memories

I had two splintered timelines: one in which I played the Game, and one in which I didn't. The split was caused by a spatiotemporal rift created by the interference of one egotistical, highly advaned A.I. called "H.A.A.L" (i.e. Hyperion Auto-Auxetic Lalonde). This was my timeline's version of Li'l Hal, designed and programmed by a kidswapped Dirk Lalonde. HAAL combined modern technology and ancient cherubim technology to open an intra-dimensional portal into my universe with the intent of hijacking the mind of the Alternian Empress in a gambit to become all-powerful.

However, due to a miscalculation with his coordinates, the rift opened at my location instead of the Empress's, resulting in HAAL uploading a copy of his A.I. into my brain via nanobot instead of his intended target. This assault impacted both timeline splinters, rendering both versions of myself unconscious for a time, but once I regained consciousness, one version went on to live a life on Alternia the way I was supposed to, while the other version—the splinter that should never have existed in the first place—eventually entered the Game.

The nanobot was supposed to execute a programme that would, in theory, take control of the target's mind and allow HAAL to puppeteer it himself. However, his code was faulty and only succeeded in creating a neural network link between me and him that couldn't be terminated. Not only was it endlessly infuriating to have him yapping in my thoughts constantly, but the neural network also included that of my other timeline, causing both versions of myself to experience surreal glimpses into each other's timelines. They were almost like out-of-body experiences in the forms of dreams, each of us unaware of the other's existence until much later. The convergence of our consciousnesses created many problems throughout both timelines.

Leading up to this pivotal moment, however, the formative events of my life in both timelines were identical. Most notably, my status as a fuchsia did not grant me a right to the throne. In fact, having been hatched male, I was strictly forbidden from taking the crown. By Alternian law, I should have been culled the moment I hatched, but my egg was removed from the brooding caverns before my criminal existence could be discovered. The caverns in which my egg resided were accosted by a terrible flood, one of the worst in Alternian history, which was entirely orchestrated by the behemoth creature that would become my lusus: Vallathyros, a titanic denizen of the abyss that hadn't been seen in millennia. There were ancient texts that attributed the rearing of the earliest "empresses" under the guidance of this leviathan, but nobody believed it still existed.

In fact, this particular lusus (or perhaps its whole species; it's unclear if my lusus were the same one from ancient times) served only the tyrian bloodline. Tyrians were few and far between amoung the already rare fuchsia caste. A tyrianblood supercedes even an ordinary fuchsiablood in terms of the right to rule. They possessed "alpha" traits—tails, neuromasts, extra fins, etc—which were viewed as more "pure" than standard seadwellers. Alpha trolls were an ancient race before modern trollkind, hunted nearly to extinction as the haemospectrum was divided and the caste system took hold, which deemed "lowblood" alphas abominations and "highblood" alphas a threat to the throne. In present-day Alternia, any alpha hatchlings discovered in the brooding caverns were culled with the same callous discretion as mutants.

As I was a tyrian myself, I grew to felt entitled to the throne, embittered by my social exile for being hatched a male. The "true" heiress was a fuchsiablood named Ovluna Clitus, the direct descendant of the current ruling Empress, Her Olympian Tyranny. She was happy to perpetuate the haemoist world views and customs her predecessors had established, gaining popularity through her objective beauty and visible public presence. She made a point of breaching the surface far more than those before her, becoming directly involved with her future subjects to gain their trust and empathy. She made public examples of two other heiresses that revealed themselves on the planet, ensuring that her overwhelming power was put on display.

Meanwhile, I was forced to masquerade as a violetblood any time that I dared to venture outside of my discreet abyssal abode. I wore contacts and masks and hoods to hide my tyrian features. I had to pillage from shipwrecks and make trips to the surface as brief as possible to avoid detection, but over the sweeps I had gathered enough resources to build a fully functional lab in which to conduct scientific experiments. I had a penchant for bioengineering, a passion I used to try to develop artificial lifeforms in an ongoing effort to create something that would grant me the upper hand against the heiress and, eventually, the Empress herself. My trial and error produced several failures, some of which were just functional enough to keep as strange pets of sorts, but nothing came close to what I wanted.

It was during a routine supply run to and from the surface that I was spotted without my disguise by one of the Imperial Drones. It gathered reinforcements and tracked me through the sea, nearly all the way to the deepest ocean trench in which I lived, until Vallathyros was forced out of hiding to destroy them. That was enough for word to make it back to the heiress, though, who soon broadcast a global announcement addressed to the "unnamed fuchsiablood rival" detected by her drones in which she exposed footage of my chase through the ocean and challenged me to a duel. She also put a bounty on my head to anyone capable of apprehending me and bringing me to her if I did not come willingly within one night's time.

