Every Day Just Feels Like

every day just feels like

We need it uwu

Breathe. It's okay. You're going to be okay. Just breathe. Breathe, and remind yourself of all the times in the past you felt this scared. All of the times you felt this anxious and this overwhelmed. All of the times you felt this level of pain. And remind yourself how each time, you made it through. Life has thrown so much at you, and despite how difficult things have been, you've survived. Breathe and trust that you can survive this too. Trust that this struggle is part of the process. And trust that as long as you don't give up and keep pushing forward, no matter how hopeless things seem, you will make it.

— Daniell Koepke

How the fuck is Chewbaca child friendly? He is pratically naked.

Tamagotchi Quest

Welcome to 2020, the year of forest fires, pandemic, and lockdown -- a paradise. I toss the remote at the TV. In a sweet shatter of glass, my Netflix marathon is over. My eyes close as the phantom Tik Tok music rings in my ears. I eye my diary with pages falling out of it. I am bored out of my mind. Then a thought clicks in my head, my Tamagotchi! A strange urge takes over my body. I stand up from my messy, lotion smelling bed. Invisible pins and needles prickle my sleepy legs.

  No, the Tamagotchi is probably dead by now. Maybe it has a family now. I walk out of my basement. My eyes feel as if they are on fire as I step into the living room light.

  “Clean up the basement.” My mom yells, from her prison, the kitchen.

  “Give me 50 minutes,” I enthusiastically yell back. But I am dead inside.     I climb up the creaky stairs to the attic. Once I step in, dust billows around like leaves on an autumn day. I pull my shirt over my nose to not catch lung cancer. I open a box filled with my childhood belongings. Inside is my old star wars lego collection. My skateboard, from my 9-years-old-skater past. Behind the box, sits my ancient gaming laptop.

  The memories of my mom breaking the screen in a fit of rage fill my mind like a Vietnam-flashback. Next, I check my box again, no Tamagotchi. Perhaps, my sister Ann has it. So I search through her box. I toss her primary school swimming medals out of the way. They clatter on the ground, scattering woodlice. Hell, she loved sports. Ann is the school's top athlete during the days.  Meanwhile, I was underage drinking. I toss her red cross youth badge, as I sigh.

  Ann was a Marine when she was twenty, while I was gaming in my basement when I was finishing high school. She is a military wife, adopting orphans from war zones. Wait, she hates playing with Tamagotchi. I should check Simon’s.

  I knock over stacks of the books Simon had during his bookworm days. Then, I rummage through his science fair medals. He is a genius, I am the average Joe.

 After that, I comb the entire attic for my Tamagotchi. It’s nowhere to be seen. I sit on the floor. Oh dear, how I wasted my life on mindless entertainment. I peaked in primary school. A pang of remorse makes me queasy. The clock in the corner ticks away with my wasted youth.

 But I still have plenty of time left. I storm down to my basement and delete my Steam account. It’s time to make a change.

Image source: https://www.eonline.com/news/843044/the-original-tamagotchi-is-back-so-prepare-to-never-get-any-work-done-ever-again

Living with ghosts - Bunny (on Wattpad) https://my.w.tt/8tAUotEiT7 A collection of horror and dark fantasy short stories I wrote. Also, some paranormal journalism and spooky events I experienced. ENJOY!

UWU

Greed and I have a lot of elaborate headcanons and AUs for the characters from idV, but one of my personal favorites I’ve come up with is on what’s going on with Lucky Guy and by extension the Manor Owner:

We know Lucky was at the manor before anyone else except maybe Leo, who certainly isn’t talking about it now. We also know that Lucky Guy is just a nickname the original group of our game’s survivors gave him, and he himself doesn’t remember or won’t recount anything that happened before they got there. 

We don’t know how Lucky got to the Manor or why, but we do know that his only skill is that he has a better chance than anyone else at getting the chests to give him the item he wants. All the items he can get are other survivor’s props, as he has no unique prop of his own.

