And while I know there is quite a bit of risk in me extrapolating on my thoughts down this avenue (seriously you have no idea how worried I am that this blog post could get me banned from sites or like have a cop knock on my door), I feel like the reward is worth it.

Basically. My detractors may have the impression I think I'm the greatest, but. I really don't. Sure, I have delusions of grandeur, I put up a facade of confidence all the time, and even get genuinely arrogant. So I'll be the first to confess there are times when I, genuinely, fool myself into thinking I'm a good person.

But whenever I'm actually honest with myself and reflect...I know I'm not. I'll talk about things I've done, thoughts I've had, perspectives I hold, but even when I try to explain why I'm a monster, I avoid actually revealing the things which make me one, because I don't want them to be known. (And frankly I could potentially even ruin my life by revealing some of them.)

Even in this blog post, right here and now, I am doing precisely that. I'm not going into what makes me a monster. I'm barely even teasing it. My statement that I am one sounds like it's empty, because I don't back it up. And people may think I exaggerate, as is my wont. People may think that what I think is monstrous of me is something completely normal. They would be wrong, because if they actually knew, they'd agree, yeah, it's monstrous.

But because I don't tell them, they assume the like of that. Thinking I'm not possibly that bad even though if anything I'm worse than I indicate. To give the tip of the iceberg, and I hesitate to even describe it that way because this makes people severely underestimate the extent of how disturbed I am, I wanted to talk about something.

What I'm about to describe, I feel would not so much as even scratch the surface of my inner monstrosity. (I've made it quite clear in the past that all of my mes, all of the me that makes me me, is afraid of that inner monstrosity, and for good reason given what it can do and my fear knowing it can and would do that.)

The evil within me can be, on occasions, channeled into good, but the evils were evils I immersed myself in willingly, with no such altruistic goal; I had no expectation of turning the evil into good, and doing so can be thought of as simply not letting lemons go to waste and making lemonade from them. It's still evil regardless, unambiguously so.

How bad am I talking?

To reiterate: everything I am about to describe. EVERY. SINGLE. THING. I am about to tell you. I don't consider monstrous. So after reading the entirety of this blog post and seeing every single thing I describe and knowing not a single one I consider to be monstrous, you should be left with a question:
"If she didn't consider any of THIS monstrous, what does she consider monstrous?"
(The answer is not some philosophical trivial BS nonsense which is completely fine with everyone else, by the way, nor is it some quirk that literally everyone has. It is actual real monstrous things, but the darkest parts of my mind I keep private from others and won't ever explain on a blog.)

Before we begin, though. This is a necessity:
TRIGGER WARNING: THE ENTIRE REST OF THIS BLOG DEALS WITH TORTURE AND MAY TOUCH ON GORE AND RAPE, AMONG OTHERS. Viewer beware!

You've been warned, so you know what you're in for here; it's...not gonna be pleasant.

​Torture is something I think about alarmingly often, and not in the more lighthearted ways. What I mean by that is, I'm not talking about BDSM here because that is in no way shape or form torture; I am also not thinking about torture in the clinical, scientific, detached, theoretical sense of it.

You know. Think about how someone can be a buff for a subject. Science buff. History buff. Gun buff. Knife nut. You get the idea. They can hold fascination over the history of the subject throughout the ages, and know details about it from various regions and points in time, and go on long, passionate rants about, saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyy, the gory details of how the Aztecs would sacrifice a human being.

But they do that in a way which is self-evidently healthy and light; they're not into those things because they derive some form of recreating these things. Their interest can be thought of as trivial. They dig into the facts about those things as a side-project, as a hobby, as a passion, as a passing interest which they can be enthusiastic about, but they don't really go beyond that.

My interest in torture is not of that kind.
My torture is of the more thorough, deeper kind. I absolutely was the kind of kid that tortured all forms of life as a child. I probably left lifelong psychological damage on one of our first pets from what I did to her; I would squish ants, tried burning them with the magnifying glass trick, and would relentlessly brutalize plants in just about every way possible.

And while I eventually did swear off those ways and promised to be pacifistic, in spite of that, on some level I did shift gears from plants and animals onto humans. Where the unhealthy, darker sides of torture would be. The type of thought where it'd be, "This is how to go about it, and this is what to do to not get caught", kind of thinking.

(Disclaimer: Due to just how vividly and detailed I am in these descriptions, I feel the need to state beforehand: in case you are wondering. No. I haven't actually tortured anyone. Nor have I looked up/researched torture. But these are a collection on my thoughts on the hypotheticals behind if I did do it. I state these with a viewpoint which sounds confident and assured, that what I say is fact. That viewpoint comes from a lifetime of demented thoughts, thoughts not acted upon but which were thought up all the same. This is the darker side of having an overreactive imagination; by having the ability to envision even the most twisted of things, I am able to do...well. Just keep reading. THAT.)

People can and have called me psychopathic and/or sociopathic for my more sadistic tendencies, and frankly I don't really blame them for doing so, given my selfishness and detachment from reality and utter disregard for the rules of society and so on and so forth.

Yet to go into torture, really go into it, you have to start with a few baselines for what I actually mean by torture, here.

You can think of torture in terms of attempting to obtain pieces of information. Not only is torture proven ineffective in this regard, but also there are more reliable ways of obtaining such information. I don't really see torture as viable to this means, and this type of torture is not what I mean.

You can think of torture in terms of deriving pleasure from the inflicted suffering of others. This is closer to what I mean, where the torturer is enjoying the act of the torture more than anything else, but this isn't quite what I mean, either. There's plenty of ways to derive pleasure from the suffering of others that don't involve torture.

​What I more mean about torture is, what you can think of in terms as being "torture for the sake of torture". Torture for the sake of tormentation. Not expecting to get pleasure, not expecting to get anything out of it. The torture here is zero gain. There is nothing to be had from it. Only pain of the victim.

In other words: inflicting suffering, just to inflict the suffering. To drag others down, not to raise yourself up, but simply just to drag them down. Something transcending a sense of sadism, as it were. This is where I approach torture from, so that should give you a good idea of where I'm coming from, if you can comprehend this concept as an actual real thing. (And I'm telling you it very much is one...at least for me.)

​I've even thought about what would ultimately be one of the most excruciatingly slow, painful methods, which I call the "Hundred Permanent Paths of Pain". (Name is a bit of a misnomer, because there's not literally 100 pains involved. There's more.)

The first step in it would be to break every bone you can safely break without killing the victim. Hands, arms, legs, feet, ribs, the like; we have hundreds of bones in our body. Not all can safely be broken without risking, say, internal bleeding, but a fair number are safe to break. Keep in mind that bones can also be broken in multiple locations if big enough, and that inflicts even more suffering.

That's just the start though. From there, pull out all 20 fingernails and toenails. Rip them out of their sockets. And then, cut off the top third of each finger and toe. Then the middle third. Then the bottom third. (Each finger and each toe--even our thumbs, even our pinkies, even our big toes--has three distinct sections. These sections are harder to see in some of those extremities than others, but exist all the same.)

For all of these cut off parts, cauterization (which is extra pain) can be applied as is necessary to stop the victim from bleeding out. We're at 81 (if you count bones collectively as 1) paths of pain thusfar; the next logical step is to cut off the hands at the wrists, then the feet at the ankles. Then, cut off the arms at the elbows, and legs at the knees. And then, the arms at the shoulders, and legs at the hips. Which bumps it up to 93.

At which point, there's a bunch on the face.
Ears, 95.
Eyes, 97.
Tongue, 98.
And then you can pull out each and every single tooth they have.

The tongue and teeth come last for the purposes of hearing unmuffled screaming.

This level of agony would of course be instantly lethal if given all at once, so would be delivered over the course of days, if not weeks. And if their forcefully-blind/deaf/mute-paraplegic state isn't enough, there's always whipping their torso and hanging their neck but not enough to kill them for bonus extras (that can technically be done again and again at any time).

Step by step, the permanent paths of pain would be...well. Permanent damage. Starting out with things that can heal even if unlikely to heal correctly, and then moving on to things that won't heal but can be adapted to, and progressively on to more and more debilitating injuries, worse and worse as it goes along with the exception of the facial ones that are technically less severe, but are more psychologically scarring.

Which is a nice segue into the next section of defining torture to me.

All of the above? Absolutely nothing to me. Because while the above does hold some psychological aspects to it, it is almost entirely physically-based induced suffering. And for me, psychological pain is the true heart of where torture lies. You can inflict endless amounts of pain, but if it's physical, it's temporary. Psychological pain, on the other hand, isn't.

​This is one of the reasons, say, rape is such a special kind of evil. (I'll try to keep my talk here light and respectful, but I do consider it to be a form of torture of sorts, so I feel I need to at least mention it. And, yes, it is in fact monstrous, so ignore my "everything I say below I don't consider monstrous" line above when it comes to this section.) There is the obvious immediate physiological damage, but the psychological scarring from rape lasts a lifetime. 

Especially if after it, the victim suffers further from others: not being believed, being called names like whore, slut, and the like, victim blaming, and in a disturbingly large number of cases absolute lack of closure as the rapist walks away without any lasting consequences for whatever reason.

Even if the victim does receive a form of vindication/justice and has some amount of closure, there will always be some reminders of the incident that they can never fully remove from their minds; it will last a lifetime and never go away. They can find ways to cope, they can find ways to recover, but they'll never fully heal, because the psychological damage lasts well after the physical damage has passed.

It is perhaps one of the more extreme examples and in our every day life/the absolutely craptastic world we live in one of the most common examples of torture (sad as that may be, it's simply the facts; it happens, and pretending it doesn't won't change that it does, and is there a LOT), but I could name any number of other tortures akin to this.

For me, torture can be thought of as a performance art, subject to the whims of the audience (in this case, the audience is the victim): the key to making it be successful is to find the audience's trigger points, and figure out what works to psyche them, what gets them to react in the ways you are hoping to make them react.

Because, the real key to torture, is to never let the victim go numb. When a person is past their breaking point, they'll numb the pain. Pain will be meaningless to them. And when pain is meaningless to them, it ceases to be torturous, because it no longer has any affect on the victim.

So you rotate the torture. You give variety, introduce new hells one after another. And you give things which, preferably, can never be adapted to. Many psychological sufferings can eventually be coped with; a skilled torturer who really knows how to torment their victim will inflict psychological scarring that no matter how long it goes on for, will never be something they can adjust to.

The majority of my most disturbing imagery will end here, but I still wouldn't say the rest of this blog is safe to read, because I'm starting out with describing the ultimate torture someone could inflict on me. (One of the few redeeming aspects of these thoughts? I had them with me as the guinea pig in them. I didn't envision me inflicting the hundred permanent paths of pain on another; I envisioned them being done to me. But that still doesn't change how disturbing they are.)

The ultimate torture that someone could inflict on me is what I call "The Metal Box".
It is exactly that, a metal box, about three times the height (and thus, width and length, as this is a perfect cube) of the prisoner contained within. The walls absorb sound, so no sound from outside enters; no sound from inside echos. As the name indicates, the walls are also a cold metal.

You might think that the metal box would have no lighting, or dim lighting. Quite the opposite, the lighting within is equivalent to that of the sun (give or take), with light shining from all six directions. Not from a single location, either; the light is spread out across the entirety of the walls, floor, and ceiling, as if the very metal itself were the light itself.

There would be a small hole in one wall for a toilet, but not a hole large enough to climb through. So small a hole, in fact, that it can barely fit the contents you are dumping into it. It's just big enough that you won't die of disease as a result of poor sanitation, but offers no escape, no entertainment (it's not like a flushable toilet with a toilet seat that you can lift and lower for entertainment or a handle to flush for entertainment or tools you can use to escape). Pure baseline functionality.

There would be a water dispenser, designed similarly to that of those used for rodent pets like a hamster, such that you only receive the amount of water you need to survive, no more; it's impossible to drown yourself when you become more suicidal. It's also impossible to break it down into tools to orchestrate an escape.

Meals are delivered at random varying intervals, anywhere from as little as one hour apart to as much as two weeks apart. There is no pattern to these meals; there is no rhyme, no reason, to them. They come when they come, and don't come when they don't come.

Said meals are delivered with no tray, no plate, no silverware, nothing but the food itself, and are dumped in such a way that it's impossible to see anyone delivering the food. It just goes in, and that's it.

The metal box is, other than these features and the presence of the prisoner within...completely and entirely empty. Nothing inside it. Whatsoever. Except the prisoner, and the necessary means to keep the prisoner alive and functioning. With no way for the prisoner to derive entertainment from those necessities, and no escape route. Trapped in a metal box of a room, utterly empty.

The end result of this would be losing all sense of time, trapped with the worst enemy of all: my own mind. My own mind is my absolute worst enemy. I function because I have an outlet for it. I wrote down this blog at work; that's an outlet. When I post it as a blog, that's an outlet.

But what if I were, permanently rather than temporarily, deprived of all outlets...yet not having my ability to think dimmed, dulled, or numbed in any way, shape, or form? What if my overreactive imagination and relatively speaking fairly sharp senses were left to run amok, unchecked, ungated?

I fidget with objects to distract myself. I do things all the time to distract myself. But I always need something, anything, to focus on, because if I have nothing to focus on my brain explodes in activity, and when it has that type of outburst, nothing can stop me from just being in agony.

I need to move. But in such an environment, I would be unable to move. I could pace back and forth, but eventually my body would tire and I'd be forced to stay in one spot. As pacing helps me channel my energy, once I was no longer able to do so out of sheer exhaustion, I'd be at my wit's ends. Because I'd have all this energy, all this mental energy, accumulating, as if a bomb ready to explode...yet it couldn't be released.

That would be the truest, greatest of hells someone could inflict on me. Highly immoral, sure, but that's a given for torture since, y'know. Torture isn't exactly ethical, now, is it? Also highly illegal, mind you. But scarily enough, not all too far off of real world jails in some parts (for instance, isolation), which mind you is a contributing factor to why I want to always be a law-abiding citizen and never need to go to jail.

I simply couldn't survive in there, because the things I would need to survive are the very same things they would absolutely forbid me from having. Pencil and paper to write down thoughts? Way, way, way, WAY too dangerous. Laptop to type up thoughts? Probably even more dangerous! I'd no joke if a thought hit me that was that important, would write it down in blood, which I'm quite sure would make my living situation even worse.

What I'm getting at there is that I need an outlet. I absolutely need a way to vent, a way to express myself, a way to give my thoughts, to give my mind away in an external factor, even if it is something stupidly simple. And not doing so would be torture. Psychologically scarring, driving me insane.

So that's what I mean when I say I can think of no greater torture someone could inflict on me than that. But...I have a small confession to make:
In spite of what I just said. It's not quite fully accurate. While it's true that The Metal Box is the worst torture which someone could inflict on me, an aspect of it would actually give me respite from the TRUE ultimate torture...one which nobody can inflict on me.

That of the hell of my life, due to what can never change in it.

There are many, many, many things that people can change in their lives. It's not exactly true, but in general it can probably be said that the more things someone can change, the more privileged they are. An old story my dad used to tell me comes to mind.

There were two men.

One man kept making wrong choice after wrong choice.
The other, right choice after right choice.

As the man who kept making right choices went on in life, more and more choices opened up to him.
As the man who made wrong choices went on in life, fewer and fewer choices were available, until only two were available: death by (one method I don't remember), or death by (a different method I don't remember).

I'm horribly, horrendously butchering that story since it's been like 15, 18 years since I last heard it, but it's related to what I'm talking about here.

If you are in a position where you have the luxury of choice, you can change many, many things. The better off you are, the more you can change; the worse off you are, the less you can change. Now, even if you are worse off, you can still make changes, but your chance to make change and your opportunities to make the change are going to be more limited than if you were better off; that's just self-evident, that a poor situation/circumstances leads to less available chances to create good ones, whereas good situations/circumstances lead to more available chances.

