Who is Percy Maelock?
Before we can begin untangling the countless rumors and lies surrounding Percy Maelock, we should first pause to examine the few things we know to be true.
Percival Nemo Maelock (yes, that’s his real name) was born on February 29th—a ludicrously ridiculous date for an equally ridiculous man. His father, Dr. Julius Maelock, served as chief anesthesiologist at St. Hildegard County Hospital. His mother, Penelope Dalton, was once among the world’s most prolific photojournalists before she traded the chaos of field assignments for the relative calm of a classroom, teaching in order to spend more time with her growing family. Both Julius and Penelope harbored a fierce devotion to classic literature, which is how their firstborn came to bear the weight of two names: one from the Grail-seeking knight of Arthurian legend, and the other from Jules Verne’s impossible voyager. Despite such lofty inspirations—and his own lifelong flair for the theatrical—Percy has always winced at hearing his full name, likening it to nails dragged across a chalkboard.
Once upon a time, however, Percy was surprisingly ordinary. He had the kind of childhood that comes with toddling, learning colors, and falling into mud puddles. His early years were as unremarkable as they were happy. In fact, the most unusual thing about him then was simply the name of the town where he grew up: Wit’s End.
Wit’s End was a sleepy, endearing place—half farming community, half retirement haven—boasting a perpetually underperforming high school football team, a hospital with more funding than was needed, a post office manned by a kindly old gentleman rumored (by locals, at least) to be over two hundred years old, and a Saturday farmer’s market so abundant it was considered the county’s crown jewel.
Yes, Percy’s childhood was blissfully simple… until he turned six. That’s when the stories began.
It is almost certainly no coincidence that Percy’s compulsive storytelling took root the same year his second sister was born. Eddie, Annie, and Zelda—his three younger sisters—take no greater joy than in calling him a liar, a role they have relished since childhood. Their favorite tale to drag out is what they call “Percy’s First Lie.” I imagine it must have been charming at the time: a dirt-streaked six-year-old coming in from the woods, eyes wild, declaring that he had discovered a secret world. According to him, hidden beneath the roots of a great tree was not a burrow for rabbits and worms but a doorway—an ancient portal—to an unseen world of monsters and magic and imaginary friends. Little Percy called this realm of fairytales the Dreaming Space.
Can you imagine it? A child inventing a universe to explain away a day of play? At six, it was darling—imaginative, precocious, even impressive. But tell the same story with the same unflinching conviction at sixteen, or twenty-six, or beyond, and what was once adorable begins to fester into irritation.
But let us return to the things we can verify.
Percy Maelock graduated from Wit’s End High School in 2010. What followed, however, is considerably murkier. Reports about his collegiate life are riddled with contradictions, alleged forgeries, and what I can only call narrative vandalism. The few pieces of evidence that appear authentic suggest he was awarded the prestigious Prometheus Scholarship, which launched him into one of the most peculiar educational careers imaginable.
Here, the story turns almost absurd. His undergraduate transcript—if genuine—records a triple major in chemistry, dead languages, and, impossibly, imaginary numbers. From there, the academic trail grows stranger still.
What appears next on his records in a graduate degree in “experimental theology” from a small seminary in Maine that, as far as I can tell, does not exist anymore (if it ever did). Alongside this, another institution lists him as having completed a master’s in “applied cryptozoology” with a thesis entited The Ecological Consequences of Minotaur Migration.
A different archive claims he earned a Doctorate in Philosophy in “comparative mythological engineering” from a technical institute in Prague. (Whether is is a real discipline or merely one of Percy’s jokes that metastasized into paperwork of questionable legitimacy is still unclear). Yet another transcript, stamped and sealed, confidently asserts that he holds a Master of Fine Arts in “narrative cartography” - the study of maps that tell stories rather than chart terrain. And still there’s another record claiming Percy earned a doctorate in alchemy from Oxford of all places (though this has bene heavily theorized to have been a classic case of forgery and records manipulation).
To summerize: if even a fraction of these degrees are authentic, Percy Maelock is simultaneously a chemist, a linguist, a mathematician, a theologian, a cryptozoologist, a myth-engineering, a cartographer of imaginary places, and an alchemist. And if they are all forged, then he is, perhaps, the most meticulous academic imposter the world has ever seen.
The question is not simply what Percy studied, but why. What sort of man goes to such lengths to stitch together a patchwork of experiences in both the sciences and the utterly absurd? Is it the pursuit of knowledge? Is it theater? Or is it something else entirely - somethingthat began when a six-year-old boy crawled into the rooms of a tree and swore he found the Dreaming Space?
