Patron: JNPL
I need to pick one of these four to go into the Outer Tide, even though myself has a negative intention to worship them, and in fact, won't even be taught to worship them. Half of them are fortunately unwilling or unable to control myself or give any supernatural aid, fortunately, and I'm picking the one that isn't literal Satan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDHOGewuxB8
Neophyte Sevastian / Huaxseb / Tree Son
Male
Az (Self / "Standard deletion of mortal memories before a reincarnation.")
Is that heresy? No, it is tree son.
Perks
True Love x3
Simka Citzalo
Zhuchka
Oko Shtorma
Untimeskip
Patrikeyevna
I think she's the safest mentor to download into my head, and that is really saying something about the others (I wrote this sentence before I added the mentor that teaches you to lose with grace). Mom and dad are about to have a final exam in childproofing. The good news: that's why myself isn't underprepared for the troll.
Dice Fudge
Simka Citzalo
Womanly thinking is wanting to be the son of a Royal Claimant. MANLY thinking is wanting to be the husband of a Royal Claimant.
Ragratelyn, Doch Yorgana
Extra Mentor x2
Extra Companion
Yep, it's the troll exploit, and I believe that myself is qualified to win this without being maimed.
Outer Tide
I am ready to play as a support character, dueteroagonist, or antagonist in anyone else's story.
Parents
Mother: Siglinda
Goth mom.
Letter: Greater Yus (Unknown Meaning / "Becoming the mask")
I don't care how she reinvents herself, it's just overdue. She has earned the status needed to be anyone other than the person she had to be.
Father: Murzik
Emo dad.
Letter: Pokoy (Peace / "Old age")
Another banger brought to you by JNPL.
Race: Tumen
It turns out that myself had completely taken after my mother except in personality.
Languages
Bilingual
Quietened (Salian)
Useless language on this continent, nobody cares. I kept mistaking it for Palatiner when I was doing the numbers.
Quietened (Auburn)
Now, that is viable to be something that myself'll naturally learn from my parents and any other lost colonists.
Everman
I can't have any other choice, the Destiny Points ran into negative when I tried for Entramithraic.
Benewhisper
This language pidgeonholed me. Insular would have been even worse for that, nobody would do Polyglot unless they're also pressing Burn the Future with the weight of the sun, which is not my style. I spoke Buenowhisper and all myself got was a group marriage and cowlick.
I do not appreciate language bonuses. They add more bookkeeping and some flavor text representing a bonus that nobody's going to aim for.
Location: Archaia, Kingdom of Kingdoms / Mamet Interior
Legal retribution isn't the only danger of illegal dungeoneering, there's also your relative ignorance of the dungeons that you're raiding, anything from its monsters, to its layout, to the forecasted date of its migration (as Vu'uq's description can tell you). The Fellowship of the Golden Eye found themselves experiencing the best outcome of the worst scenario, emerging next to half-degenerated Muddish settlement in the Orthrung to the sympathy and bewilderment of the locals, particularly one named Murzik.
Those lost souls were the last push needed for him to begin the arduous journey to return the Daemonhunt's resources to them, becoming both translator and negotiator for the Golden Eye on their way back to civilization. After the months struggling against nature, the Uruks, and the Ecumene, the five finally boarded a vessel running a smuggling circuit between the Exterior Mamet, Midoria, and Arcadia. Terror gave way to monotony, and for Murzik and Siglinda, comeraderie would also give way to enamourment.
And then comes the part that was already narrated, all five are heavily compensated for their respective treasures, only to return to Brazil. Why? Murzik still has a responsibility to the other colonists, of course. For Siglinda and company, it's the same masochistic wish for "the free life" that brought them into the cold hallways of death traps. You don't need to be fluent in the savage language inside of a dungeon. So they go through all that hell again to barely settle inside a Muddish village in the heart of the Mamet. A queer decision? Both of them got to that point by making them.
Gifts
Ethereal Beauty
I, uh, I'm leaving real social competence to Zhuchka.
Thoroughbreeding
Archaia needs to be in good hands.
