bakerstreet | Like a old, magic married couple

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Like a old, magic married couple

The Master/Familiar Love Meme

"In European folklore and folk-belief of the Medieval and Early Modern periods, familiar spirits (sometimes referred to simply as 'familiars') were supernatural entities believed to assist witches and cunning folk in their practice of magic. According to the records of the time, they would appear in numerous guises, often as an animal, but also at times as a human or humanoid figure, and were described as 'clearly defined, three-dimensional… forms, vivid with colour and animated with movement and sound' by those alleging to have come into contact with them, unlike later descriptions of ghosts with their 'smoky, undefined form[s]'."

Everybody needs a sidekick. This includes those who may have a little help of their own in the form of magic - witches, warlocks, mages, sages, casters, magicians...whatever you want to call them, they have a bit more juice than your average Joe. Luckily, the job comes with a built-in assistant: a familiar, or a helper spirit. The familiar serves as a guide to their magical "Master" of their choice, helping them out of tight spots and being their companion for life. Sometimes, they come in the form of animals, like dogs and especially cats. Some don't bother with this, though, and just stay in their true humanoid forms. The bond between familiar and master is one of intensity, and they know each other completely. Most familiars even have a telepathic link to their masters. That helps them keep an eye on them. Of course, given this closeness-beyond-closeness, it's easy to imagine a master and familiar as soulmates, and with familiars having a human form...well, intimacy seems like a natural option.

Too bad relationships of that kind between master and familiar are strictly forbidden. Surely, that rule is always followed.

HOW TO PLAY

Comment with your character, stating your preferences (ex: F/M, open to all, etc). Also, be sure to remember and put whether your character will be witch/master, familiar, or if they can serve as both. There is no "set" type for any of the roles. Masters don't have to be dominate (ineffectual witches have always been a cute trope), familiars aren't passive or submissive, and so on. It's not the same as BDSM...though your character could bring that into it if they'd like.
Comment around to other characters, playing out your forbidden master/familiar ~love~ or what have you.

PROMPTS

The Familiar Chooses the Master: The first meeting. You may be new to the craft (or someone who needs a new familiar), and someone has been drawn to you.
Setting the Ground Rules: You need to figure out how this is going to work. Where can you hide this woman/man in your apartment, if need be?
Getting to Know You: Magic/power isn't all fun and games. You need to find out how to work together so you don't accidentally blow everything up in your faces.
Helping Out: Familiars have a lot of neat powers that can be a boon around the house...and around the town.
Danger Zone: Your feelings for each other are blurring, which is a big no-no. Do you even realize that the bond is deepening to a new level?
Confession: Things have gotten heavy and you have to let your bond mate know you see them as more.
Bad Romance: The familiar in this relationship isn't treated as equal. They're a slave to their master!
Telepathy: The mental bond between. Explore it or use it to get out of trouble...
Trouble is a Friend of Mine: Speaking of! Your familiar/master is danger, and there's nothing that can keep you from saving them.
Intimacy: The obligatory smut option. Though romance between familiar and master is not allowed, many find the allure too much, and the bond does lend itself to members seeking comfort in each other. After all, they know you better than anyone else.
You're Taken?: You're in love with a master or a familiar...they're just not yours. Oops! Maybe you can find some way to break your bonds so you can be together.
Breaking Up is Hard to Do: It is hard, especially between master and familiar. In fact, it can be downright painful...physically and mentally!
Sending You Away for Your Own Good: You're distancing yourself from the other member of your bond, and it's because you're headed towards destruction.
Everybody Knows: The other members of your community have found out you've broken the ultimate taboo and are WITH your master/familiar. This is bad. This is very, very bad. Punishment bad. Separation bad. Perhaps even death bad.
Happy Ending: Somehow, you've escaped the confines of the world that doesn't understand, and you're able to live together without fear.
WILDCARD

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((The witch))

((You must be something very special to have this Archangel as a familiar...))

Edited 2020-06-13 21:06 (UTC)

[ooc: Whelp, from a certain point of view, the Force could be seen as magic. But, for a modern setting with magic, Rey could be a witch with a powerful destiny before her and without proper guidance, the human realm could become a new hellscape?]

