...it will have to wait.

About my anniversary with my wife.
About what happened two years ago.
What I want to do.
Events in my life.
Etc.

But for now.

What I came to share was the result of a dream last night. (The other dream I had involved a parody-horror film where a shark was in a WWE wrestling ring eating wrestlers and having it be valid matches, with the shark eventually defeated by the satire-friendly version of Cody Rhodes. But I couldn't really build upon that dream. This dream, on the other hand...)

​So last night I had a really vivid dream which led to the creation of a new manga shounen (or, well, seinen more accurately) idea. I'll never have the free time to make it, but I wanted to lay out the basic idea.

The story would begin at the traditional half-way point in a story. Instead of following a rookie 16-year-old teenaged boy, this would start with the protagonist at 26--a full ten years after he began his hero's journey. All of the advanced concepts that a hero is exposed to (and, through the naive hero, us the audience get to learn about), he already knows and has mastered.

The story would begin after a tragedy which killed/scattered his crew. Think akin to the likes of One Piece heading into the timeskip, Andromeda season 5, etc. He, as well as all the heroes and protagonists, lost--big time. His ship was damaged and broken almost entirely beyond repair, hanging on by a thread. He lost almost everyone on his crew and who he cared about. All his allies gone, and a bounty placed upon his head and the head of his two remaining companions. Everyone is thought either dead or with a bounty high enough to guarantee they soon will be.

And that's just where things begin.

To explain some of the mechanics involved, this would be basically a cross of stories like One Piece, Cowboy Bebop, and Star Wars, along with some other shounen stories. A large portion of the populace can tap into "The Magic Field", which grants them a lot of the abilities of Force-Sensitive users, crossed with Haki users. They have universal access to telekinesis including strong push/pull, enhanced physical abilities particularly jumping, agility, nimbleness, etc., they have a form of clairvoyance which senses danger, they have a minor ability to cause incoming bullets (not blasters because this setting still uses kinetic weaponry aside from stun guns which are energy, but these bullets are more magitek in being big blasts) to miss, as well as enhanced accuracy in their shots, the ability to plant suggestions in their opponent's mind as a minor form of hypnosis, enhanced strength and toughness, increased endurance and rapid healing, etc.

Advanced users of these can elevate these abilities further, to actually sense incoming attacks well before they happen, to have an aura that suppresses opponents and encourages allies, virtual immunity to most forms of harm, the ability to inflict harm on otherwise immune targets, etc.

And these universal tools are aided by the equivalent of lightsabers, called "artifact weapons". Usually taking the form of augment gloves, but some can be customized into other forms, too. These artifact weapons have as a universal power generating a shield which absorbs incoming attacks and, on a narrow band approximately the size of a curved broadsword, deflecting projectiles towards a location.

But this is all standard equipment and powers.

Characters have powers beyond tapping into The Magic Field, called their Star Power. These powers are entirely separate and entirely unique to the individual. Think devil fruits, or bloodline powers from Naruto, or the unique powers of every individual in most shounen. You get the idea. These powers take training to use and unlock, but are innate and nearly limitless in potential.

Those who have mastered their Star Power unlock a second, stronger ability. This stronger ability can be something entirely different, and is loosely called their "Spatial Magic Sphere". It requires both a strong connection to The Magic Field, and a strong mastery of Star Power. The downside to this is all users of Spatial Magic Spheres have some ability to detect other Spatial Magic Sphere users even when the Spatial Magic Sphere user is just using their base power or Magic Field power. In short, once one accesses Spatial Magic Spheres, their usage of Star Power and The Magic Field innately channels their Spatial Magic Sphere, and because every Spatial Magic Sphere on some level can detect the presence of another Spatial Magic Sphere, tapping Spatial Magic Sphere for the first time causes it to passively always be there on some level.

The protagonist, his first mate and longest traveling companion, and his wife (again--experienced veteran protagonist, the love interest had a relationship upgrade over five years ago before the story begins) all have access to Spatial Magic Spheres, artifact weapons, and advanced Magic Field powers.

The protagonist is a former-prodigy genius mechanic, inventor, and the captain of a cube-shaped spaceship (which is not spaceworthy at the story's beginning, trapped roaming a single planet initially where all the action happens at first), officially called The Cube, and affectionately nicknamed 'Cubie'.
He was notable in how he actually got access to multiple artifact weapons (protagonist privileges!). He's got a key that allows him to unlock just about anything and interface with anything (effectively both a key and a usb stick), that also serves as a sword (lightsaber, not keyblade). He also has gloves, as well as a staff-gun (can take the form of a staff, or the form of a gun, and in its compact form is basically a lightsaber-shaped handle, or a compact-force-lance from Andromeda if you prefer).

He discovered The Cube and retrofitted it, a la a Millenium Falcon/Lagann style encounter, although this wasn't his start to his adventuring life and took place a little down the line.

