Victor/Vickie Richards

► Species: Human

► Sex: Originally male, becomes female by around the age of 30

► Age: Mentally the same age as Tabitha but physically stuck in prepubescence

► Description (male): Victor looks like an 8-10 year old boy. 4ft 5in tall - above average for one of his perceived age - and weighs 65lbs. Shaggy black hair with bangs hiding his eyes. Usually has a serious facial expression.

► Description (female): Almost identical to Tabitha. 5ft 6in tall and between 100 and 120lbs in weight. Dyes hair a variety of colours to help people differentiate the two. Physically fit due to interest in sports.

► Siblings: Tabitha Richards, fraternal twin

► Country of birth: England

► Misc: Vic and Tabitha practice magic

Worldbuilding Details

Most humans in this world are unable to practice magic and do not know that it exists. The few who have, must learn how to unlock their powers, normally during age 6 to 12.

Magic

Magic comes in a few styles and will be explored in other documents. Ones relevant to this story include:

Transmutation

Transmutation can be done on humans (e.g., turning people into frogs, changing a person’s gender), to turn one object into another, or to enhance a person or animal’s natural strength, speed, and resilience. It also lasts longer than most other styles, for years if the magician invests enough energy.

A transmuter can create an item that can be worn by another person to transmute them. Such items are capable of storing enough energy to keep the wearer in transmuted form indefinitely. However, once it is removed, the spell exerted on the individual’s body switches its energy source to the person themselves, and if they don’t want the transmutation to fade, they must deliberately invest their own energy. This can quickly become exhausting or non-transmuters.

Conjuring

Conjuring bridges the disciplines of Evocation and Divination, which allows a conjurer to easily draw on the abilities of both schools. A conjurer can create fireballs, invoke items to use on a short-term basis, and get an occasional glimpse into the future. Conjuring is mainly the creation of items such as pencils, nearly unbreakable swords, or food and water (although they’re nutritionally poorer than real food). Ultimately conjuring is the ability to will an object into existence.

Divination

The strongest style of magic, which allows a person to see glimpses of the future, however the visions tend to be brief and lack many details. Diviners usually have no choice but to see the visions their gift presents to them.

Vic is an original character who may or may not appear in a story in the future. Born a boy cursed to die before puberty, he and his sister devised a plan to allow him to experience adulthood by having his sister mould him into her own image. Vic is bright and intelligent, competitive, and likes having a few good friends.

Trust & Confidence

Baby

Victor and his twin Tabitha were born to Carol Richards.

The Richards were a powerful family so Carol had magical powers, specifically divination. She always foresaw how her relationships would end so usually remained distant from other people. This wasn't a happy situation for her: she loved her family, but she had seen the dark things they were capable of. Her powers were not fully developed.

She knew of a curse placed on her family, in which every son would die before he reached the age of 14. She had already seen her brother die to this curse so she understandably didn't want any children of hers to suffer the same fate.

800 years prior to Carol’s life, a family more powerful than the Richards had cursed them to humiliate them into submission. They chose this curse in particular to prevent any males in the family from growing into full adulthood and having full access to the Richards' wealth and power. The curse was made before women had had the same legal power as adult men, so as the Richards became a family composed entirely of women and boys, their status and resources dwindled. By the current day they no longer had any particular prominence in the magical community.

This curse had been made in a time when neither homosexuality nor transgender identities were accepted in society and were often judged harshly. To place a curse on the boys of a family meant that pressuring them to find ways of avoiding being men to evade the curse. As a result the curse did its intended job but hadn’t been neutralised nor revoked by the time Carol reached adulthood despite the decreased power of the Richards. However, the bitterness of the family rivalry had long-since faded, and to Carol, the curse was simply a fact of life.

Carol felt the biological urge to have children of her own, and saw her own future. She didn't get to see very much detail, just enough to know that she would bear two. She decided to do everything she could to thwart the curse just in case either or both of her children were born male.

She sought out the wording of the curse. It stated: "no male shall ever bud". This meant that it prevented males in the Richards line from starting puberty. Carol believed she could work with this. She painstakingly researched the family who had cursed her own, for male representatives who had donated to sperm banks. One of them had, so she paid to be impregnated with him. She hoped that by making her own children part of the bloodline that had cursed hers, that they would be immune to the curse.

