#the setup wizard

hey guys, Merlin here. Just wanted to let you know that we'll be taking a hiatus for a month or two from Tumblr to recover from Holiday Burnout and just rest while we finish plotting the rest of the story. We temporarily delisted the story while we tweaked a few things, but it should be back up and public again. Keep sending asks and/or feedback if you like, but it'll be a while before we respond.

I was tagged by @midnighthostifs. Thanks for tagging us, bestie!

What was your first favorite book

What is your current favorite book

What Genre is your favorite, reading or writing!

Favorite trope?

If you could, what world building or story would you love to have written yourself?

Your favorite line (or three) that you've written?

Favorite medium to experience a story? (Book, IF, video game, movie, etc)

Favorite character versus your favorite character to write: Who would win?

What story keeps inspiring you to keep writing?

Random fun fact about you, your writing, your interests!

TAG ANYONE ELSE YOU WANT TO PESTER WITH THIS!

1.) What was your first favorite book?

Charon

IF: Probably Wayhaven. I blitzed through the books. To this day I'm still in a will they-won't they with A lmao Books: The Magic Treehouse series. I reread them in my 20s and they were still cute

Merlin

(I don't actually read any IFs lol) The Redwall series. I was a weird little kid and before I knew anything else about me with certainty, I knew I wanted to be a mouse with a sword. I met Brian Jacques when I was in 5th grade and was a member of the Official Fanclub until his death.

Thanks for reading and I really hope you enjoy what we have planned! As soon as we settled on our main ROs, we knew that we wanted them each to have exclusive content, so no there's not a way to get the woman/man tag while selecting genderqueer. We also wanted to make the genderqueer option as expansive and customizable as we could handle (considering this story is our first), because it's so rare to find options like it/its or genderfluid. But then the reward for choosing a binary gender and missing out on those unique reactivities is a bonus RO.

I will also say that, just in general, this story is not a romance and while the romantic bond will net you unique scenes and potential endings, our aro-ace asses are locked in for making the platonic (and queerplatonic!) bonds you form just as meaningful if not more so.

That part absolutely cracked me up. 10/10, relatable on many levels, but...

Who cares if Sofia had always warned him to leave through the same door he came in.

This? This absolutely froze me the next second. So the library is HAUNTED. Cursed, probably. A no-no. Follow the rules or die. It was chilling, I'm just trying to shake it off.

Also... I think there's a parent pronoun variable missing here?

A weight settles in your chest. It had been six months now. Six months since you came home from a night out to find them hanging from the overhead fan in their bedroom. The image was burned into your mind, pushing to the forefront when you least expected it, like now. You try to shove it away, fight against the overpowering …

But it settled like a weight on my stomach. Heavy, final.

And... Oh my god??? Just got through the whole demo. The ending startled me! Like, what do you mean that's all??? I need more! More intrigue! More of the haunted narrative and haunted library! Gosh, it felt like when the first episode of a new TV show ends and you already know for a fact it's going to become a favorite, so you're extra mad at the credits and having to stay put and patiently wait for the next episode. But I will wait patiently. Or impatiently, but not rude and pestering. Aaaaa!!! It was really good!!! Absolutely loved Seth and how he went "nope" at that bad feeling he got.

Props to both of you for the demo!!!

thank you so much, Anon! Unfortunately the demo only covers the prologue and about half/a third of the first chapter, but there IS more to come. Im glad you liked those moments in particular - we were pretty proud of those too :)

The parent pronouns are all "they" for now, but that's just temporary. This is my first coding experience in over a decade (shout out to Dr Sean and his CS112: Intro to C language and Logic Based Coding class lmfao), so part of why it ends so quickly is because we realized that having more people in a scene would require ... pronoun reactivity! Parent pronouns, additional tags for gender identity beyond "trans = true/false", and a personality/mood tracker (?????????) are all on my to do list, and will be added in retroactively to the demo when we update with the rest of Ch 1.

I am genuinely so stoked that you're enjoying what we have so far. That feeling of sitting down to watch another intense episode of your favorite "creature of the week" show is EXACTLY what we were hoping for! There's lots of forces at work in The Library and hopefully as we reveal more it will only raise more questions for you the reader 😈

Thank you so much for reading AND sending in your thoughts... we've been giggling over this ask all day

When I was a child, like many of you, I was obsessed with Harry Potter. But unlike many of you, the fanfics I entertained in my mind (though I didn't yet know they were called that) were not about the canonical characters, but all about an American Muggle-born witch OC who looked up her magical "symptoms" online and ended up finding the "Worldwide Wizarding Web". Even back then, when I was as young as a first-year, I thought it was ridiculous that the wizarding world hadn't yet entered the 21st century at all, and I decided to rectify the situation.

Well, imagine my satisfaction when, fifteen years later, Hogwarts finally "hopped aboard the Information Technology train" and hired an IT staff to deal with the Wizarding Web and all the Muggle-borns and half-bloods who refused to give up their smartphones when they went off to school! The Setup Wizard is a fan blog that posts daily updates on these IT adventures at Hogwarts, and oh my gosh, it is so much fun.

Okay, duckies -- I’ve seen many posts floating around about magic and technology mixing at Hogwarts and have individually contacted some of those rebloggers when their tags are super enthusiastic about the idea, but now that I’ve seen enough and told at LEAST three or four people individually it’s time to make a public post.