His Star Power is an augmented form of Sigil Casting. Sigil Casting is technically a form of harvesting Space Magic, but rather, channeling it to do things which normal Space Magic practitioners can't achieve. The downside is it requires writing out sigils, onto a surface, in order to cast the effect. (Think FMA alchemy.) However, the upside is a level of versatility and customability. This is a pretty weak power in terms of Star Powers (especially considering this is one of the strongest Magic Field users in the setting by the time of the story's start), but he makes it seem a lot less so because of how he customizes it, and passively channels it, and how he uses it to augment his natural mechanical and invention skills. Because he can fuse his inventions with his Star Power's Sigil Casting, and he can create Sigils other Sigil Casters can't, he's the ultimate master of rune magic, earning his Star Power the name "Rune Master".

As of accessing his Spatial Magic Sphere, he can create elemental variants on his Sigil Casting. When he has white hair he can channel Ice. Red hair, fire. Black hair, pure darkness. Golden hair, pure light. Blueish-purple hair, pure energy. And his default state, brown hair, is technically both air and earth, because he is a bridge between the two innately.

But where he's truly broken is in his Spatial Magic Sphere ability, "Sphere of Influence": it allows him to vastly augment all Magic Field users, all artifact weapons, all Star Power users, and all Spatial Magic Sphere users, within his influence range (which is the size of a sizeable starship, think about the size of a modern battleship but in 3 dimensions), and critically...he can also do the inverse, vastly weakening or even completely negating all of those. His ability allows him to be able to negate a potential fleet full of opponents to some extent, while creating an entire fleet of people under his influence.

So, his title has changed to reflect that. It went from "The Artificer" to "The Stacked Deck" to "The Spirit of Stars".


His first mate, longest companion, is a cat furry, and she's technically stronger than her captain. She's a master markswoman, master swordswoman, and really shines in hand-to-hand combat in particular. She, too, has an artifact weapon of gloves (again, pretty standard), with hers having the unique ability to morph forms into swords, guns, or gauntlets depending on her need. Personality-wise, as well as power-wise, she's basically combining Vi from League of Legends, Revy from Black Lagoon, and Yang from RWBY.

She's hotheaded, antagonistic, highly abrasive, highly combative, a bruiser who loves a good fight, heavy drinker, etc. But she's also a genius commander, both in terms of strategy and tactics, is good at logistics, understands the ins and outs of storage, picks up on subtleties in others most miss, has a way of reading people beyond that afforded to most Magic Field users, etc. She's not dumb, she's actually arguably the smartest member of the crew, and she has the talents to match. She's ridiculously good at analyzing.

She is capable of detecting and deducing the powers of combatants to an uncanny level, including being the first to notice the presence of even the most stealthy of Spatial Magic Sphere users.

My dream didn't show me her powers, but presumably they involve her abilities. Guns, blades, movement, etc. Presumably, she has teleportation powers among other skills.


His wife, promoted from love interest, who he's been married to for about five years or so (young love, adventure, etc.), is the navigator, negotiator, and banker of the group (yes basically Nami), and she also is the one in charge of plants and the air circulation in the ship. She makes it so that the crew doesn't suffocate or starve, and has a skill for disabling enemy ships in specific ways to inflict that on them. While her husband and their first mate are known to be global threats, she's the scariest member of the crew.

Her basic Star Power abilities are growing and controlling plants out of nothing. What she's capable of beyond that, my dream didn't show--only that it mortified their starter villain for the series to immediately surrender despite his own broken powerset.


The story begins by showing the captain and his first mate trying to repair Cubie, heavily snarking and trying not to mention the disasters they just lived through. Then, the first mate notices the presence of a Spatial Magic User on the ship, disturbing things. A saboteur/assassin named Zeb, who has the Star Power of a total invisibility cloak making him immune to detection to even Spatial Magic Users most of the time. When he is dangled thousands of feet above the air about to be pushed to his doom (because the ship, while not capable of traveling the stars, is still airborne), activates his Spatial Magic Sphere ability, a time-rewind ability.

His time-rewind ability is two-fold. He retains perfect knowledge from a loop he initiates a rewind on, and if he dies he automatically returns to the point he began the loop on, with the knowledge he died but none of the memories for the loops since the last time he died. Encountering the protagonist's wife repeatedly and unavoidably keeps triggering his death, not giving him the ability to rewind and find out why. And no matter how many loops he goes through, he can't win.

So the end of the first chapter is him surrendering to the crew, and in a panic, begging and pleading to join them, because his failure will make him just as much as a target, and once marked as a target he knows he won't ever be given a chance to not be one. The crew, understanding that his offer is sincere, genuine, and that he legitimately has no other opportunities, accepts. They might not remember killing him or his thousands upon thousands of times rewinding to attempt to kill them, but they retained at least a sense of his honor, integrity, and genuine skill, so Zeb becomes their first new recruit and first new member of the crew, joining them on their adventure to rebuild their crew.


