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.

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

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

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

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

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

Basically the worst streamer of all time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This one did.

​That's a sign for success.

Still been in a pretty trash mental state and also been somewhat consumed by what amounts to, to dangerous degrees of neglect in other areas of my life, an obsession with completing a story I found to read online, Everybody Loves Large Chests.

I've wanted to make a blog entry there, but have been too tired, too preoccupied, too exhausted, too distracted, too forgetful, and so on and so forth and just haven't. But, to put a long story short: I picked up the story approximately 3 weeks ago. I believe it was 3 weeks ago's Friday, making it 22 days ago, approximately at the very end of July.

In that time, I've gone from the very beginning to closing in towards the end of the story. I've read what has to have been 3-5 years' worth of content, in 3 works. In a story that I believe updated very frequently, nearly daily, for a long long time, with each update containing literally hundreds of words. Hundreds of words, almost every day, over 3-5 years, and I've gotten through all of that.

I still want to blog more about that story, but that isn't why I actually came to my blog to make a blog post, believe it or not. (Come to think of it, did I actually make a blog mentioning ELLC before? From that story I got a perfect reference image for Elemental Ruby and I know I wanted to make a blog about it, but I may have neglected it and left it as just something on twitter. OOPS. Ah well.)

​What I actually came here to blog about is something else that I've wanted to blog about for quite some time, but never really had a good chance to do so. Well, having a breakthrough there thanks to the recent part of the story I'm reading which got me in a philosophical mood where I was really pondering some deep questions I actually made some progress there.

And the subject at hand?

Religion.

​I do not follow any faith. I am not too terribly religious at all, in fact. While I respect people's beliefs, deep down the vast majority of them I cannot find myself actually truly believing. But while I don't follow their beliefs, their beliefs can and have inspired my own beliefs.

I am a deeply spiritual person. I am also fascinated with "witchy" stuff, as it were, which is why I always enjoy watching a Witch doing twitch streams (originally every Wednesday but now three times a week, even!). 

I've wanted to do a blog detailing my, continuously evolving, beliefs, especially since certain aspects of my belief system I know I could forget and need to rediscover later. I even considered writing a "Book of Meism" at some point, being a Biblesque piece of literature (well, probably closer actually to Dante's Divine Comedy in that it had a couple of main viewpoint characters on a journey through the universe and it was through the lens of the guide and the main character that my beliefs and viewpoints would be shared, and the final punchline at the end of the book would be a summary of some of the most important aspects of my Meism beliefs).

​Unfortunately me being me, I never actually did most of this so a lot of my beliefs have regressed, where I lost important spiritual discoveries that I had worked hard to develop, but at the same time, other aspects of me have progressed, where in some senses there was a draw and discard aspect of my beliefs. Drawing in new things that got added into my beliefs, but losing core aspects of my beliefs, not out of them becoming obsolete or being replaced, but simply due to having forgotten what should not have been forgotten, where I am lesser because of the loss, but it's not all bad because I'm also greater due to the gain.

My meism draws a lot from various sources. It actually has a fair amount of scientific viewpoints mixed in with various religious beliefs and also concepts that I fully believe in such as various forms of Systems and also dreamscapes but also involves spiritual realms and entities and a fair amount of what may be called "woo-woo  stuff".

​I've lost the details I put into pioneering this theory, but one thing that I had a belief in and still do I just forget how it works is a tie between the realm of dreams and imagination and a spiritual realm, how the two in spite of working completely differently can accomplish much the same end result because they are not entirely separate, they are linked.

I believe that there are spirits, guides, entities, angels, ghosts, and whathaveyou, although I've lost the details in how I tied them into the above, our world, and more.

I believe in a form of life after death, and it is actually from this that a lot of my core beliefs are derived from, from this form of life after death, it literally ties somehow into almost everything in some way shape or form although in most cases I've forgotten how. (Again, consequence of not writing down breakthroughs in my belief system.)

And I'll talk a bit about this form of life after death because it's vaguely tied to the breakthrough I had Thursday Night as I was going to bed (so like, technically speaking 7 am on Friday morning but I still call that Thursday Night).

Basically, a belief I've had for quite some time is that any entity capable of 2/3 of these is worthy of being called God with a capital G:
-Omnipotence, being All-Powerful, able to rewrite the rules of reality and/or outright break them, in being able to mold, shape, create, etc. the Universe and even Multiverse as they will;
-Omniscience, being All-Knowing, able to see not only into the current universe but to see into EVERY universe, past, present, and future, seeing all of the infinite branches expanding out endlessly;
-All-Loving, being able to empathize with humanity, loving them, cherishing them, wishing humanity the best, always trying to help them, always trying to do the right thing for them, always trying to guide them, because they don't want harm to come to them.

