Vasel

Vasel is a Serpent Islander who works as a custodian in the service of the Mad Mage, Erstam. He appears during Ultima VII Part Two.

Description
Vasel's account of his origins was rather fantastic. He claimed that he had been kidnapped from his parents and raised by an evil sorceress until such a time as she was hanged for her various crimes; thereafter he reports that he was employed briefly by a freakshow before being taken in by Erstam, who gave him the name 'Vasel' and employed him as an assistant in his various magical experiments into the nature of life and its creation.

Vasel was possessed of a ghoulish sense of humor and would joke freely about Erstam's messy disposal of past assistants, who lay strewn about the mad mage's manor as animate body parts. He was emphatic, however, regarding his disgust for having to clean up after his predecessors. Should Erstam be nearby while the Avatar spoke to Vasel, the magician would frequently upbraid, abuse, and threaten the man. Eventually, however, the much maligned servant would let slip the secret of his employer's mastery of teleportation, revealing to the hero the significance of the magician's Serpent Jawbone.

In the days following the cataclysmic release of the three Banes of Chaos, Vasel and his master numbered among the few denizens of Serpent Isle to remain unaffected by the unfolding disaster wrought by the loosed Banes. At the time that the Avatar took their leave from Serpent Isle, he was still hale and well, not having yet met a fate similar to the assistants who preceded him.

Trivia

 * Vasel appears to be an homage to the hunchbacked stock character who appears in various cinematic iterations of the Frankenstein story as an assistant to a scientist in the business of creating monsters. He bears similarities to both Dwight Frye's character, Fritz, from the original 1931 Frankenstein and to Béla Lugosi's Ygor in the 1939 Son of Frankenstein. He also briefly mentions a penchant for eating insects, which may be a nod to the classic horror character R. M. Renfield from both the novel and film Dracula.
 * "Vasel" is an anagram for "Slave" whereas "Erastam" is an anagram of "Master."