Potential future crewmates include an actual rookie (likely a native of the planet The Cube Crew are stuck on), who the crew would explain the mechanics of the world in, requiring heavy protection but being an investment;
Cubie, made into a hologram (a la Cortana from Halo, or Andromeda from Andromeda);
And potentially one or two children of the protagonist and his wife.

Among many others.

Any surviving crew members would likely be encountered and eventually rejoin after The Cube becomes spaceworthy again and begins traveling the stars, trying to fight back.

They'd be called The Cube Crew, which might be the name of the series altogether since the heart of the series is The Cube Crew recovering after barely surviving the worst events in their lives where they suffer a near-total defeat. (To give a scope of how bad this level of defeat is, it's basically a Whitebeard Pirates level of defeat. They lost a war and got hunted down after. Many died in the conflict. Even those who lived, many were killed after by multiple entities wanting their demise. Which also gives a scope for the protagonist's level of influence. By the time of his fall, he was one of the four strongest figures of interest in the setting, essentially, with the scope of influence that would entail.)

That's about as far as I got in the dream. But I really enjoyed the setting generated from it and the uniqueness of the starting point.

The goal of The Cube Crew isn't so much to get vengeance, or to start a resistance, or to fight back, as much as it is to survive, and rebuild, and recover, and regather, and to leave a path for future generations to have a better life, to not let the futures of the next generation be crushed. They're more looking for people to pass the torch onto than they are to finish the job.

Of course, part of this would involve them actually failing to pass on the torch, tragically so, in multiple occasions. Young people being killed, invoking their rage. Young people being brainwashed. Young people fighting against them, and them being forced to defend themselves to lethal results. Etc. But their goal, throughout it all, remains the same:
Track down all of the survivors of their crew,
Re-unite the crew, taking all who wish to rejoin and leaving those who have moved on in peace, to attain closure,
Talking to the loved ones of all those who perished, to help them obtain that same level of closure,
Inspiring hope,
Encouraging action,
Imparting lessons into those who follow,
Rebuilding, restarting, and continuing families, to have (more) kids, and raise those children. (The wife of the protagonist rambles on and on about having 12 kids, and goes into Marinette from Miraculous Ladybug levels of tangents about that plan, how it will be, etc. And she's been doing this since before the two were even married. It's a quirk of hers, part of her extensive planning capabilities and her own ruthless nature, essentially.)

I would love to make it, but alas. Because of how many projects have higher priority, I likely never will. Still going to note the idea though!

To be technical, it was a dream after I had woken up for the morning, work was canceled due to the snow, and then I went back to bed, so it's more like a dream this morning.

But this was no ordinary occurrence.

I had a dream that felt real. And more than that, it felt like I was viewing flashes in time. Memories sent to my past self, from my future, but like memories often are, not in chronological order.

The first I saw was of me and my wife, Kelsey, raising a daughter. (One I felt had a name starting with A and at least one more a in it, and which felt like it was primarily softer sounds rather than mostly harder ones.) I saw her as a young girl, somewhere in the age range of 4 - 9, and we were raising her in a relatively large space.

The second I saw was of her, now a young adult, visiting us with her own daughter (our granddaughter), around the same age range of 4 - 9. What initially confused me was that she was visiting us in a smaller space than the one she was raised in, but it was still her and she was still visiting us.

Then I saw a vision of us buying what felt like a mansion--a place large enough to raise our infant (she was appearing as a baby less than 2 years old, felt less than a year old) and to let Parker, our puppy that we just got, run free. (Oh yeah I haven't blogged in nearly a month, so I forgot to share the news in a blog. kels and I have a puppy now! He's a 4 month old white Shepherd mix. We don't know more yet.) We somehow managed to get a place for the both of them.

And then I got a vision of us, after our daughter was an adult, going back to a smaller residence, it felt like an apartment. It wasn't something we needed to do, but for whatever reason we wanted to.

And it felt so real.

I shared it to my wife, thinking it important...

...And then I was blown away to learn...

Kels had nearly the exact same dream.

kels had seen us raising our daughter.
kels had seen us having a larger house.
And kels had even seen us making the decision to downsize.

We had nearly the exact same dream at the exact same time.

That feels like it can't be coincidence.

Like...obviously, there's no guarantee that what we saw will come to pass. This felt like it wasn't a vision of an alternate reality, it felt like it was a premonition of what's to come in this one, but at the same time, the future is fluid. What happens isn't set in stone. So there's no guarantee this will be a life we live.

But at the same time?

...I want that vision to come true.

I want to make what we saw come to pass.

I don't know how we'll pull it off.
Every step of the way is uncertain. How we'll raise a daughter (method of getting a daughter), how we'll get the funds to procure a place for her, how we'll make all of it happen.

But...I want that future. And kels does, too.
And that has given me a whole lot of hope for the future, too--if it's a future we currently hold the power to make, then it is a future that is worth living in and raising a child in, where that child may choose to have a child of her own. 