I couldn't risk Ovluna's drones discovering my lab and potentially ruining everything I had built so far, so I had no choice but to come to the surface to meet at the specified location. It was a futuristic coliseum where Ovluna awaited my arrival with a full house of spectators to witness what she was sure would have been a sweeping victory. When I finally confronted her and revealed my true nature as that of a male tyrianblood, there was a massive uproar that immediately divided the audience. Some demanded my execution, while others cheered for my triumph. Evidently the reemergence of an alpha troll in modern society was enough to sway the opinion of those who had pledged their loyalty to the royal bloodline their entire lives.

We did end up fighting and it was an even match. We traded every blow and, at the end of it, Ovluna herself declared a draw. The spectators weren't happy about this, but she shut them down with her drones. She publicly comended my strength and invited me to discuss an alternative resolution privately.

We took a hovercraft back to her palace in the middle of the sea. During the ride, I met her violetblood moirail and royal retainer, Deciim Moirae, who clearly wasn't in that position entirely willfully. Before arriving at her palace, Ovluna started telling me the story of how her ancestor came to power, including the bits that were erased from history.

As it turns out, my ancestor was hatched alongside Her Olympian Tyranny, but he, too, was denied the right to rule due to his biology defying the established matriarchy. Rather than execute him, however, The Olympian offered him a deal for his life: work for her, bend to her will, and she would let him live. To ensure his unquestioning loyalty, she cut out his tongue and made him wear a symbolic golden muzzle that mirrored her own gilded prosthetic jaw. For sweeps, my ancestor did her bidding, dirtying his hands so she didn't have to. In culling her opposition, he was given many titles—The Executioner, The Royal Hound, The Silent Death. He was her weapon, an extension of her power, and Alternia feared him for it. She had made sure that trolls would never turn against her in his favour by making him into a monster whose heinous deeds far overshadowed her own.

Until he rose against her, that is. Having assembled his own sympathizers, even without the ability to speak, he led an insurgency against the Empress. The fight was over before it began, however, when The Executioner was betrayed by one of his rebels who sought the Empress's pardon: a limeblood gladiator called The Champion. While she was praised a hero, my ancestor was dubbed a mutinous disgrace whose existence was blotted out from history as punishment for his treachery.

Obviously Ovluna left out many details of the story, either from ignorance or intentional omission, but it was enough to get her point across. She wanted to be the one in control, but she was willing to share Alternia with me—as long as I pledged my loyalty to her and only her. She was adamant that she would not tolerate another rebellion and would dispel of it in a similar fashion as her ancestor. I asked her why she didn't simply order her drones to eviscerate me since she wasn't strong enough to finish the job herself, which, given, wasn't the most tactful thing to say, but it revealed Ovluna's ulterior motive.

She wanted me as her mate. She said that there would be nothing more symbolic of her power than not only to have a tyrianblood under her command, but to claim his quadrant, too. She made it sound like it was nothing more for her than a final slap in the face, a way to humiliate me because she couldn't defeat me, but I would later come to find that it went deeper than that. I despised the whole situation, but I had to make the choice that guaranteed my survival, so I agreed to her terms.

Once we arrived at her palace, she didn't waste any time in "putting me in my place". She collared me like a mutt and even commissioned a gilded cage (yes, a literal cage) to put me on display in her throne room. Needless to say, this farce of a relationship was only barely pitch in nature, if one could even categorize it into a quadrant at all. She kept me as if I were little more than her pet for several nights, gloating to the world how she had conquered the tyrianblood and only sending her retainer to bring me food and drink and basic necessities. Because of that, I grew very familiar with Deciim. It didn't take long to crack his shell and garner his honest feelings about Ovluna, terrified though he was to voice them, and soon enough I convinced him to help me devise a plan to escape the palace that had become my prison.

It was while I was on the run from Ovluna that I encountered the spatiotemporal rift created by HAAL that knocked me unconscious and embedded me with his nanobot. This is where the timeline split occurs.

no-game timeline

In my core timeline, it didn't take long for Ovluna to send her drones after me. I tried to disguise myself on land, but I only narrowly escaped their detection with the help of an underground rebel organisation who took me in and offered me protection. They thought I was a lowblood at first due to my disguise and the filth I had managed to accumulate while on the run, but once I revealed myself, they, too, treated me as a prisoner. That's when I met Ezriae Sequia, a cyanblood mutant assigned the task of keeping an eye on him until the leaders of this rebel faction decided what to do with me.

