Ask Luna #7
From: Allandra
Hi Luna! In your first adventure with the fateweaver, you manage to alter your curse to a good luck power and channel it to Alex. may I ask you how do you do it and is it possible to do it from then onwards?
Oh yeah, that one! At the time, the way I figured it was that my curse brings bad luck to everything it touches around me, and good luck to me. But it’s all one integrated spell – it’s not like there are two separate parts to it. So it ought to be possible to project the good-luck aspect outside myself, right? Well, that was what I tried, and it worked. I’m still proud of that – it was a nice feeling to do something the mages couldn’t for once!
After the fateweaver thing I spent a while practising, trying to see if I could do it again. It took a bit of work, but I did – only problem is, I can’t do it every time. Sometimes I can’t quite get it, or I do but it suddenly slips. And that’s a bit of an issue, because as far as I can figure the good-luck thing needs me to TOUCH whoever I’m giving it to. Which means that if it screws up midway through, all of a sudden I’d be touching them with my normal curse. And if they were in enough trouble that they needed the good-luck power but suddenly got a dose of the opposite . . . yeah, you can probably guess why I don’t want to take that risk.
The good news is I did manage to get the failure rate down the longer I practised it. Maybe I ought to give it another try, we’re out of duelling season anyway.
From: Ellen
Hi, How does someone give up their magic?
Wanting to, basically. It’s not hard. Your magic is based off your personality, right? So if you really, really don’t want to have the ability to use and sense magic, and you keep wanting it long enough, then the kind of person you are will change. Once it changes enough, you lose the ability.
I see it happen from time to time – someone just vanishes out of class, and when I ask what happened I get told they dropped out. I guess if that’s what they want, it’s better for them. Of course, they’ve actually got a choice.
From: Catherine
How do your parents get together if your mother is indeed a cursed adept? Wouldn’t ur father be cursed too unless he is immune to magic?
From: Wordwizard
Dear Luna:
I remember reading that you inherited your good/bad luck curse at birth, unlike the predecessors in your line–which implies that your mother died giving birth to you–which seems distinctly UNlucky–unless it was through a deliberate action–was she MURDERED? I also wonder how any infant could survive to riper years if every care-giver who touched it got injured or died through bad luck….I hope this is not too painful a personal question for you to answer–it’s just that the facts of your existence do not seem to add up!
Yeah, I figured this one’d come up sooner or later.
I did think about just deleting these two, and if I’d got them a couple of years ago I probably would have. Since you’re reading this, you can probably tell that I didn’t.
Okay, let’s take it from the top.
The curse on my family tree affects the youngest female descendant of the original ancestor of mine who got cursed. That means it doesn’t just go ‘down’ the family tree, it goes ‘sideways’. So if the victim dies childless – which they do – then the curse hops to another part of the family. Which means that somewhere, some distantly related family suddenly gets a curse on their youngest daughter that’ll hurt/kill anyone who gets too close to her. The more they try to help the worse it gets, and if they’re normals (which odds are they are) they won’t understand why or how it’s happening or how to stop it. Hopefully you should be beginning to understand by now just what a sick bitch the mage who came up with this curse was.
Next: adepts and mages aren’t born able to use their magic. It grows with them and only develops to full strength as they get close to adulthood – sometime in their teens, usually. For me it was earlier. I started noticing things when I was ten, everyone else started noticing things when I was thirteen, and by the time I’d hit sixteen it was ‘don’t touch me if you want to live’. Meant I got to have a normal childhood until I was thirteen or so. I’m still not sure if that made it better or worse.
As for ‘are my parents immune to magic’ . . . they’re not. They also don’t believe in it. I’m going to leave it at that.