But a long-standing question of mine has been. Any entity with 2/3 of those could qualify for being God with a capital G, sure, but...how could our world exist as it does with an entity, a being, that is truly 3/3 of them? 

For the longest time, I had only one possible answer/solution to this, but on Thursday I developed not one, but TWO possible breakthroughs. Note that, by and large, most of these are not mutually exclusive. You can have a God that is 2/3 and a different God that is a different 2/3 and you can have a God that is 3/3 and theoretically, all three Gods with a capital G could exist--all of them worthy for being called God with a capital G but not truly being the 'one true God' as we tend to think of God with a capital G as. We tend to think of capital-G God as singular, as in, if you pray to God, then God is the highest form, the ultimate (and sometimes only) divine being, singular.

After all, if there were multiple Gods with a capital G, 1: wouldn't they be gods with a lowercase g, and 2: who would your prayer to God with a capital G be to? Every thank, every wish, every prayer, if there's multiple Gods with a capital G surely there would be some sort of conflict in who you are praying to, right?

Not to me. I'm not sure that there's three Gods with a capital G, but I do believe in at least two. One much much much stronger and more fundamental than the rest as that God is directly tied to my belief in life after death considering that God basically IS the life after death. (Not quite, it's more complicated than that. God and Heaven at not entirely one and the same entity, but they are linked together.) That God is omniscient and all-loving because it is literally made out of all of us and vice-versa, with us shaping that God and that God guiding us but sadly is not omnipotent.

That God I strongly of strongest beliefs in is able to subtly guide us, through various forms of connections that I don't remember the link to, in the spirits, angels, entities, guides, whathaveyou, to subtly try and direct us down the better paths we can live but cannot rewrite the rules of reality, merely subtly guide them. Small miracles that are not impossible but are freak occurrences for the better, and helping hands to try and give us help.

It's a two-way street as well, because one of the core aspects of my Meism is that we have an influence on our reality. Reality is slightly shaped, and molded, by us. I don't mean just through physical actions, I also mean through perceptions, beliefs, etc. Our minds, quite literally, make it real, to some extent. Not to the ludicrous examples shown in media where we think, therefore it is, not to our beliefs singlehandedly fueling gods or God, but still there in a form. Where we helped shape and mold the universe as we know it, as part of God. Not to the point of God being omnipotent, mind you.

(Again, sad to say, the details of how this process works have been lost. I thought them up, I had them, but I've since forgotten how the exact process works. I lost so much that I don't even truly remember why I gave my belief system the name Meism but I know that name was not chosen arbitrarily, that it was actually tied to this 'we shape the world' and connection to the God that is connected to the afterlife/heaven/it goes by many other names which is the all-loving all-knowing not all-powerful entity.)

​This was a big part of my only answer to the trifecta for a capital-G God. I believe in a God that is 2/3 for sure, but beyond that, I've been less certain. I don't know if there is a God that is all-powerful and all-knowing who happens to not be all-loving, but if such a God exists, they would have a thought process utterly alien to any human, with humanity utterly incapable of comprehending that God's thoughts, and vice-versa, too, with that God unable to truly comprehend humanity.

It's definitely possible that God exists, but I'm not sure.

Still, though, that's what I was getting at. ELLC made me revisit the subject of the trifecta for a capital G. The first and for a longest time only solution was that there couldn't be a God that was all three, that we could have one or two Gods (theoretically three I guess but I don't imagine an all-powerful God that was all-loving would be so blind to humanity even if they aren't all-knowing so I don't think that combo exists, it's the other two 2/3 combos which are plausible imo) that were 2/3, with the omniscient all-loving God definitely existing and the other all-powerful all-knowing God being possible but being more of a maybe rather than a definite.

​The breakthrough was in realizing there was not one, but two, possible ways for there to be a God that is actually still all three.

Neither of these ways is truly mutually exclusive with each other, and neither actually contradict my first belief. Neither of these I am sure about to the same extent I am sure about the God tied to the afterlife. (That is the only God that I am positive exists, but I continue to explore my faith for considering, thinking about, etc. the possibilities, plausibilities, probabilities, etc. of the other potential Gods with a capital G.)

The first idea I came up with, and the second overall solution to the trifecta for God issue, was simply a breakthrough in realizing the infinite nature of the multiverse.

What I mean by that is, if the multiverse is constantly branching out infinitely, who's to say that God hasn't done more? There could be realities where God has directly intervened, where God has directly influenced events, where God altered the rules of reality, either blatantly or more subtly.