Anyone can climb the latter in theory, but those who are already higher up on the latter have better shots at climbing the latter further than those who start from the bottom. That's just the world we live in. I don't feel I'm being cynical in stating that, either. It's real. Should it be that way, no. (I could probably go on endlessly on a tangent about equality, equity, and so on and so forth but I won't.) But it is that way.

And why I'm saying that is...

...I hold an incredible privilege, because I am already quite high up on the ladder. Not incredibly high, but middle class. (Not sure where on middle, if it's upper, lower, or right in the middle, but it's middle class undeniably.) We have debts; we have the need to monitor money; we have a bunch of things we have to watch out for that upper class people take for granted, but we also have things like 1.5 cars per person in a six-person family, about that same number of computers, a TV in both bedrooms as well as the living room, at least two PS1s, at least three PS2s, at least two PS3s, at least one PS4, an XBox 360, a Wii, numerous DVD/Bluray players, half a dozen gameboys and gameboy advances, plus the things which make use of these (movies, shows, games) in the hundreds.

If my parents had had only one or two kids with no pets (we've had two dogs, four cats, countless fish, two mice, and a hamster as pets off the top of my head and pets are ludicrously expensive to raise and keep in good health; saving our 14-year-old cat when he was a kitten cost at least $3,000 when he swallowed too much strong), then they would undeniably be upper class. (Especially since my brother is the only sibling of us three to really make any actual money.)

We're poorer than that because of said pets and extra kids (mind you, neither myself nor my younger sister were planned; we're both accidents so the aforementioned two-children scenario almost did happen), but what I am getting at here is...that's still incredibly well-off, all things considered.

I have a lot of things that are good in my life. I have warm shelter every day, due to having a house to live in. I have safe, reliable, consistent, quick, reasonably cheap transportation. I have a steady job (albeit minimum wage). I have a neverending supply of food, and more than that, the luxury of choice in what to eat. (I can't even begin to fathom how much of a privilege that is, in spite of knowing just full good and well exactly how much it is indeed a luxury!)

I have a constant supply of water, albeit due to no city water access not quite unlimited. (We have a well. And live in Western Washington. I need say no more than 'western Washington' for 'endless water' to come across.) As indicated above, I have multiple sources of entertainment available to me at any time.

I even have a girlfriend!

​I am in a position which, objectively speaking, is awesome to be in. People would quite literally KILL to have what I have.

Yet this creates torture.

Because while there are so many things I can change.
Because while due to having all of that, I have so many opportunities, so many chances to change.
What eats me up inside is that the things I most want to change.
Are the things which can't change.

There are plenty of things which can change, and my position affords me almost unlimited access to pretty much all of those; I have at my disposal endless numbers of decisions which can lead to countless numbers of possible paths, good or bad. I can change my life in those ways, with the potential to make it better!

But the ways I can change my life, be it for the better or for the worse, are the ways I don't care about changing.
The ways I can't change are the ones that I want to change.

And therein lies the suffering, the torturous part of it.

Because what I can change isn't what I want to change. I am shown, every day, with my privileges. "All of this is things you can do." Yet I am shown, by that, "You can make change"...except in the areas I want to make change.

There's hell to be had in my every day life because of that duality.

​No matter what I do, I can't change some things, even if I really want to. I have a female mind, born into a body that is biologically male. That can't change, no matter what. I could suffer a form of death. Pretend I'm just a guy for the rest of my life and hope, PRAY, that if I tell that lie to myself for long enough, that if I consistently sell the same story, that eventually it'll be real.

That's not changing it though. That's denying it. That's a refusal of reality. That's rejecting reality, and going down a road that nobody should go down, least of all someone like me since going down that road leads only to misery and suffering not just for me but potentially for others as well.

Technological advancements are an amazing thing; there's HRT and GRS or whatever name it goes by. But while those are good, they aren't perfect. The technology to make a body born biologically male 100% absolutely indistinguishable from a body born biologically female doesn't exist yet.

We're getting closer every day to it existing, but it doesn't exist now. That's no excuse of course not to use the existing technology, which I fully do intend to use...but even our existing technology is ludicrously expensive; to fully transition will cost me $100,000 or so, give or take.

In other words. No matter what I do. Regardless of the situation. I can't change who or what I am. I can't change that circumstance. I can get good at masking it; fully transitioning will help me cope with it. But nothing can change it, well and truly change it. At least not with our current technology. (Who knows what the future holds, in ten, twenty, fifty years it very well just might, but right now, no such luck.)

I am also autistic. This is not as obvious a tormentation as being a transwoman can be, but it is not without woes. This is also a mixed blessing/curse, in that there is some genuine good to come from my autism, from my ability to pick up on nuances, increased pattern recognition, and vastly boosted creativity, among other gifts.

But there are also some tremendous downsides to autism.

I will never be able to communicate as I want to.

I can try.

And I do try!

Every day, I try to get better at communicating.

But no matter how hard I try, I am hardwired to the very core to think in a way which is just different from other people, and that difference is difficult to live with. I can never convey my intended meaning as effectively as I want to. Even in words, it's difficult. I ramble. I make gigantic wallposts that nobody reads. In person, it's outright impossible.

​I can't change that. So it's torture. I can cope with it; I live with it every day, so I've adjusted to it. But I still don't like it. I don't like not being able to tell people what I mean and have them understand. I don't like my increased vulnerability to not understanding what others mean. I don't like people altogether skipping what I say.

I don't like those things, but no matter how much I try to change them. The best I can do is develop workarounds. I can turn weaknesses into aspects of strength, to exploit the most out of things. But I can never cure it altogether. I can never change it. I can try to make it work, but it'll always be a part of me that I wish was better than it is, because it is something I simply can't overcome because it's impossible to truly grasp.

I am bipolar. This is more obvious a tormentation in some ways, because the torture is something which people can generally at least grasp the concept of, but they might not understand just how bad it can be. Impulses are very, very, very nasty things. Most people have good control over their impulses. As I'm bipolar, I am forever vulnerable to succumbing to them.

Now this is all fine and dandy if the impulses are innocent enough, and good can come from being impulsive. I took track on an impulse. I took cross country on an impulse. I decided on swimming over wrestling (which my mom actually favored) on an impulse. I went to the same lifeguard training my sister did, on an impulse. And from those series of impulses which are a direct line (swimming came from needing a bridge between cross country and track, meaning without crosscountry, there wouldn't be swimming; with no swimming, there's no lifeguarding), you get me eventually getting a job.

But most impulses aren't innocent. Impulse buying is a go-to example, but I always live in constant fear that the darker half of my brain I suppress holds the full potential to, via impulses, enact those darker thoughts. I told you in the earlier disclaimer that I'd never tortured a person before, but no matter how unlikely it may seem to you--and believe me, it's quite unlikely because I've forced myself to set up dozens of safeguards--I am always living in fear of myself succumbing to an impulse which could lead to an event like torturing someone.

Do you know how scary it is to always be afraid of what you fear you're capable of doing? Impulses can lead to me hurting someone. In fact, they have. Not deliberately, of course. But they have hurt people before, and quite severely hurt them at that. Mostly online, mind you. And years ago when I was a kid fairly new all things considered to the internet. In the dark times, of the 2010 range for me (give or take a year).

The hurt I inflicted on them will never go away. It was accidental, yes, but it still happened, and it was because of poor impulse control more than anything else. (Autism may have played a part in me not realizing what had happened until it was too late, but that's ultimately not important what caused the hurt; what's important is that the hurt happened.)

Impulses aren't even the torturous part, though. I live in fear of impulses letting loose the monster within me, but I fear that knowing it to be an incredibly unlikely scenario. (I doubt that, short of some extreme trauma severely negatively impacting my psyche, it will ever come to reality. Still doesn't stop the fear though.)

The real bitch about the manic half of my depression is that when combined with my autism allowing me to sense things and connect random things. My brain is in constant overdrive, the overreactive imagination I mentioned earlier. How's it feel to have something within you, which makes you feel like your chest/brain is going to explode? It's maddening.

It's useful! It is incredibly useful for my creative efforts. But it is so overpowering that when I wave of mania hits me, I can do nothing but succumb to it. I can't do anything other than try to release the energy pent up within me, and this can and does lead to the aforementioned poor impulse control, too.

There's more to bipolar disorder than the manic half, though. The depression half of it, the low of it, is crippling. It can kill my drive altogether. It is, singlehandedly, the reason I haven't made anything of my life. At this point, probably having had high hundreds of thousands if not even millions of story/game/etc. ideas.

Not one has made it to reality.

Not. a. single. one.

To some extent, yes, the mania half is to blame because I can't focus on one if my mind is entirely on a new, different one.

But even if I am entirely focused on an idea.

If depression is running its course.

I can't do a thing.

I just shut down.

I do nothing.

I waste time, and make no effort.

And the worst part is, this can not only happen randomly, but also be induced by the slightest of causes. If I have reason to feel down, then I can enter depression no matter how minor the reason (it can be as little as a bad work day), and once in, I'm not leaving in a timely fashion (say a bad work day happened and I get depressed; it's not magically healed the next day).

The depression has its uses, yes, in that the time down is time which I've managed to turn into an artform, sometimes quite literally.

But I still don't take it well.

​Not even going into, counterintuitive as it may seem, how depression and mania can coexist simultaneously. Specifically, the danger there is combining depression bad enough to get suicidal with mania's poor impulse control; you can understand, then, exactly why that is an ugly, dangerous, combination to exist but it is perfectly plausible.

Again, I've put in safeguards to prevent it. Numerous ones. Failsafes for the failsafe's failsafe, levels of safeguarding. But all of this. Every single bit of the bipolar disorder countermeasures. Is just coping with it. It never changes that I have it.

I can make use of it; there is good to be had from it, as I have outlined.
But there is also a great many downsides to it, and no matter how much I want to change it so that I don't have those downsides.
I have those downsides.
They won't go away, no matter what. There is no magic pill to make my mind all better; it is permanently messed up, because I was born with these neurological conditions.

And the downsides of them stack.

Because the downsides of them stack.

Every day.

In spite of having the power to change.
I know that they won't change, because the ability to change doesn't mean that anything can change.
I can only change the things it is possible to change; the way my brain has been wired since birth is not a thing that can change.

You can slightly alter it. Coping mechanisms. Workarounds. But the fundamental nature of it remains the same.

So while I can get closer to being allowed to be the me I want to be. I'll never have everything I actually want.

And because of that.
That creates my torture.

I shouldn't be in a position to complain about a hellish life, because I have things which SHOULD lead to a happy, fulfilling life. And I do in fact, genuinely, feel happiness, each and every single day!

So maybe you can then understand the torture of HAVING THESE THINGS, KNOWING THEY ARE AWESOME, YET FEELING TORTURED IN SPITE OF POSSESSING THEM. Having them makes the torture in many ways worse, especially when I am told, "You have those things, why are you saying your life is hell?"

​When I have things others want above all else, how can I tell them I don't want those things? That what they consider a cherished gift is worthless to me? That what I have is their dream, yet I'm deliberately wasting it? That I don't care about the things I take for granted they want.

When I have no RIGHT to complain...what's it mean when I DO? Knowing I got good, yet I don't appreciate it. So luxurious, so nothing to complain about...yet I do ANYWAY. I know that my feelings on the subject hurt them...but I can't stop myself from having those feelings.

I can pretend I don't feel that way, that I appreciate the things I ought to appreciate, but it's still a lie. The simple truth of the matter is that I don't care about anything I have other than my girlfriend. (Incidentally. Caring about nothing in my life except my girlfriend is, in fact. Reason I would leave everything for them. Because I don't care about those things; I care about them, my girlfriend. Because I care for my girlfriend but not any part of my life, I would thus sacrifice any and every part of my life for the sake of my girlfriend. But I digress.)

​In other words. I know I am privileged, yet with the sole exception of my girlfriend nothing I have I really feel helps, making the torture worse. The torture is mental, psychological, in nature, continuously ongoing. It never ends. There's never a break in it. Never a chance for me to get a rest from my weaknesses.

They are always there, always a fundamental part of me, constantly reminding me of what I'll never have, what I'll never obtain, no matter how much I dream of having those things. All of that? Things which, by having, I "SHOULDN'T" be tortured, so because I know I shouldn't feel tortured, make the torture I feel all the more worse because in spite of having those things I still am tortured?

It's the worst pain I can possibly have. I don't feel I have the right to complain. I don't feel like I have the right to say I'm in pain. I don't feel like I have the right to say I'm struggling every day. I don't feel like I have the right to say my life is hell, my life is pain, my life is suffering.

I don't feel like I have the right to say those things. Yet I say them anyway. And I live this pain, every single day of my life. Because every single day, no matter how subtle, I suffer from gender dysphoria of my body not matching my mind. Every single day, no matter how little problem it presents, I struggle with my autistic idiosyncrasies clashing with society.

Every single day, I live in fear of succumbing to any number of problems originating from my bipolar disorder, and even when I don't, I am constantly bombarded by my own mind's hyperdrive. Processing a million different things and inputting them all at once, with poorly-assembled filters that could fail at any time.

Hells made worse by living them every day.
So isolation cures most of them, except the explosion of bipolar's mania, which is made oh so very much worse. 

Of course, all things considered. Miraculous as it may be, I am reasonably speaking well-adjusted. People who interact with me might just think I'm quiet, or a bit odd; they wouldn't really think of autism. (The last time I was asked, it was by a police officer, who wanted to make sure my stuttering wasn't because of either brain damage ensued from my car crash or from consuming alcohol, both things he would have obvious reason to take action on.)

That's because I have coping mechanisms in place.

I genuinely am able to live a happy, peaceful life. (Especially considering, and I can't emphasize this enough, I have a girlfriend that I love, who loves me, and that by being with I feel alive; they really are a motivator for me and an anchor point, as it were, a "rock" to rest upon.)

But said happy life is largely the result of wastefully squandering what I have, akin to a drug addict. An easy example to utilize here is the game of mafia, which I have so heavily integrated into the core of my life. A running joke is that mafia is the ultimate drug addiction.

The real piece of wisdom comes in when you realize it's not actually a joke. Mafia serves as an escape from the world. My problems still exist outside of it, and manifest even within it, but while I am playing it I don't have to consciously think about those problems. They don't go away. In fact, they only get larger. But while there, I can bury myself away, happily doing nothing.

I derive a sense of self-worth from it. It is self-destructive, it is incredibly harmful, but it makes me feel happy. It is a way to deal with the torture, but it does not cure the torture. It is a way of temporarily forgetting about my problems, my suffering, but it can't cure them no matter how hard I try and by immersing myself too heavily in it as I've done on occasions my life has taken nosedives, plummeting in a downward spiral.

Sounds like a drug to me.

I do have non-mafia coping mechanisms.
Even productive ones! That being, non-gaming coping mechanisms, since I play more games than just mafia to escape the misfortunes of the world.

But while those coping mechanisms exist. They can't cure the problem. Just mitigate the damage of it. 

I am always struggling between my self, and my sense of others. The desire to do good is there, but so too is the struggle to overcome my limitations, to bypass my roadblocks, my shortcomings. And I fail, time and time again. And each failure is more painful than the last, because each time I tell myself I learned, I'll do better, and that I won't make the same mistake again...so when I make it anyway, there's a sense of dread and despair, of a broken record.

And, yes, hopelessness. Always, wasting. Never who I want to be, never doing what I want to do, and when faced with this truth, using excuse after excuse. (Heck, you can find them here in this very blog!) But never changing. Half because I don't want to change things I can, half because I can't change the things I want to. So always on repeat.

Some things I most want to can't change. Yet I have the power to change plenty. An ability I knowingly and deliberately squander. Itself a form of cruelty, self-defeating, even destructive, yet I learned to revel in this debauchery as a coping mechanism.