[[ He'd be the witch, most likely. ]]

((ooc; lobco is canonically a familiar so that's a more apt role for her, but I do have a witch AU for her too))

Edited 2020-06-13 23:35 (UTC)

[more platonic bonding with this tiny creature! but his love is STRONG o9]

[Definitely the master and prone to showering her familiars with every sort of love.]

( anyone want to be the magic familiar to a demon-banishing scholar? *open for gen primarily, m/m for ship but would prefer for cr to determine the dynamic with a slow burn situation if there is an interest for that. Ben canonly comes with a guardian angel that he's known since childhood, which tends to act as a familiar, but i can adjust it down to less a personified presence in favor of having a supernatural familiar he has accrued during his studies. Ben is basically a witch without the full aesthetic instagram to go with it, it's a low key and very normalized (nearly to the mundane) thing he practices with historic Christianic methods due moreso to association of upbringing than anything else, but with obvious historic English/Celtic craftwork. his focuses are in warding, cleansing, and banishing.

assumed cr or first meet welcome; happy with canon characters, ocs, live action, drawn, or characters from audio media. pm to discuss anything! info is here. )

[ The decision to sleep was barely a decision at all. It seemed like the only response possible when Alucard ran out of usefulness; his father was slain and couldn't enact his suicidal plans on humans anymore. The castle was secured and laid through with its own innate mechanical traps.

Laying down in the coffin he'd already spent a year healing his body in just happened, instinctively, after too many months of going to sleep in a regular bed alone. He couldn't even say he intended on waking back up again, only that it was all both too much and too little, and in he went. Consciousness snuffed itself out quickly enough from there, and went into the perpetual sleep that vampires can use to pass away years in solitude to heal, grow in strength, to wait out enemies...

He supposed he'd expected to be woken again eventually. He wasn't even terribly surprised it was a human who did it, yet again. But he is surprised that it's a human that knew enough to find a silver cross and recite the right prayers over it; that it was a human that knew enough to bind the vampire to his will as a safe guard before waking him; that it was a human that, it eventually came to seem, didn't understand the enormity of the spell it had wrought until it was too late to break that potent but simple magic.

Alucard wears the silver cross at all times, now, because it's impossible to remove. Benedict has since apologized for that fact, multiple times, and Alucard was bitterly silent to those apologies at first. They meant nothing: 'My life was never mine before. Why should it matter that my will be painted over by another's, now that my parents are no longer living to dictate it?'

But over time, it becomes a deeper symbol. It's a connection, the only one Alucard allows himself to have... Because he still returns to his coffin in between his summons. They rationalized a deal after the great accident of the binding; Benedict was allowed to call upon Alucard whenever great peril occurred, and in return, Benedict had no say over what Alucard did with his time in between. It was ideal in the sense that it only added to Alucard's cold, lonely pining, but managed to just barely balance it with the idea of being...necessary, still. It kept him alive, but not much else.

But he still stares at the cross on its delicate chain sometimes, turns it over in his fingers while he lays in the dark of the coffin, right before he goes asleep until the next time he's awoken.

***

'You waited too long to call me this time. Don't tell me you were feeling self-conscious.'

'We can argue about this later!' Benedict had been injured when Alucard arrived, a fact that set Alucard's heart rate even higher. 'Let's focus on the golem for now, yes?'

And so Alucard had. Benedict was a scholar as much as Alucard had been, perhaps more - a fact Alucard had given him credit for months ago, and gotten a blush and then some preening in return for. It meant Benedict was never wholly unprepared against what he was up against, but a human can only do so much without a magician's power backing it up. Benedict's morals seemed bigger than his powers were, and Alucard found himself wondering more than once just how long the human would have lived if he hadn't mistaken a binding charm for a simple freezing charm and bound a vampire to himself for the remainder of his mortal life.

Alucard distracts, counters, and defends against the golem, but he can't kill it without destroying its ofuda. Benedict is in charge of that. ]

Benedict - here! [ It takes no small effort to carve the small paper seal out of the golem, and Alucard gives it to the human before turning his back on him, intent on keeping the creature away until Benedict can diffuse the power of the seal and dissipate the golem more completely than destroying its earthly body can.

