Hark, an Infopost
Jan. 5th, 2024 08:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mustbeawitchEveryone please welcome Miss Lydia Bennet, hailing from a few years after the events of Pride & Prejudice and roughly eighteen months after the events of The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch, a Pride & Prejudice variation, or published fanfic, by Melinda Taub, which addresses the burning question I know we've all asked ourselves: "What if Lydia Bennet had magical powers?"
And if you're now going, "Wait she's coming from post-canon? Didn't Lydia get married in Pride & Prejudice? Shouldn't she be Lydia Wickham?" don't worry, I will clear that misconception up, along with some others you may have.
We all know what happens in Pride & Prejudice, right? Specifically, how Lydia is the fifth daughter of the Bennets of Longbourn, vain, silly, and flighty, and elopes from Brighton with a rake of an officer named George Wickham, while her two oldest sisters marry rich men and live happily ever after. Well. Lydia would like to inform you that there are some inaccuracies there. Starting with, Lydia is not the fifth daughter of the Bennets of Longbourn, she is, like her mother before her, the seventh, and, if I may quote the book, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter must be a witch."
And if you're now thinking, "Where did the extra daughters come from?" it's simple: no one ever talks about the three Bennet girls before Lydia who died, because pre-modern infant mortality rates are depressing. And now you are counting on your fingers and looking even more confused, and the answer to that riddle is even simpler: Kitty is not really a Bennet daughter. Kitty is a cat. When Lydia was very small, she used to pretend that her mother's cat was her sister, and the adults around her indulged her whim and played along...and because she was a budding witch, eventually they all began to really believe it, and their belief and her magic made it so.
Additionally, George Wickham is not really George Wickham. The original George Wickham is, in fact, quite dead, having lost his soul to a demon in a card game not long after his failed attempt to elope from Ramsgate with Georgiana Darcy the summer before the events of Pride & Prejudice. What is walking around in his skin now is a son of the Great Power Wormenheart, "fire and rock poured into man shape," which had never really experienced the world before possessing Wickham's body and finds that he quite likes it....oh, and Lydia never eloped with him from Brighton. It's a very long story (book length, in fact) that involves Lydia and Wickham fleeing Brighton in the middle of the night with the Witch Queen of Brighton, who was just coming into her power, from a society of local witches who didn't want to have a queen. Eventually, through Wormenheart's machinations, they did end up at the altar, but Lydia Did A Thing and they didn't get married. Instead, Wickham became Lydia's familiar instead of Kitty, although he wasn't thrilled about it at first.
So, Lydia and Wickham are not yet married, although Mr. Darcy (who would really prefer to be excluded from this narrative) is the only mundane person to know the truth, and Lydia still refers to herself as Lydia Bennet, not Lydia Wickham, when it is safe to do so, hence her arrival in Fandom under that name.
Following some other events during which Lydia helped Georgiana Darcy with a curse she happened to find herself under, Lydia, along with Wickham (with whom she is now engaged in an odd sort of belated courtship as he works on improving himself despite being a demon and all), now works as a sort of second-in-command and agent-at-large for the Witch Queen, who is mostly stuck in Brighton now that she has fully come into her power. Lydia has been sent to Fandom to investigate some odd rumors that reached her benefactress, as well as to receive some education. La, imagine Lydia attending a school like some bluestocking! What a lark.
As Lydia points out in The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch, she was fifteen during the events of Pride & Prejudice and you can't expect fifteen-year-olds not to be ridiculous, and also that was her as presented through the lens of Elizabeth's view of her, and Elizabeth never knew she was a witch or took her very seriously, plus by the time Lydia arrives in Fandom she will have been through some shit and matured a lot. Don't get me wrong, she's far from perfect. Lydia is vain and self-centered, easily distracted with a short attention span, and considers herself "wicked" and to be of bad character, but despite this and everything I just said, she demonstrates over and over again throughout the book that she's very forgiving and actually will go out of her way to help others, even at her own detriment. She just doesn't think very hard about it, or she convinces herself, for example, that she's helping Georgiana because it will annoy Darcy.
There isn't much physical description of Lydia in either Pride & Prejudice or The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch, but the former says that she is, though the youngest, the tallest of the Bennet sisters, and in the latter she has had a late growth spurt that leaves her with gowns too short at the ankles, meaning she must now be quite tall for a woman. I wanted to use Jena Malone from the 2005 adaptation of Pride & Prejudice for my PB, but there just aren't icons, so Lily James's Lydia from Pride & Prejudice & Zombies it is. (Also Lily James from War & Peace, as it was a mixed icon set.)
