This would honestly be a comfort for [name_f]Birdie[/name_f] at the start of her story. She has very little contact with people outside of her parents and occasionally her aunt’s family and her father tries to distance himself from his wife and daughter as much as possible, so, while not the person she cares about the most, the person she is closest to would be her mother, who has never exactly been kind to her. Most of her interactions with her daughter involve deliberately causing her pain to ‘prepare’ her for a life in power and maintain a sense of control she will be able to use to manipulate [name_f]Birdie[/name_f] in the future. [name_f]Birdie[/name_f], on the other hand, struggle with understanding other people and their motivations (honestly, same) (and even if she was the world’s most talented expert psychologist, motivation as irrational as her mother’s makes no sense anyway) and she doesn’t recognise this at all. She has no idea why her mother is continually hurting her, and would be grateful for a solution as simple as wanting to kill her. She has had so much experience being no match for her mother’s abilities and strength that she would know she’s had no chance of surviving if she wanted her dead, and her only option would be to run.
Let’s have a more lighthearted one next, shall we? WWYCD if they were trying to complete a maze, were lost in there for like an hour, then finally the hedges opened up and they realised they’d got nowhere near the centre and were back at the entrance?
[name_f]Ginevra[/name_f] would be very frustrated and would kick the hedges or scream until she calmed her nerves. She has a few unresolved anger issues from her childhood that come out at inconvenient times.
Hazel would be nervous and accept, but panickedly question what on earth she was thinking a couple days later. In the end, she’d do a decent job and have a laugh about it later.
WWYCD if they were offered an easy opportunity to take revenge on a single person? Like a Get-Your-Vengenace-Free coupon they can only use once.
[name_f]Niamh[/name_f] would 100% use the opportunity. There’s really four people she has good reason to hate and to wish to take action against, and of those four two were killed ten years ago and the third is basically taken care of. The fourth is the one who it would be hardest to take ‘fair’ revenge on, like that ‘an eye for an eye’ thing, because she is the reason those first two people are dead, but [name_f]Niamh[/name_f] wouldn’t care too much about whether the punishment fit the crime.
(If you’re wondering why [name_f]Niamh[/name_f] would want to take revenge against the technical murderer of two of her other ‘most despised people’, it’s because those two people were her parents. Says a lot about her family, but then again three out of five parent sets suck in the story so it’s kinda normal at this point).
WWYCD if they were a murder suspect, knew they were innocent, but couldn’t prove it?
Well, considering [name_f]Ginevra[/name_f] is already a know criminal and would be arrested no matter what, she’d escape custody, leave the state, and take on a new identity for awhile. If things got to crazy she’d fake her own death and go into hiding for as long as it would take for her to track down the real killer. She’d then resurface, bring the killer to justice, and escape before the authorities could capture her.
She’s a criminal mastermind, in case you were wondering.
[name_f]Edie[/name_f] would undeniably be broken. She’d go through a wide range of emotions - most of which would revolve around despair and hopelessness - as even being in a world where magic is possible (and she possesses it), resurrection is not something you want to mess about with when you’re new to the field. So revenge would be her next best option, albeit she might be convinced to go about a less life-ending route if her girlfriend managed to talk her round.
[name_u]Addison[/name_u] would completely dread it, considering she had to spend that time with her 4 little siblings (including a not so annoying sister, two annoying little sisters, and an annoying baby brother). She would definitely bring things to keep her distracted from her little sister [name_f]Claire[/name_f] constantly asking “Are we there yet?”.
WWYCD If they found out their favorite TV series was cancelled?
[name_f]Janie[/name_f] would shriek with excitement, but not too much to make others feel left out, then she would run next door to her neighbor [name_u]Max[/name_u], and tell him all about it.
WWYCD if they found a crying little boy alone in a playground?
[name_m]Lysander[/name_m] would probably think back on how he was once a lonely, crying child and try to distract the youngster with a goofy magic trick.
WWYCD if they found they could only walk backwards?
[name_f]Brisa[/name_f] would let her friends laugh at her expense for five minutes before reminding them that she can literally fly so it doesn’t matter. It only applies to walking, after all.
WWYCD if they had a superpower but it happened to link to their greatest fear?
