nysm / tvd } { if you will, please move in closer

[onebehind]

In another lifetime, Dylan Rhodes never existed. In another lifetime, he didn't need to, because Lionel Shrike never drown in the Hudson River, Dylan Rhodes stayed Jacob Shrike, and his life went in a very different direction.

At age fifteen, his father started teaching him the tricks of the trade: sleight of hand, how to build a rig, how to do a little bit of actual magic, despite the fact that probably wasn't something he should be sharing, just yet. Shortly after that, Jacob met a young Alma Dray, tagging along with her grandfather, a friend of his father's, stopping by to check up on him. They grew up together, life continued on, and Jacob eventually went to college for Theatre Design and Stagecraft. At twenty-two, just after graduation, Jacob was chosen to join the Eye, his test to help the LVPD clear the name of another magician, despite all the evidence in the world making him seem guilty as sin. There, Jacob met Michael Fuller, his partner a lifetime away, and the two became friends as they managed, despite all odds, to pull off what had been asked of Jacob by the Eye. He continued on into a career as a stage magician in the Eye, eventually married Alma, and continued to occasionally work with Fuller as a consultant, when time allowed.

Over the course of the next few decades, Jacob and Alma tried to have children and failed, and eventually adopted one Jack Wilder, age 10. Using Eye resources, he helped Merritt McKinney get a good lawyer and clear his name after his brother screwed him over. He followed the rising stars that were J. Daniel Atlas and Henley Reeves, and when they decided to call it quits, pulled the both of them back together, forcing Daniel to give Henley a more active role in the show. And eventually, yes, he called the four of them together, not for revenge but something similar, to get them into the Eye. And somewhere along the way, Jacob and Alma tried for children again, and this time managed, giving Jack a brother, Lio, Lionel, named after his grandfather.

Basically, this is the best possible timeline.

And now, it's just after dinner, Jacob off to his nightly rehearsal at 5Pointz, that his space, now, like his father before him. He takes a detour tonight, though, to grab a cup of coffee, beforehand, a little bit of magic pulled around him, to make himself not completely invisible, but at least a little less noticeable. Normally, he doesn't mind showing off or signing autographs, when a fan approaches, and fans do often approach, his notoriety somewhere up there with Penn and Teller, Seigfried and Roy, but -- not tonight. He's not feeling it tonight, a little tired for whatever reason, hence the coffee, so magic it is. And now he's sitting at a table, idly people-watching as he leans into his cup. Have at him, if you can still see him (or, maybe, in certain party's cases, sense him) despite his best efforts.

Comments

[polydeukes]

"Gemini Coven. Kind of what they're famous for." Twins, that is.

She lets her finger drag up the family tree, back generations and generations until she hits the first generation that appeared in America. The one right before it has twins as well, but both twins had families and lives. One if them didn't suddenly die at twenty-two.

"Here. So something happened between leaving Europe and coming to America. Something happened with Helene and Tobias Parker that for some reason they started the Merge."

[onebehind]

Dylan studies the book for another several seconds, before, "Okay, so, now we just gotta find out what was going on in the world, at that point."

Both locally to where the Parkers came from and went to, and on a broader scale. He, like her, thinks that might be the best shot they have.

[polydeukes]

She nods, drumming her fingers against the book. "The Gemini are kind of known for keeping themselves hidden, but I'm not sure if that came before or after the merge started. If they started hiding because someone came for them, or if they always liked to stay under the radar."

Which might make a difference in terms of what kind of information they find.

[onebehind]

"Guess we start by trying to find mentions of them, then," Dylan decides. "I mean, if something happened, they'll be there and then they won't. If they always liked to stay under the radar, I feel like we'll have a harder time finding them, period."

Either way, it'll inform how they go about this.

[polydeukes]

"Okay. So ... do you guys have archives categorized by year? Maybe we can start with when Helene and Tobias were born and go from there?"

It's a long shot that they'd come up, but it's worth a shot.

[onebehind]

"We can do that, yeah."

Honestly, the archives can be categorized in just about any way imaginable, as if they were being kept entirely digitally rather than in a mix of mediums. It's one of the perks of this place being what it is, controlled by who it is. There's a magic here that makes the place almost sentient.

"Look for anything crazy that turns up, year by year?"

[polydeukes]

"Start in 1665 and work your way back."

