...Last night I had a dream which eventually stabilized into a Narbonicesque webcomic. The characters would include:

The female mad scientist, loosely considered the protagonist;

An incredibly brilliant, but snarky, AI assistant, who later gains hard-light projection abilities and even later still gains a body (a la the series Andromeda and the titular ship);

The male mad scientist, an initial new recruit (but unlike Narbonic, he's mad from the getgo);

A bimbo female assistant who sleeps with literally everyone in the main cast (which does mean that the entire crew ends up polyamorous, in large part thanks to her), who eventually gains alternate selves (portrayed respectfully since I am plural and wish to show a good portrayal of a form of plural), one an "evil" version that is into BDSM, is smarter, more grounded, and yet, is also incredibly violent, and a "good" version that is also smart, grounded, but annoyingly altruistic, and her normal self eventually works to become less of a klutz, and while not as smart, works to become a mediator between everyone;

An alien supergenius lifeform that's mostly a gigantic green brain, who is a rival to the female scientist and has claimed her lab as its own, leading to constant fighting and one-upping;

An evil mutant plant created by the alien, designed to consume and grow, hyper-intelligent on its own with big teeth that can eat anything and vines that are super-flexible (eventually in a spoiler revealed to be the author of the webcomic itself);

A less-evil mutant plant developed as a counterpart to the above made by the female mad scientist, with all of the traits of the above, who eventually becomes a renown author whose works are developed into films as well as a scientist, who is incredibly rude, crass, demeaning, insulting, etc., not to mention monstrous wearing a paper-thin disguise, and yet people still like the plant in spite of that.

It is a good idea, but alas, like most of mine, the extent of me making it will be me writing it down here.

Well I definitely feel more-rested today and felt less tired with the change. Which is good!
Also good; I have obtained a perfect magnetic phone case for my new phone.

Today also saw me do a little bit of desk cleaning, not to mention, writing down the second of the two game ideas I have notes for. This means my notes are a lot more organized and my folders much better, but there's downsides; the folders are more bloated and the notes are a little more bulky now than they were before.

The "I think" here mostly comes from me genuinely having so much trouble remembering if I took my night medications.

I know I took my vitamins.

I'm like 95% sure I took my second estrogen pill.

I'm like 90% sure I took my T-blocker pill (spironolactone).

I'm like 90% sure I took my lamotrigine (bipolar disorder).

...But like.

None of those are the same 100% they should be--and all of them need to be.

I need to figure out a waste-free (paperless) way to reliably note what I've taken at this point. It needs to be digital, but not be something I'll easily forget about, but not be something I need to go out of my way to manage with it being a pain to actually do regularly, but also not hinder me in my daily activities, but also be around.

Haven't figured that out yet.

And, there's more that I didn't do.

I didn't get to note some things I want to do for stream in my to-do list for instance. (CT, FFVII, Majesty, Zeus/Poseidon all come to mind.)

​So I'm not sure if this was a good day or not, but it was at least definitely not a failure.

Or at least, mostly finished it. First, let's show a couple of the extra work in progress states.

And now, the "final" image:

Now, it's not perfect.

At the top, the hair is too "thick", extending too far out. The hair basically has a straight trajectory from the top in a diagonal line to the bottom--it should be more of a curve, going from where it is at the bottom in an upward curve that ends around the ears or so. So basically, the hair at the head should start at around where the black tentacle shoulder is, falling straight down from there and then curving out to the final location, rather than the much further forward starting spot seen.

I forgot to draw the toes, and also left out drawing fingernails.

I didn't add what's the term? Line width? Line depth? Stroke width? I'm drawing a blank on the term to use, but basically, making the lineart get thicker and thinner at different points rather than being uniformly thick.

This is a more "casual" look at Elemental Ruby, so I didn't have the different eye colors, the red claws or swirling vortex on the tentacle side or the mask on her face. (The idea I wanted to draw was a midway point between her being in battle form and relaxed form. Relaxed form is Future-Ruby in her default state eventually; combat/battle form is the fully combat-oriented Elemental Ruby as originally envisioned.)

The light fibers look more like lightning than they do strings of pure light; the anatomy, proportions, and perspectives are all a little bit off. There are a bunch of things that could be better if I spent time fixing them, and others I don't know how to fix.

