Tomorrow, a lord will be flayed alive. Once his flesh, freely given, is woven into a vast frame, enchanted scars will turn him into a living portal, a gift that could turn a blightstricken town into a bustling trade nexus.

Apnoe has woken up beside the same dead girl three nights in a row. The lord’s flaying is tomorrow‍ ‍—‍ same as it was for the last three nights. She’s the only one who’s noticed. Assassins lurk in the flaying festival’s crowds, and when they strike the lord dead, the whole town watches their dreams crumble, and then Apnoe wakes again as if from a dream. She knew this quite well; on the first night, she had killed him.

Scarred flesh grants magic. How deep a wound did it take to make every living soul in the city relive the same day? It wasn’t Apnoe’s, and she doesn’t know why only she remembers, but then again, most scars treat her differently. After all, she’s dead half the time.

Apnoe would kill to end this nightmare‍ ‍—‍ but it seems the only way out is saving a man who’ll die tomorrow anyway.

The Paresthesia Effect 

One rule governs cicatrices: flesh is sacred. Abilities can target nonliving matter, or living flesh, but there’s a dichotomy between them. Made specific, if a cicatrix targets metaflesh, it triggers a paresthesia response.

In most cases, attempting to manipulate flesh as if it were another material (consider a ‘midas touch’ cicatrix, or tactile telekinesis) results in simple negation. It doesn’t work, and the ostensible target is subject only to a tingling feeling, the jolt of someone stepping over their grave.

But if a cicatrix is overloaded by a powerful user, or is designed to affect flesh, it can bypass this resistance. But paresthesia is two‍-​pronged: if a cicatrix interacts with metaflesh, the two bodies become interconnected.

In short, affecting another user directly exposing the initiator to counterscarring. The simplest counterscar is simply enhancing the paresthesia response, increasing the threshold of power or purpose needed to bypass the resistance, but the returns diminish fast. Even journeyman level counterscarring must be more subtle. The attempted effect can be redirected or mitigated, but the real danger of counterscaring is mutually assured destruction.

A true, proper counterscar is an ability of its own, and serves as a promise: if you target me, I can target you with my counterscar. Are you willing to face that?

Apnoe 

Her cicatrix is ⸢Ephemeral Duality⸥

Left to drown in a lake one terrible night, she gasped her last breath. That breath was her, and when it bubbled to the surface, she became fresh air. So she dove back into the waters, to become her next breath. Her body reanimated, and crawled to the shore, and she gazed into her reflection. Face pale and bloodless, no pulse, and at length, she realized she wasn’t breathing.

In town, no one recognizes her as alive‍ ‍—‍ she is soulless, and her scarred flesh gives her the appearance of an enchanted corpse.

She’s now either a corpse or a ghost, but not both. The way it works is this: When she’s a corpse, no one can touch her. Punches, grabs, etc. don’t connect. Living things pass through her as if she’s not there. Spells that detect or target living things treat her as an object. As an corpse, she can only interact with inanimate things‍ ‍—‍ but this means that (say) weapons very much pose a risk. She’s outright immune to spells, except those that act through physical objects.

However, once she takes enough damage from a inanimate object, she exhales her last breath and becomes a ghost. As a ghost, no object can touch her. She can move through any obstacle. The nuance is that her body, her clothes, objects she’s holding, etc. become that breathe she exhales. So her motion is essentially limited to what air can move through. Solid walls? No. But anything with an opening, you can imagine her as a cloud she has full control over. She’s essentially unable to interact with physical objects in this form‍ ‍—‍ the force she can exert on nonliving things is equivalent to a gentle breeze. Living things, however, treat her as if she is now tangible, and people can touch her, and so can spells. when she takes damage as a ghost, she becomes a corpse again

Without the damage triggers, she cannot control when she switches, at least at story start.

Unsorted Notes 

the story would begin with the protag in some manner of Situation:tm:
possibly unrelated to the main plot, what matters is that she ends up encountering some girl as she dies tragically
the dying girl has an innate spell that allows her to put people in timeloops (specific limitations prob arent super important‍ ‍—‍ last person who touched her? can only trigger when she dies?)
what matters is her spell lets her specific a loop end condition, and she specifies “you have to stop <insert villain>”
said villain is a part of a terrorist organization that launches an attack (girl was the first casualty)
thus, the time loop is protag has to infiltrate some complex that’s crawling with terrorists wielding all sorts of wacky innate spells. there’s good guys and opportunists to recruit or clash with, and probably some subplots and wheels‍-​within‍-​wheels to find spinning

working title is like
The Mandragora Incident
dunno if that should be the name of the location or the terrorists

an atom of inspiration struck as i was stepping out of the shower
you know how a lot of magic systems will tie themselves to like, breath or blood
what if the texture gimmick of this system is that it’s skin

so, if you have unlocked your spell, you have magic glyphs or w/e glowing on your skin when you’re using it
getting damage directly impacts your ability to use your spell

one cute idea is that the look of your innate spell is called your “birthmark”

specifically, one possibility is that like, everyone has a birthmark right
but it’s in a random place
and before your awaken your spell, it’s invisible
it’s invisible because you first awaken your spell if you happen to get a wound that breaks the skin of your birthmark