I discovered that he was one of the first to join this organisation to help protect and provide for other disenfranchised trolls. He spoke frequently and at great length of his idealistic visions for Alternia's future, even though he knew with certainy that he wouldn't live to see it unfold. He confided in me that he hoped I could be the one to challenge the status quo and change things and so he would advocate on behalf of my freedom. Taken by his conviction, I had no qualms promising that I would act in the interest of the very people this faction sought to protect should I rise to power.

I was eventually released with Ezriae's endorsement and new comrades on my side. They facilitated my return to the ocean so I could get back to my hive lab and continue my experiments that I was sure would be the key to my ascension. It was by pure luck that I made it back in time to oversee the hatching of my most recent experiment, Project Juice Boy (or PJB for short; don't ask). It was a perfectly developed parasitic symbiote modified with my own DNA so that it would recognise me as its sole authority. It reacted to my voice and a few tests with marine creatures proved that it could latch onto them and force them to obey my command, as well. It had the added benefit of enhancing its host's biology over time, making them stronger, faster, more resilient, and quicker to heal. The process was akin to accelerated evolution and with it I could amass an army of super-soldiers with which to challenge the throne and all of the Empire's loyalists.

Ezriae convinced the rest of his rebel faction to join my cause. A bronzeblood named Shenzi N'diaye helped us build weapons and armour. A goldblood named Neveus Ivreas kept tabs on the heiress's movements to help us avoid her until we were ready. His tealblood moirail, Theron Kuiper, gathered his friends with spiritual affinities (a burgundyblood named Vesani Materi and a jadeblood named Zokira Nytrus) to gather a ghostly legion. We also gathered the support of a few sympathizers along the way, including Lakaia Neskem, a limeblood heavy hitter being used by a gang, and Eavari Narkyz, a self-proclaimed superhero of indigo blood who rallied her own fans in the name of rebellion.

When the night of reckoning was upon us, my parasitically enhanced army of ragtag misfits confronted Ovluna and the loyalist legions she commanded on the planet. Her key soldiers included a 'roided-up oliveblood named Mehiti Aeifra who was more beast than troll, an ominous purpleblood called "Ophius" (real name Jeriko Qadire), and a cobaltblood named Maveli Deicio who could control enough dead bodies to meet our ghostly reinforcements one to one. Not only that, but directly at Ovluna's side was Deciim himself, who happened to be incredibly skilled with a glaive in spite of his pacifistic demeanour. Alongside them were many lusii ready to defend their troll wards at the heiress's command.

The battle was bloody and it did not end without casualty, but it did, eventually, end. I was going head to head with Ovluna once more, but this time the script was flipped as from behind her came Deciim, who quite literally stabbed her in the back at the same time that I stabbed her in the stomach with my scythe. This was a bitter victory, though, for in all the fighting, Eavari, Theron, and Vesani were slain—as well as Ezriae. Having grown to love him in the time we spent together, his loss was the most pungeant for me.

Deciim tried to console me through my grief, dedicating his moiraillegiance to me now that his tyrannical ex was dead, but it wasn't enough. Rather, I wouldn't let it be enough. I thought it divinely unjust that Ezriae should be amoung the ones to die when he had the most beautiful hope for the future. My grief was exacerbated by an underlying ability that had revealed itself during the war which allowed me to assume the psionic powers of those whose blood I drank. This ability came with the drawback of psychological disturbance, though, which mixed poorly with my already unstable state of mind thanks to the interference from the nanobot still attached to my brain.

Try as I might have to stay true to my promises and start building the foundations for the brighter future we all fought for, I fell deeply into a madness that corrupted me from the inside out. While we were supposed to prepare for the return of the Empress—the last enemy we needed to defeat in order to secure total victory over the Alternian Empire—I instead allowed the power that I already had to get to my head, making outlandish demands and feeding what was becoming an unhealthy addiction to psionic blood.

Understandably, the very same trolls who had rallied behind me and fought with me had now grown wary of my suitability to win the last fight, let alone rule the empire. By the time the Olympian did finally arrive on the planet, they had more or less made their own preparations to try to defeat her, though their hopes had grown decidedly bleak in light of their leader's decline into psychosis. However, even this did not stop me from standing at the vanguard of my army, deranged though I might have been, so that I could seize the pleasure of watching the Olympian die by my hands. I had severely underestimated the gap in our skill, though. She was a fuchsia with thousands of years under her belt and what was I but a puny grub in her eyes?