In due time Carol became pregnant with twins, and she also learned that one of her twins was a boy. She gave birth and took to caring for them alone.

Carol's usual habit was to withdraw from other people to protect herself from relationships going bad or ending, but she bonded with her own children. Sometimes she found this difficult as she was so used to remaining aloof, but her love for her twins mostly overcame this. It was enough for her two babies who felt seen, cared for, and safe with her.

Carol had always provided for herself by using her clairvoyance: by picking winning scratch-cards and other betting resources, and by foreseeing big changes in the stock market and investing accordingly. However, she deliberately avoided becoming rich as she believed that to be overly successful would attract suspicion. Indeed, occasionally she drew the attention of power-brokers and mobsters, and when this happened she would remove herself and her children from the area before said mobsters arrived. She also worked as a fortune teller from time to time.

She was able to foresee if any new partner would go on to cheat on her, and quickly ended relationships in which this happened. She didn't settle down with anyone at all because of this, and over time accrued a string of casual lovers throughout Vic and Tabitha’s childhoods. These included men and women.

Freedom & Self-Determination

Toddler

As the twins grew into toddlers, Carol began to hire nannies during the day so that she could work and run errands.

Victor and Tabitha appeared to develop like normal children. They were as close as could be and loved each other’s company.

This showed in one of their favourite forms of play. Vic may or may not have intuitively understood his curse. It is possible he felt that he would die if he grew too much. His potential understanding of this became clear when his nanny discovered a sure-fire way to amuse him by building towers of blocks. Although he could not have properly understood it at the time, the appeal lay in the message that, "if my protector does the building/growing/developing for me, then I don’t have to and I'll survive".

The game only became more amusing to Vic when Tab joined in and knocked the bricks over! Whenever Vic saw 'his' tower being knocked down, it helped to reinforce his intuitive belief that his development was being curtailed – but added the new message that it was being done by his friends. He interpreted this as them warding off the curse, or perhaps mocking it.

Throughout all of this, his mother remained a strong presence in his life. Having a precognition-capable mum made Vic's first autonomous choice as a growing toddler a contradiction in terms. Carol may not have been able to see the whole future, but she was able to use common-sense to plan ahead and make sure that she offered her children only good choices to ensure they got a favourable outcome. For example, she didn't offer the twins an unhealthy versus healthy breakfast choice, such as sugary cereal or peanut butter on toast, because they might pick the sugary cereal and develop an unhealthy taste for sugar. Instead she offered them two healthy choices, like peanut butter on toast or oatmeal. This gave Vic the illusion of choice and a resulting satisfaction that he had autonomy over his life, and Carol got to relax knowing that her toddlers always made good choices. She did this in many areas of their lives.

Overall, Vic felt confident in his own choices as he believed them to be fully autonomous. He grew up with lower levels of self-doubt than most children, and Carol experienced him as cooperative, even when he was trying not to be. As a result she gave Vic messages of “you cooperate with me and I like that!”, and Vic liked believing that he was being ‘good’.

Aside from his love of brick towers, Vic also liked animals and anything creative. He carried these interests over into his Ambition stage.

Ambition

Young childhood

Victor continued to love building things. His favourite toys were stacking-bricks, Lincoln Logs, and Lego. Tabitha continued to love knocking over his projects. Victor still didn't mind this and actually enjoyed preparing something for Tabitha to bulldoze through. If an outside observer were to watch the two, they could easily believe that the twins had a secret system for this.

For Vic, this whole process became a form of practice for boundary-setting. In the earliest days of their game, Tabitha had gone ahead and destroyed the towers made by the nanny or Vic before he'd been ready. He enjoyed the obvious pleasure Tabitha took in destruction but quickly learned that establishing a rule that she wasn't allowed to destroy it until he said so also felt good. He enjoyed watching her squirm until he was ready, and he enjoyed having control.

Victor generally behaved himself with his nannies, although he tended to have his own ideas about whether he would tidy up his blocks or not. Sometimes he felt as if he hadn't achieved what he'd set out to achieve with them, and would stubbornly refuse to clean them up until he felt ready.

Despite Carol's tendency to distance herself from her exes, some continued to be a part of the Richards' lives even after the relationships ended. As such Victor and Tabitha viewed these people as extended family members.

