wide-reaching cures and wards. Gratitude for the fact that over seventy percent of common curses could now be easily and quickly dispelled by first responders, without need for trial-and-error or painstaking analysis.
And so the man who’d often been called “a ditzy historian lost in the curse department” clutched the award and blinked back tears and beamed at the hundreds of people he’d never met who’d used his work to save countless lives.

Prompt was “Origin”.