I don't know how we'll pull it off--but having seen this future so vividly and clearly, with my wife having seen it too, and both of us wanting to make it happen, we'll find a way. We have to.

I'm not giving up on that future, on having a family we raise. What we saw felt like it was a gentle nudge, a reminder, of the lives we want to live. And it doesn't need to be perfect, it doesn't need to be exactly as we saw, but, I believe if we take actions in pursuit of that future, it will happen.

We're facing overwhelming challenges. Illegally high rent, medical insurance exploitation, health issues, work issues, car issues, and more ugly surprises at every turn. It's not going to be given to us, and would be easy to be taken away from us. We need to not only take action, but also prevent those which close off that future.

But, I believe in that future, and want it. How we'll get there, we're still figuring out. But it is a future worth fighting for.

Well, somewhat.
I had multiple lucid dreams that I swear were dreams of alternate realities, or rather, it felt more like dreams of this reality in past or future loops. At least that's how the dreams felt. As memories of lives I am not currently living but are lives that I live, lived, or will live. (This is always an incredibly unpleasant experience and reduces rest during the sleep.)

However, one of the dreams was instead a story about a mother and her two daughters (the oldest and youngest sibling), going to a vacation house. The boys leave, but while the boys are out, the women get snowed in.

I have no clue what the vibes of the story (it was actually a movie) were. Horror? Comedy? Slice of life? Horror-comedy? Supernatural? Mundane? Survival? I don't know. I just know the setup, I woke up before the plot began.

Still, I'd forget the idea if I didn't blog about it so here's me blogging about it!

Last night I had a dream which, after the fact, I struggled to stabilize into a story, but eventually, I managed to have it solidify into something resembling a webcomic-worthy tale.

Basically, in a Resident Evil like world (one of the three main characters is, loosely, based on Wesker, albeit with a different backstory, with him looking similar and even having tentacle powers), there was a team working at this universe's equivalent of Umbrella Corporation.

The young protagonist is a 21-year-old intern, still in college, but seen by people as being incredibly dumb. He's incredibly clumsy and while he means well, he constantly makes mistake after mistake after mistake. And it's not just bumping into things he shouldn't, it's also in him having ideas that end up leading to unforeseen bad consequences.

He's in a team with a 26-year-old redheaded female scientist (yes, with green eyes, with her hair being kept in a ponytail as being fairly short but still warranting being like that), who has been with the corporation on the team since she graduated college, which was a slight while ago but not a long while ago. She's the official assistant. (Although later she becomes far more action-oriented.)

They are in service to a veteran scientist. When he was younger, he was a field agent, being just hired muscle that was smart enough to work on the scene with highly sensitive material of all types. He was genetically modified prior to this, and during his fieldwork, infected with an experimental virus. He survived, most did not. The corporation bribed him to keep this a secret by basically making him an executive of the company. Not the highest ranking, but high up the chain of command.

So with this position, he retired from fieldwork and began to work in the lab, convinced that he could achieve the dream of immortality for himself, and potentially, the world (but he admits that the latter is an afterthought). He's 55 but appears to be about 32, in peak physical condition, because his aging has been greatly slowed. He can survive in many conditions, including the vacuum of space.

One day, the young protagonist makes a coffee that he believes the scientist will like, laced with some nanites that would, in theory, be harmless if they didn't work but if they worked could help the scientist. This was done with extensive work on his part, where he thought it was a genius idea.

When he accidentally broke the glass, the coffee with the nanites managed to splash into a vial with a genetically engineered virus--and the two combined. The team was blamed for this, made public enemies and fled. They were not realistically able to claim they weren't, either. The scientist was up to no good, the intern wouldn't be able to prove lack of malice, and the assistant was just loyal to the scientist.

Basically, it's not like the big bad corporation was framing innocent people. They had their hands dirty and knew what they were doing was shady-at-best. So they become hunted by the public for causing an outbreak of a plague that mutates humans into monsters, a semi-intelligent living growing disease. It doesn't cause an apocalypse because it's not the first outbreak to have happened, but it does periodically cause local outbreaks at random that kill plenty, mutate others, and require constant vigilance and specialized task forces to put down.

Having caused the worst outbreak in recorded history, the trio fled to an underground railway as their first base. (It's later revealed that the scientist also brought along an AI with them, this AI program is not exactly benevolent but she is still loyal to the scientist which makes her benevolent to the protagonists.)

They build this base up considerably and make good use of it, but the protagonist/intern eventually messes things up by accidentally triggering an alarm that would alert those looking for them to their exact location. Desperate, they have only one escape avenue: a teleporter not meant to transport living people, which transports them to a space station that is an abandoned weapons satellite.

The scientist, however, had come prepared, having injected the two others with nanites that would allow for the transportation to be successful, and also upon arrival, allow for them to have a form of artificial gravity. The station, being in space, has no gravity, but the floor is a specialized magnetic field, which all the items on the space station are attracted to with the approximate force of gravity, so items have the same weight they'd have on earth in effect.