The darkness tentacles don't really come through and the hair being alternating strands of black and gold I also didn't quite convey perfectly, aside from the flow of the hair not being perfect.

That, aside from the issues I pointed out in my blog post from yesterday. The pose I'm not 100% happy about.
The proportions, anatomy, and perspective are all not quite right. There's a lot of funky things that are a little "off", that aren't quite right. Its anatomical flaws are definitely present, among them being the thinness and length of her legs as well as the shape of her torso.

I'm not sure I like the lip/lipstick. I wanted it to be visible on her vampire grin, but I'm not sure it comes off properly.

The blade thigh bands are too low, and should be higher up.

The arm covered in light fibers, I actually don't know how to draw, and it shows.

The light fibers look a lot like lightning, and I'm not sure how to convey that they are fibers made of light rather than jolts of lightning shooting out.

The alternating hair between gold/black I didn't get to be my vision perfectly; the capes/wings don't quite work as I want them to; the dark tendrils don't look like dark tendrils; the light fibers don't look like light fibers, both on the arm and on the extensions; everything that was "hard" to do on the image, I ended up not actually matching my vision.

But I took a look back at the spot where I originally envisioned Elemental Ruby and how I did compared to my original vision there. Some things, just changed: the default dress color at some point shifted from red to black. The second hair color to alternate with black at some point shifted from brown to gold. The wing/capes swapped color sides at some point (I think this was for better symmetry?).

And other things were left out as part of this not being part of the vision for what I wanted to make. I didn't want fully full casual Elemental Ruby, the default look for Future-Ruby, but I also didn't want to draw the full combat-ready Elemental Ruby that would include the mask, claws, swirling vortex, etc. so this was my go-to for an in-between, a partial combat form where Ruby has summoned darkness around her right arm, fibers around her left arm, and wings, but hasn't fully powered up, a sort of "display" of power without really putting power in, as it were.

So like. I rate this as being about 80% effective. It's not 100% my vision. It's not what I was hoping to make. But it gets darn close, for an image that I said I couldn't make circa three years ago. Now, granted. I did it entirely digital, when I really wanted to do sketches of it. (And to be fair, I think I can in fact do partial sketches of it and then stitch them together digitally.)

But it's still passable in conveying most of the idea that I was hoping to convey.

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

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

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

I have the worldbuilding set up.

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

Just need to iron out the finer detail points.

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

They disappeared, can't find them anywhere. If they're outside, well, the rain means lost forever, but if they're inside beit house or car I can recover for tomorrow, but from memory:

Fire: Red Phoenix (wings)
Energy: Blue Dragon (body)
Light: Yellow Lion (defensive shield arm)
Metal: Silver Horse (legs)
Rock: Orange Scorpion (offensive arm)

Wind: White Eagle (wings)
Ice: Light Blue (color of lane lines) Polar Bear (body)
Water: Blue Green (color of lane lines) Turtle (defensive shield arm)
Darkness: Black Wolf (legs)
Earth: Brown Rat (offensive arm)

Heart: Pink Cat (body)
Nature: Green Snake
Void: Purple Bat (wings)

Like I said, this makes sense. If I have the notes to verify the above and the time to blog about it.

...But while I knew them earlier today, I forgot what traits I...well, forgot. Oops.

Succubii have the flight, the innate understanding of social relationships, ability to read them, enhanced ability to charm, both through psychological reading and through literal seductive power (not used), dream viewing, dream manipulation, limited memory rewriting (requires them to be sleeping, is short-term only, and prone to failure; also not used), and probably more that I, again...forgot.

I'll see about looking up Succubus powers in various settings, and see what I want. I want most, but not all, of the powers. For instance, mind-reading I want a form of, but not as strong as in DMFA Cubi mindreading for instance. (And in this case, from the Slime half not Succubus half.)

I did however come up with the protagonist's superhero name. It's something that she very very very deliberately selected:
Wetgirl.

It seems like a lame name, and a name easy to make fun of, due to the nature of the innuendo of a name--but that's actually the point, that's actually precisely the reason she chose it as her superhero name. She doesn't want to be just a slime girl, she's a succubus and a slime girl, so she chose an alias that would pay homage to both halves of her, rather than just one.