...And that we just so happen to have the misfortune of being in a reality where God didn't​ do that. Think of it in the terms you often see time traveling to the past rationalized in fiction where it is not in fact a stable time loop:
The moment an individual travels in time, they are not traveling back in time to their own timeline, their very existence in the past automatically branches reality out in two. Their original timeline still exists, and the altered timeline from their presence also exists.

Now instead of a time traveler, imagine it being God intervening blatantly and overtly. The reality where God intervened blatantly and overtly exists, but the reality where God doesn't intervene blatantly and overtly doesn't magically disappear just due to God having made the intervention. That reality continues to exist.

Of course, God could delete the reality where God did not intervene (or vice-versa I guess)...but why would God do that? It'd be murdering, killing off, all of the individuals ever born in the reality God deletes. Yes, those individuals would still exist in different realities, but just because they'd be 99.9999999999999999% identical doesn't mean they are quite literally the same exact individual across reality.

Each individual in each individual reality is slightly different. Which makes each individual in each reality their own person. And if God is truly all-loving, then how could God decide to effectively kill off one version in favor of another? An all-loving God would love all of God's children, and each individual reality would have their own version of the individuals and God would thus love every single version of them.

​In other words; it's not that God can't intervene or God refuses to intervene. It's that God already can has and does, but we just so happen to live in a reality that these interventions are either minimalistic or nonexistent, and while better versions of us exist where God did more than what God has in our reality, God didn't have the heart to delete our lesser, so to speak, 'inferior' reality because we are still different people, even if we are less happy versions of people there are more happy versions of.

There will always be versions of us that are worse off than we are and there will always be versions of us that are better off than we are and given the infinite nature of the multiverse, they basically all exist. (Now, granted: infinite may not be truly infinite. There might actually be far fewer paths than we think, but I still believe the ever-expanding tree of the multiverse still has 'branches' so to speak, meaning it is our responsibility to try and live the best lives we can and to give the best lives to everyone else we can so that as many of these branches as possible are better. Just because the possibilities are endless doesn't mean some possibilities necessarily actually exist, so it is best to try and steer the possibilities towards the better ones, just in case.)

​If this is true, then it actually does solve things to me. A God that is all-loving, truly all-loving, cannot in good faith kill off individuals born into a less-fortunate branch of reality, in spite of having the power and knowledge to do so. Such a God could still make as many branches as possible be as good as they can be, but we just so happen to be in one of the less-fortunate ones. Not the least-fortunate I'd imagine but not the most-fortunate.

It would thus fall to us with our own influence on reality (see above in how the God that is tied to the afterlife works) to do everything in our power to shape it as much as we can to maximize the good and minimize the bad, because while God already does that, we live in a version of the reality where God didn't do that because God refused to delete our reality after having creating the maximized-good/minimized-bad path.

​The second breakthrough idea I had, the third solution to the divine trifecta of capital-G God being omnipotent omniscient and all-loving was surprisingly simple.

What if God Himself (used 'Him' here because the dominant religions in the world which believe in God with a capital G usually refer to God with male pronouns, have tried to avoid using it but can't think of a non-pronouned way to say this even though I don't believe that any God with a capital G could have a gender, as any God with a capital G would be an entity that is explicitly genderless) made the universe in order to more or less experiment with something?

For instance. If God existed before anything else, then the question is: how did God come to exist? If God was the first thing to exist, a being all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, could it be that God has in common being a bit philosophical in wondering things like how God existed? I realize it can seem paradoxical for an all-knowing God to not know how God came to exist, but in some weird way it actually makes sense to me that God may not know how God came to exist in spite of otherwise being all-knowing because there's a bit of a loop. If nothing existed before God and God was the first thing to exist, God needed to basically will God into existence but if God didn't exist then how did God will God into existence? 

If God were to have some form of desire such as pursuit of figuring out the existence of God, then our entire reality could be a sort of experiment towards that:
All of the universe coming into existence as a first version of that. What caused the universe to exist and what caused the big bang of the universe?
The birth of life on our planet is another.
At some point, there was no life on our planet. But then at some point, life existed. What caused something that had no life to gain life?
You can in evolution probably have various other pinpoint questions.
Like what caused the birth of sentience?
What caused the birth of sapience?
We can, to some extent, answer many of these questions with our understanding of the universe with our scientific knowledge of evolution. Mutations that are favorable to propagating existence, the whole process, with a mutation being the cause of that.

...But what in that mutation made sentience/sapience emerge?

​And so on and so forth.