Lydia hails most recently from the (fictional) island of Sainte Josephine in the Caribbean, where Wickham remains tending to their benefactress's business concerns, and given the time period and the location of said island I wish to make this clear up front: Miss Maria Lambe, the civilian identity of the Witch Queen of Brighton, inherited half of said island and the indigo plantations thereupon during the course of The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch, and at the end of the book dispatched Lydia and Wickham to free the slaves in her estate and oversee the transition of her properties to an economy not based on chattel slavery. Lydia is coming to us from the year of 1810, because while I doubt Lydia would pay much attention to the War of 1812 anyway I didn't want to deal with it yet.
Lydia's interests include fashion, dancing, flirting with cute boys, and the dark arts. She will be majoring inspells & hexes liberal arts spells & hexes.
Lydia's magic comes in the form of spells, ranging from minor things like glamouring her gowns to look better up through scrying, curses and the lifting/breaking of same, healing (hideously difficult; don't expect her to make a habit of that), and a few miscellaneous major workings. These spells may involve merely mental effort or something like an incantation, or they may require the use of some material objects, like ribbons braided a certain way or herbs gathered under a certain phase of the moon. Because Lydia is a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, and she has a familiar, and her familiar is an actual demon, she is a very powerful witch...but there's a catch: all magic in Lydia's universe comes with a price.
The spell-tithe, or spell-price, usually comes in the form of some kind of pain or sacrifice, and can be as minor as plucking out a few hairs to summon sparks, or it can be as major as sacrificing, say, true love, and the price must be paid. It doesn't necessarily have to be paid by the witch herself--her familiar can pay it, or someone else close to her or who agrees to do so...whether quite willingly or not. Harriet Forster, who is Lydia's mentor and friend for part of the book, is quite fond of befuddling the "honor guard" assigned by her husband, Colonel Forster, with magic to get them to cut themselves to pay her spell-prices for her. (Lydia isn't ever really comfortable with this, but she's young and Harriet assures her it's perfectly normal magical practice, so she goes along with it up to a point.)
If necessary, a witch can do a spell "on credit," but the price will come due. This is risky, since the witch never knows what the price will be and thus what misfortune might be awaiting her around the corner, and is best avoided. (Lydia and her Aunt Phillips, also a witch, have an ongoing quarrel about what the spell-price was when Lydia turned Kitty into her sister, since even though it was a total accident, the magic still had to be paid for.)
For a minor working, the spell-tithe may be temporary: Lydia and Kitty used to trade Mary's dancing ability away to improve theirs on the nights of assemblies, justifying it by Mary never dancing anyway (perhaps because she kept finding herself forgetting how...), but she got it back at the end of the night. For a major working, it is decidedly permanent: Georgiana Darcy sacrifices a recently-completed mathematical proof she's been working on for most of the book, and as soon as she throws it into the fire she not only forgets the proof, she knows intuitively she'll never be able to recreate it. (It's fine; she's thinking of taking up chemistry next. Georgiana is a delight in this book, and also, she turns into an owl.)
The thing is, Lydia is, whatever she thinks of herself, a very moral witch. She objects to animal sacrifice to the point of stealing animals other witches were planning to use for that purpose, and is never comfortable with blood sacrifice, especially when it's other people's blood and they're not consciously willing. She also doesn't like using her own blood or injuring herself, but that's more because she's a bit of a wuss. So she has to find other, less convenient things to pay her tithes with, and that can make her life very difficult indeed, and seriously limit what she's capable of even though she is innately very powerful.
Some spells Lydia's capable of do involve taking away a portion of someone's free will, like a love spell or something like a persuasion spell. Obviously, before casting one of these on someone I'll get OOC permission from everyone involved, and the same before using someone else to pay a spell-tithe in any way, which Lydia will probably also get IC permission for.
One thing Lydia definitely cannot do is identify other magical types on sight. She is surprised several times to learn that some other woman of her acquaintance is also a witch, and while she subconsciously is aware there is something 'off' about Wickham, she doesn't have the first clue it's that he's a demon until he tells her so. So if your character is more powerful than your run of the mill witch, Lydia might have a vague notion there's something odd about them, especially once she realizes how many people in Fandom have something odd about them in general, but she won't have the first clue what it is until she's told or sees enough evidence to pierce her veil of obliviousness. But if your character would typically be able to recognize a witch on sight, feel free to be able to tell that's what Lydia is.
And that's Lydia! For info on my other on-island characters, Gray is over here and Raiden's over here.
Wow, this got long. TL;DR: Lydia's a witch; any differences from Pride & Prejudice that come up are likely deliberate. Questions? Comments? Pie?