And with those nanites in them, that allows for the protagonists to have weight in a weightless environment.

With the assistance of the AI, the protagonists are able to retrofit the satellite from something that is a single compartment not designed for humans to be on (it's literally basically just the internal parts with spare parts, effectively a small storehouse of bits and pieces), into a proper space station, with rooms, a dining hall, and work stations.

This is accomplished through harnessing a ton of energy and stored matter to make what amounts to effectively an advanced 3-D printer of sorts, where they rearrange matter from one form into another and recycle everything, to create food, water, air, and the materials needed to expand the station.

The webcomic details this journey but also displays the issues they run into. The scientist basically sets his two companions to work on effectively a crash-course of advanced scientific concepts neither was really familiar with. The assistant only had a bachelor's degree and the intern didn't even have that, and they were launched into forcefully learning things that even those with a PhD would struggle with.

Which, essentially, forced them to get smart, and be creative in troubleshooting. Lots of issues crop up, and at times, the protagonists need to leave the station and go back to earth, where their presence even for that short time stirs up a great amount of trouble and solidifies the view of the public that they are, essentially, supervillains.

The issues include needing to save the ai, running out of material, irreparable damage to something power-related, and later-on after the assistant has a daughter, saving that daughter who was born with nanites that began to rapidly age her. (They save her when she is physically around 10, stabilizing her.)

The concept is two parts resident evil, one part supervillain story, and one part sci-fi slice of life, covering both bio-engineered things and advanced technological things.

It's a bit of a complex thing, but the idea formed and I like it.

Will never make it, mind you. I will never have the time for every project I want to make, and this one is near the bottom of the barrel priorities-wise.

But I like it and it's worthy of being made. It's worth making, so I'm sad I won't be able to.

Ah well.

At least I blogged about the basics behind it.

​(Also, half an hour late to leave......)

Again! Again again!

So last night, as I was drifting to sleep, I had a dream that turned into a story idea. It was just at the beginning of me trying to sleep, but still a dream. So I did wake up, ending the dream but leaving me with a story idea. I lost some of the details once waking as per the usual, but it was coherent enough for me to keep the important parts.

But it being the time I needed to sleep, I had to risk it and just sleep.

So I forgot it overnight.

I did miraculously recover some of it, maybe most of it, although I inevitably lost some details somewhere along the line.

The basic idea I had was that a girl was brought to another world and granted powers there. The girl came from a not good place, and the people she was brought to are, genuinely, benign. They are not malevolent individuals masking as benevolent ones; they are genuinely kind, caring individuals who truly do mean best.

They defend against, and even hunt, some people believing it is for the protection of all. And she became one of their top agents at having done so. By this time, she had aged from a young girl to a young adult.

I don't remember the details of the group or how she landed among them (probably either accident/injury or her deliberately going on an undercover mission), but after some time spent among them, she has a change of heart. She realizes that the group she was previously a part of and their entire nation was wrong. Well-meaning, but wrong.

She spends time among them, learning among them, and eventually even becoming a teacher for their young (tho her transformation into a gigantic serpent monster as her first day was certainly not something that left a favorable impression--she is still naïve at that point, still being new to understanding why she is terrifying, being the cute clumsy girl that is learning and figuring things out).

At some point, she does return to her previous life, but now lives a double life among both (this is actually shown first with the above as flashbacks), but the details there when she's actually in her later 20s, I don't particularly remember. Something about her being suspected of what she is doing, with her friends not understanding why she would do so, why she would betray them.

I know her point of contact for those she hunted was one of the hunted's more skilled members, and that he recognized that she had no idea about the true nature of his kind. I know that there is a conversion process of some kind that she undergoes to be one of them while still appearing as her old self.

I remember some of the aesthetics; she wears a pink kimono at all times and has black hair, tho the length changes.
I remember that one of the guys involved has gray hair, fairly spikey but not quite to Goku lengths. And has small subtle fangs.

But I can't put it all together yet.

And since I have other focuses, sadly, I likely never will.

Still tho.

​Writing it down so I don't forget again again.

Okay so today has a good explanation for my, namely, one unfortunate dream cascading into an endless cycle of repeating the same equally bad dream.

Basically, I dreamed that I woke up to my alarm--
And then I jolted awake when somehow I sensed I was not awake in spite of having remembered waking.

So in real life, I was awake, after that dream. Unfortunate, but one-time disruption, right?

...Well after that, because I had the dream I woke up to my alarm, I told myself to not fall for it again.
Which caused my subconscious to instead treat every single dream as "oh no I slept through my alarm".

Meaning I basically got no sleep last night at all.

Butstill.

I literally had a blog I wanted to make.

I would like to not be so sleepy that I can't make it.

Ah well.

​Maybe tomorrow.

It's a pipe dream because first it would require me to actually make Phyrra and Cyrus, but I actually managed to make a proper sequel to Phyrra and Cyrus!