also magic users would probably all have some innate healing factor

i was thinking the opposite, that this setting’s metaphysics would have skin = soul, so skin carries over between loops
so wounds are preserved (maybe there’s mechanics to the loop in case of death? or maybe the main character’s spell has a weird interaction that makes this less of a problem), but so are powerups
the main reason i was thinking this because i had the idea that a big bad guy would be a skinwalker with some meta‍-​spell
and either a) at some point, the protag loses, they get their skin stolen, and there’s loops where the villain gets to loop
or b) they have a patchwork skin motif, steal a bit of protags skin, and join the loop thereafter as some act 1 or act 2 disaster

the interaction 

hate to interrupt your liveread but i’ve been brainstorming Out of Skin & Time today and it’s unironically coming together
mfw the whole timeloop is gonna be the product of incredibly niche interactions between like five different powers

the characters involved are the maiden, the assassin, the guardian, the exponent, and the dead girl
here’s what happened
the maiden’s power is ⸢Endless Study⸥. when her power activates, she soultraps whatever she last touched, creating an spiritual copy of in her soul (represeted by a tattoo?). she has total control over this copy. she can copy a book and thereafter can read it at any time. the copy behaves identically to its counterpart (so copy a clock and it keeps ticking). she can pause the copy, and reset it to initial conditions.
so for instance, if she fought someone, she could touch them, soulcopy, then predict what they’d do by simulating them, even try out counterfactuals by reseting them. she doesnt pause time when interacting with her copies, but with training she could probably get pretty quick with it
the limit, besides requiring touch, is that she can only have one soulcopy at a time.

the assassin’s power is ⸢Mark & Proxy⸥. if he touches something with a soul, he can mark it as a proxy. thereafter, any physical or magical effect that targets him can be shunted to affect the proxy. the target doesnt need to be willing, but there’s a proxy buffer. let’s say 20%. every bit of damage shunted over fills this buffer, and when it’s filled, he can’t proxy more damage and needs a new proxy
the important thing to note is that the assassin’s power is proportional‍ ‍—‍ so proxying to a guy with 100 soul hp is lets him shunt twice as much damage as someone with 50 soul hp.

the guardian’s power is ⸢Veil of Cognizance⸥. basically, he can create a sphere through which no object or signal can pass without him allowing it. the caveat is that this sphere is mapped to his flesh, so if you wound him, you open up holes in the veil. but their hidden secondary power is that because the exterior maps to their skin, the interior maps to their soul. this gives them omniscience within the veil, but once you realize how it works, they’re suddenly super vulnerable to any soul‍-​targeting effects

here’s where i lay out the setup, but you can kinda figure it out already.
guardian’s veils usually aren’t that big, maybe enough to cover a single fight.
the exponent has some power‍-​boosting effect that scales up guardian so that his veil covers a far wider area.
and remember, assassin’s power is proportional to the soul he’s marked
so, exponent boosts guardian to lay a veil over a huge area, assassin marks guardian causes any effects targeting him to instead target guardian’s veil
and because it’s so vast, assassin is basically untouchable?

so assassin kills maiden, maiden awakens her power, and instinctively uses it on assassin
who proxies it to the veil
and her power is soulcopy, so she makes a predictive model of the entire area within the veil

now, remember our protagonist, dead girl? her power is ephemeral duality‍ ‍—‍ i.e., she’s either a corpse who can only be targeted by physical effects, or a ghost who can only be targeted by magical effects. when she’s a corpse, powers treat her as an object
and maiden’s power only resets the memories of living targets
so if maiden copies the veil when dead girl is a corpse, then when the copy is reset, she dodges the memory resetting effect!

wonder if should add a timestop power into the mix, or suppose that the loops are happening as the power unrolls a huge stack of the power trying to recursively copy itself copying itself n times

also on the other hand, astore was cooking something else and im not sure if it can fit into this setup
which was an idea that like, maiden dies and no one comes to save her except protag, and so she lives there several loops of protag saving her, then comforting her as she bleeds out or w/e
so like, protag becomes defined by that one moment of heroism in her eyes and she falls in love
and she eventually figures out her power in a way that lets protag loop instead of her

so the above is backplot; the story starts after maiden’s dead and protag realizes she’s in a loop and doesn’t know why, so the thematic throughline is protag viewing the loop as a hellish punishment, then when she realizes she can stop the terrorists, she comes to see it as a duty she’s been entrusted, and then when she finally uncovers the source of the loop, she comes to understand it as an act of love
(and maybe, alongside fighting the terrorists, some loops are spend investigating the maiden’s backstory, so even before the reveal, the story is haunted by the tragegy of this girl)

one other thought we had is that like, it’d probably cheapen the moment by a lot if this story’s equivalent of “Good morning, brother!” was an important character dying ‍-​‍-​ the pathos would be drained pretty quick by repetition
so instead of the loop starting with her death, it’d be a bit later (protag waking up the next day?)

another initial idea was that the girl’s body is like, rotting throughout every loop, and when she’s finally just dust and bones, the loops stops
maybe there’s other hints of a deteriorating loop

dont know if any this works with ambi’s “crazy power interaction” theory of the loop
(also another idea that’s harder to describe, where the maiden is some angelic voice at the beginning of the story who has to convince protag to let herself be affected by the power)

1) contemplating naming protag ‘apnoe’
2) thinking the power makes more sense if it’s corpse cant be targeted/affected magically, ghost cant be damaged physically
when i try to imagine it in action moment to moment, this is easier to parse out