And did so while remaining mostly family-friendly. Something that parents can't truly object to naming-wise, but which conveys the succubii heritage while also conveying her main power source, that being, her water affinity (since Slimes are more water than anything else).

Anyway, while I could have more to say, tonight? Tonight I need to listen to my body's urgings of sleep, so I'll be going to bed to hopefully beat covid as soon as possible.

My entire family did, in fact, get Covid. Really sucks, honestly. It's not surprising. It made sense. It fit. It was very likely. But I was still hoping it wasn't.

That said, today I did come up with an idea from a dream. I realize the idea of a "Slime Girl" is ridiculously overdone for a fantasy setting, but what about for a superhero setting? (Okay even there it's probably been done...) In this case, the specific concept I came up with is a Slime-Succubus hybrid.

In this universe, slimes have all of the abilities you'd expect them to have. Extensive shapeshifting, absorbing, being able to make lesser copies, special sight, being able to dissolve into a pile of goo, the goo moving, "metal slime" skin, you get the idea. But one thing slimes can't really do is have control over the pigment of their, for lack of a better word, "skin". They can change it somewhat, but they don't have fine control over it, in spite of being otherwise excellent shapeshifters.

In this universe, succubii have the opposite problem: they are the absolute masters at superficial shapeshifting. They can change pigments of their skin tone, they can change things like how much fat is where, make themselves a few inches taller or shorter, a little wider or thinner, so they can basically masquerade as essentially any human (or "human"), but can't go into obviously nonhuman shapes, and can't go too big or too small. They can't become too outside of the "norm". They still need two legs, two arms, a central mass, a head, etc. Their basic shape stays the same, even if the specifics of it, they are the masters of change.

​So you can see where this is headed--the Slime Girl I have in mind as a Slime-Succubus hybrid inherited both traits. The extensive shapeshifting of the slime and the extensive form changing of a succubus (or would it be extensive form changing of a slime and extensive shapeshifting of a succubus? You get the idea tho).

​So she can pass as human, or as a default succubus (succubii have horns, wings, and a tail by default--various succubii have different types of these, from cat horns to ram horns, cat tails to devil tails, but always have them; obviously, succubii can hide them in their shapeshifting as their wings/horns/tails are where the majority of their shapeshifting mass comes from), but has all the powers of a slime.

​Being a liquid, no need for sleep (and much lower needs for other things), having things pass through or be absorbed inside of her, store things inside of her body, immunity to physical damage in multiple ways (metal slime armor, extreme maneuverability to avoid being hit, even when hit being a liquid so blows being absorbed the way liquid would, not really having vital spots to wound so the wound not being critical, etc.), immunity to blunt impact, having an adhesive body that sticks to things and can have things stick to her, immunity to poison and disease (racial slime traits), immunity to mind control (shared racial traits between succubii and slime, with between the two covering literally every possible form of altered state of mind, with the singular exception of getting drunk, which both are actually more vulnerable to...), being able to eat/absorb anything, being able to tell what's poisonous (among other things), recognizing deception (this one's a succubus one), having the ability to read social cues and be a universal translator (also succubus), being able to generate poison (including paralyzing toxins), having the power to seduce (albeit, thanks to her morals, refusing to use it), being able to absorb any liquid (including water, natch), changing size/body proportions proportional to how much mass she has available (and she can gain/store mass from water in excess of what she has already), filtering water, having healing powers from her water, being able to unleash water with limited hydrokinesis (water connected to her body she has full control over, water she shoots she can push around or even make into a stream sharp enough to cut/pierce, but finer control is lost if she's not actively in contact with the water), control over whether what she envelops is digested or isn't digested, and for that matter, whether to drown them or not drown them, mastery of how solid she is, what texture she is, ability to control clothing, use of extra limbs (an endless amount of tentacles) that have incredible fine motor control, unmatched sense of taste, touch, and hearing, ability to mimic voices perfectly, perfect memory, limited tactile-based telepathy (feeling the surface-level thoughts of those she contacts), passive ability to absorb through this method memories and feelings (empathy basically), genius-level intellect, being an incredibly fast learner, especially skilled at navigating the human world (averting a typical slime girl stereotype), skilled at acting, no need to breathe, ability to create weapons from the body (blade-arms, blade-tentacles, axes, knives, you name it, shapeshifting + metal = anything can be a weapon), an ability to quickly learn the fighting styles of others and incorporate them into her own (and find counters to them), incredibly strong self-regeneration if she somehow ever does get hurt, ability to generate acid (and immunity to it), being able to absorb/create liquid metal, having the required heat resistance of this, ability to (with enough time) shift "types" of slime to gain immunity to cold or heat (not both at once obv, and it does take time, extensive time, to mold herself into that different "form" of slime), being able to basically act like rubber, capable of being either a conductor or insulator of electricity (and to a very limited extent, for magic in general), through being liquid being able to melt through surfaces, pass through them, slipping through even the smallest of cracks, mastery of dexterity/nimbleness/hand-eye coordination, superhuman strength, increased speed, flight, ability to mind control others (not used) through specialized created slime cores, elasticity, a limited hammerspace for objects/mass, a form of farsight from basically having eyes that can become a magnifying scope, ability to see details from it becoming a microscope, forming doppelgangers (other slimes controlled by the main body too, albeit with one mind so it being laborious), ability to sense water of all forms from an incredibly long distance, and with incredible focus, ability to track people within that range (because people have water) (but this is not an easy ability to use and requires intense focus to maintain the clairvoyance this entails), the ability to "see" everything around without eyes in a sight-without-sight in a 10-yard radius (which also lets her see magic itself), and limited skill absorbsion from things absorbed.

