#and the seer - a firm believer in If You Want Something Done You Gotta Do It Yourself- is like fine

[phoebehalliwell]

okay but like lezbehonest phoebe x the seer (debbi morgan) would've been a viiiiiibbbbbeeeee. like. i stan.

aur my goddddddddddddd… especially in a phoebe falls first seer falls hardest vibe like phoebe’s all like i love men and also marriage and also cole i am normal :D but like keeps crossing paths with the seer like hey 😏 and she doesn’t fully realize she’s doing it at first but she’s like okay well how about for this plan i seduce the seer and piper and paige are like what no that won’t work she knows you’re in love with cole and phoebe’s like right :( and then like. wait. why did that statement make me feel sad. and then she’s like ohhhh my godd so she starts like pulling away and maybe this is when the seers like you have to commit to the bit (being evil) or die!! and phoebe’s like yes i love the bit i love cole i am here i am here i am here. but she’s not. and the seer as her new caretaker totally notices and is like hey. why are you so upset. be happy be like how you normally are and phoebe’s like maybe this is how i normally am and the seers like no when we crossed paths previously you were like x and y and z all citing these examples where phoebe was flirting with her and phoebe’s like ugh whatever you don’t know me and storms out. and the seer’s like. that was weird. must be a mortal thing. they’re so weird and susceptible and love is such a skill issue that must be why phoebe’s acting so weird she must be in love. Wait.

and then the seer keeps trying to slip in conversation like hey i know you’re in love with me that’s fine like i don’t mind you’ll get over it but phoebe’s not picking any of this up bc she’s avoiding her because she’s embarrassed and but she’s phoebe she doesn’t get embarrassed you can hold her down so she goes out and flirts with a new girl and the seer sees this and is immediately Livid. if we’re going dark romance 1000% kills that person bc why is phoebe looking at you like that?? then is like hm no wait. this is what i wanted bc i’m not in love with phoebe so she should find someone else but the thought of phoebe being with anyone else makes her soooo angry she’s like wait fuck.

so Now the seer’s trying to slip in conversation hey i’m in love with you too but phoebe’s still avoiding her idk if she’s still evil then the sisters come to make some great statements and the seer saves phoebe or sacrifices herself in some fashion and phoebe’s like Ohhh!!! and then we give the seer the cole plotline of She’s Back From The Dead but this time that’s good bc now they can actually start dating.

where’s cole this whole time you ask? having an affair with darryl

[rhythmic-idealist]

Dunno if you've done these already but. Ruby and Sapphire's wands and how they translate into Garnet's wand. For the wand thing.

This is such a neat challenge! And now I’m imagining the kinds of magic that would allow Harry Potter style fusion, imagine two young lesbians experimenting with Animagi and self-transfiguration and Unbreakable Vows and ways to put themselves in each other because, I don’t know, they’re Ruby and Sapphire and it’s something they want that badly, can you imagine? Like, if we take you incredibly literally right now, and assume that they are actually physically combining and therefore so are their wands.

Of course, the alternative is 1) they’re just… still gems and also witches, calm down RI, or 2) they exist and Garnet also exists and is just. The midpoint between their personalities. In a normal, human way, or maybe vaguely-destiny-conflated way.

However far down the speculation hole you want to know, here’s what we’ve got:

Ruby: red oak and dragon heartstring, eight inches, brittle

Red oak is associated with short tempers. That’s true for Ruby, entirely, but Ollivander argues that a more accurate assessment would be that it seeks owners with fast reaction times in battle, adaptable, quick-witted. Quick-witted isn’t something Ruby would say about herself, but she is absolutely a quick-thinking and rapidly reacting soldier: think about The Answer. She’s adaptable, too, she surprises the one person in her court who knows most possible futures, she does of course get incredible anxiety and anger over the tiniest things but she also adapts so quickly, like she’s upset and frustrated about it but she processes it all in one big bang. In “Here Comes a Thought,” she can work herself past her own anger and anxiety to reach out for Sapphire, before Sapphire can get to her.

Dragon heartstring is volatile, but produces powerful, flamboyant magic. It’s the core most prone to accidents and misfires. Temperamental powers, like her feet burning through the carpet or setting grass on fire. Dragon heartstring wands from strong bonds with their owners, and Ruby is an intensely emotional person, I believe the two would be complimentary. 

Ruby’s wand is eight inches long because that can start to mean something Ollivander calls “lacking in character,” but that’s not how I mean it: she’s short-tempered. Brittle not because she doesn’t change, she changes and learns and grows so constantly. It’s about how she reacts, and her quickness to anger and frustration when she doesn’t know what to do.