Now, there was already a spinoff, Smoke Ling, son of a Gunther, covering the son of Gunther King Slayer, the second villain in Phyrra and Cyrus, appearing in the second season, the enemy of Bard. It covered things set about 20 years after the end of the main story of Phyrra and Cyrus (technically 80 years before the epilogue since the epilogue is 100 years from the ending of the main story).

This was a proper sequel, set hundreds of years into the future.

I have the worldbuilding set up.

I have the main character(s). This story would, instead of being an allegory for being trans, would be an allegory for plurality.

Just need to iron out the finer detail points.

​Speaking of plurality though, I owe a ramble on that, too.

Okay so I'm probably not on top of everything, but today, I've felt like I'm on top of basically everything. Compared to yesterday, that's progress! Now, granted: still got a lot of things which I probably am forgetting about. But I'm mostly on top of things. I'll need to brush my teeth and such before I go to bed, buuuuut, I showered, changed clothes, kept up to date on emails, did my daily internet stuff, basically everything I need to do, including my squats and crunches.

Right now as I write this blog I'm doing an update to XSplit for my stream tonight, and I'm actually writing a blog! Now, granted: I hated yesterday's stream. I actually had people show up for it! Which you'd think would be a good thing!
...If it weren't the worst stream I've ever done.

I had no idea what to do.
I had my power go out on me, so that killed my first stream.

And then on my second stream, twitch decided to basically kill the stream as everything was fine on my end, but I was dropping thousands of frames.

I was doing nothing.
And the stream had difficulties.
So what did those people who showed up see?

Basically the worst streamer of all time.

​Speaking of stream, as I was writing this, XSplit did update. The new update looks all fancy and such, but it did remove all of my prior settings. I had to re-enter them so my next stream might be a little bit...well, glitchy. We'll have to see.

Anyway what I wanted to blog about is that yesterday, I forgot to blog about a dream I had.
It was an anime (kinda like how I got a dream about Phyrra and Cyrus being an anime), this one set in a high school that is mostly our earth but has some minor Fantasy aspects to it. There's Alchemy, but Alchemy is an artform mostly seen as 'obsolete', as technology has grown to do what Alchemy used to be the only method for, and technology (while it requires building and maintenance) isn't one-time use and isn't something the user needs to know a lot about in order to still make use of it.

The setting is actually an all-ages school, K-12, which pioneered many groundbreaking things in the past. No discrimination based on race, gender, age, social background, income, physical/mental ability, religion, orientation, etc.

However, though the school did do those groundbreaking things, including co-ed sports that allow for everyone of all ages to participate (to a certain degree; they will still try their best to sort people into appropriately-sized groups where they are matched with individuals with complimenting skills), and those things are ingrained into the culture, in more recent years, the school has become notably more...decrepit. 

The school's main focus of Alchemy has fallen from their main draw to a mere shadow of what it was, and while most of the staff and students are genuinely caring individuals, there's a fair amount of corruption and darker elements going on in the school, including shady business and outright immoral actions.

The protagonist (modeled after Lelouch from Code Geass), a prodigy who is the latest generation of one of the founding members of the school (and thus, knows the ins and outs of it), sets out to change that, with his knowledge of Alchemy. He sets out to create an elaborate ruse:

Taking advantage of legends of demons, he creates the guise of him and his younger sisters being a trio of female demons (he is androgynous enough to pull it off, with the aid of a wig). Employing a lot of theatrics as well as mastery of the hidden areas of the school, combined with extensive Alchemy knowledge, he tackles issues with the school's corruption. Alchemical potions allow him to see the memories of others, and from that, witness the issues not seen in the school, and then he sets out in a Phantom Thieves style heist (taking cues from Persona 5) to select a target and then, again with alchemy, basically show the target the consequences of their corrupt actions, the suffering of all their victims, how much harm they've inflicted and to have it affect them.

There's more to it than that but I genuinely think that it could be the next big thing after Phyrra and Cyrus if I expand it out the way Phyrra and Cyrus was expanded out. The foundation is there. Like, this is the most foundation for a dream I've had since Phyrra and Cyrus (well, with the exception of the one lucid dream I had where I wrote it down and lost it all).

It's entirely a different take than Phyrra and Cyrus other than having very small fantasy elements like Alchemy and maybe some fictional pseudo-magic materials that are considered technology (plus strong superstition and belief in spiritual things that are widespread in spite of the dominance of science).

But it literally wrote itself. Dreams don't do that often.

This one did.

​That's a sign for success.

Choke it up to some of the worst mental health I've had, combined with most of the entries I've wanted to make being quite considerably lengthy, combined with me being absurdly tired as of late, today being no different and in fact me being more tired than normal due to what happened last night, which is what prompted this blog in the first place.

Let me set a scene for you.

I had an idea for some story--I don't remember much of the ideas for the story (why will become apparent if you keep reading), but I remember it was fantasy, it had a strict rigid gaming system in place (RPG mechanics with level ups, classes, etc.), and there were multiple classes, one of which, the final one I was working on, was Wizard. (Again, this is an important detail.)