‍-​‍-​‍-​

The Hellwara Dynasty 

the basic idea is that there’s this clan of people who share a bloodline cicatrix
(you ever read starry eyes?)
basic idea is that instead of bleeding when you cut them, wounds in their skin open up gateways to an extradimensional space
now, this has obvious basic applications‍ ‍—‍ these guys are kinda invulnerable to a lot of mundane attacks. shoot them, the bullets go into their space. slice them up, the blade just goes into their space
they have some control over stuff in their skinspace too, so they can leverage that against you. plus it functions as a sort of hammer space. easy for them to manage, say, fma handblades or something
to say nothing of just, coughing out traps or something
so you’d think these are some of the most powerful cicatrix users out there, right
but the crazy part is, none of that really matters in the modern age?

so the exact mechanics of the space are complex and require a lot of special training to master
but some time ago, a high level application of the birthmark was discovered that allows members of the clan can “bridge” their space to one another
early on this meant that letters or small parcels could be distributed across countries via two bridged spaces
but like
how big of an object can you transfer?
if you vivisected one of them, that widens (heh) the possibilities
the end result of this line of thought are big ol flesh portals, having these cicatrix users skinned and stretched to the broadest possible extent
creating magibiological nexuses of trade and travel

in the modern day, every major city has one of these flesh portals, and they are jealously guarded
the amount of prosperity connection to that network can get you could like, turn a backwater slum into a metropolis easily
as you might imagine, a lot of states would hunt down members of this clan and forcibly turn them into portals. there was probably a whole chapter of history comprised of wars shortly after the flesh portals were discovered. the bloodline users were all powerful, but with the whole world hunting them down? no shot
because of this, the only way for the clan to survive was to seclude themselves into a demiplane, and refuse to allow outsiders in

eventually an arrangement is settled on. whenever a clan member reaches the natural end of their life, they return to the material world and spend their last days turning themselves into a flesh portal
this a rare and momentous occasion, so a grand festival is held in their honor whenever this happens

so, you probably see where this is going, pretty much, don’t you?
the story takes place in a town that’s about to become a flesh portal city, the festival is underway.
obviously, there’s going to be a bunch of high level guards who are here to protect the spaceskin guy and all the rich festival going
there’s going to scoundrels and opportunists who are here to profit or parasitize off of the event
but there’s also going to be the true rogue elements: after all, the arrangement didnt make hunting down clan member any less tempting, only harder. these festivals are a narrow window of opportunity where a foreign state might abduct one, and use them for their own ends
(the soon‍-​to‍-​be‍-​portal would be a hard target, old and very magically experienced‍ ‍—‍ but i’m thinking other family members might attend an event like this. what if a small child of clan gets lost, in all the chaos?)
of course, maybe existing portal refuse to connect to “pirated” portals, and trying a stunt like this paints a huge target on your back. (but maybe there’s undergrown portal networks?)
but there’s other stunts you could pull. what if you simply take hostages, or threat to destroy the portal? you could make out like bandits
or maybe there’s a subtlety in the space mechanics, or a special power interaction, that might allow the villain to seize control of the whole network

but i think one of the more interesting things i could do, is have the villain’s true ambition be something more ideological.
what if they want to burn down the system? what if they think flesh portals are monstrous, the inequality they produce simply a way for the rich to shackle the world into a two tier system?

Metaflesh 

Every living thing has metaflesh, the substance of the soul. It mirrors the body in health, remembering its form. Come sickness or injury, the body refers to the metaflesh to guide recovery. 

Through every soul threads a divine nerve. When you die, you are stripped of metaflesh, reducing the body to rot while the divine thread pulls the soul somewhere beyond‍ ‍—‍ perhaps to an afterlife.

Every person possesses a ‘birthmark’. Different in every individual, the birthmark joins flesh to metaflesh. When damaged, the connection breaks, metaflesh stripped and pulled just as in death.

Except you can resist.

If the metaflesh clings fast to the body, the divine nerve is instead severed. The birthmark heals into a cicatrix. The supernatural energy of the soul is harnessed to restore the body to the state remembered in the metaflesh. A the cicatrix goes further still, engraving glowing runes and diagrams upon the skin to enchant it with special abilities.

The exact ability granted is subject to the particularities of birthmark location and injury type, as well as the specificities of the body and the victim. Everyone is unique; cicatrixes may be similar, but never the same.

Newly formed cicatrices are subject to the ‘first blood’ effect. For a brief period after formation, the users retains a profound capacity for regeneration, enough that awakening a cicatrix will ensure survival from all but the most extreme circumstances. The first blood is a symptom of the true result of cicatrix formation: uniting flesh and metaflesh.

As the cicatrix forms, the glowing lines upon the flesh shift, especially if the user must regenerate further damage. But the cicatrix will eventually “settle”, leaving the user with distinct patterns traced over their skin. Then, when the cicatrix activates, the patterns glow once more.

Because a cicatrix’s abilities stem from the exact pattern of lines, with appropriate inks it is possible to copy the pattern of cicatrix as a tattoo. After some time, the tattoo will imprint onto the users metaflesh.

This alone is insufficient to grant power; after all, a cicatrix unites flesh and soul. Thus, the initial tattoo have be a ‘false birthmark’ that serves to draw the soul close enough to force a connection. A binding to unite it without the flesh. This procedure also severs the divine nerve.