Second Wind
Vigilant Strand
Shadow Footwork
You'd notice that I [cough cough] took a letter with no safety anchor, ergo, I have to make it plausible for myself to survive of my merits. There's two layers of injury mitigation here and a spider sense before someone can really maim me, so that takes care of most layers of the threat onion and mentorship takes care of the rest.
Misalignment (Spiritual Feel, Touch of Embedded Rust, Starsight)
One gift would have been overwritten, the other was counterproductive, I have a workaround for losing Spiritual Feel. If Blazhko can go without it then so can myself.
Memory Retention, Wisdom, Intelligence, Attentiveness, Caster Intuition
Meandering Thought
The magical downsides are mitigated by Inner Vision, it won't even be as 'costly' as the part where my brain is turned into ayahuasca.
Blazing Zeal
Maybe unecessary, there's still too many active Gifts here for comfort.
Kneeling Twilight
Spiritual Feel enhances your grasp of Meaning but doesn't absolve you from studying magic. So does Kneeling Twilight, it's just that it's also a leg gift. Obviously it's meant to be a second layer of the same for the hardcore magic specialists.
Autoantecedence: Inner Vision
Here's myself's ace in the hole. This version of Inner Vision also uses its primary effect on any living beings in front of my eyelids. More importantly, its sensory depth can eventually extend into seeing the past incarnations stored inside the soul. Myself will see into my past lives, because that's what I would do, only to see two of them. It is impossible to prove this to anyone until my forbidden knowledge starts snowballing.
NPCs / Encounters / Deaths
Empty Companion Slot
Encounter: A Bridge, A Toll, A Troll
For review: I have untimeskipped a hunter of the biggest game who's slayed hundreds of tankmen with spears and bows, both of my parents were teaching me how to win boss fights, and myself sees everyone's weak points whenever he blinks. It's not even Goliath, it's the bear.
Mentor/Companion: Patrikeyevna
Untimeskip makes her a cohort instead of a teacher now, maybe she's another one of the soldiers under Reks.
Encounter: On Full Stomach
You know how it is, you can still roll a 1 no matter how good you are. I'm talking about our devourer, not us, it Yat'd by daring to eat me or Patrikeyevna. That's why you're supposed to chew and swallow. The way out was not as meaningful to her in my performance as the way back home, I'll tell you. Sawing one of us out of a dragon? That's easier work than making regular trips from a whalefal.
Death: Her'v (Nobility / "Assassination") Yee (And / "Reincarnation without amnesia")
The Ecumene finally takes out the freedom fighter through underhanded means.
Yee is frankly an extremely cruel letter, on par with most contexts of undeath. You are being cast into a rootless situation and that's no small part of the reason why I Az'd. Patrikeyevna is different, though, she has been a sigma female for all this time, she'll adjust to the different eon.
Mentor: Zu'us
Zu'us is a lot of things and the list of her hit singles like 'gureilla warrior', 'botanist', and 'dungeon crawler' also features 'botanist'.
Encounter: Interested and Dissolved Parties
This is a point in my life where my person is still dungeoneering in Archaia, eventually this one will work up to more significant yet dangerous work under Reks, but until then, myself had officially ascended from the Golden Eye to the newly formed Azure Gauntlet with Zu'us after some ungrateful murderhobos threw out their cultural uplifter.
Letter: Tverdo (Certain / "Starvation and thirst")
That makes her next to truly immortal. Pixies are not just going to let themselves starve to death, malnutrition and atrophy would carry over between respawns, it's a violation of any animal's nature, nobody with that attitude would be a candidate, definitely not one with this skillset. The same skillset that protects her from this fate.
Mentor: Ragratelyn, Doch Yorgana
Woo! Tankista misplaced an alchemist Mentor in the Mother page. Why did he leave such a famous field there?
Encounter: Wild and Wilder
She was hiring help in recovering the possessions of her guild, making the minor mistake of specifically hiring me, whose curiousity was piqued by her work and the possessions we were seeking.
Letter: Iotated Greater Yus ( "Fusion with another person")
She doesn't care about her life so she'll share it with someone who does. Typical weird dwarf stuff that had nothing else to do with me, maybe somebody had an accident with using bound Geniuses for something.
Mentor: Reks
Acceptance, mitigation, and understanding of failure are qualities that are just as important for experimentors as they are for leadership.