I knew that if I didn't write the idea down, I wouldn't remember it though.

So not being an idiot, I did exactly that.

I took out some paper and with my mechanical pencil, in my handwriting (sloppy, large, messy as it may be) and in my style (with dashes to represent a bullet point list of sorts), I began working through writing down the details of every single class.

I brainstormed not only the world (which I wrote the details down of), but also worked out the exact workings of every single class, except for the last one, Wizard, which for some reason was taking me longer than the others I had completed.

But it was no problem, because not being an idiot, I had written down the entirety of the other classes along with the world, allowing me to 'delete' the knowledge from my consciousness and focus my full attention to finishing up the last class, Wizard, which I was about 80% finished on, just struggling to close out the finer details of. I was this close to finishing it, and having everything there for my brilliant idea of a setting. All the setting details, the characters, the classes, I had thought it all up over the course of a few hours, written it all down, completed it all.

It felt like as soon as I finished with ironing out the details of the Wizard class, I'd have gotten myself a complete idea that I could then make reality once I went onto my computer (since this was all done mentally, in my head, and then transcribed onto paper to record it).

But then I ran into a problem.

I realized I needed to use the bathroom, but I couldn't. No matter how much I tried, the bathroom eluded me.

Confusion hit. After all, I was lucid, writing down information from some source in my brain, had been doing this for hours, so I was awake, right? So then why would I struggle to use the bathroom? I was thinking, I was lucid, I felt fully awake. All of my senses were active. Sight, sound, feeling, touch, etc. But then there entered a bit of cognitive dissonance in that the sounds and feelings from my environment were clashing with sounds and feelings I was feeling. I felt both at the same time, but the latter alien sounds/feelings that didn't match what I was seeing were slowly overpowering me. And I had no clue what was going on initially.

And then the dawning realization sank in, initiating the next emotion: panic. Not panic at being trapped, mind you, but in past experiences where I've had much worse versions of this where I couldn't escape the hellhole, you'd be forgiven for thinking I was panicking at being trapped (since being trapped is commonplace when this happens to me, leading to some of the worst nights of my life).

No, this panic was over the story I had made. "What about all of the writing I just did?!?" I tried, desperately, to stare at the papers, to try and have them be real, to have all those hours of work exist in reality, for the things I wrote down to be reuploaded into my brain, but it was all for naught, leading to the next two emotions:

An equal mixture of despair and rage.

Because it was at this point I realized what had happened.

I was lucid dreaming.

I know that when you're dreaming, you're not supposed to be able to read anything, but apparently there's no rule against writing when you're lucid dreaming. And write I did. I got the details perfect in the writing. The writing paper had the look and feel of real paper. The words written were an exact match to my handwriting, and even the color of the pencil's markings on paper were right. I was, legitimately, writing in my own handwriting, in a lucid dream.

And my mind was doing exactly what it did when writing in real life, trusting in the written text to hold onto my memories of the world I had built overnight.

Except I wasn't awake when I wrote them.

And that meant that the writing was vanishing from my memory.

All I could collect was fragments, from the last desperate attempts to hold onto anything. Glances at papers which I knew contained more, and yet now I blank on everything except the memory of it having been a Wizard class I was working on last.

Hours of work.

All gone.

Because I was working on it in a lucid dream rather than while actually awake.

In hindsight, the speed at which I was worldbuilding and writing things down and how coherent it was should've been a red flag. There's never that much clarity when I am actually awake and writing things down. But at the time. There was just rage and despair.

Both due to how a world that I knew to be worthy of being made ended up not surviving until I was awake. Rage that I had let it be lost, that the lucid dream's formatting where I was so sure I was awake meant that I couldn't recover anything. Despair, because I knew it was a brilliant world.

I felt a deep sense of loss.

Do you know what it's like to feel like you have lost something profound, but be unable to recall what it is you lost?

Because that's exactly what it was. I felt a deep, profound, absolute, resounding sense of complete and total loss. But in spite of knowing I had lost something...I can't remember what, exactly, it is that I lost. If I could remember what it is that I lost, it wouldn't be lost. But I know that I glimpsed some amazing story of my own creation, and now that it is completely and entirely...gone. Gone, gone. Beyond recovery, gone.

Which is saddening beyond depths you could comprehend.

Imagine if Phyrra and Cyrus had suffered this fate, for instance.

Phyrra and Cyrus, perhaps the greatest idea I have ever dreamt up, was...well, from exactly that: a dream. The dream was chaotic, shattered, and I am sure I lost a good deal of the original idea after I woke up...but the key aspect of it is that I managed to recover enough of Phyrra and Cyrus to weave together a narrative that was coherent and perhaps even better than the original dream.

Phyrra and Cyrus, the work I want to make reality more than ever, was that close to suffering a similar fate. All it'd have taken for Phyrra and Cyrus to never exist in my mind was a single lucid dream that deleted the idea from my mind by the time I woke up.