In that sense, the development of our world could be a bit of an experiment of God's. And if God relates to us, truly, then it is perhaps possible that God is an imperfect parent, that God has a, so to speak, "human" element.
Ain't no rule which says that "omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving" also means perfect and infallible.
In fact, it explicitly does not.
God is not necessarily a perfect being in spite of being all-powerful and all-knowing. Just because God is all-knowing and therefore would know of God's faults and imperfections does not necessarily mean that in spite of being all-powerful God would necessarily work to fix them.

A bit of a human mindset, sure. Humans might know what a problem is, but not necessarily choose to fix it in spite of having the power to do so. They are flawed, imperfect, and often selfish. Who's to say God cannot also be selfish?

After all, just because God is all-loving does not mean God necessarily cannot have desires. Humans can be fairly selfless, love their fellow humans, but they still usually are still somewhat selfish, and understandably so; if you give literally every bit of yourself to being selfless, you have nothing left for yourself and the result is that you quite literally die because selflessness without restraint, without holding back, is fatal without some selfishness to reign it in.

​God could be similar. God, being all-loving, would see what humanity wants and the suffering we go through and the misery and such and hurt and want to try and help us out, but have His (again apologies for the pronoun) own needs and wants and desires and be unable to intervene overtly for us while still attending to God's own desires.

I'm probably not explaining this adequately but both this idea and the second made a huge amount of sense to me as both being at least plausible.

Again, they're not necessarily mutually exclusive.

God could love everyone, but have some selfishness, but still not have the heart to delete less fortunate realities (ours among them), and there's still a different (technically lesser) God that is attuned to the afterlife.

Still figuring it out.

But I felt like recording this so that it's not forgotten.

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

Let me set a scene for you.

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

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

So not being an idiot, I did exactly that.

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

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

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

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

But then I ran into a problem.

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

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

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

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

An equal mixture of despair and rage.

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

I was lucid dreaming.

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

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

Except I wasn't awake when I wrote them.

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

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

Hours of work.

All gone.

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

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

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

I felt a deep sense of loss.

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

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

Which is saddening beyond depths you could comprehend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And our world is the lesser because of it.

Suffice to say.

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

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

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

​Not a fun way to wake up.

I would say "in my defense, I have been busy" doing a lot of things, which is true!
...But mostly the lack of blogs has been pure sheer nasty depression sticking its ugly face out and taking control of my life.

I am however, trying to fight back. It's not an overnight process where I will suddenly magically have a fix for everything, but I'm working on it, trying to get more and more on top of it. I've actually done a ton of stuff, gathering makeup supplies, shopping, etc. But I've got a lot more work to do.

I started with a list of activities, divided up into one-time things, daily/weekly things, and additional/optional things on top of those, and then added in a need to remember login information for various different important things.

So far, this is what I've got;


ONE-TIME THINGS:
-Catch up on emails
-Do tax stuff
-Regain access to any sites I need to (at least one but see below)
-Restart unemployment (I messed up by not doing it so need to restart it)
-Seek psychologist (so that I can begin transition)
-Pursue namechange
-Finish makeup collection

DAILY/WEEKLY THINGS:
-Shave (daily for face)
-Comb hair (do with shave)
-Makeup (daily once I've got the supplies)
-Shower 3-4x / week + change (Monday, Wednesday, Friday?)
-Dental Hygiene (2x/day)
-Unemployment once restarted (weekly?)
-Shave (chest Wed, legs Fri, arms Mon)
-Pills once gotten (at prescribed time/method/etc.)
-Checking email (daily+)

ADDITIONAL DAILY THINGS:
-Once on pills, exercise:
*Daily: jackknives/crunches alternating
(start 10, increase by 5/week up to 100)
*Knuckle Pushups Monday / Wednesday / Friday
(start 5, increase by 1/week up to 100)
(use corset or similar for back form)
*Squats Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday
(start 10, increase by 2/week up to 100)
*Walk/Jog/Run;
Walk 1 mile/day, increase by 1 mile/week;
After up to 5, add jog for 1 mile on top of walk (6 total);
After 5 jog + 5 walk, add 1 mile run;
Max out at 15 miles / day

BONUS ADDITIONAL/OPTIONAL ACTIVITIES IN A DAY (Possible activities):
-League of Legends
-Teamfight Tactics
-TFT Hyper-roll
-Chrono Trigger
-Stardew Valley
-Epic Battle Fantasy 5
-Minecraft
-Art
*Finish self-portrait
*Finish Elemental Ruby
-Phyrra and Cyrus (scriptwork, songwriting)
-Job Search

-Storywriting (the below are stories I have a recent desire to work on)
*Coat
*The Bandit Seven (supervillain/"hero")
*Vetra (superhero/villain)
*The supervillain trio story
*Threadripper and Kinesis (supervillain) story
*Requiem (supervillain)
*Projection (superhero + supervillain) story
*Heroes 4 Hire (superhero)



ACCOUNTS I NEED ACCESS TO:
(I probably should not list these publicly even on a blog nobody reads so, uh...there's a bunch here just not to be listed)

So that's what I've done.