Now, with the Manor Owner, we have no idea who the manor owner is, what they might look like, or even what they are. We don’t have any idea of what Miss Nightingale’s relationship to the Manor Owner is, only that she relays communications from him to the manor inhabitants.

What if whatever entity the Manor Owner is isn’t separate from the Manor itself? What if the Manor Owner is the Manor? What if the Manor Owner is the force keeping everyone there, running the magic and the games, keeping everyone in what seems to be a timeloop where they kill or die over and over again. 

We know the physical building and grounds of the Manor do exist in idV’s reality, so I mean some kind of extradimensional entity that inhabits/fits itself over a real location, copies it and traps creatures inside the copy, where those creatures (prey items of some kind, although it probably feeds on the emotions generated during the games rather than anything physical) are under it’s direct control. 

Miss Nightingale could be trapped just as much as everyone else. The Manor Owner is obviously very powerful, whatever it is. If that entity has access to multiple realities/dimensions, that would explain why she’s a harpy when we know those probably weren’t a thing even in the more magical time periods the human survivors and once-human hunters seem to be from. 

And that explains Yidhra (Dream Witch). She could also be from ~elsewhere~ like Nightingale. This also explains why the manor owner is strong enough to trap an actual eldritch god like Hastur (Feaster), even if Hastur doesn’t seem very strong for a god*.

Now, back to poor Lucky. Here’s some of his in-game text:

It is perfectly natural for someone with nothing to rely on luck. 

His world is like a slot machine that he always wins at. But who knows what will happen when he stops playing.

Lucky doesn’t remember where he came from, and doesn’t have any known connection to the world outside the Manor. All the other survivor and hunter props are separate from the maps themselves, while Lucky’s trait is to be able to affect a part of the map itself (the chests).

What if Lucky isn’t from outside the Manor? 

What if Lucky is something the Manor Owner made, another prop for the games. It’s useful to have someone who’s always there before the other survivors start showing up, who can show them how the play the game, who serves as motivation to cooperate. Who’s memory has been wiped so many times that he’s getting buggy, but that doesn’t matter if he’s not supposed to remember anything besides how to play the game anyway. He’s an actual tutorial character who made it into the full game, after all, so why not assume the Manor Owner is using him for the same thing within the world of idV?

Lucky has nothing, no backstory, no name, no deduction lines, because he’s not from anywhere else. He doesn’t have them now because he never did. He’s part of the Manor. And if he stops playing the game, well… 

What happens to toys when their owners no longer want to play with them? All those discarded dolls and puppets around the manor came from somewhere.

One last thing about this particular headcanon of mine: if the Manor Owner isn’t exactly corporeal, how does he communicate with Miss Nightingale? He could just make her Know Things, perhaps, but this is a horror game and where’s the fun in that.

But Lucky, everyone knows his memory is bad. There are mornings he wakes up tired without knowing why. Nights he didn’t seem to dream. Nights when, if you happened to be in the hallways of the Manor, you might see him walking to the Illusion Hall. 

If you followed him, you might see Miss Nightingale bow when he enters. Then you might see Lucky’s head jerk suddenly back, his body unnaturally stiff, and when after a long moment he moves again, turns to face Miss Nightingale with suddenly different body language, you might hear a different, deeper voice coming from his mouth. 

And if they don’t see you, don’t catch you, you might run back to your room, climb into bed and pull up the covers, and try to forget what you saw.

Maybe it’s not the hunters you have to worry the most about after all.

~

*As an aside, my headcanon for Hastur is that he’s the extradimensional equivalent of a ephyra larva (the floating but still pre-jellyfish lifestage of a jellyfish) of his species. The lake cult was his polyp phase. His being in the manor may be sort of a combination of a wild-caught octopus spending a year in an aquarium before being released and a rich kid’s year abroad before college.

-⚰️