Carol never introduced her twins to the rest of the family. This was because her family was involved in criminal activities including kidnap, extortion, and other unpleasant and dangerous acts. Also for this reason, she had never spoken to them of her precognition, nor her goal of breaking the family curse. If she had, it was possible they would have sold her out.

Carol may not have had strong bonds with her own family, but her connection with her twins was powerful, and she was deeply protective of them. If anybody upset or threatened (or seemed to be threatening) them, she would become a veritable force of nature to protect them.

As for the twins themselves, they became more physically active at this age and started attending school. They particularly enjoyed sports and loved running around on the playground, laughing and screaming with the new friends they made there.

Yet, however much Vic expanded his friendship network, he remained fiercely loyal to Tabitha and refused to take part in any games where she was excluded. Tabitha wasn’t quite as fierce about including Vic in her group play, but she nonetheless preferred to cultivate friendships with other girls who happily accepted Vic into their games.

Playing with girls prompted the predictable insults from the other boys. Sometimes he was called a “sissy” for it but he rarely responded to these taunts. Instead, he flaunted the fun he was having to make them jealous. Vic also played in a more traditionally masculine group with whom he sometimes played without Tab.

As good as Vic was at cooperating with others, he loved to win, and sometimes made an insufferable winner. Tabitha discovered that didn’t like playing board games with him because when he won, he could be very smug about it. Carol noticed this and believed it to be something he had learned from one of the people she had cut out of their lives.

Productivity

Older childhood

Victor may have enjoyed being active, but that didn’t make him messy or untidy. He liked to keep his room and other areas neat. Perhaps that was a result of playing at keeping house with his sister and her friends, or perhaps of Carol’s overall attitude towards keeping things in order. Either way, by the time he reached the age of 7 he had firmly picked up a habit of being well-organised.

Over time, Vic gradually picked up on Carol’s underlying tension. She hid it well and was used to managing life with knowledge of how some things would work out, but it wasn’t until Vic grew old enough to compare how carefully Carol planned her life with how his friends’ parents managed their own lives that he realised how burdened Carol was. There was little he could do about that so he watched out for her as best he could, and contributed as well as he could to freeing her of any burden he placed on her. With incomplete information and relatively little in the way of resources, he did this by making a point of being cheerful and independent.

He did well in school. In fact, he got higher grades than Tabitha. The family weren’t aware at the time, but Tab had ADHD which left her feeling disorganised and easily bored by school work. The family would come to recognise this later and adjust for it with medication and by organising her interests.

Victor liked the idea of being very useful to the wider community, perhaps as a police officer or doctor. At this time he didn’t know what an engineer was, but if he had, then the idea of being paid to build things would have appealed to him. He liked the idea of a career that would require him to be self-sufficient.

He adjusted his approach to socialising at school at around this time. While he enjoyed team-work in team sports and working with Tabitha, he didn’t particularly like the idea of getting to know more people, and if he already knew the rules of a game, he felt ready to move on to a new one. Vic had noticed enough ridicule directed towards himself and Tab that he no longer felt indiscriminately sociable, so he became more emotionally distant towards strangers. That isn’t to say he walled himself off from others entirely: he was bright enough to pick up quickly on signs that a person was accepting of girls or feminine boys, and he used this to get the measure of a new person.

He and Tabitha remained close and were very good at showing a united front towards others. Even if they had a quarrel between themselves, no outsider would be able to tell.

One day, Carol told the twins about the existence of magic, helped them identify their own primary magical abilities, and began schooling them in how to use them. Tabitha was a transmuter, while Vic was a conjurer.

With Vic being so outgoing and Tabitha having a short attention-span, Carol had to make absolutely sure that both children understood that they should not use magic outside of the house, except in an emergency. They largely complied with this, although Vic found that being able to conjure stationery was helpful. Whenever Carol became aware that Vic had done this she would reproach him.

Child to Adult Transition

Adolescence

Carol had feared the time when Vic was due to reach puberty. She watched him carefully, and quietly hoped that her plan to diffuse the curse had worked.

The truth only came to light gradually. As time went on Carol pieced together what was happening. Her plan either hadn’t worked or had only partially worked, as Vic survived but never entered puberty and halted in his ageing. While the other boys in his age group got bigger and stronger than the girls, Vic remained small and light-limbed.