[name_f]Ginevra[/name_f] would just hand out in the hotel with the air conditioner on full blast and hope she could find the channel playing Friends. She wouldn’t mind not going to the beach; at least then she wouldn’t have to worry about people staring at her scars.
WWYCD if their best friend took them to Disney World?
Be very confused – while Disney doesn’t exist in Brisa’s world, her best friend comes from our world. So [name_f]Brisa[/name_f] would have zero clue where she was and [name_u]Brooke[/name_u] would spend the entire time having to explain everything to her. It’d be the same with most of Brooke’s friends, to be honest.
WWYCD if they were the ruler of a magical kingdom, but had no magic themselves?
Ooh this is really interesting because [name_f]Birdie[/name_f] IS the ruler of a magic kingdom but she has magic. She out of her three sisters was chosen to live (although they also both survived their mother’s attempt to kill them as infants because their father, who is generally kind of clueless about his wife’s ideas, interfered and took them to a healing witch) because she showed the most magical potential.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist giving a long explanation about why this was a bad idea
although in reality, she is actually the least powerful because, having received no formal training except her mother’s attempts to beat more and more magic out of her, she has very little control over it, making her incredibly volatile. On the other hand, Leira was raised in a loving household and trained by a tutor, and she uses the standard personal magic system, meaning she can control her magic more easily and Maysee, who was raised by the aforementioned healing witches, channels her magic through objects and what are basically spells. Neither is as strong as [name_f]Birdie[/name_f] but they can both apply their power without risking killing anybody. Also, I’m thinking of having some form of this as a fairy tale based on a prophecy about the three girls in their universe, with a kind of don’t-interfere-with-fate moral.
Had she not shown any signs of magic one of her sisters would have been kept and raised by her parents instead of her. If none of them had been magical, or she hadn’t been born along with two others, her parents would probably have kept having kids till one of them showed magic and then did everything they did to [name_f]Birdie[/name_f] to that child.
WWYCD if they were fighting a bad guy whose identity was secret, defeated them, removed their mask and realised it was someone they cared deeply about?
Well, there’s a theme with the characters in my main project (Kai, [name_f]Niamh[/name_f], [name_f]Ariadne[/name_f], [name_u]Zephyr[/name_u] and Evangeline) all having both awful parents or stepparents – particularly [name_f]Niamh[/name_f] for the second one – and also trying to kill each other whenever there’s a fight (due to magic causing a lot of havoc, especially with [name_u]Kai[/name_u] and Evangeline). The only people any of them actually really care about, bar [name_f]Ariadne[/name_f], are each other and a few other friends. So for four out of five, it would not exactly startle them to have someone they care about being a secret villain. For [name_f]Ariadne[/name_f], she and [name_f]Evangeline[/name_f] both have sisters, but where [name_f]Evangeline[/name_f] doesn’t get along with her sisters because quite frankly everyone including [name_f]Evangeline[/name_f] in the Westfall family is just a really bad person, [name_f]Ariadne[/name_f] loves her sisters.
So, if [name_f]Ariadne[/name_f] was to see that one of her older sisters (not her parents, though she does care about them, it’d be expected judging by past experiences with [name_f]Evie[/name_f], [name_f]Niamh[/name_f] and Zephyr) was a bad guy, she’d refuse to believe it. Her sisters are good people, their whole family is literally high-profile healers, why would they do such a thing?
(Obviously Ariadne’s family isn’t perfect, her parents are almost worst than Evangeline’s mother, and Evangeline’s mother literally curses an entire kingdom, nearly killing her own children, before saving Evangeline’s life when she deliberately flings herself off a tower because her daughter is a powerful seer. Lots of happy families in this project, as you can see. Kai’s parents just don’t get a look in because while they’re implied to be both emotionally and at times physically abusive, they’re not magic and therefore can’t, you know, try to destroy the kingdom.)
WWYCD if they accidentally brought a stranger back from the dead?
(very specific, yeah, I had a character do this in a writing contest entry.)
connelly would feel immensely guilty for hating her enemy, and then angry with herself for hating him in the first place. then, she’d thank him way too much, then try to repay the task.
WWYCD if they had the chance to talk to someone close to them who had died?