From these skills, she's mastered every form of weapon, and she is quite good at rune-based magic (drawing magic, basically). Her ability to cast non-rune magic is nonexistent tho, but she still has extensive knowledge​ of it, and high ability to counter it (in part due to being able to see magic itself, in part due to an a limited form of adaptive defense, but also due to genius analytical skills and being able to, so to speak, predict magic--not a proper power, but effectively one thanks to her instant calculation time since she's able to do basically any math/physics/etc. problem in her head instantly).

Sadly, this is all I came up with. Abilities, and loosely ones at that, and the concept being superhero rather than fantasy adventurer. (I might look into more powers, too.)

So it's 4:15 am when I'm writing this meaning I'm already 15 minutes late to bed.

But today was a 'whoops' worse than yesterday--I genuinely spent over six and a half hours on my Civ 3 mod tonight. Started working on it pretty much at 9 pm precisely, and didn't stop until three forty-five am.

And then I realized I hadn't eaten dinner--when I had already accidentally skipped eating dinner yesterday due to negligence (I forgot). I got called out in a tarot reading for not having good self-care, and tonight is a night proving precisely why.

I have a story that I want to blog about while it's fresh, but I can't do that if I am stupidly spending literally my entire day on a Civ 3 mod.

(Speaking of all day, work will be all of my day tomorrow--I won't get a chance to write a blog since I'll be getting ready for work in the morning, at work all of the day, and go straight to bed once home due to work on Thursday, so I'll be missing a day of blogging, regrettably. Sucks when I've been having some modicum of momentum, but it's unavoidable. Well, at least unavoidable if I want to be healthy and get the required amount of sleep in a night.)

And even on that mod, I keep on forgetting to actually ask about the Conquest Scenario buildings to see if someone's done the work there. Given that the map is actually nearly 75% complete (I worked on it for six hours today, that shouldn't really come as a surprise since while I need to add rivers and mines and irrigation from non-Rise scenarios, I legit did 100% of the Rise of Rome map tonight, so that leaves Mesopotamian, Middle Ages, Age of Discovery if it's not already done, and Napoleon--speaking of which, I've now done both the Vikings and the Germans today with me having done the Hordes and Turks yesterday, so I genuinely have only Russia left), and the next step will be the extensive civilopedia work which will be the time to have the buildings, I need to stop forgetting like a dummy dum dum and actually ask.

​But that'll have to wait until Thursday at the earliest, given that I work at 5:45 am (meaning up at 3:30ish am) on Thursday meaning Wednesday will be work->home->bed.

In my defense, I thought I had blogged, but apparently not.

Oh well, I'll make up for it with this one, which will be a fairly long one.