Tabitha started to mature, and Vic began to feel as if he was being left behind. At first people assured him that he was simply a late bloomer, but the longer it went on, the plainer the truth became to Carol: the curse wasn’t necessarily that the male offspring would die, but that they would remain children and never be able to make their way in the adult world. She feared that Vic would have difficulty adjusting to this.

Soon Carol recognised the full truth: that in the past, with mental health being relatively poorly understood, most cursed boys would eventually seek suicide to escape their situation. This offered Carol a spark of hope, but not a very strong one. While mental health was far better catered to in modern times, Vic himself could hardly explain his situation to a therapist without the risk that he would be labelled delusional, and any sensible mental health professional would attempt to work on fixing his ‘delusion’ rather than his depression.

This was when Carol decided to tell the twins about the curse, in the hope that if Vic better understood his situation then he would develop his own mental fortitude without the need for a professional.

Vic was deeply upset by the news. For him, it meant that the teasing for being a “sissy” wouldn’t stop and that he would be left behind by his friends and Tabitha. He began to resent anyone who had matured more than himself. He believed that their lives were unburdened and just “better” than his. He even began to resent Tabitha for it.

He had been able to cope with being insulted for playing with his sister and other girls, but that had been his choice and he had made it from a place of autonomy. To be trapped in a child’s body while everybody else got to enjoy the autonomy of becoming an adult was infuriating to him.

On the twins’ 13th birthday Tabitha presented Vic with a plan to use her magic to turn him into a physical copy of herself. Vic didn’t like this at first and rejected it. However, he remembered her offer.

Vic finally decided to try it the following summer. Again, his autonomy was important to him and he decided that while he didn’t want to be mistaken for Tabitha – a very real possibility for a spell like this – having the choice to appear in public in a pubescent or post-pubescent body would allow him to temporarily escape his situation whenever he wanted. He begged Tabitha to go ahead with it.

The spell required the creation of an amulet for him to wear so Tabitha made him one. Once he transformed for the first time, Vic was understandably full of questions, not least how to act when presenting as a girl.

Carol decided to help Vic out by giving him a fresh start where he could change his gender presentation with a much-reduced risk of backlash from the people who already knew him as male. She moved to the US. As part of this she sold the family estate, to free up some capital so that she wouldn’t have to gamble for a while. She also introduced the idea to the twins that they would be able to pretend there were three youngsters and her in their group: Vic, Tabitha, and their sister or cousin.

Tabitha’s powers of transmutation had their limits. The copy of her body that she had made wouldn’t age. She updated it once per year, but this had the effect that Vickie appeared to leap from age 14 to 15, then 16, and so on without doing the interim ageing. It made Vickie’s ageing process look strange to her new friends and acquaintances, but without the knowledge that she was presenting a fake body, nobody understood it so mostly avoided mentioning it.

Whatever problems the spell presented, Victor used it often. Whenever he went out as a girl, he called himself “Vic” or “Vickie”.

The spell had a few other quirks that Vic had to be mindful of. Vickie would last 5 or 6 hours after Vic removed the amulet (or if it were ever to be destroyed or taken from him). Anybody with magical sight who looked at him during this lag time would spot that Vickie was an illusion: they would see an aura streaming from her and cracks appearing on the body. Vic was capable of exerting energy to maintain his Vickie body for longer, but this required transmutation skill which he lacked an affinity for, so it took tremendous energy for him to do so. It also prevented him from being able to use his magic to do other things.

Another quirk of the spell was the politics involved with who had control over the amulet’s magic. For this spell, that was Tabitha, which put Vic at her mercy. Tabitha quickly realised this and used it to her advantage. While she loved Vic and had no ill-feeling towards him, she was quite taken with the power she had over him and bargained with him that she would only let him keep the amulet, and would only update it for him, if he did things for her in return. She copied his homework to submit herself, had him side with her when the family went to dinner to ensure that they went somewhere of her choice, took his lunch money, and enjoyed many other ‘favours’ that Vic had little option but to comply with. She did her best to be the responsible ‘older’ sister, but she was too chaotic and spontaneous to be content just with being generous, and exercised her new power over Vic more than was fair. 

After the family settled in America Vic and Tabitha were enrolled in school. This time they did so with Vic presenting as Vickie, and as Tabitha’s sister, younger by two years.

