Do Cas and Cain have any hobbies?

Casper likes coding, skateboarding, and finding cool spots while he skates around the city. He’ll usually sit and look at them for a bit and try to put the colours and compositions into a picture he’ll never draw.

Cain is just a huge nerd and will literally fall into astrophysics or sorcery research holes for days. Past Casper taught him how to skateboard once, and he’s now incorporated breaks on the patio to fall off a skateboard into his semi-feral research holes. He also likes to cook, read, and take long walks on the beach.

Oh, and revising his plans for his next apocalypse while snacking on hearts. Essential for unwinding.

If you were to draw Cas as a ghoul what would it look like?

So I’d want to draw Casper as the ghoul with a real sense of uncanny valley. It’d look best next to normal Casper, and it’d be just like him – same face, same clothes, same hair – but its eyes are pitch black and almost gory at the edges, and instead of lips, it’s just got this wide, torn grin full of sharp black teeth.

The postures would be almost identical, but the ghoul would be just off in that way that’d make you shiver if you looked in the mirror and your reflection stands like all its bones had been broken and put back together again.

For Casper: If Cain freed you and gave you a million dollars, what would you want to do with your life?

Casper: I … Fuck, a million? That’s a lot. How the hell am I meant to even think about a million? A yacht maybe? Then … You know, it’s pretty sad that a million wouldn’t be enough to forget about everything for the rest of my life, isn’t it? I don’t want a million dollars, I’ll only fuck myself up with it. I’m better breaking even.

 I'm getting that yacht though.

What's the story behind our lord and saviour Mackie? (How did Casper get him?)

Okay so I’ve kind of got two contrasting backstories for Mackie and I like them both. In one, Casper buys Mackie for himself when he first runs away from home so he’s got something to keep him company.

In the other, Jack takes Casper to the fair and spends about half an hour and twenty quid trying to win Mackie from a stall while he’s too drunk to see straight. He never wins Mackie, just jumps into the stall and steals him, then legs it out of the fair with security chasing him.

Casper is understandably pissed off. Neither of them can quite remember where Mackie came from in the morning.

Has Cas had relationships before Jack and what happened to his parents? 

So, this came up in the story after I posted the Q&A I believe. Casper's mum died when he was born, and his dad was abusive. He had one serious relationship with ... his cousin. Which was the source of all the ways he's fucked up that didn't already come from his dad. After running away to the city, he ended up in a string of one-night stands and flings that did, in fact, continue well into his relationship with Jack.

When Cain kidnapped Casper, how was I supposed to know?

Casper: I—What kind of fucking question do you call that? Do you lot just blink and smile after some weirdo tells you he’s gonna kidnap you, knocks you out cold, then you wake up in his bed?

Why doesn’t Cas remember any of his past lives?

Despite being, in part, a “you have it or you don’t” type of power, sorcery can also be present in such miniscule quantities the semi-sentient “fuel” behind sorcery effectively just passes you by. Think of it like squibs in Harry Potter – they are technically magical, but they can’t do a lick and if you don’t study them, there’s nothing to prove otherwise.

That means that for the purposes of the curse, Casper doesn’t have a connection to the planes. Because he doesn’t have a connection to the planes, the curse doesn’t pull his consciousness along to the next universe like it does Cain, Levi, and Ella. It’s not actually the “old” Casper without memories that Cain’s encountering; he’s meeting a fresh new parallel universe Casper who’s got no way of knowing AU!Casper existed.

Which is why it’s kinda sad that Cain keeps clinging to the fact it’s “his” Casper when it’s just … not…

Some extra lore about the magic system of Stains maybe?

I mean I’m going to get into about lore in these questions below anyway but! I’m going to talk about the monsters because I think they're great but they never fit in Stains.

So the Veil and Void are effectively different dimensions, which means they’ve generated an ecosystem of sorts unique to each one. The monsters are at varying levels of sentience, including a “king” species with intellect equal to humans despite being totally alien from them.

Monsters in the Void reflect the world they live in – the Void is a hellish, broiling pit of volcanos and a sky of churning ash, and the monsters within it are one and all stripped down to raw, violent flesh. In the Void, you can hardly tell because the flesh crusts over into a blackened crisp almost like the rock around them. Some monsters develop this further into a form of armour baked into their skin. Some just … suffer.

Their shapes resemble things we know in the most basic ways, but I take a lot of inspiration from that fleshy Cronenberg vibe when I think about their shapes. There’s actually one the crew colloquially called a Cronenberg Demon because of the way, when things get close to it, it twists their flesh into hideous, unrecognisable shapes.

