By the way, irregardless isn’t a word— but maybe you used it intentionally to show Pisces just being pretentious?

I’ve already read the story, so I know Pisces’ background and can say that Ceria, at least, has a valid argument for the way she treats him.

Without going into spoilers, though, there are a few reasons people treat him badly:

He did more than just try and scare Erin into giving him food/money. He admitted to stealing from other farms and such around Liscor. He has likely done so in quite a number of places to even travel to the area around Liscor. So just from this, he is not really any sort of “innocent” person, he is an admitted thief.

For Erin specifically, he ate at her inn often, and was generally not pleasant much of the time, demanding he be treated as a valued customer… when he didn’t pay her anything for the food and drinks. Even when he got money from healing Ryoka, that got taken by the city and she didn’t see a copper of it. So he basically racked up a pretty large tab all while being relatively rude – not something most people in the service industry find likable.

He is also described by multiple people as just generally not pleasant to be around. He looks down on almost everyone and thinks he’s superior, and also acts that way. Most people have probably met someone like this before, and they can be really, really insufferable to be around for longer than a couple minutes. He is also constantly in robes that are filthy – even if he gets rid of the smell, it’s often not pleasant just to look at someone wearing absolutely filthy clothing.

We know he did something bad enough to get himself kicked out of Wistram.

Necromancy in general is looked down upon in most places due to both the undead normally being a major monster nuisance, as well as the general activities of the necromancer themselves: grave robbing, possibly death rituals, etc. While Pisces himself may not do these things, just being a necromancer is a black mark to most people.

Around Liscor specifically, we know The Necromancer – Az’Karesh – sieged the city with an army of undead and cause a lot of deaths and other problems. Anyone that experienced a war like that is really not going to enjoy seeing a necromancer around. Again, might not be anything about Pisces in particular, but simply that they really, really don’t like necromancer.

Now, yea, Toren is probably objectively a full payment for however much Pisces ate, but that doesn’t excuse his rudeness. And disliking him just because of his class is certainly prejudiced and often misplaced hatred – but it is also, at the same time, fairly justified by Pisces likely being out of the norm compared to most necromancers.

So sure, if people actually got to know him, and he wasn’t just trying to deliberately be annoying to them, he’s probably mostly fine. But you really have to get over that initial impression, which is important. We as readers can see a lot of stuff that individual characters would never experience. Without that extra context that we get, all they see is a filthy, often annoying, stuck-up mage, and then on top of that learn he’s a necromancer. It makes sense they don’t usually have a good view of him.

Bit of a difference between something like a grenade, that has the potential for friendly fire but is a single-instance attack, and a rune of insanity that is a persistent, extreme danger just by merely viewing it. Especially when you don’t know what form the insanity would take in an opponent.

Ironically i think he’s the most generous person there. with what we’ve seen so far if he was the one with the spell book, id imagine he’d share it.

Yeah screw the guy trying to offer some help, as if the author doesn’t ask for typo corrections…