There are good coping mechanisms, but most of mine aren't. I can change coping mechanisms, but I struggle to do so, because what I want to do isn't to change the coping mechanism, but to change myself so that there's no need to cope in the first place.

Something which I know is impossible to obtain. And the circle continues anew. A self-feeding loop.

I do, however, have a saving grace. It's a form of acceptance. Knowing that I can't ever get what I want has allowed me to come to peace to it to some extent, and I can live my every day life at least in part due to that, and I don't think that's an inherently bad thing; it's actually a quite rare gift.

I have some level of peace about who and what I am, something most people in similar situations never obtain and their response to never obtaining it is quite often disproportionately suicide; my risk of that is quite low because I know I can live this way even if I hate it.

It is also a curse though because that same tendency has a downside of feeding the negativity. It can help me, in the sense that it prevents the negativity from taking control altogether. But it can also hurt me further, because it allows the negativity to foster, to thrive.

It's actually quite possible, in fact, that this sense of acceptance is in some ways...my numbness from succumbing to the torture. It does fit a number of the symptoms; I am continuously in pain, and certainly have been pushed to breaking before. It'd make sense that if I did in fact develop acceptance as an adjustment to the pain, it'd make me more numb to it.

Granted, this being psychological pain. This being psychological torture. Acceptance as a numbing agent to the pain doesn't stop it altogether. The pain still destroys my life. It just doesn't do as much damage as it would without the acceptance.

​I don't really have a direction to take this morbid blog after this. I certainly don't have a positive spin to put on it; with more clever writing I may have managed one, but honestly I'm not sure this is a subject which would deserve a positive spin. This is a debilitating thing.

Every day, I have that torture, and every day, I know it could be oh so much worse.

I'm not even scratching the surface of my mind here.

​But I thought I'd at least give you a piece of it.

I succumbed and bought Civ 3.
And have played it.
But surprisingly...I'm not feeling as addicted to it as I thought.

Which is good, I suppose.

Still ate up most of my day though.

So I was having a discussion.
In it, it was brought up that obsidian is glass. (A fact I knew already.)
This got me to wikipedia obsidian.
From there, about two dozen tabs got opened--this is not the slipping away you think it is! They're all closed now, with no tabs replacing them, thankyouverymuch. I did waste a couple hours on the Aztecs, numerous weapons, their social status, armor, shields, and similar, but that? Got closed.

The damage done was making me think about a couple of childhood games, Age of Empires II and far more deadly...

...Civilization III.

I figured.

"Well, too bad, craving to waste my life. You can't find the correct CD and even if you did, installing it on your computer would be a royal pain."

Unfortunately.

I'm not stupid enough to listen to my brain, even when I should.

And on a whim, I searched to see if Civilization III with the appropriate expansions, was available on steam.

...It is.

WELP.

The good news is.
I haven't bought it yet!

The bad news is.

It's only a matter of time before I cave in and end up buying it, sucking my life away.

​At least it's not yet!

Today I did some minor revisions/expansions to a Phyrra and Cyrus ramble/blog that...I never originally gave, but in spite of that.

Today, I just.

I just am having one of those days where I don't want to do anything productive.

I want to retreat into a shell and do nothing of note. To veg out. Ideally with my girlfriend, obviously (because there is no such thing as too much time with my girlfriend <3), but. Failing that, I'm in a mode where I don't want to do anything except just stare at a screen. No writing. No gaming. (Though I may do a little.) Just. Staring at a screen.

I was playing Majesty--specifically, I was playing a Southern/Original quest, and cheating, but then something began to happen. I was getting a bunch of buildings which had levels higher than they actually have (e.g. Library Level 3), and also a bunch of new buildings appearing that were variants on existing buildings--they had what you can fairly call palette swaps on the buildings they were variants on, but they had notably different effects.

And more than that, as if triggered by the quest itself, there were many buildings which appeared at their 1 HP base form to build up, which I was struggling to keep up with and build all of, in addition to a ton of heroes appearing out of what seemed like nowhere.

It was a great time, and I had the thought, "this is too good to be true!".
...And between that, and my grandfather's television blazing, I realized it was too good to be true, moaning and groaning and waking up, to remember that I was on vacation down in Oregon visiting my grandfather, as is a usual enough activity for me to do.

​And it was only after having done things shifting at a pace I was having an increasingly hard time keeping up with that I realized, "Waaaaaaaaaaait a second......"

​...This, in dream time, was probably like fifteen minutes which in real-life time probably translated to being an hour or two, of being on vacation there. And then I woke up, this time for real. That dream within a dream was quite something, because it was wholly convincing. I woke up in a way exactly mirroring the way I actually wake up from a dream, so the dream was tricking my sleeping mind into thinking I had woke up, allowing me to not question things going on especially as they started off normally enough.

The dream's main 'slip' as it were, was just the accelerated rate of 'scene shifts' as it were. There was still a chronological order to it, but because I was not able to keep up with the racing scene shifts, my mind was able to figure out that if this were real, that wouldn't be happening, at least not in the way it was happening in the dream.

It didn't even occur to me until I was fully awake that of course I wouldn't be down in Oregon on vacation if for no other reason than my grandfather died half a year ago, among other factors. Still, it was quite the deception; this is the kind of trick you see captors use in all those cliche sci-fi shows to fool their prisoner into thinking that their reality is something it's not.

Funnily enough. Making the dream more realistic? That dream-within-the-dream of Majesty? I've had one almost exactly identical to it before. The southern not northern quest, the numerous buildings with higher levels and new buildings that are variant on older buildings, with me exploring around to see what's new and what's different. I've had it be a realistic dream before, so that made it almost a recurring dream you could say.

Frankly, the whole dream and dream-within-a-dream almost felt more like a memory than an actual dream when waking up--a feeling I've never had when dreaming before especially as I know the exact chronology depicted in the dream never has happened before even remotely in the way shown.

But anyway.

Upon waking up.

I was having stiff, achy, soreness everywhere. Literally everywhere. Still do. I woke up dehydrated, still with my jaw hurting, having a violent cough which thanks to the soreness hurts extra (but I'm quite positive the cough could not cause the soreness since it is soreness in places a cough could never ever effect plus I slept WAY too soundly to have been coughing up a storm overnight), the running nose from yesterday, now clogged up to the point where I can barely breathe through it, and feeling thoroughly feverish.

On the bright side, I don't have the sore throat and in spite of my symptoms technically speaking being worse, I actually feel better than yesterday; what's happening feels like my immune system just doing its job ruthlessly efficiently. Still, this is something I suspected would be flu symptoms and my girlfriend shares that suspicion, so the moment I'm hitting submit here, I'm going to nap.

Did it help?

Not one lick!

Still sick.

Sore throat, and worse, the gunk in the back of the throat makes the sore throat worse.

I did have some good though. My sister made oatmeal for me; as far as breakfasts for sore throats go, that has to top the list of good ones. I took a reasonably long, warm bath, which was quite soothing and by my understanding does help quite a bit. And in said bath, I was struck with some inspiration.

For Dawn of Order, I was thinking that each Order (Order of Harmony, Order of Magic, Order of Religion, Order of Technology) would have a unique tower you could build, with said towers being some of the best towers in the game.

The Order of Harmony can build the Death Ray, beams of pure sun energy causing continuous rapid-fire damage to a single target. This is similar to the flame tower which all races can build regardless of Order/Divide choices, but has a much further range. These beams deal a lot of damage continuously; we're talking can-kill-an-angel-in-five-seconds damage. Also, these beams don't have a melee/range/magic classification and thus can't be resisted.

The Order of Magic can build Mage Towers, which amplify the effects of spells cast within the range of the tower and extend the range of spells which have ranges. Whenever the tower is attacked, the tower unleashes a magical blast hitting every enemy unit nearby. This makes it unique in that it is a tower with no ability to protect by default, only to defend itself from being destroyed...

...However, if gold is deposited in the tower, magical energies can consume the gold deposited over time to extend this effect into offense, allowing it to unleash the magical blast to hit every enemy unit within range even if the tower isn't attacked. This is arguably the strongest tower, but because to use this ability you need to continuously funnel gold into the tower, it is also the only tower with an upkeep and thus longterm the most expensive tower.

The Order of Religion can build the Tesla Tower, shooting divine bolts which can pierce through and chain to a series of enemy units (in fact it has no maximum number of units it can chain lightning to), dealing damage to all of them. Said damage is, similar to the Death Ray, not classified as melee/range/magic.

The Order of Technology can actually build two towers. The Gatling Turret is a rapid-fire turret capable of targeting up to four enemies at once and shooting bursts of many ranged attacks to the targets. The Rail Tower shoots a single, super-high-damage attack to a single target (an attack which is not melee/range/magic), but has a fairly high cooldown.

These towers have some fairly obvious explanations. The Order of Harmony uses the power of nature--all of nature, including the power of the cosmos, in this case, the sun, to shoot death to enemies at a long distance.

The Order of Magic builds Mage Towers, which are unmanned stations that mages can channel their energy through.

The Order of Religion once had a genius theologian, Reverend Tesla, who pioneered understanding of the divine, both harvesting the power of the gods for enrichment and for retribution; the Tesla Tower is thus an unmanned station which allows for divine protection through deliverance of the heavens: lightning bolts.

The Order of Technology pioneers technology, so they are at the forefront of weapons development; it thus makes sense for them to have two towers, and for one to focus on enhancing guns to their maximum potential and the other one to be a really, really, super-advanced gun.

The player can build numerous other towers, of course. Flame tower, guard tower, bolt tower, cannon tower, blast tower (crowd control, essentially). But the five towers from the four orders are meant to each on their own be tremendously strong. For instance, the Rail Tower can one-shot an Angel. However, don't expect a bunch of these towers together to do any good--their AI can cause every tower to target the same enemy, and thus waste a bunch of damage potential.

Or when you want them to target the same enemy, they can all target a different enemy, and thus kill said enemy at a much slower speed than preferred. Balanced defenses integrate the tower of the Order you selected IN ADDITION to the normal towers, to allow for protection against any kind of assault.

Albeit not much.
While I did some random hero work it didn't get far in Dawn of Order; my main contribution was making the hardest non-boss monsters in the game: Angels, with ridiculously high magic resistance and high melee resistance (just with no ranged resistance), ridiculously high health, and then in addition to their normal attack which deals high damage to one target, they have a unit-wiping-out attack dealing high damage to all units in a large area surrounding them, a healing spell to heal nearby monsters, and a revive spell to revive monsters with gravestones nearby.

...Yes. A monster which heals other monsters, can even revive other monsters, is ridiculously hard to kill, and can kill units with great ease. Oh and while not fast, it's not slow, either. The flavor text for it would say, "Once, it was believed there were two types of angels: Angels of Life, and Angels of Death. Further research revealed the only difference between the two was the mood of the angel."

Their bigger cousins, the Cherubim, would have half the speed, but double the health, double the damage, and half the cooldown time on their spells. A combination of Angels and Cherubim would be what is summoned by the cheat doh you wanna die. And, yes. Their spell can heal/revive one another. So a whole swarm of them could, in theory, chain-heal/revive to never die.

A Seraphim would not be a normal monster, but would be featured as a boss monster as having four times the health, eight times the damage, one quarter of the cooldown, and being fast. Basically something which if faced unprepared could level your entire kingdom all on its own.

​All three have a high preference for unit-destroying, but if not, will be defending other monsters.

For Phyrra and Cyrus, I mainly worked on villains, and what happens to them. I don't want to give it away though, even though I know I probably should write it down somewhere.

So I did do work today, just not much.

One of the things which turns me from manic to depressed so often now in spite of medications meant to help with that.

Forgive the phrasing as it's something I'd normally not say unless in tongue-in-cheek because saying it seriously is a hallmark of arrogance, but I can't think of a better phrase to describe the issue:
"It's not every day you have a stroke of genius."

I don't want to call myself a genius because of how presumptuous that'd be. BUT. I think you can at least understand my sentiment here, what I'm going for.

It is not every day that you come up with a great idea.

It is not every day that you come up with an idea which is amazing.

And like.

I know I am a very creative person, who builds grand worlds. The World of Soano (The Descended's setting) is one of my favorite places. The Rubyverse is a conglomeration of my work across the years and takes the best of everything put into one place.

Heroes of Gistou takes what is perhaps the greatest achievement I've ever had as a writer and is a conglomeration of all my years of work as a writer; in the original mafia game I wrote the flavor for it was ambitious enough but as a novel which took things even further, it has literally every skill I've ever used in any of my stories ever in one place, while adding elements I've never used before including diversity in gender/sexual orientation (okay so that's touched on very lightly in one other story but only barely), racism, and hair/eye/skin color and whatnot.

It is basically my crowning achievement as a writer because the characters are humans I know (okay so to be fair, this was a bit of a cheat because when writing their characters some influence from the players who were assigned those roles leaked in), the setting is one of the most intricate ones I've built, the plot is one of my favorite stories, and the quality of the writing is the highest I've ever done; there's nothing to top it.

Though, coming close would be the other novel I was working on when my flashdrive failed and caused me to lose literally years' worth of work. (Still bitter about that, but if you're wondering, probably wouldn't work on my novel if I had the information, anyway. I'd back the information up, but my mood to work on the novel was utterly killed and having the flashdrive back and functioning wouldn't magically revitalize it.)

It is, in many ways, similar to Gistou in that it is the other story which touches on sexual orientation (albeit not gender orientation), and in some ways it actually is more of a statement. Some things which we might think are very unprogressive are shown even from the main characters...but this is more or less commented on in the book and you can tell that it is a deliberate narrative choice. (At least if I competently write that is.)

Racial divide, philosophy, the nature of war, the nature of fate/destiny, discrimination, eugenics of a sort (something I don't think I ever actually wrote down was a minor revision to dialog at one point where the protagonist notes that while there are 10,000 humans left alive, only about 4,000 of them are pureblooded humans with no genes from the other species which is closely enough related to humanity that they can have fertile hybrid children and said hybrid children's descendants account for the other 6,000 and the protagonist believes that in order to survive humanity needs that genetic diversity since humanity's gene pool is dangerously small; even his ancestors had a first cousin marriage).

It just touches on a lot of things, with some of the most powerful writing I've ever done, a full cast of characters who are actual CHARACTERS. They don't just have quirks. They have flaws. Most of my characters, well, they might have flaws but they don't get displayed in my writing. It's a bit of a weak spot in my writing; when I write characters, they don't tend to fail, they don't tend to have shortcomings, they don't tend to be in the wrong, and so on and so forth.

This story has all of that. And the question, of course, of "am I really in the right?", with ambiguous answers, rather than clear-cut ones. People. More than any other story, maybe even more than Gistou, people. Yet the world has a beautiful history to it and the plot progresses in this altogether philosophical way, where action is happening and yet you still get these little moments to know everyone.

The Perfect RPG for me is a setting I might have slightly tabled in favor of other projects, but I am still passionate about it because I really like what I made there.

I still want to make the Disneyesque Villain Song setting. I've toyed with various expansions, from extra characters (the protagonist, the seer, the love interest, the best friend of the protagonist, a cool old guy, and of course the villain among many others), how the beginning of the story unfolds, how the protagonist meets the love interest, how the story ends, and little things here and there including that the villain would be almost by-the-book following the evil overlord list (with some liberties taken here and there).

It is a wondrous, beautiful thing, envisioned as a film but also suitable for a miniseries. Probably not a full series, but could be done I suppose with tweaking.

And then there's the two most recent.

Phyrra and Cyrus.

And Dawn of Order.

I am passionate about them all.
Yet those ones really speak to me as, so to speak, "genius among the genius". Or rather. "This is the perfect balance of something which can actually be done (and is thus, pragmatic to do), and yet is something which is still grand enough to be ambitious, reach the masses, and inspire greatness", more or less.

