#the skull in the crystal ball is a man who wronged her in her backstory--

[atomic-insomnia]

For the potential AU question, how about a Victorian AU, you know with balls, fancy big outfits and all, an 80s AU aaand a post apocalyptic AU. I gave you 3 so that you can choose :3.

thanks!

i will probably come back for the 80's and post-apocalyptic au's, but i actually drew a victorian au a long time ago but never uploaded it! it was inspired by the sort of dark/gothic/melodrama victoriana like sweeney todd, crimson peak, penny dreadful etc

-this takes place vaguely in "london," not the real place but the grimy, perpetually overcast, singing and dancing jack-the-ripper style place of sweeney todd & the like. everyone has magic powers, often of the sort that has terrible cost to their own health & sanity the more they use it

like these , with nothing "normal" in between

Amelia contacts real ghosts through her crystal ball (containing the skull of a mysterious someone...) which act according to her orders, so that it looks to anyone else like she's moving things through telekinesis or learning things about other people's activities through extra-sensory perception; she's started hearing the ghosts all the time even when she's not intentionally calling them up.

makoto paints pictures which affect the real world, either predicting future events or being able to paint an object and then just reach into the picture and take it out as a real object; she's working on painting life-like animals and people and trying to turn them into real living creatures which is slowly turning her into a sort of doctor frankenstein mad scientist (except, an artist instead of a scientist).

rolls royceton acts like a rich swell but can transform into a huge monstrous creature like the hulk/jekyll and hyde; he intentionally does it to fight/threaten people so as to build territory for his gang but it's started happening out of his control.

vinny was supposed to be executed for theft...and it didn't work; he's essentially a zombie that is still thinking and feeling and doesn't understand it at all but is too scared of dying for real to try to "fix" it.

-various murder mysteries happen through magic or strange dramatic circumstances (no one gets shot with a regular gun for normal murder reasons; it's always some rare poisoned dagger or bizarre curse or something), which amelia & co solve (or technically solve, by getting someone to reveal what's happening)

-a lot of the world revolves around the powers people have & what that means for people of different social classes or genders or ethnicities--a wealthy girl who can blow people up with her mind wouldn't do such a rude thing in society, it's unladylike! a street urchin who can heal people with their hands is probably just using that as an excuse to pick pockets, you know how those people are... as a result, a lot of those murder mysteries are something ironic, like a kindly old grandma whose cookies force people to mind their manners or else be poisoned because manners matter more to her than murder. it's the sort of place where if someone jumped off a bridge, everyone else would judge them like an olympic diving competition

-the characters first meet at a masquerade ball all wearing masks and different clothes, where a murderer is hiding by changing costumes. there should be an exploration through the crypts of an ancient cursed church, a mysterious carnival full of actual magic and deadly games, a theater with a ghost directing (and possessing) the living actors to have the Perfect Performance(TM), twisting back alleys where you could find anything (literally anything) for sale or might get murdered or simply disappear; gothic-steampunk-esque vibes...

-this has gotten more grim than the request implied haha, but i think there's an element of a group of selfish, sometimes callous people coming together in a found-family way and realizing that they want to be better than that and eventually either working to be better people or tragically failing because the terrible things they've done in the past have come back to haunt them. like most of the story would be somewhere between horror and dark comedy, but the final act would actually be life or death for the main characters