In the Veil, most low-level, weak monsters are very insectile. They’re entirely encased in chitinous exoskeletons and come in sizes between the Centipede, which hammers across the Veil like a freight train the height and width of a house, and the tiny Xu, which form into swarms and devour anything they go past.

At higher levels, the creatures shed the defensive exoskeleton and become more humanoid in shape. White skin, withered limbs, inhuman skulls and faces broken only by a mouth. Walkers trail the desert at the height of a skyscraper and charge beams of pure black Veil energy from the wide mouths in their hammerhead skulls. Kii are almost like humans and live in underground conclaves like dusty scholars, harbouring power that could sink continents at the tips of their fingers.

Can I get every episode but it’s just Levi?

Stains: The Levi Special (What do you mean it’s not fabulous, darling?) will be coming soon to bookstores near you.

But legit, I’ve got something resembling a plot for a Levi novella that I’m dying to write. It’ll have vibes like the TV show “You” and he'll be out in all his psychotically manipulative glory.

Is Casper schizophrenic/schizoaffective?

Short answer: No, not at all.  I enjoy using warped perception and hallucinations as a tool of creating unease in my writing, and for Casper, it’s something that he suffers exclusively on very hard lows.

Long answer: I’m assuming everyone here reading the Q&A has finished the story so – the ghoul stuck around for so long because it ended up being a projection of Casper’s drizzle of magical ability (the Veil can be twisted into illusions, and I have a villain somewhere in the ‘verse who uses them prolifically) so when the ghoul first came to him when he was close to a psychotic break, some bit of him believed the ghoul should stay, so he created it. It wouldn’t have worked if he was anywhere but in that house with Cain, because the Veil concentrates so powerfully around Cain.

You’ll see it by watching what the ghoul does in different scenes. He’s always acting on the things that Casper, at the most gut level, feels and wants. There’s also quite a few instances in Stains where I’ve shown the ghoul cluing into things before Casper does, which is some heightened, sub-conscious sense from his drizzle of magic.

What’s your favorite way Levi killed Cas

Did someone say Cain’s Christmas trauma?

So in something like the fourth life, Cain’s late finding Casper. They go on a date and have a great time, get drunk and messy, and Casper takes him back to his flat to fuck. All’s going well until drunk Cain spots a single silver reindeer dangling just above the entrance. Now it’s November, so it’s a little weird but enough to shrug it off. Fake snow dusts the floor as they stumble through the lobby, and inside that dingy little lift, tinsel rings the railings and someone’s stuck little stars to all the corners of the mirrors. More silver reindeer dangle from the ceiling, a little procession like they’re circling prey.

Cain’s gets a tad uneasy when they stop on Casper’s floor. Down the hall one way, there’s nothing, but the other, it's decked out. Casper, laughing at the strange décor, leads him down the decorated route. Subtle silvers and blues, nothing garish, just those winds of tinsel above the doors and fake snow on the floor. Baubles dangle from the ceiling and garlands of fairy lights mark a trail. The most purposeful thing amongst it all is the silver reindeers. Strung low so they almost brush Cain’s hair, they prance a trail all the way to Casper’s door.

It’s the only one with fairy lights around it.

Casper snorts and makes some dark comment about his creep of a roommate before letting them both in.

It’d be black inside the flat if it wasn’t for the fairy lights. They glint off the knife Levi plucks against his thumb, a set of antlers askew atop his head. The reindeer procession marches right up to where Ella still arranges tinsel at the base of a pyramid of glistening baubles.

Now, Cain’s totally fucked. It’d be fine if it was anyone but Levi, but Levi’s a nuclear weapon this life while Cain has hardly bothered. Not to mention, there’s a sorcerous circle on the floor that caged Cain as soon as he walked inside. Casper’s just as pissed, and he definitely got some lines of something in before they left the bar. He doesn’t even realise anything’s wrong until Levi’s already got him, and Cain can't do a thing but listen to him scream.

Levi’s always been a bit of an artist. No one really needs me to go into how sharp baubles are when you shatter them.

When will Casper and Cain go on their ski trip so Cain can kill another MWD disguised as a yeti? Then they make love on its pelt in front of the crackling fire as the snow falls in fluffy blankets in the wintry night.

They actually have this ski trip planned for their honeymoon, and Cain has already paid the random MWD to show up so he can bravely slay the opposition and woo Casper with a warm pelt and murder.

Casper: 🌝

Cain: 🥺🥺 Everything for you, love.