Sapphire: silver lime and unicorn hair, nine inches, slightly yielding

Silver lime has little description in canon, but it does have two very important qualities: highly coveted by clairvoyants and Legimens, and as such assigned considerable status. Sapphire is a Seer, clearly, but I think we shouldn’t ignore the association of Legimency with Sapphire: the power to shut others out of your head. Her powers will betray her in times of crisis, as the time when she froze her motel room shows us, but she bears a straight face and keeps her head up. And in The Answer, she shows no distress at the idea that she would be hurt. She knows her mind well, uses her clairvoyance well, and the only thing that throws her off is things she didn’t have control over and cannot know.

Unicorn hair produces reliable magic, is loyal, and is, in a way, emotional. Unicorn hair wands can “die” if seriously mishandled, and can grow, as Pottermore puts it, “melancholy.” I think of “Here Comes a Thought,” and the way Sapphire will let herself be overwhelmed until someone reaches out to her. She’s very dedicated, quiet, and will just keep moving forward until she’s unable to, and unicorn hair strikes me as a core that would… empathize with her, for lack of a better word.

Nine inches because she is quiet and physically, emotively reserved. Slightly yielding because she has learned to love change and fell in love with the unexpected at the same time as she fell in love with Ruby.

Garnet: silver lime and dragon heartstring, eleven inches, reasonably supple

Garnet doesn’t keep Ruby’s quickness to anger or frustration, but she does keep Ruby’s intensity. She is more showy and dramatic than Sapphire, but keeps that “strong, silent” Legimens’ demeanor, and her Future Vision.

Silver lime is drawn to Garnet for all the reasons it is drawn to Sapphire, but also because she is a more effective and creative Seer with Ruby as a part of her. Dragon heartstring is drawn to her despite the fact that she has tempered Ruby’s outbursts and Sapphire’s anxiety, because she shows off, her fighting style is flashy, and she is confident. Garnet’s anger is forceful, her fun is exuberant, she can be goofy and emotive and angry or stony-silent and that’s the incredibly rare personality type a silver lime and dragon heartstring wand is drawn to.

Garnet’s wand is eleven inches partly because hey, that’s how their heights combine in canon! And partly, too, because she’s more self-assured and more likely to run and yell “hey Steven, watch this!” or sing a song about how she is, undeniably, better than you. Reasonably supple because she has a firm, assured core, but is willing to change. More open to it, often, than Pearl or sometimes even Amethyst would be, but always thoughtful and always very “safety first.” Steven will be begging her to c’mon Garnet, just give them a chance, you gotta, and Garnet will consider him very sincerely before giving him a “we’ll try” or a polite-but-firm “no.”

[airmidtheawakened]

Edge of the Blade, Part 3

Last time on Airmid the Awakened:

Having barely escaped Dr. Westgate’s Saw LARP, my cabal and I found ourselves in the care of Free Council mage named En. He agreed to teach us how to use our magic until it was safe for us to go back to our homes. Punches were thrown, spells were cast, and Lipsy got a puppy.

This time on Airmid the Awakened, things are a little less exciting. I know I promised you guys a “much more exhilarating tale,” but after thinking it over, it makes more sense to finish off the last part of our education. Gotta keep the narrative flow going and all that.

We spent about two weeks at Professor En’s School for the Gifted, practicing and studying and doing our best to make our new teachers proud. En bought us everything we needed. Food, clothing, hygiene products… We really didn’t want for anything.

Saki spent a lot of time with Mr. Fisher studying more offensive uses for his magic (and learning about self defense in general). SiSi worked with Aces on learning the Space arcanum. Hugo spent most of his time hunched over books and drinking way too much coffee. Edgar was always at his side, being as encouraging as possible for a relatively non-emotive spirit dog. I tried to learn more through trial and error, though I did do some book work to so I could brush up on my first aid and biology knowledge. I was a bio major before I Awakened, and rely a lot on that education to help me with my healing spells. After all, you can’t fix something if you don’t have a firm understanding of how it’s supposed to work in the first place!

SiSi, Saki, and I started learning ASL too, so it’ll be easier for us to talk to Lipsy. He was so happy we all put so much effort into it. He’s really adorable when he’s in a good mood. Our Lipsy likes to act all bitter and grumpy, but don’t let it fool you. He’s got just as mushy a heart as the rest of us.

At the end of those two weeks En wanted to test us on what we’d learned. Poor Saki was a big ol’ bag of nerves about it. He never gives himself enough credit. And the test wasn’t even that bad. En had this people-sized wooden mannequin set up that he animated and had start attacking us. One by one he told us to defend ourselves. Saki went first, and used his Mind magic to confuse the thing into attacking something else. SiSi tried to set it on fire, but couldn’t get a big enough flame, so settled for giving it a punch backed up with the Forces arcanum. She splintered the mannequin’s torso. It was sick.