Natural or induced, this union animates a user’s skin. Fine control of the flesh becomes a skill, and a practiced user can achieve supernatural healing speed‍ ‍—‍ never as fast as the first blood, of course.

Though at first tattoo were copies of cicatrices, there are pronounced differences between them. Cicatrices are always functional; tattoos are subject to error, design flaws and oversights. Cicatrices are often broad and flexible; a tattoos (often as concession to minimizing error) are narrow and rigid. Most importantly, cicatrices grow with use, gradually shifting and evolving, and new lines branching off and expanding the power; tattoos fade and degrade.

They aren’t fully incompatible. Cicatrix users can get tattoos (though they may rub against and interfere with the scars), but tattoo users can no longer form cicatrices.

There are some motifs and principles to cicatrix typology.

Most cicatrices spill out from a flesh wound somewhere. Generally, these result in three broad classes of abilities.

• Grasp‍-​type: abilities that can trigger when the user’s skin comes into contact something
• Hide‍-​type: abilities that alter properties of the user’s skin, or trigger an effect anchored to the skin.
• Wound‍-​type: abilities that trigger when the user’s skin is broken.

A natural cicatrix is one triggered through normal biological processes. The common types are:

• Bite‍-​type: cicatrix formed from losing a tooth. Often results in abilities that trigger on bite, abilities that require or benefit from consumption, abilities revolving around ejecting or discarding things from the body. Because of how early these cicatrices will form, the user will have a long time to evolve into something more general.
• Cyclic‍-​type: cicatrix formed from menstruation. Can result in a number of abilities, but the defining feature is a cycle: either waxing/waning over the course of a month, or having a brief window of either great strength or weakness.
• Birth‍-​type: cicatrix formed in childbirth. Actually two categories; a cicatrix of the umbilical cord results in metaflesh of mother and child intermixing, granting both a similar ability. While in other cases, the mother suffers first blood during delivery.

A special cicatrix often results from injury to a particular organ.

• Eye‍-​type: rare and powerful, eye cicatrices can grant abilities that target anything in sight.
• Breath‍-​type: often ranged or area of effect abilities transmitted through the air.
• Voice‍-​type: often abilities that target things that hear the users’ voice
• Todo: internal organ damage?

The final type of cicatrix is the most mysterious. Esoteric cicatrices form from no visible wound at all. The brain is a part of the body, so a soul joined to flesh in the mind may be severed from mental anguish alone. Instead of first blood, this triggers a state of incomparable mania and psychosis, and resulting in a distinct transformation of the victim’s mind. Esoteric cicatrices follow almost no rules; and can have deeply conceptual effects.

Given that the nature of the soul implies that every person has a birthmark somewhere, why not create an army of cicatrices by inflicting total damage on someone’s body?

There are a few reasons this is unviable. For one, it’s unreliable. It’s unknown if birthmarks are triggered by any damage, or a certain type of damage is ‘fated’ to unlock it. Every type of injury can activate a cicatrix, but can every type activate any cicatrix? It’s also unknown if damage to a birthmark is sufficient to create a cicatrix ‍-​‍-​ can anyone become a cicatrix, or is there a hidden potential in only part of the population?

Every cicatrix is someone who clung to their flesh instead of following the divine thread to the afterlife ‍-​‍-​ does that mean any of them could have chosen to to leave instead? It’s difficult to imagine many clinging to the agony of total bodily disintegration.

One rare developmental abnormality results in a children becoming inverted. Soulflesh on this side, flesh on the other side. Sometimes, the inversion is immediately apparent: a woman gives birth to a concept.

A changeling is an inversion that, perhaps through a response to its mothers’ expectations, mimicks what a child is supposed to look like. Oddities may persist ‍-​‍-​ they may have impossible deformities, or their appearance changes, whether willed or not.

Soulflesh has an innate intuition for magic, and a changeling is nothing more than a soul enchanted to seem like skin.

This same plasticity means ‍-​‍-​ particularly if feared and rejected ‍-​‍-​ an inversion can mutate into a wholly inhuman state.

But like normal humans, inversions have birthmarks. Their first blood will grant them true flesh, confining the possibilities of their soul into a cicatrix. For this reason, this is a preferred approach for containing inversions for those who don’t wish to kill them outright.

i actually cant decide if i should keep the losing a tooth triggers
i kinda like it from a following premises to conclusions standpoint but it feels so ridiculous
“i got stabbed 20 times and left in a ditch to rot. what your backstory?”
“i lost a tooth and i cried”
what if nobody admits it was losing a tooth that did it
“yeah no sometimes you just naturally manifest it, trust me fam”