So I had a couple of story-worthy dreams, although the one I really want to pursue is the one that was very very vivid and surprisingly coherent.

The basic of the story:
There is a vampire war going on, between multiple vampire kingdoms.

One of said vampire dynasties just suffered a devastating defeat.

The vampire prince of this vampire coven was forced to flee, with his two servants/bodyguards (also vampires), to go into hiding, as potentially the last heir to their clan, and to potentially rebuild.

And the only place they can flee into is...the mortal world. As in, to live among us, in a normal environment. Without the resources a vampire coven would normally have in said environment. The bodyguards are barely even able to obtain IDs for them, and the cover story they have has a small inconvenience:

They couldn't get three male IDs.

One of the IDs is for a teenaged girl of high school age.

And the prince happens to be somewhat effeminate in looks...even without vampiric shapeshifting...

Point of clarity; 
Vampires in this setting, in order to better hide themselves, have minor shapeshifting abilities. They can change hair color (to some extent), eye color, hair type (to some extent), hair length (to some extent), skin color (to some extent), and body mass (to some extent), you get the idea.

They can't make a 4'6" person appear to be a 6'2" person or vice versa; they can't make a person who is naturally black appear fully Caucasian or vice-versa (no going from white to black); they can't make someone who really strongly looks like a guy suddenly look like a girl; the adjustments are subtle. Something like shifting genetalia to appear as the opposite sex and add the necessary fat to the chest is doable, and shifting from pale-white to more tanned is doable, and eyes into a more natural color is doable. But it's not "they can appear as anyone"; they don't have the ability to copy the look of someone even if that someone fits their height/build. They have to manually change everything so they use their shapeshifting not to appear as others, but to appear close to normal but easily changed into someone else.

But back to the plot.

Their cover story is that they are from northern Ireland, and have moved to (you guess it) Japan...as Japanese Transfer Students. They don't have much time to teach the prince how to blend into human society (especially as the opposite sex), but they do their best to fine-tune things to not be very obviously "not human". (Vampires here have super-strength and super-toughness and unlimited stamina, with enhanced speed and reaction speed and heightened senses.)

The hope of course being that as long as they don't do something humanly impossible, any quirks would be written off as "oh they're foreigners".

​And from there, high school shenanigans ensue.

The prince, by the way, looks like and has the basic personality of Tanya from The Saga of Tanya the Evil, in that he looks like an effeminate blond(e) and has a bit of a vicious "we're going to DESTROY the enemy" attitude, where allies are given very strict/harsh treatment to push them to their limits and enemies are ruthlessly destroyed.

Of course--this isn't the setting of Tanya the Evil; this is high school so that attitude, instead of being fitting for a brutal ruthless setting, is instead a little...out of place. (Played for Laughs, tho.) The anime that I have in mind for this would have it be mostly slice of life shenanigans where they're high school students going through high school with their vampiric quirks, but would still have the overarching plot of the vampire war, including some students discovering the vampire prince's secret and remaining loyal.

Part of the setting is that, in spite of the 'brutal merciless attitude' shown by the vampire prince, and the quirkiness of him, he still manages to attract a lot of followers who genuinely like him. His methods usually actually produce results, he's got decent ideas to help the school, he helps out in his own ways, he's got a ton of snark to him, and can weirdly be encouraging even when declining to help directly.

He's smart, and in a sense (pardon the language), "doesn't tolerate bullshit", and will in fact pursue injustices that happen, attempting to fix them. And due to being a vampire, is one of the best athletes at the school (since limiting to human doesn't mean limiting to average or below average human, at least to the vampire prince). Not afraid to say that something is 'unacceptable', and basically more annoyed than truly angry at the hijinks of high school.

Sometimes energetic/passionate, other times finding things boring, combine all of this together and you get a person who I feel like could, and would, naturally attract individuals that genuinely are interested in gravitating towards them. (You could have it either way I guess, cynically deconstructing these aspects, but this setting is more optimistic so it highlights the positive aspects of these traits. It acknowledges that it can be "too much" sometimes and acknowledges that there can be downsides, but the upsides are emphasized more due to the general idealism of the setting, in spite of the vampire war raging on in the background.)