And if you're now going, "Wait she's coming from post-canon? Didn't Lydia get married in Pride & Prejudice? Shouldn't she be Lydia Wickham?" don't worry, I will clear that misconception up, along with some others you may have.
We all know what happens in Pride & Prejudice, right? Specifically, how Lydia is the fifth daughter of the Bennets of Longbourn, vain, silly, and flighty, and elopes from Brighton with a rake of an officer named George Wickham, while her two oldest sisters marry rich men and live happily ever after. Well. Lydia would like to inform you that there are some inaccuracies there. Starting with, Lydia is not the fifth daughter of the Bennets of Longbourn, she is, like her mother before her, the seventh, and, if I may quote the book, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter must be a witch."
And if you're now thinking, "Where did the extra daughters come from?" it's simple: no one ever talks about the three Bennet girls before Lydia who died, because pre-modern infant mortality rates are depressing. And now you are counting on your fingers and looking even more confused, and the answer to that riddle is even simpler: Kitty is not really a Bennet daughter. Kitty is a cat. When Lydia was very small, she used to pretend that her mother's cat was her sister, and the adults around her indulged her whim and played along...and because she was a budding witch, eventually they all began to really believe it, and their belief and her magic made it so.
Additionally, George Wickham is not really George Wickham. The original George Wickham is, in fact, quite dead, having lost his soul to a demon in a card game not long after his failed attempt to elope from Ramsgate with Georgiana Darcy the summer before the events of Pride & Prejudice. What is walking around in his skin now is a son of the Great Power Wormenheart, "fire and rock poured into man shape," which had never really experienced the world before possessing Wickham's body and finds that he quite likes it....oh, and Lydia never eloped with him from Brighton. It's a very long story (book length, in fact) that involves Lydia and Wickham fleeing Brighton in the middle of the night with the Witch Queen of Brighton, who was just coming into her power, from a society of local witches who didn't want to have a queen. Eventually, through Wormenheart's machinations, they did end up at the altar, but Lydia Did A Thing and they didn't get married. Instead, Wickham became Lydia's familiar instead of Kitty, although he wasn't thrilled about it at first.
So, Lydia and Wickham are not yet married, although Mr. Darcy (who would really prefer to be excluded from this narrative) is the only mundane person to know the truth, and Lydia still refers to herself as Lydia Bennet, not Lydia Wickham, when it is safe to do so, hence her arrival in Fandom under that name.
Following some other events during which Lydia helped Georgiana Darcy with a curse she happened to find herself under, Lydia, along with Wickham (with whom she is now engaged in an odd sort of belated courtship as he works on improving himself despite being a demon and all), now works as a sort of second-in-command and agent-at-large for the Witch Queen, who is mostly stuck in Brighton now that she has fully come into her power. Lydia has been sent to Fandom to investigate some odd rumors that reached her benefactress, as well as to receive some education. La, imagine Lydia attending a school like some bluestocking! What a lark.
As Lydia points out in The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch, she was fifteen during the events of Pride & Prejudice and you can't expect fifteen-year-olds not to be ridiculous, and also that was her as presented through the lens of Elizabeth's view of her, and Elizabeth never knew she was a witch or took her very seriously, plus by the time Lydia arrives in Fandom she will have been through some shit and matured a lot. Don't get me wrong, she's far from perfect. Lydia is vain and self-centered, easily distracted with a short attention span, and considers herself "wicked" and to be of bad character, but despite this and everything I just said, she demonstrates over and over again throughout the book that she's very forgiving and actually will go out of her way to help others, even at her own detriment. She just doesn't think very hard about it, or she convinces herself, for example, that she's helping Georgiana because it will annoy Darcy.
There isn't much physical description of Lydia in either Pride & Prejudice or The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch, but the former says that she is, though the youngest, the tallest of the Bennet sisters, and in the latter she has had a late growth spurt that leaves her with gowns too short at the ankles, meaning she must now be quite tall for a woman. I wanted to use Jena Malone from the 2005 adaptation of Pride & Prejudice for my PB, but there just aren't icons, so Lily James's Lydia from Pride & Prejudice & Zombies it is. (Also Lily James from War & Peace, as it was a mixed icon set.)
Lydia hails most recently from the (fictional) island of Sainte Josephine in the Caribbean, where Wickham remains tending to their benefactress's business concerns, and given the time period and the location of said island I wish to make this clear up front: Miss Maria Lambe, the civilian identity of the Witch Queen of Brighton, inherited half of said island and the indigo plantations thereupon during the course of The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch, and at the end of the book dispatched Lydia and Wickham to free the slaves in her estate and oversee the transition of her properties to an economy not based on chattel slavery. Lydia is coming to us from the year of 1810, because while I doubt Lydia would pay much attention to the War of 1812 anyway I didn't want to deal with it yet.