Power Templates

• When I touch something, I can…

• My skin is always…

• When I am wounded, I will…

• When I bite something…

• Every time my heart beats,

• Each month…

• When I work up a /sweat

• With each breath…

• When I hear something…

• When I close my eyes…

Plot 

i’m thinking one possible lead in would be like this
‍-​ apnoe’s scar means she lowkey freaks people out. she doesnt register as alive to magic, which means that she doesnt register as live to people’s senses. so people think she’s an enchanted corpse on the loose. might make this setting chill with necromancy on the whole, but enchanted corpses are just automata, so she gets dismissed and mistreated by most of society. doesnt help that she doesnt even understand her ability, so she cant really explain
‍-​ then this mysterious dude comes along and he knows. explains her ability to her, takes her seriously where almost nobody else does. he convinces her that she can blame all her problems on society, and we should tear it down. eventually, he reveals his plan to kill a portal lord. apnoe is actually perfect for it: in ghost form, she’s essentially embodied wind. portal lords are immune to physical damage, but they still need to breathe. so the plan is for his goons to set things up so that apnoe can sneak in and suffocate bro in his sleep or something
‍-​ on the train to the town where the portal lord will arrive, apnoe runs into this scholar girl studying, having a nice conversation. maybe she says something omnious, that in retrospect reveals that she’s figured out what apnoe’s here to do and wants to stop her.
‍-​ girl tries to warn the portal lord, gets ganked by the villain’s goons. the power interaction that creates the timeloop happens. so now girls’ not only bleeding out, but overstimulated from having a city’s worth of information being dumped in her by her scar. apnoe en route to killing the dude encounters girl, tries to save her, endearing her further. girl probably tries to convince apnoe to not do villain shit. some cryptic “you’re the only one who can stop this, i believe in you” shit

things get fiddly because the way the power interaction works is that there’s actually two time loops
there’s nested world‍-​simulations of indeterminate depth. the simulation is so complex that trying to understand or manipulate it strains her flesh to the point of killing her.
this isn’t really a timeloop, but something stranger. it’s like N parallel timelines with one way information transfer such that timeline M can in theory receive information from the future of timeline M+1. depending on how i tune the time dilation of the simulations, this can have odd dynamics
importantly, only the girl is aware of these loops, but inside each timeline, once she gets a handle on the simulation, she can reset it, and when she does, everyone’s memory gets reset to initial conditions except apnoe

which i think actually lets me explain the dead girl setup.
girl uses her ad hoc future sight to brute force her survival from the mark&proxy assassin who should otherwise have killed her. but she’s still too injured to have any hope. maybe with infinite timlines she could force a path to victory that thwarts a whole team of superpowered terrorists, but the existence of her loops means she hit a stack limit somewhere, so her loops are finite.
anyway, she notices that apnoe keeps her memory, and realizes she might be her only hope.
she does some big sacrifical push herself beyond her limits thing to engrave the rules of the time loop on her flesh
...which has the very interesting consequence of, when ap finally figures out the nature of the loop, she can look at the dead girl’s skin and see a representation of her living out a loop :ablobnomcat:
it also means that ap’s looping is kind of futile unless she can figure out a way to bootstrap jailbreak herself out of dead girl’s flesh
which actually might be within the purview of her expanded abilities‍ ‍—‍ i’ve been toying with ghost!apnoe being able to eventually bodyhop

but anyway the weird part of this approach is that it kind of takes the speedrunning to an extreme that i’m not sure about it
it’d mean that apnoe literally starts the story off knowing about the villain’s plans
maybe not all of them, and villain prolly has backups for when apnoe defects
so idk

oh yeah another idea i had
manton effect thingy is called the paresthesia field?
with the idea being that if someone tries to target your metaflesh with an effect and you shrug it off, this manifests as chills/goosebumps

John the Destroyer 

what if the villain is this buff stoic dude with one arm
and the whole right side of his body is blackened with ultra fractral scar tissue
and his cicatrix is constantly referred to as “Destruction]” (sic)
where like, anything he touches with his right arm can be deconstructed either partially (cracking, sundering, deforming), or totally (straight up disintegration). the more he destroys, the more his scars grow
and even if he doesn’t use “Destruction]”, just touching something is enough to intuitively see the weakpoints of something, letting him know exactly how to destroy it by other means
(he’s also just like, top tier in magical strength/toughness. so real end game boss vibes)
and as a thematic note, maybe a point is made about how it must feel to look at the world and only see how to burn it down

but anyway the twist is that somewhere in act two, he obtains the ‘left hand of creation’. his other arm was cut off and is currently sealed away probably by the authorities or some old enemy in the town atm (in most loops he’ll be busy recovering his left hand, probably)
anyway, so there’s this big moment when he reattached the other arm
and reveals that his actual cicatrix is ⸢Creative Destruction⸥
so instead of just deconstructing he’s now able to do some fma transfiguration bullshit
and can pull a bunch of bullshit out of hat bc of the backlog built up scar tissue from years of “Destruction]” with no outlet
and maybe he transfers disintegrated objects from the hand of destruction to hand the hand of creation by clapping his hands
and maybe there’s a line about how he’s been fighting with one hand behind his back for so long

this buff stoic dude
ok real talk in my head i’m just visually picturing toji

if the “Destruction]” thing makes it into the text, it’d be funny to joke/red herring that he’s capable of destruction so profound he destroyed the open bracket
and maybe there’s theorizing/rumors that
‍-​ he’s missing an arm because he destroyed it himself because ???
‍-​ or exponent tried to alter his cicatrix to disastrous results?
‍-​ (closest to the truth) his technique wasn’t originally Destruction, but he used it on himself destroyed his ability to do anything but destroy, so it’s like a metaphysical wildfire
which will sate curiosity in the gap between his earlygame(?) introduction and he lategame apotheosis