En fixed the mannequin (with a Matter spell, I think) and told me to go next. Now if there’s one thing I always try to do with my magic, it’s to cast with style. I managed to get a hold of a halfway decent phone to play music on, so I pulled up Foreigner’s “Hotblooded” and went to town. The mannequin threw a punch at me. I spun out of the way, and imagined the spiral motion curling up in my muscles like a spring. I came out of the twirl with a roundhouse kick, tapping into my Life arcanum for a strength boost, and kicked the mannequin’s head clear across the room.

Lipsy went last. Rather that attack the mannequin itself, he used his mage sight to find out who was controlling it – Aces – and turned his attention to her instead. En decided that was enough to constitute a win. Which is fair. I mean, we couldn’t have one of us throwing down with one of our teachers now could we?

Needless to say, we all passed part one of the test. Part two was less of a success. Mr. Fisher brought a fluffy little puppy into the room. En told us we had to kill it. Something about learning to make difficult choices? I don’t quite recall. I was too busy wondering why the hell he’d ask us to do something so stupid. We all huddled up and discussed our options. Lipsy used his Mage Sight on the puppy to make sure it was really a puppy. He determined that it was. Saki tried to read Mr. Fisher’s mind to see if there was a catch to the test. All he picked up on was annoyance. That didn’t surprise me at all. Mr. Fisher was almost always in a bad mood. Either way it wasn’t helpful.

Anyway, I wasn’t about to hurt such a precious little pupper, so I picked it up and started petting it. And then I turned it into a kitten. I showed En and Mr. Fisher and said “We can’t kill a dog if there’s no dog here.” I thought it was clever. En must have thought so too, since he burst out laughing. Mr. Fisher was less enthused. He said he knew we would  fail. Like I said, that was one was almost always in a bad mood. En then revealed the trick of the test to us. The dog hadn’t actually been a dog at all, but a spirit of pity that took a physical form to feed on people’s emotions. If I had just bothered to use my own mage sight – the one attuned to Spirits – then I would have figured it out. So despite our failing the test, we did learn to rely on everyone’s skills to solve a problem rather than relying on just one or two.

But let’s be real, turning an animal into a different kind of animal is super freakin’ cool and I stand by that decision one hundred percent.

After the test was done we got a visitor. He called himself Patch, and he was one of En’s former students. He’d rigged up this massive video phone that we could use to give a two minute, magically-protected call to anyone we wanted. He told us that the Seers of the Throne had most likely stopped looking for us, but just to be safe, the first contact we had with our families had to be brief. He said he’d know more in a couple of days if we were totally in the clear or not.

I called my best friend, Will. She and I have known each other since we were kids. She’s always been a believer in magic and faeries and whatnot, and while I couldn’t tell her what happened to me or that I’d discovered real magic, I figured she’d be a least a little bit more accepting of my mysterious disappearance than my Dad would be. And I’d probably cry if I talked to Dad, which was not on my list of things to do that day.

Will ended up just being mad at me though. I told her to keep quiet for the next two days, and if I didn’t call back, she could tell my parents I talked to her. But the call cut off so I don’t actually know if she heard me. In hindsight it was a really poor decision, but at least I put forth the effort. And I can’t really blame her for being upset. I was gone for half a year with no word. I should have known she wouldn’t accept anything less than a full explanation.

I don’t know what the others talked to their families about. I do know Saki didn’t talk to anyone. He’s undocumented, Muslim, and gay. He had nowhere to go and really no one who would miss him. I’m glad he ended up with us. No one should go through life all by themselves.

We had one more surprise in store for us that day. Mr. Fisher took us on a field trip to our first magic shop! It was owned and operated by a changeling – an honest to God, real changeling – who kinda looked like a corpse, but was really cool at the same time. He had an entire basement full of different enchanted items, things that were useful for casting, and other supernaturally-inclined doodads. En wanted us to pick focus items for our casting. I found a blue silk ribbon that, if I attached it to the right type of rod, I could use really easily in my dancing.

SiSi got a Native American necklace. Hugo found a ring made out of a tiny bird skull. Saki hit the freakin’ jackpot, though. He found a magic set of tarot cards that cut anyone who isn’t supposed to be using them. I guess it’s kind of like a “wand chooses the wizard,” type of thing. Abraham (that’s the changeling’s name) didn’t want to sell them at first, and even then was worried En wouldn’t be able to afford them. But in the end he gave in, and we all went home with fancy new magic toys. And McDonalds. Mr. Fisher actually let us go to McDonald’s. Yeah, he actually knows how to have fun every once in a while.

And with that, we come to the conclusion of my cabal’s introduction to the mysterious. Hope you all liked it! Next week things really heat up, I promise. We’ve got mysterious disappearances, a rural fishing community in New England, and a ragtag group of investigators trying to get to the bottom of things! Are we going Lovecraft or Stephen King? There’s only one way to find out! Tune in next time on Airmid the Awakened! (same magic time, same magic archive!)