It's not enough, but it's at least a good start.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...But as it is quite late and I am doing this after a night where I streamed (there's usually a good reason I don't blog on days that I stream--I get so tired when streaming that I usually go straight to bed after streaming), my thoughts are not as coherent as is ideal.

I feel like I should mention some of my mystical beliefs.

I've always been a believer in more of the spiritual side of stuff. I have my own beliefs, so I don't blindly believe in all of the (as the streamer I watch defines it) "woo woo" stuff, but a fair amount of the witchy things that I watch from this streamer I put a great deal of stock behind, including her tarot readings, whenever they resonate with me.

The tarot readings basically told me that I needed to apply for the jobs, which I did yesterday.

But they also gave me hints that streaming Chrono Trigger tonight was a good idea, and the universe aligned to make it so; there was nobody online that I wanted to watch, no professional game of League of Legends I considered a must-watch, I had done everything I needed to do in the day, so it all lined up and felt good to do.

Streaming is fun to me, even if the possibility of monetizing streams is a one in a million probably-impossible dream...but there's multiple reasons that I feel like doing it even if it isn't a viable career.

The first is that streaming might allow me to connect in other areas. Streaming isn't exclusive to games. It also covers art, even writing! And, yes, even talking about things! It allows me to talk about passions tonight, for instance, tonight I touched upon my first-ever story that I began writing! Even if streaming isn't the key to my future, it could serve as a tool to help me key in to my future.

A stream could end up helping me focus on a project, a story, help talk about it, get it more tangible. A stream could connect me to people. A stream could help me find people to make projects of mine I am passionate about come to reality.

The second is that streaming helps me relate to streamers I watch. Watching streamers eats up a significant portion of my life. Every waking minute, I have at least one stream, often two (sometimes even three!), in the background. And in those communities, most of the people I am close to, some who could maybe be worth calling 'friends' (not sure if they call me friends and I'm not sure if I am objectively close enough to them to be worthy of that title but I would call them friends), are also streamers.

By streaming myself, I get to better understand their own experiences with streaming. So that when they talk about it, I know what they mean from experience myself, so that I can relate to them better. It allows me to connect with them more, talk with them more, interact with them more, from a perspective that is more knowledgeable than that of someone who hasn't streamed.

​The third is that streaming is actually amazing practice at just talking. I am not the most competent at talking, but I am getting better and better at it...via streaming. Streaming is actually teaching me how to talk, a skill I had lost from a year of quarantine where talking was kept to a minimum. Streaming to help me prepare for the outside world would be reason enough to stream, but there's more!

The fourth is that streaming allows me to practice other good practices, too. Streaming is giving me practice at managing social media. Streaming is giving me practice at social networking. Streaming is giving me practice at basically...well, being able to manage my life and aspects of it. These skills should, if I keep practicing them (and I do so every time I stream!) translate to any future endeavors of mine.

If I ever write something.

Whenever I make art.

The practices I am practicing on streaming, translate to those things.

It could even be a key for me creating a passion project like Phyrra and Cyrus! After all...if I am actively networking and keeping folks updated, the skills I am practicing now could translate into managing updates on a passion project and keeping it going, showing it off, etc.

But fifth and finally?

Streaming's just fun to do. Even if nobody shows up, even if I am talking to the air. I wouldn't do something I didn't genuinely enjoy. I think that I could actually be good at streaming, so if I could make money from it eventually, that would be cool! But, inherently, that would just be a bonus. It would be an extra. Even if I wasn't good at streaming, even if I never make money from streaming, even if streaming never helped me out?

It wouldn't need to.

Because streaming is just fun for me. And do I really need any other reason than that to stream? It's fun. It's relaxing. It's something I genuinely enjoy. After all, I am playing games in my spare time anyway; when I've the ability to, why not stream it as well? I wouldn't stop playing Chrono Trigger if I wasn't streaming, after all, but if I am playing it I may as well stream some of it.

This has actually gotten me to talk to someone at least once! I think twice, actually. Me being me, I didn't do nearly as much talking as is ideal so the folks I talked to probably lost interest in me, but hey, it was still nice to talk to them about a game I am passionate about, and that is something that I can't do while playing the game and not streaming.