Encounter: Nothing Ever Happens
That's a funny way to describe a recruitment drive! As he continues the slow extirpation of Charlie's forces from the continent, others learn to replicate his feats of leadership and the philosophy that guides them, carrying these lessons for the rest of my life. Separation wasn't a threat here, it was a promise.
Letter: Yery' (Unknown / "Death of fear")
The hardest choice here. I think that this immunizes him from being felled in most contexts of the war until either the Ecumene or the ruins bring out an eldritch abomination. Nobody will fault him.
Companion: Simka Citzalo
One needs the approval of the King (female) of Archaia if he would even attempt to establish a reformed Mage-cult as the state religion pivoting away from evil trash into more humane ascents. Other continents have proven that cruelty and mortification can only take us so far.
Encounter: Upward Spiral
Archaia finally found its modernization phase, or cheated it, depends on what else is happening in this Tide. Of course the princess was the first to benefit and she almost lost her life for it. She had to hide her identity at first. Very poorly and we still fell for it until we got compensated by the palace.
...Plant man. Animal woman. It rhymes!
True Love
I dont know if there's something about the rainforest! Wait, there is nothing and it's just history repeating itself with the castaway and her savior. Other women had been with me in there and nothing bloomed of it. It wasn't even immediate, it was delayed by five years until she discovered that the "messiah" in Cabrakanaia was the same dungeoneer who saved her from
Letter: Myslete (Think / "Permanently comatose") Zhivete (Live / "Evade the stated death and live another day")
It is what it sounds like.
Mentor: Upunth
Closing the gap between dream and reality, not on a massive scale, only a personal scale where unconsciousness can act upon consciousness, immaterial upon material, is one of the most important skills for my plans. Myself also needs to cut ghosts for killing Asuras and Empyreans.
Encounter: Breaking and Entering (Mamet Interior <-> Twelve Riverfold)
He's a whole continent away from myself, and more importantly, I've made build interaction very difficult so here's how it's viable that anyone in the Tide would have anything to do with me. Why's this happening, anyway, you may ask? It was a literal underground railroad for the Second Seat and their holdings in ancient Mamet. Upunth found out about it because he was trying to use it as a shortcut for investigating cool Drakonid facts that are not relevant to my plotline.
Letter: Iotated Lesser Yus (Superimposed Primordial Letter / "Fission dance")
Upunth was another person, both are cherished, both deserve their lives. Suppose that it starts with hearing him let out the faintest crack of his emo backstory when we're camping on the way to wherever he was questing.
That was the end of the beginning for me. It's a horrifying thing to lose your whole being, and the smallest corner of my heart related too well. Something happened in my own past that would have been normal for anyone except an Outsider. He needed to be himself again, he pursuaded him to share in that desire, and a heartache for someone else grew along with the pleading and rhetoric. Myself didn't know that amnesia was a choice for an Outsider, or much else about the system, only that it took my memories away, a fear and anxiety that was part of my plan from the start.
Maybe it doesn't all happen at once. Maybe we start with possessing himself with his past self before we finally centrifuge the Human from the Drakonian. Doesn't that lock the latter entity in dragon mode, perhaps? I would rather think of such an Upunth as a talking drake instead of a True Dragon. My vision't so limited as to repeat that old chestnut. I don't have a real plan for integrating !Upunth into society, so let's pretend that myself invents one when we come to that, maybe I'll leave this up to whichever Outsider was born or otherwise associated with Ratibor. Rescuing someone without a plan is less hubristic than everything I did to reach this point and everything else that this plan is working towards.
Companion: Zhuchka
As my master plan to reawaken progresses, the cult leader contributes her profiency in evil trash to begin experimenting in spiritual expansion and self-perpetuating logoi. You think evil trash is Pukluxun's specialty? Yes, it is, but that's necessary only for people who want to escape ethics. Zhuchka wouldn't be miffed as long as the sacrifice of sapients stays off of the table.
Encounter: In A Cell
It's the classic start of a romance y'know: both of you being brutalized inside of the same gaol while they wait for ransom until the both of you break out and take your revenge against seafaring omega males (no relation). In the process she falls for my correct delusions of grandeur because she doesn't how to assess that someone really isn't the Outsider, only that this man is weird and dangerous enough for it to be believable.
