Charlie Meeting Him

Charlie meeting him

When your characters just start revealing lore you didn't know about them, as you're writing them

Rick prime doodles from when I was on magma earlier

PARALLEL CANON

Imagine, if you will, the bad end to Side Order: Overlorder wins, everyone is pulled into the Memverse and loses their free will, and what was once a therapeutic VR space becomes an existential prison, grinding down countless souls into passionless sludge.

What ‘PUNISHMENT’ awaits the protagonist now…?

Oddly enough, they remain themselves-- Agent 8’s rebellious spirit must be definitively crushed before they are allowed into the normal workings of the World of Order. So they are locked in the Spire and given a task: complete all 30,000 floors without dying once (no hacks, after all) and they will be “freed”. Of course, each time they fail, they must start over from 1F.

The overwhelming challenge comes with a greatly expanded palette, but even as it becomes more saturated, the strength of their enemies increases in turn, far past the limits of the laws of physics, or even the laws of time and space. The further they go, the harder it becomes to even comprehend what’s going on around them, let alone react quickly enough to win.

But Agent 8 is nothing if not determined. The hope of being freed, and at least being able to learn what happened to Marina, Pearl, Acht, and the rest of the world, is all they have left.

For now they are totally isolated, with only a standard-issue drone and the cries of the Jelletons for company. As far as they know, they are the only sentient being within the Spire…