Wilbert Ree

"I know your master is impatient for the wax bust of his mis-tress, but he must understand that I will sculpt in no material —none - except for the unique wax that I alone import from Ind.Until the next shipment arrives, we can do nothing."

- Wilbert Ree

Ree is slim, effete and tall at 6'3". With his large nose and prominent Adam's Apple, he looks like a scarecrow -and dressed in his exaggerated artist's clothes, like a temperamental one. He affects a pose of dignity with high-born clients.

At 32, Wilbert Ree is a flamboyant member of Goudberg society, and that's the way he likes it. A high public profile is good for business, and he looks and acts as if he fits perfectly into the surrounding society. When they commission him to sculpt themselves and their families, the wealthy of Goudberg expect a temperamental and dramatic artist, and that's what they get. The middle-classes who visit the museum expect erratic genius and scandalous tittilations, and that's what they get. And both of these images let him get away with much more than any ordinary merchant or smuggler.

Ree studied in Tilea, and with the skills he learned during his apprenticeship to the deranged Luigi Spadolini of Tobaro (later burned at the stake for his researches into the taxidermy of humans), he has become a brilliant student of anatomy and a wax sculptor nonpareil. However, he understood from the beginning that there was little money to be made from sculpting, and much more from other fields - particularly the Black Fields of Araby, where the Black Lotus blooms.

Playing the perfectist artist, Ree has made it known that his is the only wax museum in the Old World to only use Ivory Wax from Ind, created - so he says - from the tallow of elephants and the wax of the giant bees which exist there. Shipments of the wax arrive on ships from Ind every few months: hundreds of heavy blocks, each a cubic foot in size. Although each one is stamped with Ind marks and seals, the blocks are actually from Araby. Each one has a small cavity deep in its centre, filled with about a pound of Black Lotus powder. Wilbert Ree is the largest smuggler of Black Lotus in Marienburg.

Ree believes his smuggling is undetectable: if the wax is melted the drug dissolves with it, and only by cutting a block in the right place (through the Ind seal) will one hit the hidden cavity. However, his business is threatened by something else. A few weeks ago Ree discovered to his total shock and horror that four of the figures in his museum are more than they seem. Like the rawblocks of wax they have something unpleasant inside: Giovanni, his assistant, has been obtaining bodies, covering them in wax and building them into the tableaux.

Giovanni is a brilliant artist in his own right, as mad as his master, and a devotee of Slaanesh - the cult is a good customer of Ree's, and lured Giovanni into its clutches a year ago. Some of the corpses he uses have been obtained through the Body Trade, others he abducts from the streets himself; mostly beggars and foreigners. Needless to say, if this is discovered it will be the end of the museum, possibly of Ree, and certainly of the smuggling operation. Ree is in a desperate quandary. He knows he must get rid of both Giovanni and the corpses, but while he's so far got the former addicted to Black Lotus, he has no idea how to deal with the latter.

Ree is well-known through the upper-crust of Marienburg society - he is on the A-list for every party in Goudberg, and more and more social-climbing parents want their children to be immortalised in wax by him. Ree is also on good terms with Venk Kataswaran of the Golden Lotus: the Lascan is a major customer, although at present he has owed something over 500 guilders for more than a month. Ree has threatened to cut off his supply and is worried that perhaps Venk has found another supplier. Giovanni is familiar to the few ghouls of Marienburg, who act as intermediaries with the most depraved of bawds and cut-throats who supply his victims. Deecksburg knows Giovanni and fears him, for he has seen the touch of Chaos through his own sketches and knows it has consumed him.

Source

 * Warhammer Fantasy RPG 1st ED -- Marienburg: Sold Down the River
 * pg. 102
 * pg. 103

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