I can talk about a game I am passionate about when not playing it. Say on a forum, on a discord, in a twitch chat (not that twitch chat talks have any permanence), you get the idea. I can play a game I am passionate about when not talking about it. But the only way to do both at the same time is to stream it. (Or record it, but same basic principle.)

And talking about games I am passionate about while playing them is fun. I enjoy myself a lot.

​I think I had more non-streaming stuff to talk about but I can't remember. This should suffice for a blog tonight tho.

I've actually been having a lot of dreams worthy of recording as stories recently, and last night had at least two that were incredibly coherent, filled (they were mostly with a start middle and ending where I could manually fill in the gaps), basically worthy of being a Phyrra and Cyrus tier of story that came from a dream that I could flesh out into a real world.

Unfortunately.

I've been unable to motivate myself to actually.

Be new.

Be creative to something new.

All I want.

All I want to do.

Is revisit the old.

Old, and old, over and over again.

And I bet my depression certainly doesn't help.

That said.

I AM trying my best to do my best.

I'm doing not enough and feel like doing ten things. League, tft ranked, tft hyper-roll, chrono trigger, stardew valley, minecraft. I don't have the time to do them all in a day, best I can do is like 2-4 out of the six.

And the more I am to the higher end, the more likely it is that it came at the cost of daily stuff I should be doing daily. Like emails, mafia stuff, staying on top of webcomics, even rl health stuff.

​I'm also finding myself going to bed earlier and waking up at the same time or later. Like, I'm dead tired now at 4:20 am. That's an hour or two earlier than the time I normally would be dead tired, and yes, I am writing this just before I am going to go to bed.

I am still going to sleep until like 2, or 3, or even 4 pm. In spite of going to bed 1-2 hours early, I will wake up at the same time or later.

Sleeping literally 12 hours is something which has been happening to me as of late.

It's possible my body is short on vitamins or something, but if I had to wager a guess, most of this tiredness and long sleep is due to depression.

That said.

I am doing what I can.

While I'm largely dead inside for most things, some things in my more manic moments have actually been inspired--for instance, I actually think that I might have it in me to draw Elemental Ruby.

Elemental Ruby.

I'm pretty sure I've blogged about her before.

But it was a long long time ago because I don't really talk much about Red Hood Rider in spite of having not lost my desire to make it. (My desire to make it has only grown, rather than shrunk.)

So to refresh your memory.

Elemental Ruby is Ruby Scarlett Ventrella, canonically after the end of her titular series, Red Hood Rider. She first gains access to the form ~10 years after the ending of the story, and by the time she passes the mantle of Elemental Rider of Light on to the next generation (small spoiler there, but one which canonically makes an appearance before the end of the series anyway so it's not much of a spoiler that it happens as I am not revealing the how), her vampiric powers have grown to the extent where she keeps the form permanently, albeit losing the actual light-aspects of it, with her simply mimicking the appearance of the light powers while using pure darkness ones.

Elemental Ruby is Ruby's final, and ultimate, super form, combining aspects of her previous super forms. She has footwear of the arbalest armor super mode, with her boots literally made of the crossbow (also allowing her to jump on air and accelerating her jumps). On her thighs as thigh bands she has blades that are her darkness staff's bladed section, acting as both arrows and knives/shortswords.

Her skirt is a strapless, shoulderness, backless dress which prominently shows off her stomach. (Dresses in real life might be able to do 2/4, potentially 3/4, but all four would probably be beyond the realm of possible. Fortunately for Ruby, she has magic.) It also has slits at the thighs to allow for greater range of movement.

Ruby's right arm is covered in tendrils of darkness, with a red gem sticking out of the 'glove' on the back side of the hand. Her left arm is covered in threads of light, with a gem that I believe is colored white, and these threads also form a hard-light construct of a bow.

Erupting from near the shoulderblades, she has two wings/capes that combine the properties of feathered wings and malleable, pliable, fabric-like capes in that they provide flight but are flexible, can cover her back, fold in, are fully controlled by her, and take from her Archangel form. The right wing is white, the left wing is black, and they can shoot feathers like arrows/knives, and are very very long. (I think like 20 feet long?)

Her hair is alternating strands of black and golden hair, and is ankle-length, going all the way down. Her mask when she chooses to wear it...well, that I don't remember off the top of my head because I didn't want to draw the masked version of her, I wanted to draw the unmasked version of her.

Basically, it's an incredibly detailed, nuanced, elegant, gorgeous, animated form--one I previously said that I could draw maybe one piece of it at a time but that was it. That I'd never be able to draw the whole thing at once.