Phyrra and Cyrus, and Dawn of Order, are both outside of my general comfort zone. I am a writer first and foremost. I am secondarily an artist. While those are used in animation and games, they are not at the forefront of them. Both have incredible ambition behind them, both have incredible ideas which make them truly unique and original, and yet because of what they are, are something which can be spread to the masses fairly easily and readily once made.

And more than that. I feel that they can actually be done. Not by me, alone, yes. But they can be DONE.
One of the reasons The Descended may never get off its feet is because it feels like a project which needs to be done entirely by me, but yet the scale of the project is such that while it's incredibly ambitious I'm probably never going to be able to complete it in my lifetime just as me alone.

Aside from how I've lost the art and scripts I've had multiple times, aside from how the site is (pardon the language) a clusterfuck and yet I have a strong desire to not nuke it and start from scratch. Aside from that. To tell the story I want to tell, I need to produce high-quality, almost professional art. Yet there's a ton of content for the story. I've forgotten a fair amount and with no usable notes that content is lost forever but even with it removed (or magically recovered).

The story isn't short. Compared to Red Hood Rider, yeah, it's short. But it's still something which if I were updating daily would take years of my life to complete and updating at a rate slower than daily would take...well. Longer than a human lifespan, honestly. 

Speaking of Red Hood Rider. What I just said about The Descended applies to it, too. Red Hood Rider, being a project which is mine. Just feels like something which should be done by me. I have also lost many notes of mine on the subject and what I have is chaotic, jumbled, scattered. Yet new content keeps being added even to this day, and content gets revised. And it's estimated to be about 80-100 episodes worth of content.

Each episode with 20-40 pages.

If that were daily updates that'd be potentially 4,000 pages. You know how many years that is? Ten. If I were releasing daily pages it would take ten years to complete Red Hood Rider. Now imagine less than daily. And knowing that the quality of art demanded for the project is even higher than that of The Descended, because Red Hood Rider is meant to be something which could be adapted into an animation (which is why chapters are called episodes).

My novels are, obviously. Personal projects. Can't outsource writing. Well, you could I suppose but heck no that's not something I'd do. So it'd have to be me doing them, by myself, alone.

All of them, I can reach out to others of course. Get a novel published, I can communicate to my readers. Start updating a webcomic, I can have dialog with my readers actively on a daily basis. But there's something in that which feels missing, actually.

And that is something not missing when I think of Phyrra and Cyrus especially, although also recently Dawn of Order.

Because on those. I would be creating my visions, but I'd be working with others, collaborating with them to bring what I envisioned to life. It would be my project, it would be personal, but it would have the touch of others on it as well and that would be a good thing. For The Descended, Red Hood Rider, and my novels, the thought of the touch of others on it feels WRONG.

But because it is literally a requirement for Phyrra and Cyrus (given voice acting) and Dawn of Order, it feels right. It feels good. The thought that I'd have it.

I'm not sure I'm presenting a very coherent thought here on what I am getting at.

What I am getting at is that many of my projects, I feel are personal projects.
Yet when it comes to a project like Phyrra and Cyrus.

What makes them strokes of genius.
Is that they are something which aren't personal projects. Yet in spite of not being personal projects. They feel like they are realistically achievable. I don't think anything I've envisioned in them is impossible, unreasonable, or really that hard to achieve if I really set my mind to it.

And I just.
Really, really like thinking about them.

And that's where the depression comes in--when I can't think of them, as it were.
Or rather. "I have thought of this great idea. Why am I not thinking of something just as good, or doing something just as good?"

By that, I mean.

Anything I do, I feel like it's less than what I could be doing.

I pretty much stopped playing Final Fantasy VII once I started envisioning the perfect RPG.
And now there's something similar for Majesty, Zeus/Poseidon, and the like.

Where I have envisioned a really cool game, Dawn of Order. Which I want to be playing, or at least designing. Rather than playing those games.

And any other game just feels...lesser than those, because those are some of my favorite games after all.

And there's something similar for Phyrra and Cyrus.

I've pretty much stopped rehashing most of my ideas (aside from the villain song one which is alive and well) since starting it. And when I think about them. I just. Want the moments I envision to be real.

I've even mapped out exactly how I could do it, too. The things I ask for, most I know explicitly can already be done because I have seen them done. And if I've seen them done, then it is possible for them to be done on my project. (For reference, this is also true of Dawn of Order. I don't think anything I describe is impossible, not even when putting it all together, because every element I describe exists in one of the games I was inspired by, and while I know code isn't exactly directly transferable, it'd be possible to more or less manage it if you were a competent coder familiar with the inspiration and knowing the intended result.)

​If I could, for instance. I'm like 97% sure that Phyrra and Cyrus could be hosted on ComicFury. Yes, it's a comic site, yes, Phyrra and Cyrus is an animation, but I am almost absolutely positive (thus the 97%) that a "comic" can be a video.

Specifically. A video which doesn't autoplay, which you hit play in order to play, and which has both animation and audio. There is a file format which allows that. Well, multiple file formats. But I am positive one of said file formats, ComicFury supports for comics, and thus, it would be potentially possible to upload an entire episode. (Might run afoul of the size limitation to uploads but I'm sure there'd be a workaround for that.)

If that were possible, then from there it'd be easy.
Each comic (except fillers in the form of character art or worldbuilding concepts) would be an episode.

The most iffy thing I'd want would be the ability to make a video fullscreen; I'm less than positive that'd be possible.

But I'd want a home page with disqus comments that'd display the latest episode and latest blog (easily done), the ability to leave disqus comments on every blog post (easily done), maybe disqus comments on some extra pages (easily done), and then for the comments on every comic...
Disqus comments displaying on top and ComicFury comments also displaying below Disqus as the default (seen it done so it can be done),
With the option to alternatively have ComicFury comments on top and Disqus comments below,
And the option to hide ComicFury comments (seen it done so it can be done),
And the option to hide Disqus comments (seen it done so it can be done),
And the option to hide both comments,
And the ability to save preference for comment display (the above options) between both pages page to page and visits  visit to visit (meaning not needing to manually click the preferred option each time; pretty sure this can be done),
And Disqus comments linked to every site I host Phyrra and Cyrus on with Disqus (seen it done so it can be done).

Optionally, with a domain purchased and used.
Premade layouts have a quick-navigation (dropdown menu) so I'd have that, and premade layouts also have the "save my place" function for saving the comic/episode location you were watching so you can "load my place" later, and optionally, I could maybe have non-intrusive advertising built into the site.

So that might seem like a fair amount. But given what I know ComicFury can already do. In that I've seen almost all of this already done. I'm pretty sure it'd be possible to do. And it'd be awesome.

This is what I mean. I mapped that out over a week ago. It's doable. Most likely, at least. 

It feels like something I can actually have made real.

It feels like something where I could have a blast.
Just interacting with viewers, with fans, with friends, and coworkers, to make a project, pouring pure love into it every step of the way. A project which is mine...but also more than mine. Something greater, built by a team, a community. Something to share with the world, and be remembered for.

Something unique, quirky, original, and ambitious. Yet not so ambitious as to be impossible. To be manageable. To be something that can be made.

That's what I want to make on a daily basis.

But it's not every day I make a Phyrra and Cyrus.
It's not every day I make a Dawn of Order.
It's not every day that I get to have those moments of genius for lack of a better term.
It's not every day where I can snatch that greatness and feel it.

But on those days where I don't have the greatness.

I still remember the feeling of it.
The sensation remains.

On days I am not making the next Phyrra and Cyrus. Or for that matter, making Phyrra and Cyrus. I am remembering the sensation of Phyrra and Cyrus. And that is where the depression comes in...because I feel empty, because it's just so real and something just so close to something I can see tangible...yet not actually existing. The ideas will die with me.

I intend to live a very long life, of course. But the ideas if I don't make them...well. Nobody else would. Nobody else could. They could make something which has all the elements my notes describe, of course. But it wouldn't be how I had tried to make it because my notes aren't nearly as extensive as they should be, and there are little things here and there that the only way I'd be able to bring up is if someone first was trying to do them wrong and I'd be able to tell them, "No, not that. This." to fix it.

And that's the frustrating feeling.

Knowing that I have these ideas. Ideas that are. No matter how much I try to be humble. No matter how much I try to avoid arrogance. No matter how much I try to be a realist, a pessimist, a cynic. Ideas which are just...good. Ideas which are genius. I have them. And they demand to be made real.

I feel them as real. I actually live with them as real. I don't just see episodes of Phyrra and Cyrus. I also see me interacting with viewers who watch the latest episode of Phyrra and Cyrus. Me commenting on their comments, engaging them in dialogs which are currently nonexistent. Talking to them, revealing miscellaneous facts, sometimes being a bit of a trolling creator, other times revealing tiny snippets which couldn't make it into the show, small Word of God things like that, you probably can get a sense of what I mean.

When I think of them. I am actively doing that. Not just laying out the episode itself. But also the reactions to the episode, which I know would exist because. Well. I am confident in myself. Not arrogance. I know that, 100%. If Phyrra and Cyrus was made into a series. There would be fans. There would be people commenting. There would be a lot of them because in order for Phyrra and Cyrus to publish so much as a single episode. It'd need to get the publicity to get off the ground in the first place.

In other words. I know that if Phyrra and Cyrus existed. There would be people talking about it. It would demand to be watched. Demand to be seen. It would be popular, spread like wildfire. I know this because I know what I can make it be. If it existed, then it would exist at a high enough quality where those things would be impossible to not have.

And the depression more or less comes from.

"...So why isn't it so?!?"

So why don't Phyrra and Cyrus already exist.
So why doesn't Dawn of Order already exist.
So why doesn't this idea. Which is magical. Have its reality.
And why can't I have something like it, right now, in front of me.
Why can't I have something like it, or it itself, in my mind if nowhere else.

And that's what cuts deep. Not having it in front of me. Not having it in my head. And not having something similar to it in my head. Living in a world where it doesn't exist tangibly. Living in our world. A world close to the one they exist in. But they don't. Because I haven't made them exist yet, in spite of being their creator.

I think that describes my depression pretty well. And people might be able to relate to it now that I've described it in those terms. But I never know. Sometimes, it might just be I'm crazy.

Apparently my subconscious is genius, because the idea was spawned from a dream, too. Now, granted. Most of the fleshing out I've been doing over the last twelve hours has been a conscious effort, and given the nature of this, I can't claim credit for MUCH (just the original stuff such as the lore I'm beginning to build), BUTSTILL.

Anyway. Today, the new idea?

A game.

This game was inspired primarily by Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim (and some of the better elements from the hypothetically-if-one-did-exist-sequel which is a shame that they never made. What's that you're saying? Sorry, can't hear you over my lamenting that Majesty never was given a sequel game, you'll have to speak up louder)...

...But throwing in STRONG elements of Nemesis of the Roman Empire (a game literally nobody seems to know anything about existing pretty much; even MAJESTY is less obscure apparently), with fair amounts of Age of Empires II (plus a little from Age of Empires 1 I guess) thrown in for good measure. (Not really Age of Mythology and certainly not Age of Empires III, but the monsters in this game can I suppose take cues from Age of Mythology.) I suppose you can say Starcraft holds some influence, too.

Yes, that would mean that it'd have a bunch of mechanics which are RTS in nature and take from some more traditional RPG styled games, so this isn't "Me imagining Majesty's sequel as it should be"; this is a new game, with inspiration from Majesty. Inspiration, nothing more. You can see the aesthetic of Majesty in the game I envisioned, but you can also clearly tell that this is a separate game, not intended to be identical in any way.

Where do I begin?

I literally gave up my morning shaving/hair brushing/teeth brushing and critically nap in order to write down notes, and I wrote down three full pages worth of notes at work not to mention a fourth mini-page (mini mini page, half of a sheet which is I estimate 1/4th of a normal page, so 1/8th extra) continuing, and these pages were pretty cramped, so I got a LOT of work done on this idea; it was a borderline obsession and I am positive my performance at work was notably suffering (bad because my bosses were both present, but oh well for this I consider it worth it).

Hmm...I suppose I'll start with some of the mechanics.

So this is a game featuring a zoomable map: able to zoom in fairly closely, but also to zoom way out until the units are basically dots, and this zoom is designed to be functional and sane with every zoom in-between, a way to view as much as the kingdom as necessary. (And yes I call it a kingdom, because of the games I listed, Majesty still is the strongest influence on the game.)

Said map can be ROTATED, too. It can be rotated 360 degrees, viewable from any angle at any zoom. It has four "preset" rotations found on buttons, with the default being north (okay so this I took from Zeus: Master of Olympus/Poseidon: Master of Atlantis).

There is a minimap always visible, which has various different options toggled for how/what is viewed.
There is a tracking window below the minimap, to track something the player designates, including the option to rotate through things/places.

The commander would have various different flags (you'll get more about this later on why these are necessary): "Attack this target"; "Don't get near this target"; "Don't go near this area" (for things in the unexplored area which you know are there); "Go to this location"; "Defend this".

The game would have VARIOUS different speed options. Everything from 10% to 1000%; moving in slow motion to moving absurdly fast, faster than a human can realistically follow. The game would also feature the ability to PAUSE. The player can't issue commands when paused (no spells, no commands, no recruits, no upgrades, etc.), but the ability to pause allows for much faster translations between commands for the micromanager especially when paired with the slow game speed.

The game would feature hotkeys, easily set, to allow for fast tracking of specific units/formations/buildings, along with a command to zoom to the selected.

The only REAL resource would be gold--stored both in the treasury (max: 99,999,999), and in various buildings. Gold stored in a building can be used for any purchase IN THAT BUILDING (for instance, a hero building with gold can use gold to recruit a hero without depleting the treasury) and does so by default, BUT, purchases can also be made using the treasury.

In other words, there's a universal source which is used when there's nothing else to use, but you can use locally if you don't want to deplete the universal source. Said local sources feed back into the main source via the economy, anyway, but more on that later.

Said gold is generated over time--automatically a small amount deposited in the treasury as a 'daily income', some from certain items, and collected both from units/buildings (many buildings generate gold, other buildings have gold deposited in them, and both can have it collected; think tax collector from Majesty) and from harvesting gold deposits on the map or from trading. (Resources on the map aside from buildings are destructible; you can destroy them in order to build, but it's a bit wasteful since there's a limited amount you can harvest.)

Thus, it's never possible to run out of gold even though with careless spending it is possible to find yourself a bit short on gold for an inconvenient duration of time.

Every unit within the game would have an AI--every unit. Even units who, under normal circumstances, should never need to be artificially controlled. (Due to a specific level with the quirk of zero obedience, which you'll learn about below.) Each AI would be unique to that unit, but following a pattern. This is the Majesty coming out, you might be able to tell.

Even Peasants and Tax Collectors had their little quirks to them which made them act in weird ways. (Often stupid, but that's beside the point.) This would be that. All units have an AI setting which works on autopilot, and all units with that AI setting follow patterns which, at least theoretically, are optimal usage of their abilities. Non-heroes travel together in groups, for instance.

​In spite of said AIs, the majority of units can be ordered. Henchmen and heroes tend not to really respond to direct orders (though henchmen can be ordered to follow directives, basically, differing behaviors IN their AI), but even they can do so and if not, that's what flags and spells are for. (Still more on that below.)

Most buildings are constructed and thus destroyable, but some buildings aren't destroyed, just demolished/converted. These buildings can't be permanently destroyed, simply rendered currently-unusable by their current owner by whatever method (including being converted into having a different owner). 

Heroes can always capture/convert structures; some units also can. Alternatively, demolishing and then rebuilding can be done if not capturing/converting them. Obviously, there are a predefined set number of these per level. They are structures of importance. Settlements are the most important (as they are basically the equivalent of a Palace in Majesty), which often (but not always) are surrounded by permanent (rather than temporary) walls and usually have prebuild (rather than built) towers.