Lydia's interests include fashion, dancing, flirting with cute boys, and the dark arts. She will be majoring in
Lydia's magic comes in the form of spells, ranging from minor things like glamouring her gowns to look better up through scrying, curses and the lifting/breaking of same, healing (hideously difficult; don't expect her to make a habit of that), and a few miscellaneous major workings. These spells may involve merely mental effort or something like an incantation, or they may require the use of some material objects, like ribbons braided a certain way or herbs gathered under a certain phase of the moon. Because Lydia is a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, and she has a familiar, and her familiar is an actual demon, she is a very powerful witch...but there's a catch: all magic in Lydia's universe comes with a price.
The spell-tithe, or spell-price, usually comes in the form of some kind of pain or sacrifice, and can be as minor as plucking out a few hairs to summon sparks, or it can be as major as sacrificing, say, true love, and the price must be paid. It doesn't necessarily have to be paid by the witch herself--her familiar can pay it, or someone else close to her or who agrees to do so...whether quite willingly or not. Harriet Forster, who is Lydia's mentor and friend for part of the book, is quite fond of befuddling the "honor guard" assigned by her husband, Colonel Forster, with magic to get them to cut themselves to pay her spell-prices for her. (Lydia isn't ever really comfortable with this, but she's young and Harriet assures her it's perfectly normal magical practice, so she goes along with it up to a point.)
If necessary, a witch can do a spell "on credit," but the price will come due. This is risky, since the witch never knows what the price will be and thus what misfortune might be awaiting her around the corner, and is best avoided. (Lydia and her Aunt Phillips, also a witch, have an ongoing quarrel about what the spell-price was when Lydia turned Kitty into her sister, since even though it was a total accident, the magic still had to be paid for.)
For a minor working, the spell-tithe may be temporary: Lydia and Kitty used to trade Mary's dancing ability away to improve theirs on the nights of assemblies, justifying it by Mary never dancing anyway (perhaps because she kept finding herself forgetting how...), but she got it back at the end of the night. For a major working, it is decidedly permanent: Georgiana Darcy sacrifices a recently-completed mathematical proof she's been working on for most of the book, and as soon as she throws it into the fire she not only forgets the proof, she knows intuitively she'll never be able to recreate it. (It's fine; she's thinking of taking up chemistry next. Georgiana is a delight in this book, and also, she turns into an owl.)
The thing is, Lydia is, whatever she thinks of herself, a very moral witch. She objects to animal sacrifice to the point of stealing animals other witches were planning to use for that purpose, and is never comfortable with blood sacrifice, especially when it's other people's blood and they're not consciously willing. She also doesn't like using her own blood or injuring herself, but that's more because she's a bit of a wuss. So she has to find other, less convenient things to pay her tithes with, and that can make her life very difficult indeed, and seriously limit what she's capable of even though she is innately very powerful.
Some spells Lydia's capable of do involve taking away a portion of someone's free will, like a love spell or something like a persuasion spell. Obviously, before casting one of these on someone I'll get OOC permission from everyone involved, and the same before using someone else to pay a spell-tithe in any way, which Lydia will probably also get IC permission for.
One thing Lydia definitely cannot do is identify other magical types on sight. She is surprised several times to learn that some other woman of her acquaintance is also a witch, and while she subconsciously is aware there is something 'off' about Wickham, she doesn't have the first clue it's that he's a demon until he tells her so. So if your character is more powerful than your run of the mill witch, Lydia might have a vague notion there's something odd about them, especially once she realizes how many people in Fandom have something odd about them in general, but she won't have the first clue what it is until she's told or sees enough evidence to pierce her veil of obliviousness. But if your character would typically be able to recognize a witch on sight, feel free to be able to tell that's what Lydia is.
And that's Lydia! For info on my other on-island characters, Gray is over here and Raiden's over here.
Wow, this got long. TL;DR: Lydia's a witch; any differences from Pride & Prejudice that come up are likely deliberate. Questions? Comments? Pie?
no subject
Date: 2024-01-05 11:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-05 11:26 pm (UTC)It was four demons.
And I'm actively hunting them down because I don't want to deal with the consequences!
no subject
Date: 2024-01-05 11:36 pm (UTC)My demon comes when I call. Eventually.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-05 11:39 pm (UTC)...What does your demon do for you, exactly? Besides eventually show up?
no subject
Date: 2024-01-05 11:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-05 11:44 pm (UTC)