his technique wasn’t originally Destruction, but he used it on himself destroyed his ability to do anything but destroy
this touches on some stuff i was originally brainstorming
which is that his destruction is paresthesia‍-​limited, so he cant touch a mf and disintegrate them
but i did imagine him having the ability to like... touch people and remove their powers???
which seems random but is kinda justified with some rules lawyer ass reading of scar mechanics
namely, supposing that 1) how Destruction] actually works is that he removes properties from objects, which in most cases is intuitive (structure is a property), but 2) paresthesia means that he can’t remove properties from people’s skin itself (they’ll resist that) but there’s a mental gymnastics interpretation where he can affect their scar or their connection to their scar, because that’s not necessarily what paresthesia protects
kinda pretzel logic though
could be foreshadowed by having part of why exponent dude is so scary is that his ability to manipulate scars ignores paresthesia too, because it uses the same logic

what if exponent’s general M.O. is using his scar‍-​manipulation to poke people and riddle them with horrific body horror transformation scars :slight_smile:

wait
can apnoe counterscar :BAB_IS_THINK:
corpse!apnoe can’t counterscar i’m thinking (and doesnt need to bc she’s just not a valid target for anything that needs countering)
ghost!apnoe would probably

ok more thots
stupid idea: what if the antagonists name was “john”
but
he destroyed his own name, turning it to “jo‍-​”
and anyone who tries to utter his name gets interrupted by a cough. if they keep tryin to say it, the coughs get more violent until they’re spitting up blood
so ppl just call him ‘the destroyer’ or something
or joe :lmao:
another stupid metaphysical feat is what if, once he knows scholar girl’s cicatrix, after she touches him he can intuit that (one of him) is in a simulation, and destroy it from the inside out
maybe this even backlash damages scholar girl
so he no sells the ‘i predict your every move’ power
and since the time loop itself is just an application of that power, he could destroy the time loop from the inside
so maybe there’s a guardrail where if john ever gains awareness of apnoe, the loop ends
just like if apnoe dies or skips town
guardrail would only get removed in later acts after ap wakes up scholar guard and they gain total control of the loop
also, i think i’ve sketched out the shape of a possible ending

first, (this’ll come up later), there are a few ‘gaps’ in the loop, things that escape the simulation. nothing outside the veil (i.e. outside of town) is simulated
not sure what else should be in a gap
but a big one is the portal lord
he’s connected to extradimensional space, but most of it is not part of the simulation
maybe he’s straight up cut off from it, but i dont know about that

i have this image that one of the early theories for the motivation behind the loop is that killing the portal lord unleashes this crazy eldritch space‍-​beast
(obvious primordial expy)
you see, the idea that apnoe could “kill” a portal lord is a joke. she can kill its flesh, sure, and that spoils the creation of the living portal, but portal lords, more than any other cicatrix, are more metaflesh than mortal, so their inner space is alive and can still writhe and manipulate
after a few loops, apnoe discovers that the way the plan was going to go is that after apnoe kills the lord, john goes on to solo the portal beast
what if john’s left hand was sealed away in extradimensional space, so it seems like one of his motivations is straight up just ‘gimme my hand back or i will destroy you’
another bullshit feat is that he leveled up his destruction until he could, unlike any other scar, permanently kill a portal being, space and all
(maybe intuiting that he would eventually get this powerful is why they sealed away his left hand in the first place? idk, it’s half‍-​baked)
while we’re fleshing out john, there’s another idea i had
which is that what if the scar that gave him his cicatrix was a burn scar
so the aesthetic of him using Destruction] is of flame consuming stuff
anyway
so, once they escape the loop and are doing things in the real world, they have the final confrontation with john
and they’ve gotten powerful enough that it’s genuinely a closer fight than anything else john has faced save the portal beast
but it’s still not enough

and john eventually closes and upon touching apnoe, destroys her body to bring forth her ghost, then rips her cicatrix away from her ghost form
(maybe in order to do that, he either figures out or reveals that he figured out how to activate Destruction] via breath as well as touch; since ghost‍-​apnoe is normally untouchable? dunno)
anyway, apnoe’s scar is the only thing keeping her alive, so she’s ded

but like, remember how the loop was scholar girl’s ability? and so in order for apnoe to even emerge in the real world basically required her to bootstrap herself back to life from being a scar on scholar girl’s flesh
(which uh, :lesbianthoughts:)
anyway, the story could end here. because Destruction] removes the scar from the target and inflicts it on the user‍ ‍—‍ meaning john now has apnoe’s scar, but apnoe is her scar, so she can bootstrap herself from john’s arm

but maybe’s john no sells this anyway, and his will overpowers hers so he emerges seemingly victorious, and now he has apnoe’s power
he knows about the time loop now, too
so maybe he goes on to remove scholar girl’s power, and veil and proxy, and then he literally has “time loop on command” as one of his powers.

he wins, and he turns his eyes toward the portal beast.