I feel like it has a lot of potential as a story, and as an anime. I don't have an exact idea of how it'd unfold, the pacing of things, of what exactly the high school hijinks would be and what the plot would be, but it'd loosely be going through high school with the usual high school things happening 80% of the time, with 20% devoted to the world of vampires and things going on in the background, including the looming threat of the prince.

For instance, the vampire faction trying to hunt the prince visiting the school but failing to realize the prince is the prince, but the ever-looming threat, probably eventually down the line realized, of them recognizing the prince...but by that time, the prince has human allies there to help, as well as maybe one or two converts.

On that note, in this setting, 95% of vampires are born vampires--it's possible to turn a human into a vampire (one of the vampire prince's bodyguard-servants was human not too long ago), but the process is ludicrously complicated, involving a proper ritual. The vampire has to drink from the human (on that note, vampires need blood but it doesn't need to be directly from a human, although using blood bags is considered a sign of poverty) while the human drinks from the vampire, the human needs to be on the brink of death, and there is actually a ritual involved, dealing with certain ingredients, lighting, and even a ritual circle.

That's about all I have note-wise there.

I would like to add though that today marked me receiving my medication for my bipolar disorder.

I'm starting it tomorrow, but I want to voice what might be a stupid fear but is a fear all the same.

Off of medication, I came up with a story like the above in my dreams.
What if the medication prevents me from ever coming up with something like that again?

More than that, I have a deep connection with something more spiritual in nature.
My body radiates an energy, constantly. I can feel it across my body, and I constantly feel like I am venting excess energy through my hands (which is one reason I actually like wearing fingerless gloves; it feels like the gloves help me relegate the energy excess more easily).

This natural energy of mine (it's loosely a light blueish color, cyan or aqua or something along those lines), I very much do not want to lose my connection with.

Beyond that, I also have a second energy bound to me. It's not from me like the natural energy, but it is something that is symbiotic, is fully benevolent. Some sort of 'golden thread' wraps around my body and through my natural energy, I feel like I can interact with this golden energy. I don't want to lose my connection with the golden energy.

Occasionally, there's a third also-not-malevolent energy attached to me, an energy that feeds off of my excess energy and takes the form of what looks like sparks of lightning to me, and I also don't want to lose that.

I realize that medication effects on spiritual connections isn't that well-documented, since...well, to have documentation on it requires belief in the spiritual in the first place, and most medication studies are far more scientific than spiritual.

But I don't want to lose what I have.

And the scary part of medication is that I might not realize I've lost it while on the medication.

But obviously, this is just a fear at this point, not realized. I haven't even started the medication. It may turn out that the medication doesn't affect my dreams at all, so that I still generate stories like the vampire prince who is forced to live as a mortal teenaged girl. It may turn out that the medication doesn't shut off my energy flow and connection to the energies I mentioned above.

We'll have to see, but if it does happen and if I do notice it, then I'll need to switch.

Still tho, if it doesn't affect my dreams badly and doesn't affect the spiritual badly, is probably a good medication for me.

I haven't done my research yet on Lamotrigine, which I intend to do before starting it tomorrow, but I imagine it will be reasonably good for me in the long-term, as long as it doesn't produce either of the effects I am worried about. (My psychiatrist was of course worried about more medical/scientific side-effects like a rash, but to me? Nah. I'll have to report that if it happens, obviously, but my concern lies elsewhere.)

Was it four or five days that I went without blogging?
I only have excuses for four.
Yesterday, something I thought would take like 15-30 minutes ended up taking 1.5 hours and I still didn't get it perfect (I gave up on making it right and just posted it as-is in spite of the errors within), when my plan was very specifically to go to bed early so that I could wake up early enough to take a desperately-needed shower. (Which I did, it just meant that I went straight to bed.)
Saturday, I went to bed before midnight because I need to get up early on Sundays for work. Really early. Like, need to go to bed at 9 pm (10 pm due to daylight savings time this week) to get up at like 5 am or so, which meant no blog then due to poor time management.
Friday, well, I watched the entirety of the League of Legends Worlds 2021 final live. (Well...except for the postgame. When Damwon lost, I just left immediately. Nothing against EDG, they earned their win; on the day, there is no question that they were the better team. But like, I really wanted DWG to win, so when they didn't, I just lost any interest in watching the aftermath.)
Thursday, I streamed Kingdom but while I ended my stream due to my parents getting up, I kept playing until 8 am. (Whoops.) "Just...one...more...night..." applied.