( keep breathing, keep breathing — Benedict packs angel feathers into the wound against his flank while Alucard does what it is he does best: taking the focus of the golem away, while making the scene no less dangerous.

Benedict will refrain from complaining, as he dives down behind a pillar here in this ancient ruin, clutching his side as he goes. panting vocally, at least he can stop bleeding all over the place.

his hands are trembling as the dhampir slides across his view to thrust something at him — the talisman off of the golem, a strip of gentle paper marked with an ancient name written in something foreign to them...and learned by Benedict through years of dedication. )

Oh— yes— good, thank you...If...you could just... Oh. ( Alucard has already turned to face the decimated creature again, keeping the irate animated guardian distracted and thoroughly stale-mated to buy him time to finish the deed. Benedict sighs, tired and well past the point of patient in this disastrous conflict. dismissively, Benedict waves a fatigued hand after Alucard. ) Do...that.

( he has clean angel feathers aplenty; Benedict needs a flame sparked without sulfur — he chooses flint and steel for this.

and it isn't the easiest to light, but being practiced, it happens quickly enough. with the fire off of the feather pinched between two blood-stained fingertips, Benedict holds it to the talisman. )

'By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou ‭art‭, and unto dust shalt thou return.' ( the curse of Adam, born from dust in God's hand, and condemned back to dust for the sin he took, a final price after a promised life of toil for naught.

Ben holds the image of the golem dissolving to that very dust as the vivid flame on the dwindling feather and disintegrating fire flare in the sheen of the sweat of his own brow. )

[ The smell of human blood calls to him; finish the job, puncture its throat, drink deeply and feel the way it shares the human's power and then grows a hundredfold inside of his own body. Having a fight with a creature constructed of stone and clay is, in that sense, a boon.

The scent of angel feathers burning, by contrast, is an unsettling thing. Perhaps that helps keep Alucard safely away from Benedict, even more than the necessity of fighting the golem away from the man who could alter his fate with a few simple words. ]

Those sorcerers do love their Adam references. [ The golem's baked-clay skin seems to crackle like an abandoned and dried out riverbed after the verse is read. It's a silent signal that the spell holding it so closely together is broken by Benedict's human magic.

It's only a final blow from there, and the entire lopsided creature begins crumbling in onto itself. The plume of dust off of it is enough to choke even Alucard, and he covers his mouth as he backs up several paces, only not hitting Benedict directly because he can hear where his heartbeat signals his presence behind him. ]

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Wrathion is not good at staying idle.

He has sharp focus, unceasing drive and a constant desire to be taking action.

Unfortunately, taking action in general tends to require one to know what the correct action would be.

Currently, he's draped across a sofa like a lazy cat -- taking up the entire thing while he reads a book he's retrieved from Ben's library. If it was chosen specifically or on some whim is hard to tell, but the restless lines of tension are visible in his body anyway. As much as he tries to present himself in an indolent, carefree way where possible in truth everything about him is fiery. His opinions are strong, stubborn, unwavering unless talked down with clearly presented evidence. It's simply all about attitude. A buffer, to keep people from getting too close. To keep them seeing when a word strikes too hard, from seeing when he cares perhaps too much. Wrathion tries desperately not to wear his heart on his sleeve, but he simply isn't as good at hiding it as he'd like.

Perhaps, with that in mind, being bound to such a level-headed human was a blessing.

It hadn't been his first choice. Wrathion has long known that dragons were a dying race for a reason. They'd been hunted to extinction for their seeming fits of violence and madness, driven into hiding, and as far as most people knew were entirely a myth. For those more savvy, they were still long gone.

Apart from Wrathion.

Wrathion was, as far as he knew, the last living dragon. There were still intact eggs, of course, but there's no guarantee a dragon egg will hatch -- even hidden as they were in the dark, deep, warm places of the earth. So Wrathion was the last, and he had no intention of experiencing the same fate. Of listening to the whispers. Of giving in to the same madness his family had, being controlled and possessed then struck down. That was the problem, after all, with dragons -- creatures so highly attuned to magic. To the movements of things beyond the veil, as it were. Wrathion had thought he was stronger than his father, stronger than those who came before him. He has begun to fear he was wrong. He had begun to have dreams, to

So, a tether then. A tether to someone versed in the craft who can sharply rein him in should it become necessary. Something which benefits them both. Wrathion is, of course, useful to keep this way -- he has powerful magic, can change his shape on his whims, is more than capable of throwing himself into the path of danger and protecting Benedict should the occasion arise. He's even knowledgeable on plenty of topics, although carefully reading before acting has been something he's had to learn. A lot of said knowledge is gained through dangerous experimentation.

