#all maxes know... is rewrite shakespeare... and respond to questions with a full page of text...

[goose-books]

Ok first of all your Darkling magic post was fantastic and I can't get enough but now I MUST know...what kind of magic do the Stayer sisters have and how does it manifest??? (Also if you want to share more about Jasper's I will take it because I can't get enough of this bastard)

first of all: i apologize for the length of time between my posting of the worldbuilding post and the posting of this ask... i had almost finished writing you a response and then my computer shut down and the ask did not save! so that was a blow directly to my head! i also apologize for... the length of this!

second of all: [cups my hands and offers you this]

They say Cressida Stayer was nine years old when she turned her hair to gold. They laid her down in bed blonde, and the next morning, the waves cascading down her shoulders were solid metal, glinting harshly in the sunlight, weighing her down, creating that odd head-cocked expression she still wears now. Nine years old. Two or three years before most people develop enough magic skills to dye a single curl. Much less transfigure their hair into precious metal.

People also say Leovald Stayer’s immediate reaction was to hack it off her head and melt it down for cash. But generally they say that part a lot quieter.

— darkling, segment iv: control

so: the stayer sisters and magic.

if we charted the stayer sisters on the passive-to-active scale, it would look like this!

(left to right: ruby, cressida, and gracen.)

that said, they’re all leovald stayer’s kids, and leovald is pretty well known as one of the most magical people in dovermorry, if not in general. so he fully expected his children to have large amounts of raw magical energy as well. and they didn’t disappoint. cressida is the one well-known as a Magical Prodigy ™, but gracen and ruby are also notably powerful and notably in-control of their magic, especially for their ages! (21, 19, and 16, in descending order.) most people don’t get really, really good at controlling their magic until well into adulthood. technically you can join the guild at 17 or older, but the median age on the Mage’s Guild’s high council is, like, sixty. (when leovald is the young guy in the group, there’s an issue.)

interestingly, cressida is about two months from turning 17. but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. in descending order:

gracen’s entire thing is control. gracen stayer has a lot of power inside of her that would very much like to be outside of her, and gracen would very much like to prevent it from getting loose. she deals with this by being so hyperaware of her magic that it cannot possibly Do Things On Its Own, because she keeps it on an extremely tight leash. (this is a pretty good metaphor for how gracen deals with things in general.)

gracen... runs the stayer household. by which i mean she does everything from cleaning up after Mandatory Family Dinner to helping cressida with her calc homework to making sure ruby comes home before curfew (as not to get yelled at) to organizing leovald’s paperwork and making sure he doesn’t say something stupid on TV. gracen does most of leovald’s grunt work, actually. does she hate this? yes. but she’s also pretty sure that training the most powerful man in dovermorry into instinctively relying on her for everything is… a good long-term move, pragmatically speaking.

so gracen has a lot to do! and a lot of magic that she absolutely will not allow to build up inside of her. and she deals with this by using her magic for everything. she parcels small bits of magic out for every small task - doing the dishes, summoning a pencil from the other side of the room, making paperwork organize itself. if someone spills their drink on the carpet, gracen will draw the drink back out of the fibers, drop by drop, into the cup. by twitching one finger. understandably, this takes a lot of practiced focus and control; magic is very much something you can study and gracen very much studies it the way feral high schoolers study for the ACT. it almost doesn’t matter how active her magic is, because her magic NEVER takes any kind of natural form - she wrings out every drop in a very deliberate way. (i say almost because she can still feel it. she deliberately keeps it calm. it is harder than it looks. pretty much everything i’ve just said about gracen’s magic is a FANTASTIC metaphor for [gestures] the everything about gracen.)

and then there’s ruby, who is exactly the opposite. quelle surprise.

look, ruby is fully aware that no matter how much she practices, she is never going to be as good at controlling her magic as gracen. so she just… doesn’t. she just doesn’t! she doesn’t control it and she doesn’t use it. magic isn’t her best skill - her skillset lies in writing, in thinking, in persuading, in befriending, in provoking. why on earth would ruby magically whisk her laundry off the floor when she can just pick it up? and why would she pick it up when she can probably convince someone else to do it for her?