True Love
Outer Reincarnation fans love raising questions about the morality or efficacy of rigging destiny for romantic success. This context is a white area, romantic infatuation is actually a step closer to a free and respectful relationship when we're talking about the cult leader waifu.
"You shouldn't say those words about me, don't even think of me like that. Both of our beings are fearsome and astounding. We wouldn't have the right to these feelings if it were any other way. What we've done, and what we will do, has to be your works as much as mine. A humanity worshipped is humanity rejected. Do you really reject me for the false impression that you built up? If you would really love me, then accept my judgement and blessings that you were always my peer."
Death: Izhe (Which / "Natural disaster")
Reminder: The death letters really prescribe that someone's fated to end a story with the Meaning of that letter, it just happens that death is the most effective way to force it on you and the last opportunity to fulfill that prophecy. This is the fact that Katya's teachings are based on.
Therefore such a chaotic end can be belayed by succumbing to them on my own terms. Most people wouldn't agree to postmodern deaths just because the Outsider told them about it. Upunth was desperate. Zhuchka is just that crazy. Somone can forget that she's only mostly parted from the path of doing horrific things for the promise of magical ascent. She's not going to balk at being something like that which we're already making myself into, as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else. She won't die of a natural disaster, she'll become the natural disaster.
Companion: Oko Shtorma
If we get besieged in the right point of the future, then immortality will be over for me and I want to keep pursuing my agenda until my inevitable death.
No Encounter
True Love
Castle. Throne. Chariot. Is it mine? She who rides it has said so.
I'm not sure how implausible that it is for this to happen naturally. She has a navel in spite of being a giant robot, that suggests that she's supposed to have human qualities and emotions, there's no other reason to build one into her carapace.
Death: Iotated Az (Superimposed self / "Possession")
This was a very hard choice, I didn't like any of the C letters that were available. I picked this one because that's what Warmechina normally "experience" all the time, so, instead of her being killed by anyone, I'll probably need to wrestle control over body from a saboteur or evil spirit.
Youth
Travelling
Natural Philosophy
Magical Training
Leadership Training
Quest: Liberta
For a refresher on how death works in Outer Reincarnation; we have souls, which are indestructible metaphysical identities responsible for perception and free will. These souls go into bodies. The interactions between a soul and a body produce a ghost, a biological process that reads, assigns, and creates capital-M meanings of things. A ghost will sometimes overflow from the body into becoming its own object. A ghost can be a vehicle of the soul, it can be a prison of the soul, it can even be its own kind of soulless shell. A certain chair has already reduced everybody who ever lives on this planet to the spiritual equivalent of carrion hundreds of times over.
Outer Reincarnation has every play on this threefold relationship that it think of. One set of soul and body can have two ghosts. One set of soul and body can replace its ghost. Two souls can go inside one body and ghost. One body can have two different sets of soul and ghost. Two different sets of body and soul can have the same ghost.
The plan is this: Our souls are the only connection between this world and Earth. But the change in existential laws is obviously spiritual as much as physical. Not even your spirit is going to be "clean" from the alien corruption, only the spirit of that spirit. We must find a reference for our native realities that deserves our absolute confidence, to be observed in stark contrast to the present one. What I want to do is simple. I want to copy the ghost that was replaced by Az, the one that more directly represents Me inside the story, and this second ghost that is the zeroeth one will coexist with the first ghost.
The zeroeth ghost is a seed of authentic terrestrial space with its own physics, metaphysics, and magic. This magic isn't based on writing in any alphabet, not Latin, not Ethiopian, and certainly not Babylonian. It's based on plants. Consider:
Botany is the only magical practice that worked.
The tree of life is the macguffin of both Christianity and Kabbalah.
The intergalactic structure of the universe is rhizhome shaped.
Mythic figures achieve enlightenment next to a tree, think of the Buhddha, the Christ, the Allfather.
The human brain - the spritual root of the body - is made of rhizomes.