Well, sans the mask (which I don't perfectly remember and don't actually have the inspiration/vision to draw as it was specifically her unmasked self I thought about), I actually think that I could draw her that way now.

Yes, really.

I think I could pull it off.

I'd just need to actually start drawing.

Something I've not done recently because there's so much to do in a day.

So much to do, so little time, and I waste most of it on games.

It is an absence that is, mostly, not my fault.
I could've made a blog entry yesterday night--that's my fault; I forgot. So no blog Monday, totally my fault.

No blog on Sunday, Saturday, or Friday?

Not so much.

There was a three-day period without internet. Three solid days.

​Still recovering today.

I did have a new story idea come to me. Basically a shonen manga. The protagonist is a pre-transition in the closet transwoman who dies--as she is, very clearly, unhappy with this and dissatisfied, feeling unfulfilled in her life with a bunch of unfinished business due to not having gotten to live her life as her, she ends up in a lesser circle of Hell.

Hell, in this setting, is basically made up of a combination of those who did great atrocities causing endless suffering and are unrepentant about it, and those who cannot find happiness in death even if they have the ability to move on.

If they cannot be at peace with their demise, especially if they have negative feelings, Hell it is for them. If they ever get to be at peace, they can move on, but for as long as they cannot accept their death, for as long as they cannot resolve their issues, they are stuck in Hell.

In this sense, Hell is a little like a jail in that theoretically, anyone within can move on. If someone who has caused great harm genuinely sees the error of their ways, recognizes the pain they inflicted, is remorseful of it, then they have the chance to move on (tho they may be stuck in Hell if they're unable to find a way to get redemption).

If someone who hasn't caused great harm, but hasn't accepted their death, finds a way to accept it, they can move on.

Hell is overseen by the ultimate exemplifiers of both of these traits: demons, who're technically fallen angels; they were never human, but they did great atrocities (it's how they became fallen after all) and cannot be at peace with their situation. There's multiple types of demons, all of them immensely powerful in Hell.

Theoretically, tho, even a low-rank angel can not only go toe-to-toe with the strongest of demons (demons retain a lot of angelic power, but lost a lot of it in their fall), and yes, outrank them. Angels mostly stay out of Hell to not interfere with the process of Hell to reform individuals, but can intervene if they feel their presence is necessary for a soul that's close to moving on.

Hell, in this setting, works a lot like Earth. (Even with Earth technology!) You can't truly die, but all pain you experience is amplified. If you don't eat, you become really hungry and will eventually collapse from fatigue, and even pass out (which is not pleasant, see below). If you don't drink, you become parched with thirst and will eventually collapse from dehydration, and even pass out (which is not pleasant, see below).

If you don't sleep (you need to sleep), you become fatigued, experiencing incredibly amplified duress during this time, and eventually, your efforts to avoid sleep will fail, and you'll collapse, passing out, from exhaustion eventually.

And sleep? During the time you sleep, you don't dream. You relive aspects of your life, including seeing the feelings and thoughts of others, up to and including personally feeling your death, amplified, many times over, repeated multiple times. "Life flashing before your eyes", only much much worse.

Fatigued-induced sleep makes it much much worse. You relive it not only with even more sensations, but for a much much much longer period of time.

If you suffer a would-be fatal injury, you not only experience the full pain of your original death but of the new death, and stay that way until your wound heals.

While the unrepentant monsters are mostly kept in a different, deeper, section of Hell, by and large, the entirety of Hell is left to run amok as people see fit. Meaning that you've got to fend for yourself. You can form bonds with others, friendships, even create societies, but you can constantly be attacked by people who're warlords commanding literal armies of the Damned.

In that world where you're up against literally billions (not quite trillions; not everyone goes to Hell and quite a lot who did move on) of humans, and even against quite-often-malicious demons, you're basically subject to their whims. You follow their rules or suffer for your disobedience.

Hell does have things like landmarks, a map, and such, but due to being infinite and, largely, the same weather (there's frozen areas for frozen hells and water areas for damp hells but it's mostly fire and brimstone of various kinds), it's a pretty bleak place occupied by pretty bleak individuals that're largely hard to befriend owing to them all having various issues of their own.

And the protagonist finds herself in Hell, struggling.

But it's discovered that she has a fairly rare power for a human; the power to manifest her soul's will, and the willpower to control it. (Both are, individually, rare, but having both is even rarer.) On the one hand, this gives her magical powers that you'd expect in any shonen series, making her able to fend for herself, be able to stand up against anyone except others with this power and Demons who have a similar, but inherently innately stronger, version of the power. Meaning she, unlike most denizens of Hell, won't be repressed by the rules of those around her.

