Serpentine Squiggles

You awake beneath a yellow sky over a hungry god. You know how this story ends. Unfortunately, you’re starting at the beginning.

Which is to say, this is Vigor Mortis SI.

Protag SIs into a starving orphan in skyhope. Not vita, but a rando. Given this is styled as a SI, protag would be aimless and lacking motivation, just rottin away. Until they have a brush with death (a mugging perhaps? or witness to a violent crime? some vagary or other of the street life), and they realize they need to get stronger, seize peace and prosperity for themselves by any means necessary.

(Good place for a title drop)

Anyway, this is where they awaken their talent: they have an ultra special talent unlike anyone else in setting: chronomacy. Haven’t decided on the exact power (limited precognition, maybe?), but it wouldn’t be too powerful (one benefit of precog in particular is you could plausibly give it a self​-​cognimancy aspect as a required secondary power.)

Anyway, so they decide to get to work. Now, this brush with death is not like, a complete mindset fix. Because their first plan after awakening their talent? Suicide by vita.

Or the opposite, rather. Their plan is simple: they know Vita is a lich, so all they have to do is kill Vita, then she’ll instinctively possess them. then, if their personality takes precedence over Vita, they now can leverage the power of a lich. If it doesn’t, it’s not their problem anymore.

Except as soon as they see Vita, they realize they can’t do it. They loved vita as a character, cried at her struggles, and imagining inflicting more suffering — no, they can’t do it.

Scratch that plan, then. Will they have the will to kill any main characters? That’s a new mission constraint, I guess: protect the main cast.

Still, what do they do now?

Well, if they could choose to be anywhere in the setting, where would that be? And it’s obvious: Liriope.

So their main objective is clear: ascend to bug heaven. but how do they do that, if the athantos don’t give a shit about savages?

So they formulate a plan. The broad strokes go like this:

• Step 1. git gud enough to track down the burrow hounds before vita’s team gets to them.
  • in a way, this echoes their first plan: simply let a clear one take control of their body, and after that they dont have to worry about or take responsibility for any of their choice.
  • but a more interesting way to spin it might be to explore how you could cooperate with a clear one if you know what’s coming.
    • some kind of precommitment, or just being like “ok, future clear self, you’re me and i have a plan to protect your kind, our interests are aligned, lets work together”.
    • (or even more interesting still, if the protag’s talent is self​-​cognimancy: they could remove key memories (the nature of the children of nawra, for instance?), and making arrangements so that the clear one cannot get access to that info without letting the original take control sometimes)
  • anyway that’s just step one of the plan
• side objective: figure out how to become a lich (the nawra did it, ideally). the plan doesnt hinge on this, but it would absolutely help
• Step 2: use the clear ones to seize political power. You can use one of the tiny villages as a testing grounds, infecting the population, ironing out your methods, and then using them as a power base to leverage your takeover of skyhope.
  • This step is super dubious and will absolutely go wrong:
    • What happens if people other than Vita have talents they can use to no​-​sell clear one possesions? (actually, how do you deal with vita herself? ).
    • What happens when after enough sequences of possessions, the clear ones experience value drift?
    • Or hell, what happens when they possess Galdra or Cassia and the minion realizes they’re powerful enough to call the shots?
  • also, dunno when this would happen, but when the protag encounters Penny, they realize they hate her and try to kill her. This potentially blows up in their face, somehow.
• Step 3: ideally, step 2 let the protag control the templars, but in the worst case, they can simply mobilize a clear one army. This step is simple: retrieve To​-​Kill from Site 4, either peacefully or through a raid. Possess To​-​Kill with a clear one — this will give you knowledge of Athanatos language.
• Step 4: To​-​Kill will cooperate with the plans as soon as you explain that you intend to conquer the Plentiful Wood and hand it to Liriope on a silver platter.
• Step 5: Conquer Verdantop
• Step 6: Negotiate with Liriope. You’ll give them the island in exchange for one of their queens having a daughter in whom your soul will be inserted.
• Step 7: You are now a immortal bug person. Win condition achieved. Enjoy insectoid heaven.

Obviously each step of this has the potential to go pretty gruesomely wrong. One complication I can already think of is the fact that there should be other SIs walking around, with their own agendas. (A Vrothizo SI anyone?)

Eventually it’d get to a point where the clear one infestation and Site 4 raid blows up in the SI’s face and they’re being pursued by the mightiest magic users on the island, and they reach out to Liriope not from a position of strength, but begging for their help — they do why? Because someone flat out got SIed into a princess. Fucking lucky.

This is probably the person who figured out what’s actully going on and explains it to the protag

Because the big twist of this fic?

It’s not a SI at all.

Here’s the actual premise of the fic:

An alien civilization creates AI and experiences an apocolypse of some cause. A bunch of people get their brains scanned and sent out on a space probe hoping to be preserved. Some time after the events of Vigor Mortis, this probe enters the Mistwatcher cloud, and Nawra intercepts it and figures out what the deal is simultaneously, magic is advancing. Electromancy was only the first new school to be discovered; they eventually discovered chronomancy and push it to its limits.

So this whole fic is nawra’s fix fic. She’s sending people backwards in time with historical knowledge disguised as if they had come from a world where VM is fictional. The protagonist is from another world, but they aren’t human, just cognimancy’d into forgetting that. There would strange discrepencies to foreshadow this.

(This would probably also justify some amount of Vita​-​like flesh dysphoria.)

Anyway, this setup explains some things.

Why doesnt the protag want to kill Vita? Because nawra loves Vita.

Why does the protag want to kill penny? Because nawra hates penny.

Why is the protag willing to do whatever it takes to get to Liriope? Because entering the progenitor’s sphere of control is as good as entering Nawra’s sphere of control, and precog knowledge reaching Nawra is her win condition.

Not sure how to conclude this fic.

The cheap way to do it would just have the protag use their chronomancy power to undo everything that happened.
Getting their bug body at the cost of their memory or whatever.
But that’s like
Such pointless cop out
if the conclusion of the fic is “fuck off and let canon happen lol”
But like
It’s genuinely hard to intervene and “fix” canon I think
The mistwatcher problem overshadows everything and nothing you can do really puts a dent in that