Of course, stuff has happened!

I got the answer I was looking for on the character from Phyrra and Cyrus. (The term I was looking for which applies is Gender Non-conforming.)

I came up with THREE horror stories on Sunday!
Two of them formed instinctively in my brain when I had the idle thought of, "what would an inverse-Freddy be for horror?", and my brain quickly, automatically, gave me the answer in the form of two fully fleshed out takes that both qualify as being inverting the mechanics of Freddy.

The first, a story I am conditionally calling, "The Darkest Sleep", I can best describe as "Inverse-Freddy meets Final Destination meets Alan Wake". Basically, in a small town, a darkness comes upon the citizens, a darkness that brings their nightmares to life, with the nightmares able to hurt everyone, but hunting down to target the source of the dreamer.

​In other words, every time someone goes to sleep (making sleep dangerous), instead of the danger being in their dreams invisible to the real world but capable of hurting them, the danger is visible to everyone except the dreamer, and very much real. Being manifested from darkness, they are weak to light, but they are very much capable of killing multiple people and even in some cases outlasting the dreamer's nightmare. (For instance, a zombie apocalypse doesn't go away when the dreamer wakes up, at least not entirely. It's weakened, it's lessened, but not removed altogether. A tornado might start to dissipate when the dreamer wakes up, but doesn't suddenly vanish in an instant.)

The story would cover the outbreak, covering multiple characters and what happens to them and how they eventually manage to fight the darkness/dreams.

​The second, a story I am conditionally calling, "Don't Wake Up", I actually lowkey think would be better as an actual horror game, but I still think it's definitely writeable as a novel.

The basic premise: a family in a car uses a 30-year-old map instead of their GPS, taking a turn onto an old disused road instead of the main path because according to the map, it was a more direct route to their destination.

Predictably, this does not go well.

Their car takes a beating, and ultimately, it just barely manages to limp its way into a town;
Farmville, a town with the slogan "Where Dreams Come True".

But immediately, things are a bit eerie. The town appears to be basically a ghost town. Everything is 25 years old, dated, beaten, worn, etc., and yet the town still stands in spite of the disrepair. If it were fully abandoned, things like foliage should've taken over, buildings should've collapsed, etc. But while the town is in a state of disrepair, with basically no technology working, the buildings are still intact. Beaten, but not broken.

Around the town, there are a bunch of "graffiti", red words spelling out things that mostly just look like nonsense, naysayers, paranoia, "end of the world" talk, propaganda, etc., to an uninformed individual's eye. Messages like "There Is No Escape", "Don't Trust The Farmer", and such are strewn about.

And the family of four comes across a Farmer. Wielding a shovel, wearing a straw farmer's hat on his head, in blue overalls with a plaid/red shirt, big brown boots and gloves, the full look. He smiles at them, acts friendly, and gives them the suggestion that they can get help by waking up one of the denizens inside a building he leads them to.

After they do what the helpful farmer asks them to (you can guess where this is going), the citizen woken up goes "Oh no...", and the farmer reveals his true colors.

The protagonist, the older child, manages to flee, while his(well, ambiguously-his, this story is written in first person, protagonist is named Ash, is masculine, but is not actually strictly speaking gendered as I want to leave it open but for the sake of the narrative I use 'he' for the protagonist here as the main reason for the ambiguity is the potential for gender-flex if made into a game because before I had the idea of it being a game he was just a young teenaged guy unambiguously) younger sister faints as the three present (their parents and the woken up person are slaughtered).

​So how does this inverse-Freddy work?

In the town of Farmville, The Farmer is an immortal serial killer. He cannot be killed. And he is out to murder everyone. However, he has certain limitations. He cannot leave the boundaries of the town, permanently trapped in Farmville. And secondly, more importantly, he can only appear when someone is awake within the city bounds of Farmville. If nobody is awake, he disappears, he vanishes.

When someone does wake, he spawns in the town center, and from there, knowing someone is awake, he attempts to hunt them down.

