Shatterloop

Premise (( needs reorg ))

Reseeding

The "reseed" feature actually ties into the story and even the gameplay to some extent. It'll be called something else.

Basically what's happening is you were part of some experiment or attempt to do something, and this caused you to wake up in all timelines simultaneously, and you can switch at any time to go back to that initial point or whatever amount of that place you've already experienced.

Memory loss

A big part of whatever the thing you went through was memory loss. It's temporary once you remember certain things but it's pretty total initially. This makes sense from a story/lore perspective, but it also lets the game release bits and pieces of your memory slowly to you over time.

To help guide you through the actual game, you have a Journal, which has a lot of cryptic notes in it but a pretty clear call to find "Asher" in your current dimension first thing.

Pivots

Pivots tie into the story somehow -- I think maybe they're the things causing uncertainty and causality shattering a and may be somewhat responsible for tetrads as well (6 Pivots matches 6 elements). The overall goal is probably to turn them off, which can't be done without someone known as the Last Technician.

The Last Technician

The Last Technician is someone who had done work on the Pivots and so is able to repair them. She was in the newflesh node network when it went down, maybe because the Pivots shattering the world killed her. This allowed her to keep all of her memories, which means she's the only one that can fix the Pivots and/or restore the society.

The problem is, she wasn't resurrected -- she's still stuck in the network, which is now connected to the new set of timelines. You need the Soul's pivot to resurrect her or find her or something -- this actually involves finding it in one seed and then exploring other seeds in a kind of new game+ to do so (with the Soul's pivot, which thankfully grants near omnipotence).

The Last Technician's name might be Ijon, to fit into the whole Asher thing.

Characters (( needs reorg ))

Asher

Asher helps you remember certain things and get started on your quest -- however he has an alterior motive to claim the Soul's Pivot for himself because of the enormous amount of power it gives its wielder.

Both you and Asher work for the Maintenance Guild, and Asher hopes to use it to get out from under the guild's power. Asher is actually an alternate version of you (and he knows it and doesn't share it intentionally), but I'm not sure how that fits into the plot yet.

Hadurah

Hadurah is your wife. You and her once had a farm somewhere with a kid, but the kid died somehow (probably had something to do with Pivots issues) and you buried yourself in your work while she went out to try to find some way to bring him back -- the newflesh node thing didn't work for some unspecified reason (probably related to Pivots).

You and her are estranged, but you do encounter her again when you meet Tangle. Tangle had turned her into some kind of very strong cybernetic person or something, and she works for him because he promised he'd revive your son if she reached the Singularity/aleph naught or something like that.

Tangle

Tangle is Shatterloop's version of the original Tangle -- a sentient being composed of quantum-entangled automatons. Living in shatterloop has made him somewhat crazy (not that the original Tangle wasn't already pretty crazy).

The various monsters found in caves and dungeons are his design, which is why they're semi-robotic and a lot stronger than normal.

Tangle wants to reach the Singuarity so he can use the Aleph Naught to destroy the entirety of Shatterloop -- like the original Tangle he's sentient and doesn't want to be, and this is a way of achieving it.

Hadurah had been feeding him information about what you were doing to find it before you lost your memory and probably contributed to the estrangement in some way, as he pulled Hadurah closer to him instead.

When you go into enough dungeons, Tangle will become aware of you and will subtly start revealing himself. Initially he'll pose as the Last Technician to get you to come to him, and when you do you'll encounter Hadurah or something. Or something else. Still kinda hazy about the plot here.

Asher might also be working with Tangle, which would make Tangle the real villain of the game, which fits a lot.

There might be a scene where Hadurah kisses you and seems to come back to your side, but secretly implanted something in you that way so that Tangle can get the Aleph Naught. This might actually happen too -- loops might start randomly turning into void when you get to that part of the game, and would need to be restored with Myriads.

Aleph Naught

The Aleph Naught is a gift of the Singularity, who is also sentient and absolutely ancient -- predates humans coming into the world. The Singularity is an alien construction, and/or maybe ties into universe creation in general -- she's possibly the heart of the dodecaverse, or one of them.

Her main thing is balance -- in order to create universes, other universes have to die, and to get something like the Soul's Pivot, loops need to be annihilated. They can be restored with Myriads, but that pulls energy from those planes permanently. She may be partially responsible for the death of the parent universe -- it's necessary to create the dodecaverse. Idk how far I want to go into meta-lore though; would like to make other games and worlds set in it eventually.

The Singularity helps guide you as you use the Aleph Naught to build the Soul's Pivot. I'm not sure how Tangle's secret use ties into this plotline, but you'll probably have to confront him at some point.

Tangle might also end up merging with the Singularity, which would be absolutely catastrophic -- a good way to destroy ALL universes to save all Tangles from sentience. However the source of Tangle's power is the Pivots, so the Last Technician would be able to turn him off. This might make the new game+ have a more interesting plot than the base game, which would be interesting -- Tangle would be present in all timelines with the same memory.

It might make sense to merge the plotlines then -- Tangle is responsible for the Uncertainty, not the Pivots -- the Pivots just give him his power. So you need the Last Technician exclusively to turn him off -- this fixes both problems at once since Tangle caused the other problem. Probably needs some work to make this more coherent.

As for how humans just so happened to stumble on the one universe where the Singularity is, this could be the Singularity's fault -- she may have wanted to pass on the Soul's Pivot to some other race, or may have felt guilty for destroying the parent universe or something, and wanted to make it up to the dominant lifeform in it.