The enmity between the twins slowly deepened over time. Tabitha continued to hold Vic to ransom over the amulet’s powers. If Victor complained too much then Tab would take the newest amulet away and give him an older one, which forced Vic to live as a younger girl again. This did not sit well at all with Vic, given how much he hated his autonomy being taken away.

Ironically, in some ways Vic would have been a better candidate to cast the transmutation spell. Her mind was more organized than Tab’s so had a better knack for memorizing and applying spells. The amulet itself essentially contained a reference point, which Vic could theoretically use as a starting point to generate her body herself, and would be able to do so without using the amulet at all after she’d completed the spell a few times.

In practice however, it was still impossible for Vic to actually cast the spell. There were a three reasons for this. Firstly, Tabitha had been blessed with this spell by Aite, A goddess of chaos. Aite’s methods were imprecise and hard to describe, making them difficult to teach or learn. Secondly, Vic’s gift was in conjuring, not transmutation, which put her on the back foot when it came to mastering transmutation. Conjuring only required a moment’s concentration and then the caster could forget about the spell, but transmutation required sustained concentration. Indeed, it would have been better for the twins if they had each received the others’ gifts instead. Thirdly, Vic’s real body was smaller and weaker than that of an adult, which meant that she had less energy to expend on magic than an older teenager or adult would, and transmutation required huge amounts of energy.

Vic rarely took her amulet off, and wore it even when she slept.

Tabitha’s power games weren’t the full extent of her interference with Vickie. She was able to make changes to Vic’s new body whenever she wanted and occasionally did so without Vic’s knowledge, such as by changing her eye colour. However, Tab’s ADHD made it difficult for her to maintain the concentration needed to hold the transformation in place for longer than a few minutes.

Vic didn’t take long to pick up on what Tab was doing, felt very put out about it, and learned to be watchful for whenever Tabitha seemed to be concentrating. The first time Vic called Tabitha out on it, she played her trump card of taking away Vic’s ‘older Vickie’ amulet and giving her one with the one that made Vic look younger.

For a while Vic uncomfortably accepted defeat over any changes Tab made, but eventually got her autonomy back by purposefully writing the wrong answers in homework to mislead Tab.

Vic looked after both of her bodies well by keeping fit with martial arts and track training, so that she had plenty of energy with which to cast spells. In addition to this she went through a ‘witch’ phase in terms of her preferred style of dress and presentation.

Vickie had her first sexual experience at 16 or 17 years of age with a boy called Matt, in her bedroom. Matt, who had no idea what the amulet was for, removed it during their foreplay, and Vic made a mental note to put it back on as soon as possible afterwards. However, after the act they both passed out and Vic only woke up hours later. When she did, she had reverted back to her male body.

Carol and Tab learned of this because when Matt woke up he screamed in horror at finding a boy in the bed. When they went to investigate, they found him in obvious distress and Vic in tears. Carol tried to use her magic to calm Matt down, but this went disastrously wrong because the spell required skill at enchantment, which was not a school she was competent in.

Neither Tabitha nor Carol believed that Vic was mentally mature enough to cope with anything more than platonic love. However, they were not entirely correct about this. Vic’s constant use of an older body had left an imprint on Vic, including mature neural activity, which had allowed Vic’s native brain to bridge the gap to adulthood.

Carol’s efforts to calm Matt down had been noticed by a nameless band of wizards who watched over the use of magic in the world, and they intervened. Neither Carol, Vic, nor Tab would ever know, but the wizards abducted and lobotomised Matt, then abandoned him in an unfamiliar location to make sure he would never talk about his encounter with magic.

Vic’s distressing experience helped to break up the ongoing fight that Vic and Tab had been engaging in for so many years, and at last they began to see one another as friends again.

Vickie understood the danger Matt had found himself in, so when he disappeared she assumed that he had absconded by his own choice. She understood his motivation to do this but was devastated that he never contacted her again nor returned any of her calls. Carol and Tab did their best to comfort her, but Vic had far more to deal with than ‘just’ a broken heart.

Vickie resented being anchored to a boy’s body and her situation with Matt had brought this resentment to a head. She regarded it as something that interfered with her new life but had tolerated the situation until this point. She decided to find a way to erase Victor permanently.