starts a new time loop, and uses it to iterate strategies for defeating it
maybe there’s a whole chapter from his pov covering this
because the portal beast has emerged, and because john knows what he’s doing (rather than creating the loop by accident), the loop now encompasses the entirety of the portal beast
and the portal beast is a whole tier of power up, it’s a rough battle of bullshit vs bullshit, but repetition is the mother of learning and he eventually cracks the nut

he ends the time loop, and—
instantly dies

remember how it was impossible to interact with extradimensional space during the first time loop? but in the second, john did it right?
yeah no. john was aware of the loop, but so was the portal lord
so when john started the second loop, the portal lord noticed, and simply played with john, letting him have the grueling but ultimately victorious battle he’s expecting
then when john moves in the real world, the lord then finally uses the entirety of his power to insta gib him

potentially flaying his flesh in the same way the lord flesh was supposed to be flayed
and john, despite being memetically, ridiculously powerful, is still mortal, and without skin just dies.
but remember how he has apnoe’s scar?
remember how apnoe’s whole deal is that she’s dead?
remember how the entire culmination of the timeloop was figuring out how to bootstrap herself from nothing but a scar?
john can’t survive life as mere skin, but apnoe can
now there’s four ways it can go from here

option a: apnoe reforms and she’s free to go. uses her profound flesh manipulation to bring scholar girl back to life by splitting her new skin in half. scholar girl’s like holy fuck, we did it, we stopped the back guys, we saved the empire. and apnoe’s like ‘yeah but the world still sucks, i’m still gonna burn it all down.’ and she’s has john’s power now. so the final chapter is them walking off into the sunset, plotting to take on the whole world‍ ‍—‍ and they’ll win, since they’re probably the most powerful people in the setting now

option b: uh, portal lord flayed john, remember? so he still has his flesh. when apnoe comes back to life, she’s enclosed within extradimensional space. portal lord recognizes her as basically one of them now‍ ‍—‍ a creature of metaflesh rather than flesh.
this results in one of two receptions (maybe it’s even explicitly a choice in the text)
option b1: and apnoe’s is far, far too dangerous to let run around. she wants to burn down the world? then she’ll never see the world again. the portal beings seal her in an extradimensional prison for all eternity
option b2: she can’t be allowed to wander the material plane anymore, but why would she want to? the portal lord welcomes her to the extradimensional society the clan had cloistered themselves into. she metaphorically ascends to a place in what amounts to the world’s pantheon of gods
(could blur the lines between these two; they’re both riffs on being sealed away from the mortal realm. maybe she’s imprisoned, but eventually freed?)

option c: i dont remember the exact logic i used, but john doesn’t get flayed, he gets properly killed. but remember, apnoe’s trigger event was getting killed. so even as he dies, john gasps a last breath‍ ‍—‍ just as apnoe, throughout the story, gasped a dying breath from from her corpse form to assume her ghost form.
john dies, and apnoe is counted among his victims. unknown to everyone, apnoe still drifts through the world in ghost form, only now, if she dies in this form that’s it.
she ran out of skin.
but she scraped through in the end. still, at what cost?

big thing i need to think about is lining up an escalating series of bosses to earmark apnoe’s power
thinking not!mahito will be the last big one before big dick john himself
maybe before that, it’s proxy assassin? funny thing i could do is having proxy assassin be weirdly entangled with the loop due to his role in bringing it about, but i dont think that’s the most reasonable interpretation of the power interaction at play
another thing i need to do is come up with a list of mysteries and revelation so there’s something that’s actually learned over the course of loop

first: enby with frost powers. specifically, ⸢Dead Winter Skin⸥
the essence of their style is basically winning fights by going “you’re already dead” and then your arm falls off or your torso is bisected
i’m thinking in place of their fingernails, they grow these ice claws. they can control how they grow, so in practice they have a big ice katana made extra powerful with an enchanted leather hilt, and maybe ice throwing needles
but they still get use out of the claws, of course
anyway, when your skin is penetrated by their ice, it goes numb. so numb, you don’t notice if you arent using the body part in question
once the target is nipped, they undergo magical frostbite, speed somewhat controlled by the user
but more than just magical numbness and frost damage, they can trigger three addition effects
one is vitality draining.
the downside of the user’s frosty flesh is that they cant actually regenerate normally (or maybe it’s greatly impeded), so they heal by freezing other people.
they’re probably also really slow movementwise, but maybe vitality draining lets them speed it up?
but of course, they have to be subtle with how much vitality they drain, because of the paresthesia effect
the other effect is... what if they can recursively freeze? i.e. freeze A, then if A touches B, they can freeze B? could be OP, could get out of hand, but maybe if it’s limited to consenting allies? (which they’d want to have, to drain a bit of their vitality)
the last effect they can trigger is out and out power negation, if they freeze skin bearing the pattern of a cicatrix
maybe this is a bit OP, but i think it’s really useful as illustration. it could be the reader’s first exposure to power negation
and importantly, it’s “normal” power negation, not metascarring like john or not!mahito’s hax
so you can counterscar their power negation if you’re skilled enough
because it targets the cicatrix through the skin, rather than targeting the cicatrix directly as those metascars do

how do i know it’ll be the reader’s first exposure? because i spent a few minutes thinking about what john’s plan might actually be
obviously it cant be as simple as having apnoe float in and suffocate the lord.
and frostby might be a moving piece there. what if frosty freezes a bit of ghost!apnoe, so that when she’s suffocating the lord, he gets frozen numb in his sleep?
and maybe once the loop is in full swing, frostby is one of apnoe’s first allies, once she figures out the right revelation that’ll make them defect from john’s terror org
(what if this is implicit conceits of the plot? for everyone working for john, there’s some secret that once apnoe figures it out, it’ll sway them to some extent? unlike unblocking a one way door in a soulslike)

anyway, last note is that.. would it be cheap if i casted against type here?
maybe frostby fiery and passionate personalitywise? boisterous comic relief type character?
(if nothing else, they cannot have family‍-​related trauma)