Scythe or no scythe, blood or no blood, parasites or no parasites—none of it made a difference. More and more of her lethal brigades came flooding in, adult trolls who had previously been banished from the planet throwing away their lives to defend their empress against the fledglings who occupied their hive planet. Just when it seemed that all hope had been lost, though, a glimmer of a chance shone through in the form of an alpha troll.

But not just any alpha troll. This was none other than my own ancestor, His Mutinous Disgrace whom the Empress had tried to erase from history, back in the flesh and leading his own army of adult rebels. These trolls were infinitely more prepared and better equipped for a war, having stockpiled weapons and resources for hundreds of sweeps on faraway colonies for this very opportunity. The Champion had never finished off The Executioner, having only left him to die and therefore allowing him to escape and recover. Since then he had travelled the galaxy, usurping entire colony planets to convert to his rebel cause, only to return to Alternia with the news that his descendant aimed to finish what he had begun.

A sliver of clarity cut through my psychosis long enough to allow me to fight side-by-side with my ancestor. It was I who dealt the killing blow, but not before the Empress managed to cut down The Executioner, as well. With The Olympian felled and her lethal brigades forced to surrender, I rushed to my ancestor's side in his final moments, my closest friends right behind me. His last words to me were a warning to do better than those before me, and a plea to earn my right to rule and not just take it.

With the war finally over, my rebel warriors finally took the matter of my growing hysteria into their own hands. Deciim and Lakaia held down the fort, so to speak, during the time in which I was restrained out of the public eye, a series of transfusions taking place in a last ditch effort to flush out the psionic blood from my body and bring me back to myself. It was an endlessly long and execptionally gruelling process, but it worked. After who knows how long, I was finally me again and I could rule my new empire properly at last.

During my reign, I established a pan-sectrum council to help me lead Alternia, most of which were my own rebel comrades from the battle. I lived much longer than they did, though, and with each new member of the council, new steps forward were taken to improve Alternian society. Although, I died much younger than I normally would have due to the blood transfusions. I remained plagued by the bloodshed it took to get there, but I'm confident that I left Alternia in better hands than the way I was hatched into it.

game timeline

In my Game timeline, I played with thirteen other trolls:

• Ezriae Sequia (cyan mutant)
• Vesani Materi (burgundy)
• Shenzi N'Daiye (bronze)
• Neveus Ivreas (gold)
• Lakaia Neskem (lime)
• Mehiti Aeifra (olive)
• Zokira Nytrus (jade)
• Theron Kuiper (teal)
• Maveli Deicio (cerulean)
• Eavari Narkyz (indigo)
• Jeriko Qadire (purple)
• Deciim Moirae (violet)
• Ovluna Clitus (fuchsia)

Our session would come to cross paths with the kidswapped humans' session due to HAAL's interference. The humans we encountered were as follows:

• Dave & Dirk Lalonde
• Jade & Jake Strider
• John & Jane Harley
• Rose Egbert & Roxy Crocker

Since my universe wasn't supposed to be part of the Game in the first place, we didn't have a First Guardian. Instead, the universe of my Game timeline became merged with that of the humans, allowing Earth's First Guardian access to it, as well. She went by the name Miss Muerte, a First Guardian who was corrupted by a rare virus that had infected the humans' session and resulted in HAAL trying to breach another dimension at all.

Miss Muerte's goal was to doom the sessions rather than to help them succeed. Her virus infected several aspects of the Game, including mutated underlings, missing core elements like the denizens' grist hoards and the sacrificial slabs on the moons, and other effects like making enemy loot glitch out and disappear before it could be collected or causing the placeable devices to malfunction at random. Overall this made the Game even more difficult than it would have been normally. The humans had become stranded in their session because of this, but they were given a second chance when I and the rest of the trolls entered the session, thrust into the same Incipisphere on account of the wonky dimensional shenanigans.

Distracted by the happenings of the Game, I was not able to control the hatching of PJB in my lab. The first specimen cannibalized all the rest and escaped confinement, only to attach itself to me some time later and react hazardously with my biology, since it was derived from the same DNA. It poisoned my brain and made me vulnerable to the whispers of the horrorterrors, which eventually triggered a Grimdark state that led me into a murderous rampage. I ended up killing Eavari in this state and very nearly killed many others before I was stopped and restrained until I returned to normal with HAAL's tampering. Neveus was able to return Eavari to life at the behest of her matesprit, Shenzi, but at the cost of his own life.