The core problem, he knows, beyond any manner of personal clashes will be that... Humans live short lives. He's not considering that in depth, it's a problem that hopefully will not come to pass for many years yet.

Right now, the tethered dragon is simply a man with long waves of dark hair, brightly gleaming gold earrings and bangles who is impatiently flipping through a book. He has the look of someone working himself up toward saying something, but who is hoping if he sighs and huffs enough first he might be asked to do so. It hasn't worked so far.

He snaps the book shut finally, turns glowing red eyes over toward where Benedict is sitting and makes the executive decision that the only way he'll get his attention is to pick his chosen topic right back up as if they never dropped it.

"All I'm saying," he continues, as if they hadn't called a truce already for an hour or so. "Is you should consider the bigger picture. You must trust me, Dearborn. There are forces at work that will seek to destroy you as much as they will me, especially now we work together."

Admittedly, Wrathion is working on rumours. On whispers he hears in his sleep, on gut feeling -- yet surely the gut feeling of a dragon must count for something?

Ben sits here upon his domestic throne, a brandy-hued leather chair situated at his desk — grandeur is not in his wheelhouse, but while efficiency and purpose are the cornerstones of his home, profession, and life, he certainly pours a little more of this intention into what serves him most. He enjoys the pensive lulls of his home, less common now that he has adopted to himself a creature facing the tragic threat of illness and extinction, certainly a humanitarian cause despite the non-human species of his case. Ben would be first time argue that true humanitarianism, at its highest, should be a cooperation and mercy that extends toward all living things.

Alas, what is gained for dragon-kind, is at the cost of...the privacy and relaxing quiet of one poor man just trying to do his best.

Ben has been idle and quiet in the interim since their last remarks, about fifteen minutes ago — but now, he goes strangely still, paused firmly in his work as one falls victim to Medusa's cursed gaze, when Wrathion picks back up suddenly, bursting back to life in the middle of his train of thought that...Ben had been foolish enough to believe had fully left the station by now.

The impatient sigh that escapes Ben is not unlike the sounds Wrathion has been building into the air for these long, crawling minutes.

"You know, I've reviewed about half of this thesis from this graduate group, who have worked for their entire graduateship, half a decade according to the cover letter...and here I am, halfway finished only, and I find myself diligently interrupted."

Ben shifts, sliding a marker in between the pages before flipping the paperwork shut, before rubbing at his forehead with one hand, arm planting now on his desk. "I'm ambitious about my concerns for humanity, but I know what is outside of my jurisdiction. Moreover, I'm just as concerned about preserving the last of you as I am preserving the abundance of humanity." If only they weren't wide-spread inclined to act dangerously, ignorantly, and stupidly... Ben can't account for those actions, only wince at them wearily. That's an issue for later debate.

He turns from his desk finally, still seated, shoulders geometrically rigid even under a simple button-up shirt, dressed down to the barest requirements while in polite company...as he is always subject now to having this recently-established familiar appearing from out of nowhere (from the next room, usually.) When Ben levels his gaze upon Wrathion, finally, he carries with him the very air of impatience that an instructor finds for their most disruptive student, brow stern but allowing for an arch to convey a withered-dead amusement to their conduct. Ben's lips are thin, stretched into a level line.

"But I'm still failing to understand where this paranoia of yours is coming from. I'm all for proactivity, but you're starting to make me look carefree." Which is...probably impossible for Ben. He can't go ten minutes without another 'did I leave the stove on?' caliber thought running through his mind. "I'm sure there are plenty of forces in existence that would love to victimize me, but that is hardly a new phenomenon." While not untrue, that last bit is...sort of meant to be mirthful. Except that Ben doesn't find it pleasant enough to laugh. Every day is a struggle.