Yet others would exist to serve numerous different functions, including Outposts acting as mini-settlements giving some, but not all, of the abilities of a settlement and acting as a combination of other buildings as well including a trading post (something which there can be an unlimited number of, but it gets costly to build, so finding an outpost helps).

As mentioned, most buildings are built--when building buildings, a ring (let's call it the green ring because Majesty) surrounds all existing buildings to let you know where they are in relationship to the new building (which has its shape phantom-overlaid onto where it'd be) that has a circle around it so you know how to get things as exactly distanced as you want them to be.

Furthering that, the game would also feature the option to turn on a grid function, which would give a fair idea of where things are and thus allow for optimal building placement ease, among numerous other factors.

​There would be MANY buildings both built and constructed (found then built/converted) that would contain items--some automatically handed out, some for sale. And similarly, there would be various different magical items littered throughout the map which have various different effects. These items are mostly for heroes, but units can have some of them in limited quantities. (Heroes have unlimited capacity for items so long as there's no redundancy. The only redundant item they can have unlimited of is a healing potion.)

Some items are deposited in buildings for passive effects, e.g. passive gold regeneration. Items picked up not for buildings' usage can be either passive (provide a continuous bonus of some sort) or active (used and then the item is depleted by the amount indicated). Some items can even be manually triggered by the player, albeit mostly in those who have higher obedience.

EVERY unit levels up, regardless of type or task, getting better at their primary function and gaining health. 

Upgrades for equipment, items, units, buildings, and even heroes exist; many upgrades are automatically given to NEW units of the type and older units can pay to have them (heroes, they pay from their personal pocket; non-heroes, the player pays from the treasury). Heroes can do this automatically or in some cases be ordered to; non-heroes will never do it on their own because it would take from the treasury so they need the input.

Upgrades are also global--no researching the same thing twenty different times. Research it once, and it doesn't need to be researched again. 

But back to the AI...
...Every unit has an "act independently" setting. For many, this can be disabled--sometimes temporarily, other times permanently--in order to have them act in specific ways determined by the player. This is usually for units rather than henchmen or heroes.

Units have the ability to move in formation. (Heroes do not. Henchmen also do not, but peasants are classified as units so peasants can.) These formations can take...well, various different formations. Tightly clustered, spread out, single file line, double file line, you get the idea. They move at the speed of the slowest unit, together, acting as one.

Units have the ability to "attach" themselves to a hero (which automatically makes them a formation moving with the hero; heroes have the option of 'move at default speed' or 'move at formation speed' so you don't slow heroes down unless you intend to), which makes all the units assigned to the hero have +(hero's levels) levels for the duration of the time they are attached to the hero.

The units attached also get increases to all their stats proportional to the hero's stats, including accelerated XP gain rate. Formations attached to a hero can also be larger than formations with no attachment to a hero, allowing for a larger army to exist. These units will always move with the hero (to the best of their ability) and do what the hero is doing (to the best of their ability).

Almost every unit and the VAST majority of heroes has AT LEAST one upgraded form. (Heroes don't have more than one.) They usually have more than one.

ALL units have passive health regeneration. Heroes regenerate HP faster, with attached units getting that bonus regeneration speed to a lesser extent. Units (which include henchmen and heroes) can garrison--garrisoned units heal faster, among other benefits.

Certain buildings heal MUCH faster than other buildings when garrisoned within. And yes, this does stack so having units attached to a hero garrisoned inside a rapid-healing building can swiftly regenerate an army which was moments before almost all dead.

Permanent buildings never increase in cost (if they have a cost at all), and of built buildings...some buildings (towers, economic buildings, hero buildings) increase in cost whereas others (unit buildings, upgrade buildings, various defensive structures, etc.) don't. 

Units/heroes never increase in cost to recruit, nor is there a cap on how many can be recruited (other than whatever game engine limitations I'd encounter). Maps could be of varying different sizes. Small, medium, large, huge, gigantic, etc. 

In spite of what I said earlier, there are other resources...which are, completely, totally, 100% optional: they enhance things (especially playing as certain civilizations), but are never needed for anything. 

Food can be consumed to increase unit regeneration, or in the civilization with organic buildings, be used to repair/upgrade an organic building. It is NEVER used to create units/buildings...except, of course. A "food caravan" unit, which transports food from one location to another.

You can also trade food for gold. (And, yes, vice versa, too, but this is something the game recommends against.)

Stone can be consumed to repair buildings at an accelerated rate. In the civilization specializing in it, stone can also be used to provide a passive regeneration to said building if said building has a garrison, no need for a repair unit to be on site. This also applies to upgrades. It is NEVER used to create units/buildings...except, of course. A "stone caravan" unit, which transports stone from one location to another.

You can also trade stone for gold. (And, yes, vice versa, too, but this is something the game recommends against.) In fact, this is the primary purpose of it, to be harvested for extra cash.

Wood can be consumed to repair buildings at an accelerated rate. In the civilization specializing in it, it can also be used to repair/upgrade a wooden building. It is NEVER used to create units/buildings...except, of course. A "wood caravan" unit, which transports wood from one location to another.

You can also trade wood for gold. (And, yes, vice versa, too, but this is something the game recommends against.) In fact, this is the primary purpose of it, to be harvested for extra cash.

​Among other traits, heroes have unique names, FAR more independent AI, can carry more items, USE said items automatically, gather items on their own, among numerous other traits; they are the elites which make up the core gameplay, with all non-hero units (be it henchmen or regular units) essentially as cannon fodder to help support them/provide the backbone of the economy and military force such that heroes are placed in less danger.

Like units, heroes come in numerous different types. I've got 25 (maybe 29; maybe 34; maybe 30) heroes with associations (4 tied to one thing which if they have upgrades is instead 8, 12 tied to another, the four base heroes associated with the 12 which are their upgraded forms, five civilization-specific heroes which if they have upgrades is instead 10), and the plan is to have APPROXIMATELY one hero per basic unit type (plus upgrade to said hero) plus any "quirky" hero I want that's not a unit type, so if I had to estimate, I'd say I'm looking at somewhere in the range of 60 unique hero types as a fairly conservative number.

Why is it so conservative? Well, you'll be able to check my math on this later when you see how I got this figure, but by my calculation, when you tally civilization choice (five civs) with the other mutually exclusive choices, my mental math said that was 240 unique combinations. (5 * 4 = 20, * 2 = 40, * 2 = 60, * 2 = 120, * 2 = 240; five civs, and you'll see what the *4 and the four *2s are below.)

​BUT ANYWAY.

As I mentioned. There are different civilizations. These civilizations are not simply "one or two small differences but basically interchangeable". This isn't quite as extreme as, say, Terran vs. Zerg vs. Protoss would be (or more accurately, Roman vs. Carthaginian vs. Gaul vs. the fourth civ I can never remember the name of but which is my favorite to play as); you do use basically the same things.

It's more in the middle. Think more like Age of Empires (at least Age of Empires II Conqueror's Expansion, don't quite remember if the original had civ traits), but slightly more extreme than Age of Empires. All five civilizations have specialties, all five civilizations have quirks, all five civilizations have unique units/traits (PLURAL), but not really much in the way of penalties and absolutely nothing "off-limits" aside from the uniques of other civs, obv.

The player can and is pitted against both an enemy civilization and monsters. (There are various victory conditions. You could theoretically have a level with no monsters even though none exists; you could theoretically have a level with no enemy civilization and some do exist because there are plenty of monsters to challenge your kingdom.)

Monsters spawn from lairs which follow many building rules. They are not all destructible, but many (especially ones which appear after the map was created) are. They can be the entirety of the enemy for a level, because they present a formidable threat.

Monsters have "roaming" mode, "destroy building" mode, "Attack units" mode, "Attack everything" mode, "Specialized" mode for some, and "defend thing" mode. Kinda like the flags, except you don't get to see it in them; you just have to observe which mode they are in from their actions. (Making a beeline for your settlement? Probably destroy building. Chase hero? Probably attack unit. Engage on sight/when attacked and wander around? Roam. And so on.)

Non-hero units have various different "directives" they can be given. Directives aren't orders, per se. They aren't things which say "do this", so much as they are: determining which type of AI path the unit will use. Among these settings:
"Never attack, ever"; "Don't attack unless in self-defense"; "Attack only explicit threats nearby"; "Attack any threat, but do not pursue"; "Attack any threat and pursue".

Henchmen in particular have VERY strong usage of these directives. These directives, unlike for other units, can actually be globally set. (But can still be given on an individual basis.) "Value life over duty" (flee), versus "value duty over life" (ignore danger) would be an example, albeit not quite the best way to word it. 

A better way to say it would be: "Flee if danger nearby"; "Flee if attacked"; "Never flee". The first on line of sight; if an enemy is spotted, RUN AWAY to the nearest garrison. The second when an attack is sensed; if registering that they have been attacked, RUN AWAY to avoid being killed.

Units, especially heroes, may flee from battle, especially when low on HP. They have threat assessment; the accuracy of this assessment is based on stats, and accounts for their situation with all the information they have in their line of sight versus the situation of the enemy for as long as they can see in their line of sight. Enemy too strong, they will run for their lives.

Units fleeing seek to garrison themselves in the nearest building, ideally high-healing garrisons, but they'll take anything they can get. This is more specifically "seek best garrison to garrison", but 'best' is often just 'nearest'. It's MEANT to function as 'gets unit functioning at fastest rate', though.

​The game would have various different cheats (with a witty dialog for the cheat) easily used by control-C and with a quick method of entering them...say, by hitting. Well. Enter. I've thought up a little over half a dozen; the completed list would be probably closer to two dozen. I'll post them at the end because they're on page three and four of my notes and I'm not even onto page one of my notes (though I'm close).

The game would feature player spells: cast from the treasury, depleting gold reserves, to have numerous different effects. Some of these spells come from buildings which are mutually exclusive, showing that Majesty influence some more, and yes there is a high level of redundancy in them, great overlap even when choosing the other side.

Some units would have special abilities, but mostly, the realm of spellcasting is reserved for heroes, who have NUMEROUS spells/abilities they have access to; it is one of their main defining characteristics, their unique abilities that their hero class possesses which no other hero class has.

That being said, because all units follow some basic classifications, heroes follow some of these same classifications. It's not quite as simple as "magic melee range", but it's along those veins at the very least in that they take the same penalties/bonuses that units do when facing specific types of opponents.

Another benefit of heroes is (okay so this one is from Age of Mythology) that they do bonus damage against monsters--the main foe in the game, frankly, because while doing battle against an enemy is all fun and good and all, the main threat other than incompetent friendly AI is going to be competent unfriendly monster AI.

Now, that's just what I covered this morning.

Okay.

So.

This is a very long-ass ramble (sorry, language) as-is even to me right now as I'm writing it. But. Small confession to you as you are going to be reading it. I will be editing in content from the four pieces of paper above into the sections appropriate, such that related topics are, loosely, categorized together.

Meaning that from your perspective, there's going to be a LOT more in the above than from my perspective as I am writing this because from my perspective, that content is "below", down here, where I am writing right now except not yet written, even though to your perspective that content is in the above.

Hmm...lemme take a screenshot of the scroll bar. (This is an imperfect method, but oh well.)

...Bonus points. If I edit any of the content visible in that screenshot, you'll be able to go, "hey wait a minute, that's not what I just read". (Well. Assuming you're masochistic enough to read the thing twice.) But ANYWAY. That gives you a fair idea of what the blog looks like right now--it is already long, but it is still only a FRACTION of what it WILL be by the time I am finished.

​SO.

Moving on.

All units have a "home" building. When garrisoned in their "home" building, units have accelerated healing even if this home building doesn't normally offer accelerated healing when garrisoned. Hero homes have a limit to the number of recruits they can have--I'm just gonna plagiarize and say that's four, in most cases.

All other unit recruitment buildings have no limits; you can have hundreds of henchmen and thousands (god forbid if the game engine could take it) of units and they could theoretically all spawn from a single location.

I want to do some research into Age of Empires and Age of Empires II to plagiarize units from them (I'm not gonna pretend otherwise), but some unit types I was able to come up with off the top of my head were:
Spearmen
Light Infantry
Heavy Infantry
Archers
Light Cavalry
Heavy Cavalry
Cavalry Archers
Converter(*)/Healer/Buffer/Debuffer (probably not all as one unit but probably not all as four separate units)
Armored Transport (one form which is easy to think about: a siege tower)
Armored Ram (battering ram)
Unit Siege (pierce) (Ballistae)
Unit Siege (spread) (catapults)
Building Siege (distance)
...And most, aside from some siege weapons, would have heroes of them.
*Heroes can't be converted and only some henchmen can be; conversion is mostly a function for units and some buildings.

​​When I designed the game, I designed the game to, like my inspiration, have four "Ages".
And get ready for this, because this is where things get important. You're about to get some rather important namedrops.

The first age: Dawn of Harmony. This is the age where civilization comes to fruition, where life begins to inhabit an area which was previously uninhabited. It is the birth of, in the current location, all that is to unfold.

The second age: Dawn of Magic. While magic is ever-present at all times, both in Harmony (before) and in all ages after, the Dawn of Magic represents the time where the existing civilization has established the roots necessary for branching into magic; magic is something best done with the support of a thriving economic settlement.

The third age: Dawn of Religion. While religion is ever-present at all times, both before its dawn (Magic/Harmony) and in the stage after, the Dawn of Religion represents the establishment of structure and continuity in the civilization. People strive to live for something "grander", and now have the resources necessary to accomplish it.

The fourth age: Dawn of Technology. While technology is ever-present at all times, in all the ages before its dawn, for technology to thrive, it requires harmony, magic, and religion to be established first. Because in order to be at the forefront of technology, you need to have the people, the roots, the support, the structure, the continuity, of everything else already there.

And from this...you get the game title.

WOW this far in an only now I'm namedropping it?

You bet.

Now granted.

This is a pretty good title. What that means is that there's like an 80% chance that a game by this title already exists. If it doesn't, then there's like a 98% chance that a game with this subtitle exists (e.g. "GAME TITLE: Dawn of Order"). Butstill. IN SPITE OF THAT.

The working title of this game that I invented today?

Dawn of Order.

The idea of that should be self-evident. You, as the player, are hoping to become the master over the kingdom, to establish order where before there was none. Conquer any rival kingdoms, and conquer any monstrous threats lurking in the wild, to establish an era of eternal order where civilization's laws reign supreme. Your goal, the goal of the player, is to bring about this utopia, to bring about the Dawn of an era of Order.

This can be done in any of the for "ages", obviously, but in terms of lore it would be a kind of "fifth age", coming after the other four, when a kingdom has achieved everything there is for a kingdom to achieve.

The victory screen for any level is thus, "Order Obtained!", a white and blue screen with glistening buildings; the defeat screen for any level is thus, "Chaos Consumes..."; it is red and black flames and ashes. While we're on the subject though, this game features unique introductions to every level with voice narration (same as Majesty and Zeus/Poseidon), and has unique ending screens with voice narration for everything except for freestyle; similarly, every level's defeat screen (while featuring no voice) has a unique narration outlying the horrible fate you just suffered and what will happen next.

​By the way, units when they die are, mostly, gone for good. They die, they're dead. An exception: heroes, when dieing, produce a gravestone to be resurrected within a window of time. Deaths are announced with a loud narration from the hero. (All units have dialog for doing every action in the game--hero dialog is unique to the hero type, thus each hero death can be identified as belonging to that specific type of hero, and their name displays on screen so you know WHICH hero it was.) You know. Just like Majesty.

Generals, when they die, also don't die for good. They can be resummoned. What are generals? Generals are heroes carried across levels. At the end of a level, one of each hero type you possess can be promoted to become a General. The maximum number of Generals you can have is (number of settlements you control) * (number of the age/"dawn" you are currently in), e.g. three settlements in the Dawn of Religion age = 9 generals.