Tab sensed all of this and realised that the hold she had over Vickie was unhelpful, so she taught Vickie how to create her own amulets. The handover process involved Tabitha switching from copying herself to making a near-copy. This allowed Vickie to edit in her own adjustments, which in turn allowed her to personalise the body and make the changes she believed needed to be made as she aged.

Indeed, Vic went above and beyond this and made a new amulet without Carol or Tab’s knowledge. She’d taken a dislike to being under anybody else’s thumb, and being able to make her own female body gave her the control she wanted.

She also wanted to go out into the world and find herself. Vickie recognised that one of her biggest barriers to doing so was her mother’s foresight, so she dedicated herself to learning how to thwart it by learning about it. She did this by testing it. This included trying to uncover anything and everything that Carol may have tried to keep secret. Carol believed that this was Vickie being an adolescent and wanting to defy her mother or improve her autonomy by testing things out. As such, she engaged with Vickie on that level and entirely missed Vic’s plan to leave and explore the world.

In time Vickie left Carol and Tabitha and went on a several-years long journey of self-discovery.

Closeness in Relationships

Young adulthood

Vickie spent a while decompressing and discovering herself. She went through a late adolescence of sorts to experience life with complete freedom. After she felt that she had done enough of this, she considered what she wanted from her life.

She wanted to break the curse, if such a thing was possible.

She researched it, and concluded that the key to breaking the curse lay in marrying into the family that had cursed her own. According to her research, the best candidate for marriage into the cursing family was a man named Arnold, so she arranged to meet him.

She ‘accidentally’ bumped into him at a coffee shop. The two got to know each other, and Vickie courted him from there. Arnold liked her, and courted her back.

Despite his connection to a magical family Arnold hadn’t learned to use magic, so he lacked the ability to see Vickie’s amulet for what it was. Instead he assumed that it was just a piece of jewellery that Vickie liked, and thought little more of it.

She didn’t tell Arnold about the curse, her plan, or who she really was. She always felt somewhat guilty about this, but breaking the curse was more important to her than being completely truthful.

In time they married. Vickie became pregnant, and this broke the curse. Vickie felt a release of energy the moment she conceived, and believed that the curse had lifted. She later confirmed it by removing one amulet to replace it with another: her body did not revert to Victor’s. It no longer existed; she had truly become Vickie.

The reason that the curse had lifted was as follows: the males of the cursed family had never been able to continue the family line on account of being unable to go through puberty. By adopting a post-pubescent body and having a child, Vic had overcome the curse, which had broken it. When the curse had originally been cast, women had been second-class citizens to such a degree that having a male member of the family turn himself female would have been unthinkable, and if it had been done would have cemented the idea of the cursed family being ‘lesser’ than the cursing family. With the equality between the sexes being far more minor in the current day, Vic had made the sex change necessary, which had allowed her to break the curse.

She surrendered forever the idea of ever being Victor again. She was far happier being female and certainly with being an adult, but she honoured Victor on her birthdays by burning a candle for him. Aside from that, her memories of being a boy grew dimmer over time, and that suited Vickie well.

Vickie’s pregnancy went to full term, and she gave birth to a boy whom she named Timothy, partly in tribute to her sister. When Tim reached the age of 5, Vickie reconnected with Carol and Tabitha to introduce Tim to them. This was a highly symbolic moment for her as it was the moment she put her faith in her belief that the curse had truly lifted, a celebration of sorts.

Her marriage came to feel more natural too. Over the years, Vickie learned to love Arnold, so the marriage became one of genuine, mutual tenderness.

She watched Tim grow, reach puberty… and pass it safely, with no problems other than the expected feelings of awkwardness. This was the final confirmation she needed, to know that she had succeeded in lifting the curse, and she finally, completely relaxed.

Passing on Responsibility

Middle age

Tabitha had two children. Vickie watched Tim find a girlfriend and settle down to have his own family. Most of the children that Tab and Tim had were boys, and all of them had strong magic.

End of Life

Old age

Vickie passed on as much information as she could to her children and grandchildren, to be aware of the ways in which they practised magic and mindful of the magical community of which they were a part, and to know that life, magical or mundane, had the potential to uproot their lives at any time. If and when it did, she also encouraged them not to dwell on the bad, but to celebrate the good that these changes brought.