She pauses, because that's a very specific year, but given the years they were born, it doesn't take much to do the math. Magic may be nebulous and unexplainable at times, but there are always patterns. And twenty-two is such a specific age for it to not have a reason.

"They would have been twenty-two. The merge always happens when you're twenty-two."

[onebehind]

"Alright." Dylan glances towards the door. "C'mmon, let's go poke around in the stacks, and see what we can find." And see what's waiting for them, when they get back to this room here. Like he didn't say, the archive is just shy of sentient. It'll help where it can.

[polydeukes]

Josie nods, before disappearing into the stacks and starting to page through the histories. She grabs a few records that seem to be around the right time period before making her way back.

"Curses are so funny, you know? I mean, most spells end with the death of the person who cast it. Even compulsion wears off when you kill the vampire. Most curses end with the death of the person who was cursed."

She places her books down, next to whatever the library provides.

"But then there are just ... the big daddy curses like this one, or the werewolf curse that just ... they hold on and they don't let go. How much power do you have to have to curse an entire bloodline."

[onebehind]

"A lot." He sets the books he pulled down, too, before gesturing around them. "I mean, most of the permanent shit here? That's decades of magic, dozen of magicians pouring their time and energy into it purposefully, and then just -- just ambient shit, seeping in."

Like Josie can borrow magic, so too can places like the Archive, albeit on a much lesser scale, but so many people have and will pass through here that it's negligible. Like being able to power a lightbulb with a static electricity.

[polydeukes]

"Right so, a curse like mine, it might not have been one person cursing the Gemini coven. It could have been a lot of witches, working together. I mean, witches like Esther Mikaelson or the Hollow are once in a lifetime situations and they channeled big things to do it like celestial events and ancient trees."

She shakes her head. "Anyway, I think that maybe we might not be looking for one person. They might have had help."

[onebehind]

"You know of anyone who's got a grudge against the Gemini Coven in modern day?"

He doubts the level of animosity a person or group of people would have needed to do something like that to someone else would have been satisfied by one 'little' curse. That level of anger lingers. It stands to reason, then, that whoever cursed the Gemini Coven in the first place probably still isn't all that fond of them today.

Maybe, then, if they can find out where they were when the Gemini first came Stateside, they might be able to find some answers.

[polydeukes]

"There's not much of a coven left."

It's pretty much just Josie and Lizzie, and even then they're not really part of the coven. They're just beholden to this by genetics, nothing else.

"The other side effect of this curse is that when the Merge is complete, the lives of all the coven members are tied to the coven leader. So if they die before a new Merge is completed so does the rest of the coven. Which is basically what happened at my parents wedding."

[onebehind]

"Doesn't mean there's not still a grudge."

It'd just be an easier deal, getting rid of them, now, permanently. If and when Josie and Lizzie merge, after all, then there will only be one Gemini left. And maybe that was the plan all along. Maybe it just took a little longer than expected, for one reason or another.

"Who was behind that, anyway?" The wedding massacre.

[polydeukes]

"The coven leader."

If her tone there is dry, it's because it is. She settles into her seat before leaning back for a long story.

"My mom's twin was a siphoner, like me. He was also a psychopath. And he was determined to win the merge and take control of the coven, because in his mind, there was no way that he could lose. But the coven knew that he would be terrible for the job, so they started trying to find ways around him. My grandparents kept having more children until they had another set of twins - Olivia and Lucas."

She swallows hard, because this is where things get messy. "When Kai caught on to what they were doing, he went nuts. Slaughtered most of his other siblings and tried to kill the twins, but my mother managed to hide them, and told him that she would complete the Merge with him, right then, but it was a trap. She had put her magic away and the rest of the coven used the opportunity to trap him in a prison world with an ascendant. My mom went off to the military and medical school, Liv and Luke were set to complete the Merge when they turned twenty-two, life moved on. At least until a Bennett witch and a Salvatore vampire got caught in Kai's prison world."

Which is an even longer story, so she's going to skip that for right now.

"Bennett blood activates the ascendant, so Kai saw Bonnie as his way out. She tried to hold out for as long as he could, but eventually he managed to escape. By the time that happened, my bio mom was forty and a successful doctor and in love with my dad, but Kai wanted what he felt was his birthright. He attempted the merge with Luke, because Luke thought he could win, but in the end, it didn't work - at least not fully. The ritual recognized that it was the wrong magic, but it was enough to make him the head of the coven. The rejected magic could kill him, which would kill all of them including my mother who was pregnant with us at this point, so they found a way around it. My mother sacrificed her magic for Kai to absorb, stabilizing him and saving the coven. A coven which quickly sent him into another ascendant. They thought it was taken care of. Again."