Of course, things aren't as easy for him as they might seem, and not as easy for the denizens of Farmville, either. You can see some obvious loopholes he could try to exploit and some obvious loopholes they could try, but as it turns out, there's more rules to The Farmer's "Game".

The citizens of Farmville are themselves trapped inside the city bounds. They are just as trapped with The Farmer as The Farmer is. They can't just leave. 

​However, when the citizens of Farmville go to sleep, they are completely immune to any form of harm. They cannot be harmed by any method. And The Farmer is incapable of waking them up, by any method. He can't do anything to harm them or wake them up...if they are sleeping.

That, aside from the fact that if everyone is sleeping, he vanishes into nonexistence.

The rules partially apply to visitors, but visitors don't work identically. The Farmer still spawns if visitors are awake, and still despawns if those visitors go to sleep, but visitors do not get the perma-sleep that the natural citizens of Farmville do. They will wake up. They don't have total immunity while asleep, but do have partial immunity while asleep. The Farmer can't hurt a sleeping visitor. The Farmer can't force a visitor awake, either.

So, visitors sleeping get more safety, and if everyone is asleep even visitors, The Farmer despawns.

But, visitors, unlike the citizens, can and do wake up.

The citizens can only be woken up by force by the visitors (think kinda like Inception style with a "kick").

And with Ash's family entering Farmville, The Farmer began the latest round of his sick game. With Ash trying his best to survive/escape with his sister.

There's a little bit of extra.

Every individual killed by The Farmer doesn't leave a body--they dissolve, and then their dissolved form takes the shape of red letters...which record their last thoughts. "What's going on???" "I don't understand..." "They've doomed me!" are red letters that Ash sees when revisiting the building where The Farmer revealed his true nature to Ash's family--visitors leave red stains just the same as citizens do.

​This has been going on for 25 years, but the government didn't ignore things altogether. They investigated Farmville, and were able to, eventually, verify the supernatural nature of the ongoings there, and discretely took action, removing Farmville from the map, creating detours around the city on all four sides, but also did their part to try and help the citizens, by dropping in a bunch of equipment for forcing sleep. (Taking the form of needles to inject, forcing immediate sleep.)

The fewer knowing about it, the less there'd be idiots going "Don't go there? Pfft, yeah right! I'm going there!!!". Including some idiots in the government because if it were widespread knowledge in the government then it need not be a citizen going there, it could be someone who has the information but doesn't believe it all and wants to see it for themselves.

So instead of a hard-quarantine where they blockade it off, they took the much subtler route of making the old road be, well...an old road, that basically nobody would go on, and made it as hard as possible to stumble upon Farmville. This has a very high success rate, albeit not foolproof, as proven by Ash's family.

The less it looks like the government was trying to hide something, the less it'd be investigated, basically. So with it not looking like the government was hiding anything, nobody investigated, so the government kept the world as safe from The Farmer as possible and the denizens of Farmville as safe from harm as they could. Knowledge of what happened there became strictly need-to-know, with basically nobody in the know.

The denizens of Farmville did their own part as well, trying to create hiding places, stashes/caches, etc., where The Farmer couldn't find individuals, couldn't destroy their equipment, etc.

So Ash has been given the tools, from the sleep serum to the hiding spots, to survive, but it's still...well. Not easy, because The Farmer has been hunting the area for 25 years and knows when something is amiss, knows when something has been disturbed, knows when something has changed, having stalked the entirety of the town over the 25 years and scoped it out.

He doesn't know every nook and cranny, but he's found some hiding spots, some things, just by time. He's got very good knowledge, but also a disadvantage of not instantly knowing where the waking person is. He has to guess. And even if he guesses right, there's travel time from the town center.

Which gives Ash the fighting chance needed.

​The third horror story is a short story about a possessive tool coming back, not as well fleshed out but basically, person finds tool, tool is useful, keeps coming back...but then won't leave and can cause harm to others. (A bit more cliche admittedly.)

And in more recent news, today I basically made a friend! I don't want to share details because details are details that go beyond what should be shared publicly, but saying I have a friend now is still okay, so like. I have a new friend! That's legit something I've not made for YEARS. And it is AMAZING.