And a work worthy of rivaling Phyrra and Cyrus in scale, in scope--just suffered that fate.

Phyrra and Cyrus I salvaged from ruination by having enough remain after I woke up to restructure things, refill in the gaps.

But this work, I don't have enough. I have the fact that it was a fantasy setting, I was working on classes, and specifically the Wizard class. I don't even remember the DETAILS of the Wizard class, or any of the other classes! I have...NOTHING left of the world.

And our world is the lesser because of it.

Suffice to say.

I woke up today both prematurely and restless, with me having not gotten a good night's sleep.

After all, for god only knows how many hours, my brain wasn't asleep.

It was recording an idea thinking it was preserving it, while in actuality unwittingly destroying it and rendering it unable to be saved.

​Not a fun way to wake up.

This one I devised as a webcomic, involving a mixture of sci-fi and fantasy elements, with bits of slice of life added to it.

The central point is about a strong woman leader, who created a time traveling force that's dedicated towards saving lives from various tragedies (mostly massacres, but can be terrorist acts or even natural disasters). The saved lives can be saved either through faking their deaths or by averting the tragedy altogether.

The point of view character is, however, mostly not the leader and founder of the organization; she's the most important character and is prominently featured especially at the beginning, but the main point of view character is actually the naïve newcomer:

We get to witness how the team rescues him and his entire village from a massacre, which we get to see his point of view from as well, where they explain that had they not intervened, everyone (himself included) would have died. (To which he just says, "...Oh.")

He ends up being recruited to this time traveling task force though, in part due to his natural talents. The time traveling task force organization is able to do what they do thanks to the aid of a supercomputer (and, partially, because the leader has a bond with a divine entity; on her forehead there's an eye-tattoo mark that's actually the conduit containing a small fraction of a deity's power).

The viewpoint protagonist character, the naïve newcomer, happens to have an innate gift for real-time projection of the supercomputer's model. It's described as basically, the supercomputer projects on a 2D basis, and he is able to process it in a 3D image, with a perfect ability to transition what the supercomputer projects into real life. Basically, he is able to perfectly remember what the supercomputer says (they can't actually take the supercomputer with them on their missions), and then see it (kinda sorta Intersect style from Chuck) overlaid in real life (but think more controlled, more ghostly-3d-imagely) and manage to act on that.

This makes him something of a huge asset on the field. Beyond that, he's also got a huge amount of combat training, is not actually stupid and is naturally smart, charismatic, clever, etc. He was going to lead his village's defense initially, after all. (It wouldn't have worked, per it being a massacre the time travel organization prevents, butstill.) He's got a wide array of, so to speak, adventuring skills. He knows how to approach people, he's decent at adapting to local cultures, he's basically naturally suited to the work.

Also, he, like the leader, has a divine influence--but unlike the leader whose divine entity with a conduit containing a small fraction of a deity's power, he has the entirety of the divine deity (the divine deity inside of him having somehow been hurt badly enough to need to be entirely rather than partially within him), which gives him a huge amount of power.

Magic in this setting doesn't exist everywhere. In fact it only exists in a few places, most places notably don't have magic. (The places with magic are common enough that people know magic exists, but they also know that magic only works in those places and ceases to work outside of those places.)

But in the places magic does work, he is an insanely powerful user of it, albeit largely untrained/untapped.

Furthermore, eventually, down the line, a specific incident ends up cloning the main protagonist character, creating two of him. Unlike most settings where this happens, both are treated as the real deal and with all the freedom to be whoever they want. The two have the same abilities, memories, experiences, etc. before but would over time slightly diverge, but neither is going to be forced to do anything different. The one and only requirement they have is of a tactically-necessary one;

The naïve newcomer protagonist is, explicitly, as soon as he is revealed to be the main character, revealed to be telling the story of how he went from the naïve newcomer to being the organization's second in command and field commander (the one actually in charge of time operations).

Both of hims can end commanding. They are, explicitly, both the exact same rank with the exact same authority as field commander and second in command. They're required to have a mind link whenever giving orders as to not give contradictory orders, where one giving an order is aware of the other giving an order and exactly why the order is being given.

Otherwise, they are free to be themselves, both equally as much the protagonist.

This also only makes him stronger; both of hims have the ability to 3D project the computations, and both of hims have the full deity within them, which means that when they tag-team, they are capable of doing missions that the supercomputer by itself wouldn't be able to handle. In other words, their tag-teaming is more powerful than the supercomputer, able to do things the organization couldn't before.

The story starts with him, however, largely learning the ropes as a rookie. After all, just because he's that powerful and naturally competent doesn't mean he's experienced. He's not going to know everything, so he has to have things explained to him, and has to take time where aspects of the organization are explained to him (and by proxy, the audience).

But eventually, he rises to the rank of field commander and second in command, and from there field operations continue, with more slice of life elements contained within.