On the other hand: the power to manifest her soul's will with the willpower to control it makes her an actual threat: if she can escape to the real world, she has the strength to partially manifest on Earth. She can't come back from the dead, but she could disrupt the world as what amounts to a ghost akin to a poltergeist, a fairly big threat.

After gaining control over this power and learning of what it can give her, she becomes what's known as a "Third-Generation Succubus". First-generation Succubii are a specific type of Demon. Second-generation Succubii are descendants of those Demons (Demons' ability to procreate is limited, but not nonexistent altogether, and children of Demons are fully fertile with absolutely no restrictions), and have the same traits, just with less bounding to Hell.

Third-Generation Succubii are purely just humans. Humans, nothing demonic/angelic about them, that just so happen to have a specific type of powersets that represent nearly-identical powers to their demonic namesakes. (Inherently weaker than their Second/First-Generation counterparts tho.)

Those powers include shapeshifting, accelerated healing that lacks pain (getting hurt still hurts, but healing is done with less pain), enhanced charm (manifests as a passive influence on the emotions of others but also increases self-confidence and allows for easier smooth-talking, essentially granting the user a silver tongue), enhanced strength/speed/endurance/stamina, increased empathy (manifests as pseudo-telepathy, in being able to sense the feelings of others nearby and increased analytical abilities to guess at what this means), and pure energy manifestations of handheld objects:

Swords, bows, guns, shields, knives, etc.

Oh, and also: they have incredible lust and instantly heal from having consensual sex, and are vastly powered up from having had it, and the more often they have consensual sex, the stronger they become.

And thus her journey as a protagonist begins, where she fights and makes friends.

It continues to develop in my mind, and I had a bit of an idea with it:
By taking advantage of it being a first-person story, what if the protagonist could, mistakenly, have self-diagnosed himself (with the help of those he was surrounded by as a kid) as a sociopath, without him actually being one? For him to have been called a narcissist, sociopath, psychopath, etc. due to struggling to understand the feelings of others and seemingly lacking emotions of his own. (But him not actually being any of those.)

Over time, as he got into the teens, he learned to fake these responses, and even exaggerate them: he became a large ham, grandiose, extremely bold, outgoing, confident, even arrogant, showing the typical traits of a supervillain: charm, incredible intelligence, witty banter, a level of snark, a fondness for puns, grandiose demeanor and overcomplicated plans, a fondness for loquaciousness, and the like.

And while he maintains a respectable social life, he's still even now polarizing with a lot hating him (and him knowing they hate him) even though plenty like him, and him remembering the comments from when he was younger and couldn't fake these responses.

Still convinced he's a sociopath, and very aware that all of the traits he displays are perfect for being a villain--and then he gains his superpowers and realizes they are perfectly suited for being a supervillain. And he wants the infamy of it as well as the fortune a supervillain can accrue, and just basically assumes that due to being a sociopath with the hamminess of a villain and power set suited for a villain, along with what his ambitions are, of being recognized and appropriately feared and having the pull, the weight, appropriate for his status, that it's inevitable he is going to be one, so he starts his plans to become one.

And then, panicking at the presence of a known threat that could harm him (he's invulnerable from the outside, but some threats can bypass external armor so to speak and this was one of them), in public before having donned his uniform, he uses his powers, and people assume he is an emerging superhero.

He initially thinks this could be an opportunity to take down the superheroes from the inside, thus setting up the narrative for the story, but there's a rather obvious twist, which becomes quite obvious to those with familiarity with conditions: no, he is not a psychopath or sociopath. He's not even a narcissist. Or any Cluster B personality disorder, or Cluster A, or Cluster C, or Haltlose, or Immature, he's none of those.

He is, however...an incredibly high-functioning autistic individual, who despite being on the autism spectrum, is high-functioning enough to have not gotten diagnosed with it, with people assuming he was just a normal, if a bit "mean", distanced, etc., kid.

And yes this does take inspiration from my own life with what I've been called before. (I've been called a narcissist; I've been called some condition similar to narcissism which may be in the Cluster B or Not Specified sections, don't remember what it was; I've been called a psychopath/sociopath; I am in fact none of those, as it's actually being a high-functioning autistic adhd-laden bipolar disorder-suffering transwoman.)

But that's exactly why I think I can write it and write it well.
The ability to mix fiction tropes, like Good Feels Good and multiple supervillain tropes like Large Ham, with a dose of reality with it being a very real underlying condition that went undiagnosed, is right up my alleyway.

And I kinda think I can do it.