#everyone is invited to yell about magician hal with me

[thepersephonecabin]

magician!hal au

can i tell y’all what i thought was going to happen for literally my entire reading experience of the volstovic cycle?

I didn’t have a whole thing mapped out but i had this one incredibly specific and incredibly not canon idea that i was positive beyond doubt would happen

so get this i totally believed that hal was a magician and that everyone, including himself, simply didn’t know it yet

why? well because The Gay of course

because in chapter two while hal is reading to comfort royston’s sorrows roystons monologue reads 

and i was like “omg hals a magician and he has an antithetical talent to roystons and roystons going to train him and they’re going to be invincible together omg” (i could have sworn there was a part that talked about how duos with opposite powers were unbeatable but i cant find it it feels like the amery discourse all over again)

and so i continued to read the books with this firmly in my head and it just never happened but did that stop me from making olympic sized reaches to explain why every time hal says “i wish i had a talent/i wish i weren’t so useless” he was actually doing magic without knowing it?

no

for example, the most antithetical thing from combustion is chemically reduction (the process of gaining electrons during a chemical reaction, whereas combustion loses electrons). Likewise you could say that being less technical about it that because royston’s combustion is specific to flame, a true opposite would be extinction (as in fire extinction) but both these examples rely on chemical output.

and process control would be a way for hal to do things like manipulate chemical output of someone’s body for instance. or stopping royston from accidentally combusting something. and this is all very broad and held together  by strings but my theory was that the foreshadowing of royston talking about magicians and assistants was building up to a reveal of hal actually having powers and the climax of it seemed like it would be the plague, no?

so the idea in my head was that royston lived for however long because hal was unknowingly altering royston’s body chemistry to keep him alive during the plague “but if hal was a magician he would have it too” buuuuut not as quickly as royston because the magicians with the purest concentrations of magic got it first and the worst according to the esar and hal could easily be a “mutt” as one of the airmen put it

plus i just like to imagine the look on royston’s face when he realized this after royston accidentally blew up a lasagna and hal accidentally extinguished the explosion before it could do much damage and they both just stare at the lasagna in shock for like. 20 minutes.