“but max,” you are thinking, “doesn’t her magic build up like you’ve been saying?” yes and she likes it. to be fair, she has comparatively more passive energy than her sisters; it’s easier for ruby to deal with this buildup than it would be for gracen. or for jasper, for that matter. when jasper’s magic gets to be Too Much, it’s a physical palpable thing; he gets itchy and shaky and tense and sometimes sick until he can twist off the metaphorical cap and let off some steam. for ruby, it’s more like an adrenaline rush - pounding heart, shaky limbs, heightened senses and emotions, without the risk of Making A Mess in public. she likes to let her magic build and build and build and build and then pull it back and release it into something deliberate at the very last minute. she finds this thrilling. which isn’t to say she doesn’t care! that honestly takes as much control and focus as gracen’s strategy does.

at her high school graduation, ruby “accidentally” “lost control” and set off magical fireworks over her head as she crossed the stage. loudly and vividly. leovald in the audience was so psyched he shouted. gracen would have slammed her head into the wall, except she had to comfort cressida, who reacts to loud noises like this:

as much as gracen and ruby differ in their ways of handling their magic, they’re… very similar at the core. what looks effortless is actually a lot of concentrated effort behind the scenes. and then there’s cressida, who just… does not have that.

some people (leovald) think of magic as a thing to flaunt. some people (jasper) are constantly fighting it. cressida just… does not care all that much? she just does not care. magic comes very naturally to her because it is first and foremost a way she copes with being trans and autistic in a world that is not made for her. she used to turn the lights out when rooms got too bright (and then sat back and let everyone else wonder what had happened). she’ll change fabrics to make them softer or smoother. the real story of her hair has nothing to do with gold - she was ten, not nine, and she grew her hair out to shoulder-length overnight, because she was sick of having short hair. and that was what made the rest of her family realize that maybe all that stuff about wanting to be a girl was, like… significant.

technically, yes, she is a Magical Prodigy ™! her magic settled very early and she has a LOT of it. and her magic, more than even her sisters’, is very similar to leovald’s. leovald lets his magic do WHATEVER the fuck, and the result is that he warps the world around him a LOT - fireplaces light when he walks into the room; lights flicker when he raises his voice; doors burst open in front of him even when they aren’t automatic; when his emotions are running high they affect the weather. cressida’s magic would like to be doing all of that. leovald would also like cressida’s magic to be doing all of that.

but cressida… kind of just doesn’t give a shit? she has a lot of untapped potential that she is fine with not tapping. she is perfectly content with living her life using her magic to, like, change the radio station from the backseat of the car (when you’re the youngest of three children, you NEVER get shotgun).

buuuuuut leovald is really psyched about having a freaky magical savant child. and most people see cressida - quiet, staring off into space, blank facial expression, not great at talking - and quietly assume that the magic thing is… like… all she has going for her. so she’s very much been pigeonholed into Magical Prodigy Zone, whether she likes that or not.

whoa this is a lot of text have an image

and then jasper is just… the anti-cressida. he has a thousand and one talents and gets perfect grades and charms everyone he meets and he is a walking biohazard when it comes to magic. and it drives him CRAZY, as much as he pretends not to care.

most people have their magic all figured out by the time they’re in high school. jasper is sixteen, almost seventeen, and something about it is… still just not working for him. even simple stuff (duplicating post-it notes! making flashcards shuffle themselves!) just… takes much more effort than it should. and because he hates being bad at it, he doesn’t use it, and then it builds up, and he ends up jittering like a live wire, and then if that goes too far things explode.

jasper has elected to blame his mother pretty much entirely for this, because vee has NONE of the same problems. (plenty of problems! but not related to magic.) …plus, you know. jasper’s had enough mishaps in public to know that his father ALSO blames jasper’s mother, pretty vocally, whenever he gets the chance.

on a conscious level, jasper is actually fine with having magic that just Does Not Fucking Work. because he has SO many nonmagical skills that it makes up the difference. at his boarding school, he sits atop a throne made of forged prescriptions, pay-per-page homework, and confessions of love from people who do not know him nearly enough to confess their love to him. on a subconscious level he has a whole complex about it but [gesturing] that’s a given, isn’t it