The tone in her voice indicates that it is not. But that is a lot to start with so she's going to pause for any questions.

[onebehind]

"But it wasn't," Dylan concludes.

He may have questions later, but right now, all he can think of is how much of a clusterfuck her coven, her family is. He's glad the craziest thing the Eye gets into is its obsession with secrecy. He's glad his father, his sons have never been anything but the light of his life. He can't imagine replacing himself as any of the characters in her story and either being victim or victimizer to them.

[polydeukes]

Y e p, the Parkers are a mess, and it's probably for the best they're gone, even though not all of them were bad people. Still, she needs to get all of the story out.

"No, it wasn't. The ascendant they put him in was full of heretics - siphoner witches that were turned into vampires, so they could still practice magic. When they managed to escape, one of them gave Kai some of his blood. He then crashed my parents wedding, stabbed my mom and then killed himself. And since he's the head of the coven, everyone connected to the coven died. But, before they did, the coven cast one last spell, transferring me and Lizzie to the nearest non-Gemini available womb. Which happened to belong to a vampire named Caroline Forbes."

Aka her actual mom who raised her. But it's still real weird.

[onebehind]

" ... how does that even work?" For all that vampires are dead, they shouldn't be able to give birth, magic or no. He's not sure she's going to have an answer, for all that it's all but an impossibility, but he can't help but wonder.

[polydeukes]

Josie shrugs. "I don't know. While I was technically there, it's not like I can really explain to you what happened." She was a fetus at the time, so. "I know it wasn't easy for her though. Both me and my sister are siphons and vampires are basically made of magic, but if you take too much they start to dessicate."

[onebehind]

"She actually carry you for nine months?" Josie may have been there-not-there, but he feels like she might know that much, at least. Either way, he's curious because he can't see carrying a baby to term being good for a vampire -- or not being carried to term being good for a baby. Either way, it's kind of impressive.

[polydeukes]

"More like six, I think? Jo was far enough along to know she was pregnant when she died." Far enough to know she was having twins. "But the Gemini did a cloaking spell so even Caroline didn't know she had us until she was a couple months from being due."

So basically yes, this is weird, she knows it's weird, but there's still a lot of question marks about what exactly it is that spell did.

"I guess it worked well enough because as long as she has a steady diet of blood, vampires can do things like eat, and their body functions normally? I don't know, I try not to look too closely at it."

[onebehind]

At this point, Dylan's not sure what's weirder -- the fact that a vampire carried a pregnancy to term, or the fact that it was apparently forced on her without her knowledge. He's sure there wasn't a whole lot of time to ask permission and all, but still. The idea of being pregnant is a relatively foreign notion to him, beyond having a wife who was pregnant once, and that's strange enough. The complications of Josie and Lizzie's births are even more bizarre.

"Am I allowed to say I'm glad my Coven's mostly normal?" he asks, almost apologetically, after taking a moment to shake his head to try and clear it.

[polydeukes]

"No. You are definitely allowed to say that, because you don't know how much I wish mine was."

She sighs as she leans back in her seat, looking over all of the various notes in front of them. She shouldn't have to be trying to chase down a curse to save her life, and Lizzie's life. But she is, and she will.

"Hopefully once we break this curse, that'll be the end of the crazy."

[onebehind]

That statement enough to sober him, recenter him, Dylan nods seriously. "We'll figure something out."

And then she and her sister will be able to live -- mostly normal lives. He's holding onto that hope just as much as she is. No one so young should have such a terrible fate ahead of them.

[polydeukes]

She nods as she looks down at the books in front of her.

"Just because there isn't much of a coven left now doesn't mean they didn't have enemies then. I wonder if ..."

Her nose wrinkles. After they turned eighteen, she and Lizzie got access to all the assets that were held in trust for them. She's never had any reason to care about what Joshua Parker left behind given how he handled his children. She also thought that maybe her father had gone through it and not found anything helpful. But Alaric is not the most forthcoming father, and he didn't know what she knows now - namely, names and dates.

"Lizzie and I inherited our grandfather's estate. I'm not sure what's left in that house, but maybe there are some family histories or something."