#also if you think i can get through one wip without a soft romance you're wrong

[crtalley]

actually fuck it i want to talk about loyal, long post below the cut

so basically i’m fucking with the worldbuilding but think like. 30s-40s tech with an 00s culture where the whole cultural landscape is torn by this internal war on innocent people and there’s a wide split between people who are on the side of the state and people who. aren’t

but basically there’s a huge government-sponsored private industry of witchfinders, headed by what is effectively the largest private police force slash army in this world, which is owned by axel drake, aka theophon drake’s obscenely rich grandfather, aka basically whatever betsy devos’s brother is up to now but with jeff bezos’s money

theo ofc agrees with his family’s politics not only because it’s dangerous for him if he doesn’t but because -- he’s been raised with them, they make sense in his head. he IS the indoctrinated child of magic cops

witchfinders, more or less, are exactly what they sound like -- they root out street witches and other unregistered magic users and basically shove them into a drake-owned magic prison system

this is not an addiction metaphor

anyway theo has premonitions and has successfully predicted at least four separate major occurrences in his family in the last five years but he refuses to believe it’s magic because that’s dangerous yo. but also he’s confided in certain people about this (important to the plot) which makes him a target for detainment by his own grandfather’s forces (who he is training to join)

then there’s nix -- nicolet eliason -- whose sister was killed in a public massacre by drake’s witchfinders five years ago and thus she holds a very reasonable grudge, except she ends up saving theo’s life from a kidnapping and witch-drowning attempt before she knows who he is

then she finds out he’s theophon fucking drake and she’s like. i should have left you in the fucking bay. can i undo the events of the last eight hours i would like to kill you please

anyway nix finds out he has magic and she now has blackmail on like the twelfth-most-important person in the city, which she uses to manipulate him into helping her investigate the internal system of the witchfinders, since there’s little to no accountability and the majority of street witches simply disappear in custody

she (local anarchist with approximately one nice outfit) pretends to be a journalist so that theo can get her into nice places and at one point has to sit in a room with the man who ordered her sister’s execution and not say a word about it

theo is an absolute jackass to her at first when he’s, you know, being blackmailed, but then has a grudging respect for her once he figures out that when she says she wants a better future for witches she’s . including him. like no one has ever included him in anything. he’s always been left out for one reason or another.

anyway he has trouble imagining himself as part of society and not a step away from it so there’s this growing divide between him and nix even though he feels beholden to her bc she saved his life (and broke a premonition), and maybe she’s pretty cool to hang out with, and maybe it’s strange to have so many different worldviews in his life now, but there’s also a growing divide between him and his grandfather and his family where they’re pretty sure he’s getting involved in illicit shit

anyway one of the major themes is loyalty hence;;; the title

and also there’s a major nb character whose name is leslie who is chronically late to everything. and a talking tree. and a sentient (but not sapient) magical city. i think it’s pretty cool

#in which ve talks #wip: loyal #i just think it's neat okay #also if you think i can get through one wip without a soft romance you're wrong