i have been assailed with yet another AU idea

final battle ends in more of a stalemate. uzi triggers core collapse 2 or makes the planet destroying mat collection tendrils go haywire.

bottom line is, instead of imploding, the planet explodes

nothing but neighborhood‍-​city sized chunks floating off into the solar system uzi et al have to regroup and build a new society in space

not sure what happens to cyn, original idea was that she’s broken into fragments or rendered dormant, so the overarching plot is finding a new strat to beat before she’s back for the rematch

but writing it down now, it feels lot more interesting if it’s not just lead up to another cyn fight

…that said, the literal original basis of this idea was specifically “what if instead eating the planet, Cyn tried to turned it into a dyson swarm?”

(yes i am thinking about Alkaloid ‍-​ The Malkuth Grimoire again, how could you tell)

forgot to mention my favorite part

which is just the image of solverpedes undulating throught the void, drifting from fragment to fragment devouring mass

running away from them, thinking you found a safe haven, only to feel the ground underneath you quiver

Imagining massive cables that connect the isles
big ass hooks and winches keeping it all together
and all the wonders (and terrors) that come with working in zero‍-​g
or at least low‍-​grav, if some of the chunbks are big enough to still retain gravity/technology is used to substitute
An unpredictable day/night cycle making outside existence for DD’s hazardous
you are cooking with thermite snuggs
very much exists the threat one can just fall off the islets and into space

…so like, remember how the original seed of the idea was ‘what if cyn was trying to build a dyson swarm’

what if the solverpedes are like, literally following a directive to manufactor solar panels and thrusters and such

so like, youve got to keep them around and the whole basis of your society is trying to scrape off bits the pedes have made and hope you dont get nommed in the process

that mantis hornet art bounced around in my head for a bit and i started thinking about an au where instead of getting trained by vespa in the hive, hornet gets sent to train with the mantes.

but it gets kinda fucked up when you realize it even makes sense. you have to imagine there’s still tensions with deepnest even after herrah’s bargain. so what if pale king decides that having her taught by the warriors who stand as defend against deepnest‍ ‍‍—‍ savages who nonetheless fell in line with civilization in a way deepnest never did‍ ‍‍—‍ would be just the thing to ensure his daughter grows up with a right‍-​thinking mindset? perhaps she could be what integrates them with the kingdom‍ ‍‍—‍ or, if peace proves untenable, this way she’s sure to be on the right side

kind of heartbreaking to imagine hornet grappling with even more conflicted feelings about that half of her heritage. or to think of the devouts regarding her with the same admiration while she can only look at them with distaste or hostility

one interesting knock‍-​on effect this could have is if hornet was especially dedicated to the mantis lords and also knew the five knights (i.e. ze’mer), she would have a lot of reasons to dislike traitor lord‍ ‍‍—‍ imagine if she decided to go and take him out herself?

it’s tempting to spin out this plotline because further‍ ‍‍—‍ what if this dominos into dryya surviving? (even better‍ ‍‍—‍ if anyone read that fic i was talking about last month, incorporating Dryya the Fierce’s interpretation of her would give that knight a very interesting relationship with this hornet)

…but before i can really commit to that line of thought i’d have to figure out why hornet wouldn’t have done that in canon.

silly idea: it’s not a deckbuilder, it’s a chainbuilder

instead of adding cards to your deck, you add nodes to your markov chain. where in other games you might normally draw cards from a shuffled draw pile, here your chain repeatedly enters a new states, adding a copy of each card associated with a given state

(for comparison, if N cards had a uniform transition probability between their states, then using this chain would be like if you could draw cards from a deck with replacement after each draw‍ ‍‍—‍ a giant dice roll, essentially)

but in practice, this would enable very complex “deck” structures. cards that synergize together could be “clumped” so that they’re often drawn in conjunction, giving your deck “moods” or “phases” that it drifts in and out of throughout combat. you could have “tree” decks that might go down very different gameplay routes based on the roll of the dice. at the most basic level, you could have idioms like “chaser” cards that only generate after their “shot” cards have been drawn.

anyway, there would be a whole menagerie of different keywords and constraints. imagine an effect like

1. “whenever you add an attack to your deck, create a transition to this card”
2. “this card can only have three transitions to it”
3. “deal 40 damage. for each transition to this card, deal 4 less damage”
4. “this card can only transition to nodes which have no path back to it”

this would be a nightmare to balance, and presenting its information legibly to the player would be another nightmare, and there is not much advantage to this system other than novelty for a the thousand‍-​hours‍-​in‍-​deckbuilders audience

way earlier this year i did a write up brainstorming an angle for writing vessa. have you seen that one?

i find it most interesting to approach vessa as the opposite of jessa, especially when you can use it to prefigure her copper‍-​9 personality‍ ‍‍—‍ which is to say, V’s brazen and vicious streak wasn’t a new development, instead the urges she always had but was too shy to indulge in back in the manor, especially around N.

Tessaract was a formative fic for me, which probably shows in how easy it is to imagine Tessa as a sub who enjoys being toyed with by her robots‍ ‍‍—‍ which, again, makes for an interesting contrast with jessa. it’s easy to imagine J being too deferential to Tessa to treat her as a beloved pet rather than a controlling master.

and it’s also fun to imagine a rivalry, V being smug about how close she’s gotten Tessa and bickering with J about it. what keeps this from getting too heated is that i also like to incorporate the headcanon of J being asexual if not partly aromantic, and viewing their relationship with a some measure of disgust‍ ‍‍—‍ she isn’t envious because she’d never want to treat her boss like that

but i digress. the thing i’ve always found most fruitful to explore in V and Tessa’s relationship is the equality of it. Tessa condescends to N, J puts Tessa on a pedastal, and Cyn is… a lot.

so even outside the consideration of who tops whom, i think V would be the only one willing to call out when Tessa’s screwing something up and give her an honest opinion. and though V will keep up a certain facade around both N and J for different reasons, she has to tell Tessa how she’s really feeling and what’s wrong, because that’s her mechanic, she needs to know

so i think V and Tessa’s dynamic is one of honesty and respect, especially as something each respectively is pretty bad about giving anyone else

minor silksong act three spoilers

my coffeepot theory is that maybe the mantis tribe was like the skarr. the skarr resisted the haunting bc of karmelita’s lingering strength. what if the mantes aren’t just built different, but it was their devotion to the mantis lords instead of the pale king that lets them retain their independence?

are there any instances of intelligent bugs that aren’t aligned with pale king nevertheless succumbing to the infection?

probably the biggest complications in this theory are deepnest and the hive.

deepnest never accepted pale king’s rule, but i would argue this theory would suggest that if herrah had never agreed to become a dreamer, her cult might’ve been able to resist the infection like the mantes

meanwhile, the hive refused to assist the hallownest’s perpetuation, and i feel it’s a fine distinction between that kind of independence (they’re literally walled off!) and the mantis tribe’s truce with hallownest. still, vespa considers her hive a part of hallownest‍ ‍‍—‍ so perhaps the bees still revered the pale king alongside their queen

it is amusing to imagine that the infection specifically afflicts mindless bugs and pale king worshipers (but i repeat myself) and mantes have atheist super powers.

12a’s use of kenning‍-​esque compound words is one of the more striking elements of their dialogue, i just love the flavor it gives them. “identity‍-​idiom” from the silkshot description might be my favorite

but i find myself wondering if it’s a deliberate, the product of searching for a meaning that can’t quite fit into a single word without a poetic juxtaposition, or if it’s more like a stutter.

did they mean to call building a cage, or was it reflexive? is that stutter there from them resisting it?