Generals in freestyle are for freestyle quests only, but Generals are shared between Quests and Campaigns (including the bonus level).

Speaking of which! There's three types of levels: Freestyle levels are...well, freestyle. They're random matches, basically a single game with no story. Just complete the objective of the level which you set before generating the level. (I'd want to look up those victory conditions both in Majesty and also Age of Empires to see what they offer.) 

Quests are exactly what they are in Majesty: isolated self-contained stories, with very little relation to one another. Some quests are unlocked by completing others, and you can carry generals from one quest to another, but otherwise they have no tie with one another; they are each almost their own freestyle game, except there IS narrative for the level, and there's unique quirks not found in freestyle for every quest.

Campaign contains missions. Each mission unlocks at least one other mission; all missions require at least one other mission to unlock save the first one of course. For the most part, this is linear; complete one, do the next. The order is flexible in some cases, in that sometimes, say, three different levels will open up, but just as often as levels open up, they close up with the next level unlocking only after all the others are completed.

There are five campaigns (plus the bonus level). They can be done in any order, but the RECOMMENDED order is the order they happen in the story, because these being campaigns, there is a continuous narrative to them and they take the Starcraft route of "this campaign happens after the conclusion of the last campaign, and before the next campaign". Each campaign covers a race.

The first campaign doubles as a gradual tutorial (though, Quests offer tutorials on gameplay mechanics in much the same way Majesty quests do), and thus is the longest, at 25 episodes; the other 4 campaigns are 13 episodes each. Which is 77 + bonus level episodes/levels in the campaign mode.

Let's see...for henchmen, they are "Collectors" (collect from buildings), "Caravans" (transport goods to other buildings, usually gold), Gatherers (special units which must be manually recruited; can be converted; gather gold/wood/stone/food from the land and deposit it in buildings which can take those resources), Guards (self-explanatory; generated from specific towers mostly but also important government buildings), Builders, and Peasants (can do any of these tasks and also has a weak pitiful attack they can use; is a jack of all trades, which is manually recruited, has different AI, and can be converted).

Buildings change aesthetic with the four ages. Many (but not all) buildings also have upgrades. Some from the building itself, others from other buildings. (Imagine having to try and upgrade every single link in a wall--not viable; that's an upgrade done from another building. But there are plenty of buildings where sometimes you want the lower-level; that's an upgrade done from the building itself.)

There are never more than four levels to a building, which means there's 4-16 aesthetics for a building. (One each age for level 1, level 2, level 3, and level 4. Each level adds four possible aesthetics.)

As can be expected, some buildings/units are only available after other buildings/building levels/research are completed. Furthermore, some buildings/units/upgrades (both unit/building upgrades) only when reaching a certain age/dawn, also as can be expected.

And, true to Majesty: Some Hero Buildings are mutually exclusive with one another. There are twelve total such buildings.

Four of such buildings are the Buildings of the Orders. There are for "Orders". These are people who follow a set way, and refuse to settle in a kingdom which has set in a different way than theirs.

The Order of Harmony focuses on resources. They emphasize the importance of living in harmony with nature, and see magic/technology/religion as serving only one use: to further that end; any magic/technology/faith not serving this agenda they think to be an abomination standing in the way of their goal, thus their hatred of the other three orders.

In other words, they do not ban such things, but they live in the natural world, bringing out the most from it and allowing for a plentiful fulfilling existence. It is the oldest of the Orders, but also the smallest. It's certainly not the weakest though!

The Order of Magic focuses on Items. They emphasize the importance of pure thaumatic energies, harvesting the mystic arts in numerous enchantments, items, and spells to further civilization. They feel that nature should be harvested for its resources, technology should serve to simply further understanding of the mystic arts, and that religion is good only for instilling the learning process of magic.

Thus, any usage of those not following that agenda, they abhor, and the other three Orders have ways mutually exclusive with their own. It is both the second oldest and second largest of the Orders, but no mere second in power.

The Order of Religion focuses on Units, instilling within all a sense of inner strength from divine protection. They believe that faith in the higher powers allows for an enrichment of life, and feel that all resources should be used as offerings to this lifestyle. Nature should be harvested for sacrifices and for sustenance, magic should be uses by the faithful to inspire miracles, and technology should be used to spread the word to the masses.

Thus, if those things are not being used in the way the order deems appropriate, they are banned. It is the largest of the orders currently.

The Order of Technology focuses on Buildings, representing the march of industry to create a powerful economy in the modern world. They believe that the resources of nature exist only as fuel for their machines, that magic serves only as a source of power for new, interesting, innovating technology, and that religion serves as a fine way of providing divine inspiration, nothing more.

They don't see those ideals as outdated, but they do hold about them a certain level of arrogance in thinking all those things should serve them. So the thought of them existing independently, and even of them operating under the ideals they are superior, is taboo.

Orders can be thought of as loosely akin and equivalent to Races (Gnome/Elves/Dwarves) in Majesty: Pick one, exclude the others, and get some significant changes to the kingdom's functionality based on your choice. (More on that below.)

​Good news, just passed page number one.
Bad news, just passed hour number three on writing this ramble.
Oh well, continuing on.

Now would be a good time to talk about the races. Races are, explicitly, the "civilizations" of the game. Human/Zerg/Protoss, Roman/Gaul/Carthaginian/The one I forget the name of, the NUMEROUS different choices in Age of Empires from Huns to Britains to Franks and so on and so forth there.

​Each race has MANY unique buildings, units, items, and upgrades. Each race has AT LEAST one unique hero and AT LEAST one unique spell. So there's not just aesthetical changes; there's actual serious differences between them.

Humans are the default player race. The majority of quests use them, they are the first/longest/tutorial campaign, and generally the metric by which all other races are compared to. So, yes, stereotypical as it may sound, they have no real strengths nor any true weaknesses.

Elves have an affinity for the resource of Wood; some of their buildings are wooden, grown from the ground. (Wooden buildings do not require wood to build, because once more, the resource of Wood is OPTIONAL.) As a general rule, their buildings tend to be cheaper, but more fragile.

Fae (think insectoids meets zerg) have an affinity for the resource of Food; some of their buildings are organic, birthed, and consume food like any living creature would. (I'm not gonna stress this every time, but yes, NO FOOD REQUIRED TO BUILD; FOOD IS OPTIONAL.) As a rule, their units are cheaper, but much weaker.

Orcs have an affinity for the resource of Stone. As a rule, their buildings are sturdier, but also more expensive.

Dwarves have an affinity for Gold; as a rule, their units are stronger, but more expensive.

Again. THESE ARE NOT THE ONLY DIFFERENCES. These are not superficial changes. But before I can go into the details of changes more intimately I'd need to research various games to more or less lay out what those exact changes actually would be.

So yes. There are extensive differences beyond the ones listed; each have significant gameplay separation from one another.

Next on the agenda for this game is the rest of the mutually exclusives.

I call these the "Divides". Each Divide can loosely be thought of as "Open"(Selfless) or "Closed"(Selfish).

Harmony Divide: Gathering of Protectors (Open) vs. Gathering of Masters (Closed).

The divide in Harmony comes from Harmony not being a unified concept. You can understand the idea of "live with nature" well enough, but these opposing Gatherings have entirely different ideas of what that means. The Gathering of Protectors believes that it is the duty of all who accept Harmony to not only live in nature, but protect it from outside harm.

In contrast, the Gathering of Masters believes that to live in nature means to be the masters of nature. They still believe that nature should be preserved, but it should also be directed and controlled to the benefit of all who accept the way of Harmony.

Magic Divide: Council of Elements (Open) vs. Council of Enhancements (Closed). This can actually be thought of in another term, "elemental magic versus non-elemental magic", or "elemental magic versus pure magical energy". The Council of Elements believes that magic should be used to harvest the power of the elements. The Council of Enhancements believe such things to be superfluous and wasteful, and that the pursuit of pure mystic energy produces a more "pure" form of magic they feel should be taught to all who embrace Magic.

Religion Divide: Temple of Love (Open) vs. Temple of Wrath (Closed). I need not explain why there would be a divide in religion, but to explain those concepts, it is simply the thought of "God(s) is Love" versus "The Wrath of God(s)". Both feature prominently in all religions pretty much, and yet they are at odds with one another. Divine acceptance, versus Divine retribution. Caring for others, versus empowerment.

And this is thus the divide; the Temple of Love believes in protecting all who accept religion into their lives, whereas the Temple of Wrath believes in punishing all who stand in the way of those who accept religion in their lives.

Technology Divide: Company of Progress (Open) vs. Company of Profit (Closed). This is simply a choice between being idealistic and being pragmatic. The Company of Progress believes that technology should be used for the progression of all aspects of life. The Company of Profit believes that technology serves to make money.

Harmony/Magic/Religion/Tech Divides are akin to Temples from Majesty, BUT: Choosing one "open"/"closed" only locks out the corresponding "closed"/"open". Choosing one open does NOT make you choose all-open; choosing all closed does NOT make you choose all-closed; the only times you have all-open/closed are either if a level dictates so or because you the player specifically desired it for whatever reason (probably thematic).

Also, you can probably guess this, but:
SAID DIVIDES ARE UNTIED TO ORDERS.
It's NOT "Pick Order, then pick Divide" (e.g. Order of Harmony-->Harmony Divide); that'd exclude basically half the hero roster and like 75, 80+% of the more "specialized hero" list. The two choices are entirely unrelated to one another, just like the choices between races and temples are unrelated in Majesty. You can and will have an order of technology and then choose either a council of elements or a council of enhancements.

​So the good news is, I'm through two pages; the bad news is, the third got so cluttered I needed a fourth mini page so it's the longest. Also, I need a break to eat because I start fasting for bloodwork tomorrow. So small pause, invisible to you but not to me, as I eat.

​...Okay, fifteen minute break over. Coming up on four hours now, but loosely speaking you could say this is the home stretch. So ANYWAY. Continuing on.

Order selecting gives one unique hero and has the mentioned alteration to the game: Harmony gives greatly enhanced resource gathering, building an economy; Magic gives a bunch of exclusive items which are useful for units especially heroes; Religion gives a bunch of exclusive upgrades that buff units; Technology gives a bunch of upgrades which modify buildings.

However, they grant no spells and aren't fundamentally altering the very nature of the game like race selection does.

Four heroes have three upgrades: Purely an upgrade to their hero class, and then two choices between the two divides associated with that hero. (One hero has a Harmony divide between upgrading into a Protectorate and upgrading into a Master in addition to that hero's pure upgrade, a second hero has a Magic divide between upgrading into an Elemental or an Enhancement in addition to their third pure upgrade, and so on.)

The choice between Divides is thus fairly minor. Divides do provide some minor miscellaneous kingdom influences, but nothing as extensive as the choice between Orders. Mostly, it comes down to the two heroes they offer (one as an exclusive for their Gathering/Council/Temple/Company, the other as an upgrade to one hero) and the spells they provide.

We're nearing the end of the content I have.

One unique building is the Embassy--you can build only one and when you know what it does you can understand why; the Embassy allows for the recruitment of one hero from each of the four races the player is not playing as. So as a human, it allows the recruitment of 1 elf, 1 fae, 1 dwarf, and 1 orc.

Guards have numerous different commands to them, but among them are "Flee when low in health" (can leave units/buildings vulnerable without their meat shield) vs. "Attack to death" (can lose the meat shield altogether until the replacement generated arrives); "Pursue enemies" (can get Guard to go further away than you want) vs. "Stay close to radius" (can allow guard to be sniped); "Attack strongest" vs. "Attack weakest" vs. "Attack nearest" vs. "Attack furthest away" for targeting.

Peasants have the same commands as henchmen do: Flee if danger nearby; Flee if attacked; never flee, but in addition to that, have two unique ones: "if attacked, attack the attacker" and "if threat nearby, attack nearby danger". (The former leads to them soloing the problem; the latter, a swarm of peasants deals with the issue.)

I have two things left to talk about.

The first on the list is Obedience.

Obedience is a stat every unit--henchmen, peasant, hero, whatever--has in two values: "Base obedience stat" (what the unit's default obedience value is) and "current obedience stat" (what the unit's current obedience is and thus the pertinent information to have when dealing with a unit).

Everything leads up to this, because this is the most critical game mechanic of all.

Obedience dictates how responsive units are to both direct orders and to directives (indirect orders, the "sets AI behavior to do this instead of that").

At 100% obedience, a unit ceases all action and starts to do ONLY actions the player directly orders them to do. This is almost never used; only specific units can have it, that or the use of a spell I dubbed "Mind Control" (to control the actions of a unit you control entirely...for about ten ingame seconds. With a cooldown at least 3-6 times that length).

At 80% obedience, a unit will always follow directives to the best of their ability and will often respond to direct orders given: "attack this"; "go here"; "garrison this"; "join that"; "pick up this". Pretty much those commands only though. This is the level many units tend to be at, but not nearly as many as you'd prefer. At this level, a unit will always for FREE obey the commands of flags. This level of obedience is incredibly rare among heroes.

At 60% obedience, a unit will try to follow directives, but will do so sometimes a little unreliably. A unit won't really respond to direct orders of "attack this"; "go here", etc., but orders to do those things will initiate their reevaluation process, making them more open to the suggestion if nothing else. At this level, a unit will always obey command flags; they'll need to be paid to attack something, defend something, or go somewhere, but they'll stay away from something for free. This level of obedience is where the rest of units are for the most part and is the base level for heroes.

At 40% obedience, directives given they will try to uphold, but they still use their own AI judgement to do what they think is the best thing for them to do now, a judgement which will often run counter to the player's intention. No direct orders can be given. At this level, a unit will always obey command flags...if they are appropriately priced high enough. They still will stay away from things for free though. This is the level of many heroes.

At 20% obedience, directives are more like guidelines...loose ones, at that. They basically do whatever they want to, irregardless of what's best for them to do. No direct orders can be given. At this level, a unit will almost always obey command flags; the higher the price, the higher the chance. They need to be paid to obey stay away flags. This is the level of the lowlife heroes more or less.

At 0% obedience, no input from the player can be given whatsoever, though they will still acknowledge flags most of the time especially if the price is high enough. This is occasionally seen from heroes, but mostly is a special curse from hell to be inflicted with.

This obedience system is where the heart and soul of the gameplay lies. The cannon fodder units have higher obedience; they act on their own but mostly act on the players' directives. Henchmen have medium obedience because they have a higher level of independence; they act on their own primarily but take heavy input from the player.

And Heroes have lower obedience because they are potentially fully self-automated; they act almost exclusively on their own and only rarely do they take some input from the player.

This obedience factor is where the hybrid between the RTS elements of games like Age of Empires meets the fantasy sim elements of Majesty. Low Obedience = acts like Majesty characters, in that you can't do anything to really force them to do something. High obedience = acts like RTS units, in that you can tell them what to do.

And yes, these units will do things like raid lairs, attack enemy settlements, and the like all on their own.

This is what I feel makes my game I invented truly unique. I don't think anything like this has been done before, and yet I think that if it could be pulled off it would be absolutely amazing to see.

​So what do you get for sticking with me to the end? (Or skimming four hours' of worth and just skipping to the bottom.) Why, cheat codes, of course!

woodent ya know displays the message, "My bark is worse than my bite!" and has the effect of causing every building which can store Wood to have maximum Wood stored (999).
have a meating displays the message, "I'm sick of the bare bone necessities!" and has the effect of causing every building which can store Food to have maximum Food stored.
stone cold killer displays the message, "I'm off to a rocky start!" and has the effect of causing every building which can store Stone to have maximum Stone stored.
a golden opportunity displays the message, "All the Shinies are MINE! My own. My preciousesss." and has the effect of maxing the treasury out to 99,999,999 gold.

ranger guild displays the message, "I'm a cartographer! Who knew?" and reveals the whole map.

order of operations displays the message, "The chain of command whips you until you obey.", and has the effect of allowing for all normally mutually exclusive buildings to be built: all four Order buildings, and both halves of the four Divides (so instead of having five, you can have all twelve).

dawn of fun times displays the message, "Time flies when you're having fun!", and has the effect of everything being done instantly. Buildings insta-constructed; upgrades insta-done, units insta-recruited. Entering once enables it; entering it a second time disables it.

go away displays the message, "Shoo, fly, don't bother me!" and has the effect if instantly killing/destroying/dismantling the selected unit/building.

lets roll displays the message, "Never gonna give you up, never gonna level you down, or desert you." and has the effect of leveling the selected unit up five levels.