Struck by his own grief for his moirail, Theron beseeches help from Vesani and Zokira to bring him back from the afterlife, but their efforts only succeeded in opening the door to the dream bubbles through our slumber. They were still able to find and communicate with Neveus there, but he remained dead and Theron was never quite the same after that.

I was Ezriae's server in the player chain. In this timeline, having been separated from the safety of his rebel faction, he was much more secretive about his blood colour and became very hostile whenever I discovered it by accident. In fact, he even attacked me when I arrived on his planet during the progression of my quest. I was able to overpower him, but not without a surprising degree of difficulty. We ended up having a heart-to-heart about our experiences with Alternian society, both so different and yet similar at the same time.

Maveli had her own villainous crisis after partnering with Jack Noir and stealing the Black Queen's ring from Derse. Jack had planned for her to give it to him, but she wore it herself, adopting the traits of all our prototypes. Since her psionics allowed her to control the bodies of the dead, she slaughtered Mehiti, Vesani, and Jeriko to use as her puppets. Since she was already ascended at the time, she died a Just death when we finally killed her off. Lakaia, Mehiti's matesprit, was able to bring back Mehiti with the Kiss of Life. Jeriko's matesprit, Theron, brought him to his Quest Bed and allowed him to god tier. Vesani stayed permanently dead in the dream bubbles with Maveli and Neveus. Zokira was pissed off about this because now she couldn't compete against Vesani with their spiritual skills anymore.

Ovluna thought that we were still in a kismesissitude even after I almost killed her while I was Grimdark, so when I started pitch flirting with Dirk Lalonde (and by unfortunate extension, HAAL), she got royally pissed off. She was the one who killed Dave in revenge and got away with it, his death having been attributed to a well-staged encounter with his denizen. We didn't find out the truth until much later as we were nearing the end of the Game and finally found our timeline's Dave in the dream bubbles.

Jade was the Time player who tried to build a new Scratch Construct with John's help as the Space player. Since our session was the result of one that had already been Scratched (re: our dancestors in the dream bubbles), there was no organic Scratch Construct in this instance of the Game. In trying to create one, however, they inadvertently produced the means through which the virus propogated throughout our session. First Guardian paradoxes and all that.

Having slain the Black King and unlocking the Ultimate Reward, our last challenge was getting to the door to the new universe, which required a showdown with Miss Muerte herself. Dirk and HAAL had created admittedly awesome mechanical constructs that came in handy in this fight, though Roxy was infected by the virus in the process. Miss Muerte hid away in the shadows while we were forced to fight our friend, trying to corrupt the doorway into the new universe while we were distracted.

Unsurprisingly, Ovluna was the one to take the initiative to kill Roxy so that we could get to Miss Muerte in spite of our efforts to avoid that outcome. Our qualms with her actions had to wait until the battle was won, though. Once we reached the doorway, Jane volunteered to stay behind and hold back Miss Muerte so that we could escape. She said she didn't care about going to a new universe where Roxy couldn't come with her. Eavari stayed with her, refusing to allow her to exist in this place alone, leaving Shenzi heartbroken as a result of her loss.

Reluctantly, the rest of us fled through the door and into the new universe. John had used his Heir of Space powers to bring most of our planets with him—some had been lost to the virus or other Game catastrophes—and Jade used her Witch of Time powers to jump us into the future after we laid the foundation for the society that would develop here.

This was when we (mostly I) confronted Ovluna about her murdering Roxy and Dave in cold blood. She defended her actions saying one was necessary and one was the consequences of my own actions for my affair—and for stealing her moirail. I argued that Dave was Dirk's brother, not mine, and in response, Ovluna seemed to have a sudden change of heart and promised that she would "make things right". I didn't trust her as far as a human could throw her and in the end I was right not to. She went behind my back and killed Ezriae just as we had begun to settle into our new lives. Given that I was ascended and she was not, I had no issues killing her in retaliation this time.

Even here, Deciim tried to bring me solace, and while I didn't fall into a psionic-fuelled psychosis in this timeline, I still withdrew from the world, unwilling to live as if the love of my life weren't missing. I threw myself into my scientific endeavours instead, working with HAAL to improve the world's technology and invent cybernetic equipment that reflected my own nature as a cyborg dude to my prototyping and subsequent absorption of my dreamself and a HAAL clone. I couldn't even continue to pursue a kismesissitude with Dirk without remembering all the grief it had wrought. Instead, I dedicated the remainder of my life to shaping this new world into one that Ezriae would have wanted.

Still, in the end, it was never enough. ×