next ideas are less fleshed out

one idea is a girl, not affiliated with the terrorists, whose power is bat wings
maybe she has difficulties with her powers that makes apnoe sympathize with her?
cuz her power is a bit weird
what i’m thinking is that it’s a wound triggered power
from openings in her flesh, bat wings of various size can emerge
any opening. and maybe there’s like three or so wounds that never heal right so she always has baseline access to wings (they’re asymmetrical: one on her back, one on her arm, and maybe one on her butt or neck/head)
which gets to the weird part of her power: despite them being, yknow, wings, they suck for flying
and the ‘final form’ of this girl is BE NOT AFRAID but with back wings
anyway, the thing that makes this power useful is that the wings are wicked and tipped with magical claws that leave gnarly wounds
maybe she powers up from drawing blood?

part of why i think this tracks is that i’m thinking she’ll have a brother
who is a “natural” baby tooth trigger
instead of bat wings, he got bat fangs
and he’s on some vampire bullshit
because he triggered naturally and early, he got recruited into like the city guard or something so he’s really successful while leaving his sister out in the gutters

already chafing against the loop constrains bc i’m wondering how tf apnoe is gonna unfuck this girl’s issues in time for her to be useful every loop i want them to team up in
anyway
last random idea is shadowskin dude
who just can meld into shadow and then travel along 2d planes. peak traversal power in the right conditions
but if you shine a light into a shadow he’s traveling through, he’s shunted out and disoriented to the point she’s basically down for the count if it’s a fight or something
(i also have an idea for a puppet girl power, but it’s really weird and needs more time to bake‍ ‍—‍ or be thrown out entirely, because it’s the sort of weird where there’s 99 ways to do it yikes and 1 way to do it kind of okay)
anyway

Paperface 

not!mahito

also what if “exponent” is the guy who is able to hijack loops
and his cicatrix is some spooky meta‍-​scar manipulation
will have to meditate on what made mahito such a menace and if there’s space to approximate that

because it would be really really easy to just lazily expy mahito in this system, but i dont wanna do that and dont think i could do it well
instead, i will reuse an old black nerve character
but no, here’s my thought

what if this guy triggered from a tattoo scar?
and his superficial power is turning flesh into paper
so his aesthetic is that like, his face is a canvas and all of his expressions are animated ink
and he styles himself as an artist‍ ‍—‍ he has a notebook made of his paper skin and can draw patterns on it, giving him new powers like an WtC ink mage
and it seems like if he touches you, he can turn you into paper skin too
but that’s not what happens!
and maybe it’s even hinted that something weird is going on, because it doesnt trigger on touch‍ ‍—‍ he wields a paint brush as his weapon (think paint master sheo in hollow knight).
and this contagious skin‍-​to‍-​paper is triggered by him getting his ink on you
you can’t counter scar his ability, because he isn’t affecting your flesh, he’s giving you a new power, and that power is his own “turn self into a paper” power
maybe the equivalent of mahito’s transfigured humans is people he turned into origami
and the fucked up part is that in a literal sense, they did it to themselves
maybe even, since counterscarring is skin magic, trying to counterscar it just makes it happen faster

anyway personalitywise, i think i want him to be super pretentious and artsy, perhaps to an infuriating extent
i do think it’s kind of hard to make him as hateable as mahito, because you cant exactly replicate junpei when things go back to normal at the start of every loop
unless, hm
what if there was something john promised apnoe when this all began, or just something she was hoping for
and this guy goes and fucks while the loop is iniated
so apnoe discovered his fuckery in the loop, but it’s impossible to stop it
or maybe she tries to stop it, but then the loop guardrails are like “do not fuck with paperface”

thinking that at some point in act 2(?) apnoe finally confronts paperface
and he touches her
and it interacts strangely with her power
maybe in corpse mode, it cant do anything because her skin doesn’t count as living skin
and in ghost mode, it struggles to do anything because her skin is already under a transformation effect (into wind)
which gives apnoe false confidence that she’s immune to to his power
what she doesn’t realize is that in every battle against him, he’s reading and leaving secret messages in the ink alterations to her cicatrix
giving him awareness of the loop. so he eventually figures out how to subvert apnoe’s power, causing a paper bird to tear itself out of apnoe’s skin at the beginning of the loop to find its master and making him essentially a second looper
but when he makes john aware of the loop, that’s when he learns that he can target the loop itself with metascarring
which leads to a hopefully scary fake out bad end where paperface complete overwrites the loop
causing apnoe to wake up in the next meta‍-​loop up in the hierarchy, with only the memory she had at very start of the fic. but dead scholar girl’s body turns into paper (because every loop so far had taken place in her body, through her cicatrix)
so paperface bootstraps from dead girl’s body to possess apnoe, and now he’s the only looper
and maybe the story follows his pov for a bit
but‍ ‍—‍ and i’m not sure how yet‍ ‍—‍ apnoe persisted in spite of paperface’s overwriting of the loop, and eventually she also bootstraps out of the loop

actually, wouldnt it be stupid if the way it worked was somehow, apnoe was still immune to the meta‍-​loop while inside of the dead girl turned to paper
so she’s looping in parallel with paper‍-​possessed apnoe
i doubt that makes sense to you but wow
the final plot of this shit is going to be some pretzel shit innit