I would also need cheats for Instant Win, Instant Loss, Kill Monsters, Kill all other Kingdoms, Kill specific Kingdom, All Spells, and no cooldown on spells which have cooldown.

But then comes the fun ones:
this is a terrible idea displays the message, "Aaahhh!!! Monsters! MONSTERS EVERYWHERE! WHOSE IDEA WAS THIS?!?", and spawns monsters across the whole map.
trouble is coming (cheat name was something else that I forgot originally) displays the message, "Well...that's not good." and spawns monsters across all four edges of the map.
doh you wanna die displays the message, "Uh-oh..." and spawns the strongest monsters in the game LITERALLY EVERYWHERE.

So that is everything I have on Dawn of Order.

I hope you think the game idea is as interesting as I do.

Otherwise I just wasted four and a half hours of my life on nothing.

Well, I suppose by saying I am doing some spring cleaning of sorts. I'm moving every piece of paper which I know is 100% obsolete to an appropriate location; I am moving things which are potentially appropriate elsewhere to those locations; I am cleaning up my notes more or less.

The good news is--I am just about done with this process's first stage.

The bad news is, I've got a ton of stuff which I classified as either
-Being kept around because there was some detail different,
-Is pertinent to current things,
-Was explicitly never blogged about,
-Or--and this is the biggie--I have no memory of whether I have blogged about it or not.

If I removed that last one I'd have a good 70% less papers in the gigantic stack I have.
Still!

This has allowed me to more or less focus.

I have the recent content I haven't blogged about. The perfect RPG content (times two), the new webcomic, more about the impaler stance, and of course, the focus of why I did this, Phyrra and Cyrus notes.

I also have peripheral easy access to what I believe is the entirety of the relatively-recently-written notes on a story idea I meant to unload the details of in a gigantic ramble yet never got around to, the story which started as a Bleach knockoff but evolved to be something that is my own.

So...more or less, the question becomes...what can I blog about today, and what can I not blog about today?

I'll not be doing the gigantic ramble on the Bleach knockoff story idea yet (that one deserves a special ramble of its own), but I should be able to do the others...once I finish with the organizing of my papers. For a frame of reference, I'm pretty sure that I started dumping stuff in this area during NaNoWriMo of 2016. I am up to...well, a little past this point of last year, 3/26/2017.

Hmm...I suppose I'll start with the Rubyverse bit, about the impaler stance's vampiric martial art. What wasn't new was that there were two guards: knife guard (knife hand block is a common enough thing that I don't need to describe what it is; this is basically that), and claw guard (same basic positioning, but with fingers apart and curved).

What I developed which is new as of...well, about a week ago...is what I dubbed the tri-guard: open hand, elbows pointing up, towards target (with palm close to body). (Note that the front hand and back hand can take different guards, but are most frequently seen using the same guard.)

In normal circumstances, this would be a hilariously bad idea, because it exposes the ribcage to attack. However, I played around with the position, and found that with sharp, crisp enough techniques that are well-placed and timed, this wasn't actually an issue and was a potential asset.

In particular, the elbow up is great for up/upward outward blocks, the hand can sweep downward to do a downward block fairly easily...for either side. As in, with the right elbow pointing up, the right hand can block downward and have the deflected attack go to the right, OR go the other way and have it deflected to the left (more as a push than a sweep).

Other than the elbow itself, there isn't really much of an inward block, though the elbow itself acts as a pretty effective, close-range defense. And for an outward block, the same motion which applies for the downward block can be used. The whole thing is fairly fluid and effortless when I try it, and it pairs nicely with a particular strike pattern.

The idea behind the tri-guard is to use the triceps to snap a strike outward, where you basically just go from a bent elbow to a straight elbow. This is loosely akin to a very close-quarter jab; it isn't meant to have much power, but it's fast, allows you to grab your opponent, and sets up for the followthrough.

This followthrough has a working name of the Typhoon Strike, which is more akin to a cross: with the front hand fully extended, twist hand and reverse it around (the idea being you are grabbing onto them, drawing them in, and knocking them off-balance), and simultaneously the back hand does the inverse motion, rotating out to deliver a powerful strike. By reversing the process, this can then be combo'd, where the back-currently-in-front hand grabs and pulls, and the front-currently-in-back hand snaps from its rear position back into the position it started in.

I'm probably not describing it fairly well, but the body mechanics of it when I tried it out were at least in theory fairly sound. This stance also allows me to play more heavily around with the more crane stance aspects that I was inspired by originally, in that the triguard is built to allow for low/high blocks with a much, much greater ease than the knife/claw guards do.

Next on the list, and probably a disappointment because I've been building it up for so long as some amazing thing, is the new webcomic idea I had, called Average Joe's Bar.
The idea behind it?

Basically every being from every mythology gather in a bar to just hang out. Many of these beings even have multiple forms. For instance, capital-G God has no less than four: Big G (stereotypical old man with a beard), Momma G (an elderly plump black woman), Lil' G (a Bishonen anime boy), and Girly G (just a small girl). All angels have one for each gender (Lucy/Lucifer, Gabrielle/Gabriel, Michelle/Michael, etc.), and so on and so forth.

You have patrons like Lucifer/Satan I (Satan, in this case, being a title), God, various demons e.g. Beelzebub, The Devil/Satan II, Zeus and other Greek/Roman gods, Thor and other Norse gods, Ra and other Egyptian gods, Titans, (Demi)humans ranging from Jesus, Buddha, Hercules, Achilles, Theseus, Perseus, Moses, Noah, and the like. Basically, figures who are involved in the divine.

All of them more or less having the powers they are meant to have (or lack thereof).

...And they all meet in the titular bar, run by...
...Joe, a completely and totally, 100% ordinary human, who in theory could have regular human patrons. It's just that by some cosmic coincidence, everyone who is a patron at his bar just so happens to not be a normal human being. (He does, however, have the ability to serve godly drinks, e.g. ambrosia.)

It was envisioned as a slice-of-life story, where gods would get into antics, more or less, and crazy stuff would happen, but more or less that in spite of their drunken stupor, the gods would more or less always walk out with nothing having changed. Basically, just a setting to have fun in.

Of course, because I'd actually have to research everything I put in, and because I utterly suck at slice of life comics, it'd never come to be, even if I could pull off the art style. (I had a more chibi-like art look planned for all of these various numerous mythological figures, as to best emphasize the comedy.)

There may be more to it than that (for instance there might be a third Satan with The Devil being either Satan III and coming later or Satan II coming before, don't quite remember), but I think I hit all the important notes.

Two down, two very long ones to go.

​I'll start with the Perfect RPG. It's something I've worked less on because my inspiration has been far more focused on Phyrra and Cyrus as of late, but I've still done some work there. I worked out the beastmaster's name (you remember that she was the one to romance the dark archer, right?), and settled on Erin. This marks her as the first character I've actually named!

I also figured out an aspect of the Dark Archer's personality--in most situations, he will talk in a slightly antiquated, eloquent, verbosity-laden way, where he more or less is formal. However, whenever he is stress out, he will slip into more casual speech. Said stress is, mind you, what stresses him out. For instance, because he loves battle, even if his life is in danger he'll still be talking formally because to him that's not stressful.

However, try and get him to express emotions......

...This can be seen when the romance begins.
The following dialog is the precursor to before you can select something, to give an example:
Dark Archer: My good friend, I come to you seeking advice.
Protagonist: Sure, what are you after?
Dark Archer: I have grown rather fond of Erin over our time together, and I wish to formally initiate courtship. However, I am uncertain as to how this should be achieved.

This is when the dialog box comes up.

I also worked out a working draft for what the dialog is for choosing the hilariously stupid option of "Present Boar's Head as Proof of Manhood". Said dialog might change, but I more or less thought it'd go something like this (I wanted to show you this as a comic, but oh well):

Protagonist: I dunno, man...give her something?
Dark Archer: To what thing would you suggest?
Protagonist: Something with a personal touch would probably show sincerity!
Dark Archer: That is not a bad idea! I know just the thing......
[Fadeout to black; scene transition]
Dark Archer: Hey, Erin, look at this!
Erin: A- A...
Erin: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
*Erin faints*
Protagonist: She...she fainted!
Dark Archer: Ohcrapohcrapohcrap......
Protagonist: What do we do? Whatdowedo?
Dark Archer: I dunno, this was YOUR idea!
Protagonist: Uh...uh...let's go check her out!
Dark Archer: Check her o...DUDE SHE'S UNCONSCIOUS!
Protagonist: Yeah, that's why we need to!
Dark Archer: What the hell, man?!? I want to date her, not...
Protagonist: I MEAN CHECK UP ON HER!
Dark Archer: Oh.
Dark Archer: Uh...
Dark Archer: ...That sounds like a good idea.
[Fadeout to black]
Protagonist: Just a small bump to the head; she'll be fine once she wakes up.
Protagonist: Wonder what caused her to react that way?
Dark Archer: ...You think she liked it?
[Scene fades out]

As a reminder. Erin is an all-loving hero who absolutely adores animals. The two guys, during this route, are utterly clueless; Protagonist genuinely doesn't know why she reacted that way and the Dark Archer is genuinely hopeful that she liked it.

It still makes me laugh to this very day thinking about the scene. As in, I literally just laughed myself to tears by typing it out and thinking about it. If you're not reacting much the same way, that means I need to better demonstrate things, be it on a different medium or with better descriptors of their characters or just a rewrite of the dialog, but then again. This is MY perfect RPG, so I suppose it making me laugh is good enough.

The other thing I worked on for the perfect RPG was more or less making the first steps towards defining the relationship between the Future/Present/Past and differences in things sold.

For a start--it's (almost) impossible to make a profit off of buying things cheap in one area and selling them in a different area. With specific exceptions (said exceptions being tied to repeatable quests meant to level up the Merchant job), all goods are sold at a set price.

Goods are bought at varying prices so you can get things where the buy/sell ratio is 1:1 (as in, you can sell it for just as much as you can buy it), but also in places where the buy/sell ratio is potentially 1,000:1 (as in, you get 1/1000th of the item's cost to buy when you sell it).

The game does have a rudimentary supply/demand function, mostly tied to the repeatable quests to level up the merchant job, but still existing even outside of that. There are two basic variables at play:
"We have plenty of this good"/"We have very few to none of this good", and
"This good is something we can sell"/"This good is something which we'll never sell".
There is an in-between state for both, "We have some of this good"; "this good will sell a little bit".

And selling prices are thus set at select prices off of those criteria. None of this good + we can sell = maximum profit; Plenty of this good + something never selling = least profit; there are seven intermediary states (for nine total) of good prices.

Again, outside of specific circumstances, it's never possible to make a profit buying one place and selling another, but it's possible to get a 1:1 ratio between the two. 

Now.
That having been said.

I didn't quite get to work out the details, but I wanted to work out that there are different mechanics in play between the Future, Present, and Past when it comes to
-Buying Items (Cost/Variety/Grade)
-Buying Gear (Cost/Variety/Grade/Number of Slots)
-Upgrading Gear (Cost/Grade/Number of Slots)
-Enchanting Gear (Cost/Variety/Grade/Number of Enchantments)
-Slotting (Cost/Type/Number)
Among others.

As an example I came up with, in the Future, it'd be possible to buy products that are mass-produced and thus have a high number of slots, but come at a lower grade. Variety would be increased, but so too would cost.

I didn't get to detail the mechanics there, but I got a start on them, the idea being that the economics of the three times are not interchangeable, but still follow a general mold such that you, as Walkers, have a fairly decent progression in the quality of your gear as the game advances which is supported by the storyline.

​And now we get to the main project.

I suppose I'll start with the heroes.
I had a bit of a concern when I was going over the story in my head.

The Thaukama has 13 total members to it across the whole story. But of them, only about half of that are given the level of character depth over the course of the series that I would prefer them to have.

Phyrra and Cyrus, being the titular characters, aren't a concern. Gora, the only Guardian for the first half of the first season, is obviously not a concern because he travels with the Thaukama from the very beginning and is from the onset the closest to the siblings, so he's not a concern.

Ace, as the first human to join the Thaukama which he does fairly early on (we're talking, like, first six episodes or so), is not a concern of mine when it comes to depth. We have plenty of opportunities for him to show off his heroic badassery every step of the way.

Cedrick, given how he is introduced and how long he takes to formally join the Thaukama, is not much of a concern of mine. He is introduced before episode ten (when, exactly, hard to say) and remains a rival/antagonist until the shipwreck (his official joining point), so he has a fair amount of character focus during half the series. While he does lose some limelight after that coming into season two, he remains as one of the core fighters of the Thaukama. I'm not too concerned about him.

Kaze is not a concern, though mainly because he is deliberately designed to be the Guardian with the least amount of depth to him. This is an intentional design choice for him, to make there not be much about his character, though even given that, he has opportunities where he gets to show his character off to others.

Bard is a bit of a concern, though--during his introductory arc, he has a ton of focus. Like, he has a great deal of depth added to him during the period of those 6-8 episodes. But after that, I'm a bit concerned I don't have enough planned for him when it comes to the Thaukama's team dynamic more or less. How he interacts with others. He DOES get some focus in the latter half of the second season, though, so I'm not concerned about him that much.

Lily is not a concern of mine, because she is a co-holder for team mom with Myra, in addition to her interactions with Hera and generally her usefulness to the team, between her shops in various cities and her life experience and what she can do. She's also mostly a noncombatant in spite of being an incredibly competent fighter when she does fight, so that gives me some freedom to let her do things aside from fight.

However, there's three human members of the Thaukama and a whole Guardian (one of the core entities to the series) that I am a little bit concerned about when it comes to chances to really show them off as characters, to give them depth, personality, screen time, and levels of individuality such that you get to see them as people rather than just plot devices used to further the story.

I am deeply concerned and even troubled by the fact that Myra is someone I don't have a lot of material for. Even Kaze, the homicidal maniac, has more planned than she does. I know she is a people eater, along-side Hera. I know she is the team mom, and shares this role with Lily. But in spite of her holding the status OF team mom...I don't really have her doing much in the way of motherly things for the majority of the story, and that's an issue.

Plus, aside from that, she's the only Guardian I don't really have much in the way of battles planned. Admittedly, I don't have many for Kaze, either, and I can only think of one (really, really awesome) battle for Hera, butstill, Myra is introduced in episode 14, or thereabouts. She's with the Thaukama for 3/4ths of the series, more or less. She should have a notable impact, which I am still working on giving her.

I do have a little bit of depth planned for Will, in that his services as the son of nobles help the Thaukama out and he is the one who helps provide them with rides, but I don't have much in the way of plans for him...until the second half of the second season. This is a bit of a concern of mine, since unlike the others he doesn't have as much screen time. I do think I need to do more with him.

Alena I also am deeply concerned with--as the last member of the Thaukama introduced at a set point, I have only ten episodes to show her off and make her be seen as a deep, important character. She has a very heavy focus, but I'm not sure it's enough. I did develop a bit of a patch for this, though--I am giving her a cameo during a time contemporary to Cyrus's "are you going to have lesbisex?" line. Her introduction proper wouldn't be until later, but even this little bit would help to establish her in advance.