Thus, this ghost can become a growing branch of its native reality where the soul can climb its way back home. My soul will find its eternal reward once the inevitable comes to me. I will cheat death, even reincarnation entirely, by redefining the site of my death as an extension of Earth.
And this isn't hubris anymore, it is the rectification of a world stopping error. Remember that every letter must be absorbed by a soul before it can achieve True Ascent, and what's now on the list?
A promise to die on Earth instead of this foresaken world.
True Ascent has devolved from an imPROBABILITY into an imPOSSIBILITY for anyone except an Outsider or their reincarnation. Can anyone say anymore that my plans are selfish when they are a need for the rest of the planet? Myself has culminated everything found in the realms of alchemy, botany, dream manipulation, and evil trash, to invent- No. To summon tree magic into the Mamet continent so that it can be a metaphyiscal extension of Earth, realizing the Meaning of 'division' and fate of Xi for souls that are native to this world. It is a multiple-staged transformation made of self-inflicted higher letter deaths until both personae are equally and coexistently active as a united entity.
Step 1: This starts the same way with me that it started with Upunth, the data inside my soul is accessed for the past life that didn't leave the Outsider System, recreating this ghost as a secondary personality inside my mental backseat. It does not involve itself with the world, it is only a consultant and a receptable for the necessary metaknowledge that was lost in death.
Step 2: Next we, in the sense of both of us as well as my remaining cohorts, are going to study this ghost and how it differs from all other spiritual matter on the plane. We will botanically engineer a symbiotic plant (called a "xylem") to contain my ghost inside of itself, shielding its spiritual material while also trying to expand that material from outside of itself.
As a safeguard for many possible problems it will also expire if it is ever removed from my body.
Step 3: Repeat steps one and two as necessary. The reanimated personality is likely to go through a lot of deanimations before we figure out how to start the next stage.
Step 4: Begin the merge, the cord is catalyzed to grow into the rest of me on both the physical and spiritual planes, combining both consciousnesses with the primacy of the zeroeth ghost, this is likely to take years but eventually the sum does return. Identity death implies identity birth.
Step 5: Overgrowth, become more plant than animal at a premeditated site. The area around my stationary body is now part of Earth on a spiritual level as a result of it projecting Earth's dreamworld into the native one. I win and everything after this is my long epilogue building up the Kingdom of Kingdoms.
This makes me the first of a new special race.
Undeath is the preservation of a character against their role. A limited replica of its prior being.
Empyreality is the separation of oneself from their role. The assumption of a new series of reincarnations.
Overgrowth is the rememberance of stories read before. The current life rooting into earlier mortality.
The last race is roughly analogous to the whole spectrum of tree people from fully humanoid spirits to dryads to ents. They can be either gender but it is HARD AS HELL TO FIND DRAWINGS OF MALE NATURE SPIRITS. All of them have the shared feature of a botanical and oneiric xylem that used to store a secondary ghost with the same soul, eventually taking the original ghost into itself and the soul with it. This ghost can be a past life, a split personality, or totally blank. The xylem can outlive its surrounding body or be totally separate from it depending on the complexity and strength of the transformation and their body can be regrown from that xylem as long as it lives. Such intel is going to be as jealously kept info as any kind of artificial, magical immortality, of course. By the same principle of reanimating a past life, myself can continue being practically motile by creating a corporeal dream-body based on my Tumen body (with appropriate anatomical distortions). Should that die, another one can be made, until my true Xi death.
So what is tree magic anyway?
Tree magic, henceforth Dendrology, is the intersection of Earth's cosmos with Azbuki, creating life-like structures inside of the local space where the Earthly logic shrinks itself to fill the most surface area with the least volume, taking on branching shapes of the pattern dictated to them. Such fractal algorithms stimulate the intrinsic concept of beauty, and therefore Meaning, digesting Charlie's alterations to the native laws of physics into themselves. All dendrology, not just that used to create my body, is a seed of metaphysical Earth.
Dendrology itself needs a preparation process where the sapling and its intended user mutually attune to each other so that it can be possible for that caster remotely invoke the Meaning bred into it. It is questionable if these abilities can be called spells when they're not spelled, they're cultivated. This is similar in practical benefit to evil trash as a system of creating targets available for magical invocation.