However, the largest concern of mine is Clara. Other than her introduction, I have...basically nothing on her. I still have basically nothing on her, but I did manage to figure out some ways to help. One way I am helping out is by introducing her earlier--she'll be in the shipwreck, and is introduced on the mainland, returning from a pilgrimage there to head back to the new world, where she does most of her adventuring.

She would be traveling with her master, and the shipwreck actually serves as a convenient method of separating her from him...allowing her to become a member of the Thaukama far more believably, and also helping to explain why she doesn't have her master with her (an issue I had before--basically, the idea was to introduce her without her master but I was having trouble with how that'd work and once her master was in the picture how it'd make sense for her to travel with the Thaukama; now I have a way of doing that).

The main thing I did to flesh her out was to develop Paladins. (Disclaimer: I want to research Paladins in D&D to see what they can do. I want to cover most "traditional" Paladin abilities, more or less, which can be justified as being based on Sun Magic. So, no, no Anti-Fear-Aura, but yes, Lay-On-Hands. See below.)

Specifically, I developed Paladins such that Paladins are subdivided into two types, depending on what they are aiming to specialize in (because, remember--they use specialized magic; they can't learn everything without becoming full mages which takes half a human lifetime).

Solarii (what Clara is in training to become) are spellbladers, who make use primarily of two main spells. Clara's lantern-spell and engulf-weapon-in-light spells are the two preliminary versions of the spells Sun Scorch and Fire Hammer (respectively).

...Yes, those names should seem oddly familiar, but I thought it appropriate. Sun Scorch, the evolution of the lantern-hand, is basically an explosion of pure sun energy, radiating out from the caster to obliterate all opponents, cast either through the hands or through a weapon.

Fire Hammer, the evolution of the engulf-weapon-in-light spell, is to create an entire weapon out of pure sun energy, controlled through heliokinesis. This heliokinetic weapon is usually utilized to rotate around the caster to attack enemies on all sides, since with every strike, a miniature sun explosion is unleashed. (This type of 'weapon rotating around the caster' spell is common enough that I think the effect comes across.) Alternatively, the concussive/explosive force generated when the weapon is 'thrown' forward can devastate a single target in front of the caster. (This is from the source material where the name originates from, but can also be thought of from another source...)

There is also a mundane application. The weapon might be made out of pure sun energy, but is still solidified--it can be grabbed. Because it is controlled by the heliokinesis of the caster, it can go however the user wills it to. When you combine these properties, what you have is that when the user grabs onto the weapon, they can, functionally, fly.

In short, this is an ability you can think of as basically being Thor wielding Mjolnir, except instead of being lightning-oriented, it is oriented around the sun. Otherwise the effects are much as you'd expect them to be, launched and returned at will, the staple attack of a Solarii. (Because Sun Scorch tends to, with repeated casting, exhaust the user, whereas Fire Hammer is cast only once and thus the only drain involved is the heliokinesis which relatively speaking is basically nothing to a trained paladin.)

They may have other spells, but these two are their signature moves, which are what make them be Solarii. They are incredibly potent, powerful abilities, difficult to master, and yet incredibly awesome once they are. Solarii paladins are generally what the masses think of as "adventuring paladins", because they have a skillset best suited for that profession--martial moves that are combat-oriented, albeit having pragmatic use outside of combat (e.g. smithing).

​Paeans are the other half of paladins, thought more of as the "healing paladins". They do have combat-oriented skills, revolving around ranged weaponry (typically missile weapons in the form of bows or the occasional crossbow), but most of what they focus on is healing/buffing based around photosynthesis. That being, they use the energy of the sun to propagate life, mending wounds at an accelerated rate and the like.

I don't have their spells detailed as well as I do Solarii spells, admittedly, but that gives you a general framework for what they do. They are more passive, but just as important.

There are some spells common to both types of paladins--the main one, Shield of Light, is exactly what it sounds like, though the form of the spell differs. For Solarii, the shield of light is a spherical barrier encompassing an area (based more around the sun scorch), usually surrounding an ally, which can be condensed (based more around the fire hammer) to form...a rather literal shield, often directly in front of the target to stop an incoming powerful attack.

For Paeans, the shield of light is a barrier encompassing an area, usually surrounding an ally, which can be condensed to form an aura surrounding the target. You know how in sci-fi a semi-common piece of tech is a personal forcefield? Sometimes so personalized that when you see the outline of it it is literally just inches above the skin and form-fitted to the body? The uncondensed is the former; the condensed is the latter.

Both techniques might have a different basis based around the particular magic unlocked in the individual to use (because, again, this is specialized magic which must be taught from an early age and which only is partially unlocking magical potential such that the caster can do a very specific set of things and nothing else), but they result in an identical effect, thus the shared name.

That's what I have for heroes.

Now let's move on to the villains!

​Back a few days ago, I managed to give them some names. The first big bad, Sloan Patrick Breaker, received the equipment which made him a threat from the third big bad. When defeated, he contacts said big bad and informs him, "The ones who defeated me are the ones you were hoping to surface. Their names are Phyrra and Cyrus."

His evil schemes are fairly small compared to others. I don't have the specifics laid out yet, though.

The second big bad, Gunther King Slayer (for the record, he is the son of two villains so that name is not what you'd call incidental), received the ability he needed for his scheme from the third big bad. When defeated, he contacts said big bad and informs him, "Phyrra and Cyrus are on their way to the New World, and if they survive the trip...they will be fully awakened."

The third big bad, Archer Cross Hill, more or less is after Phyrra and Cyrus's powers for himself.

All of those big bads, because they are tied together, have a particular theme to their names--it's ridiculously subtle though, so mad props if you can navigate my mind to the extent where you are able to pick out the common thread to all three names. (Even better would be if you discover a common trend to their three names that I hadn't intended because that'd mean there was more than just the original one!)

The fourth big bad, deliberately meant to break the trend, is named Muse Gerald Icarious. Which, in of itself, has a not-so-subtle meaning to it along similar veins to the other names. (You might note that not many of the names in Phyrra and Cyrus are particularly clever; all of them more or less are some reflection of something.)

The third big bad, Archer Cross Hill, stole some research from Muse Gerald Icarious in order to enact his final scheme (which failed, obviously), but the final big bad being the final big bad gets to use the research in its full unadulterated form. Said research being...

The Six Sins.
"Six?!? What happened to seven?!?"
Not just kidding!
You heard it right.

SIX sins.

The Six Sins are summoned spirits, directly akin to the four Guardians in function--they are cursed spirits, who reveled in their particular sin until they were forced to never embody their desire. They can never truly die; whenever they are 'killed', it simply means that they cannot be re-summoned for a minimum of 200 years. (There is of course no maximum so they could theoretically go all of eternity unsummoned, but if killed then they can't be summoned again for 200 years.)

And, yes, they are a bundled package. You summon them all together, and then are the master of all six until all six are released from the bond.

So the basic reasoning behind this is...the six sins were once human. (Which differentiates them from the Guardians, who explicitly never have been human, though did once exist without being tied to the books.) When they were caught for their crimes, they were cursed to serve a barbarian sorcerer-warlord, who made it sure that the owner of the seventh sin (pride) controlled them...starting, of course, with him. (This being eons ago in the story, his name has been lost to the history books.)

That is why there are only six of them. Because the seventh sinner is their master, the human who summons them, who must embody both pride, and yet also humbleness. They must have the ambition and drive to have grandiose goals and essentially a grandeur of godhood mindset, to have the knowledge that they can have the power to surpass all...

...And yet, because the curse also forces the sinners to be their opposites (more or less), the owner of the other six sins must be humble and wise enough to understand their own limitations and be honest about their capabilities. This unique mixture is a rather lethal one, because it involves a person who dreams big but knows exactly what steps will end up screwing them over. In other words--a genre savvy villain.

The Six Sins are...
Ivan, sinner of Gluttony. Ivan is unique among the sins for having the capacity to lie; the other sinners cannot. Ivan's sin was that he was a serial killer cannibal. At the height of his debauchery, he would eat one entire human a day, bones and all. (Literally everything in a human is at least some definition of edible with the right preparation; if you're a fat bastard, you have a big enough gut to eat much more than normal.)

His punishment, upon being cursed, was to become a mummy. (Think, half of the curse from Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. Specifically, a combination of their appearance and the eternal hunger/thirst.) When he touches someone, he drains them of their physical energy, as if starving them.

Olivia, sinner of Lust. Olivia is unique among the sins for having the capacity to still sin, albeit not in her sin. Her sin was that she was a serial rapist--she tortured her victims, enacting various sexual fetishes on her unwilling partners. If they died, that was no problem; she kept going, making her guilty of necrophilia. She was also indiscriminate in her victim choice--man, woman...or child. So yes, she was guilty also of pedophilia. (I realize I might not be able to get this by censors, but I'd get as much as I could through with the rest implied.)

Her punishment, upon being cursed, was to become a withered old hag. (Think the other half of the curse from Pirates of the Caribbean, unable to feel the pleasures of the flesh.) Her touch drains mana. Because she is so denied what she desires and is eternally reminded of it, she experiences envy.

Balian, sinner of Wrath. Balian is unique among the sins for having full recollection of his name. All the other sinners only remember their first name, but Balian knows his full name. Balian's sin was that he singlehandedly massacred an entire city of 10,000 civilians. When an army of 20,000 was mobilized to avenge them, he massacred the 16,000 who fought...and then, when 4,000 fled in terror...

...He hunted them down, massacring every village along the way, just on the possibility they harbored his prey. He left no survivors by the time he had finished. So yes, he was in fact a person of mass destruction. He was a spellblader, whose spells are ironically what he is more or less cursed to only be able to use (nothing more). Back in the day, he used entrapment spells such that he could help narrow escape routes such that there was nowhere to run, allowing his massacres to transpire.

...Now, he is cursed with the appearance of a pseudo-Buddhist monk (bald head, peace beads, etc.), able to create barriers (basically a kekkaishi) which are explicitly nonlethal. He cannot loophole his way into killing someone by, say, materializing a barrier inside a body, or asphyxiating someone by draining their oxygen. (Well, he can do that to the point of unconsciousness, but the barrier collapses before killing anyone.)

He is forced, absolutely forced, to be a complete and total, absolute, utter pacifist. He cannot harm anyone. At all. He can only prevent harm, and is in fact compelled to do so. He can't do nothing; he must help prevent harm, in order to never embody his wrath.

Erik, sinner of Envy, is unique among the sins in that he has no recollection of his past life--thus, he doesn't remember what sin he performed. (Mostly because I couldn't actually think of what atrocity he committed comparable to the others, butstill.)

His curse was to become a blind beggar, with the gift of healing--in other words, he is forced to only give to others and to never in turn receive anything for his service. He is basically compelled to always reverse destruction. 

Deryll, sinner of Greed. Deryll is unique among the sins for not having anything unique about him. He is a textbook cursed sinner. His sin was that he was a serial killer of noble heritage--similar to Gluttony, he murdered at least one person a day, but instead of eating them, he collected various, numerous trophies from his victims. (Which is a semi-common thing from actual serial killers.)

His curse was that he became a robot, unable to be adorned in anything. (This was the only way I could think of to make the fact that he's naked get by censors.) If he grabs onto anything, he is forced to teleport away--without the item.

He also serves as the messenger for Muse. He's the one who informs the Thaukama that Archer made use of powers of the sins and knowledge acquired from his master, and that his master is actually out for much the same goal...however, his master still regrets Archer's actions, because while Archer acted alone, it was only possible thanks to his master's research.

Furthermore, his master desires to acquire his goal through any method necessary--even peaceful ones. Conflict was thus, strictly speaking, unnecessary, and that it happened was not ideal; the violence used was excessive and entirely unrequired for the goal.

However, Deryll does relay that his master laments that, inevitably, they'll still come into conflict, because his master is villainous and the Thaukama are heroic so even though his master's goal can be met without any force, they will still end up fighting each other.

Ulysses, sinner of Sloth. Ulysses is unique among the sins for being the only sin to feel remorseful for his sins. The other sins? They still desire their sin, just are cursed to never have it. With all but Olivia apathetic about their situation, yet making it clear they absolutely would still perform their sin if they were capable of it.

...Not so much for Ulysses, who feels immense, deep regret for his actions, desiring atonement he knows he'll never get. His sin was multiple chained events--he started as an adventurer, becoming a part of their core group. Eventually, he was placed in a position where he could easily have saved them...yet he let them die, and reveled in it, enjoying the absolute betrayal of trust his companions had placed in him.

After this, he returned to his kingdom where he was a prince, and took innocents and placed them in Saw-like death-traps, such that he could just watch them slowly die as they tried to get out. At every stage, he could abort the torture-executions, but he kept them going because he enjoyed watching them suffer and die rather than sparing them.

Inevitably, his kingdom was invaded, and while he easily could have crushed the invaders...he let his people perish. He deliberately ordered his troops to more or less act in the way which was most passive and yet still suicidal. Then, fleeing from the carnage, returned to adventuring and duplicated his first feat on a second group of unsuspecting adventurers.

This betrayal of trust is emphasized as essentially having been the worst of the sins (not that hard to understand when you go Thaukama-->Nakama), and thus, his curse is also the most severe. At its most base level, his curse makes him an insomniac, incapable of sleeping and yet always eternally having the effects of sleep deprivation forced on him thanks to this.

Furthermore, he is a compulsive analyst genius.  (And yes, he does look like L from Death Note.)

The exact specifics make this even worse. He has the absolute compulsion (think like in Code Geass where Suzaku is geassed by Lelouche with the "Live!" command) where he cannot commit suicide, not even suicide by cop; he is compelled to fight to survive and to not pick fights he cannot win. If he can win a fight, he is compelled to proactively INITIATE said fight against any he deems a threat to his master; he can't let his opponents live/go free, nor can he let them kill him.

Why would he want that?

Because he is in eternal pain. He has hyper-senses. Increased vision, VERY increased hearing capable of hearing everything, increased sense of touch, taste, and smell.

Additionally, he is constantly being forced to analyze that sensory input. In short, he is a constant, never-ending, ultimate Sherlock Scan, aware of every little detail about everything in his surroundings which more or less means that he can see the life story of everything he is around more or less; there is no "off switch" to this ability, and no way to tune it out.

Worse, he has an Eidic memory. He remembers everything. Every thought he's ever had, every emotion he's ever felt, every feeling he's ever experienced. Pain from a wound he sustained hundreds of years ago still hurts as if brand new. And that above ability? You know, the scan everything one? He remembers every single second of every single scan.

Constant sensory overload, fresh every single moment. He more or less is in a constant neverending hell, and among the reasons is that he can remember with crystal clarity his sins, and what he did, the absolute betrayal of trust, the feelings he felt when doing so, and with his new abilities, being able to understand exactly how every single victim felt, through a combination of a retroactive sherlock scan (that being, knowing things he didn't know at the time through having perfect recollection and perfect intuition) and through personal experience (in that unlike when he was originally alive, he has now personally experienced the wounds he inflicted on others dozens of times so he knows exactly how they felt).

He is forced to hunt down enemies and eliminate them, knowing full good and well exactly what it feels like to be killed, and being unable to be killed himself because he's too competent to be killed and can't let himself be killed. He basically gets to always experience the absolute worst of everything.

​This is, more or less, what gave him a conscience, though. By having to actually witness what his atrocities were like, he actually genuinely is sorry for it, but knows that even were it possible for him to be released from the curse, he wouldn't deserve it.

By the way, yes, he is in fact the most deadly of the six sins. He makes it abundantly well-known that he is in fact going to massacre the Thaukama if they let their guard down for so much as a second, and the only reason that he isn't compelled to fight them is that he calculates a 60% chance he'd die when fighting every member of the Thaukama at once, violating his master's commands in the process.

I think that's about it. I am looking at the three sheets I have, scanning them for information, and I BELIEVE I got everything I had written down, so I think that's everything.

So yeah, that's what I had.