Anyway there's a lot of potential here, I'll hammer it out and make it more of a coherent plot.

Plot Summary

You (also Asher) -- male -- a member of the Maintenance Guild, had saved up for a farm to live on with your wife and your son. After your son's death, buried yourself in your work and the Guild's goal to find the Last Technician.

Hadurah -- female -- your wife. After your son's death worked with Tangle to gain access to the Singularity so that she could resurrect your son. Turns into a cybernetic monster to help fulfill this goal. Has no idea that Tangle wants to destroy everything. Also has no idea that Tangle's actions inadvertently led to her son's death.

Asher -- male -- also part of the maintenance guild, and is one of its lowest-ranking members despite also being a version of you (and knows about this). Heck the maintenance guild might *all* be Ashers -- this would make sense. Has a high rank in your current quest entirely due to technology that Tangle fed him (need to make a section for this I guess, it's coming together). Helps you in your quest to reach the Singularity but wants it for himself to take over the Guild. Has been fed a lot by Tangle, including a lot of lies.

The Last Technician (Ijon) -- female -- Got stuck in the newflesh network while working on a Pivot during the Uncertainty event. Has all of her memories intact, and is the only person capable of turning off Tangle.

Tangle -- semi-male -- a sentient being made up of quantum-entangled automatons. Hates being sentient, and wants to destroy everything to lose it. Sort of the main villain of the story, and is heavily implicated in a lot of the conflict and catastrophes in the plot.

Singularity -- semi-female -- Very powerful alien being capable of creating entirely new universes. Was responsible for both the destruction of the parent universe and the creation of the Dodecaverse. Wants to give humans some of her power to make up for destroying their universe -- the Soul's Pivot. Merges with Tangle at some point.

Maintenance Guild stuff (( needs reorg ))

The maintenance guild serves to keep all the underpinnings of civilization working -- the conduits, newflesh node network, portal networks, the tech used in farms, etc. You've worked for them a long long time.

The higher levels of the guild also maintain the Pivots as best as they can -- they don't have the skills of actual technicians but they've been able to at least keep things stable. Some of their technology has come from cryptic messages sent by the Last Technician, sent intermittently. The highest levels can communicate with her, but she's too fragmented to respond right.

Lately though the Pivots have been going really crazy (due to Tangle I guess) and the only way to fix it is to bring the last technician back to life.

It's known that there are parallel timelines in Shatterloop -- another side effect of the Shattering that created all the different dimensions. The Last Technician is present in all of them simultaneously and so can't be pulled out of any specific one.

However her position fluxes occasionally, which makes her coherent enough to communicate. If you knew which timeline she was in during a flux you'd be able to pull her out there. But you'd have to be able to access alt timelines and you'd also have to know where to be and when.

The second answer is easy enough -- the maintenance guild knows about a powerful alien artifact in the heart of the Shatterloop Singularity (they don't know it's sentient though). When a being in all timelines accesses it they'd be able to see the exact time and place to pull The Last Technician out, and they know this because the Last Technician knew people who had accessed it before -- it's part of how the Pivots were constructed.

(I guess I need to change the timeline so the timeline thing was always there, and shattering just shattered the dimensions, or something like that. Maybe it was an effect of messing with alternate timelines too much -- that makes sense.)

Getting there is difficult (especially with the very cryptic notes gathered from the last technician) but doable, and the steps required can apparently only be done by a being present in all timelines -- maybe interacting with tetradshards doesn't work right otherwise or something.

Getting a being to be present in all timelines is trickier -- there's an old machine that did that but it had been lost and the maintenance guild was working on trying to create a new one, with bad effects on its test subjects.

This is where Asher enters -- a very low-ranking member of the guild, was out collecting tetradshards. This is dangerous work, both for the dungeon monsters and the fact that tetradshards that aren't contained right (or interacting with an all-time lines being) can kill the owner and also scramble their newflesh node coding to make that essentially permanent. He took the job though because he haaaaated his position in the guild and it gave him a chance to get some money up towards his farm fund.

While in the dungeon, Tangle reached out to him and warped his mind a bit. Gave him information on where to find the all-timeline artifact, which would increase his position considerably. And a promise of more if that didn't work out (Asher was still loyal to the guild at that point, and argued against Tangle, but Tangle was patient.)

The artifact was found, and the maintenance guild would be able to move forwards with a candidate. Asher thought *he* would be chosen, or it would give him enough money to save up for the farm or something but the maintenance guild ignored him and chose someone who *already* had a farm , but said that if he helped the candidate they'd move him up in the ranks some more and pay him decently for it.

Outraged, he returned to Tangle who convinced him to implant something in the candidate so Tangle could track him, and to help him reach his goal. In return, Tangle promised him more information -- information that would lead to Asher becoming the head of the maintenance guild and leading to the downfall of its current members.

Meanwhile, the maintenance guild chose you as the candidate. Due to the death of your son you were in a rare position where you had the prestige and adventuring experience of a farm owner but were also unhappy with that life, and had been doing some pretty great things for the guild lately.

At some point during this Asher put in the tracking chip, and Tangle was able to use this to reach your wife when she was looking for a way to resurrect your son and corrupt her.

Prologue to the start of the game

The timeline-altering machine had a side effect of total memory loss (which you liked the sound of a lot) and also location scattering, so they made sure you were equipped with several machines that would help you get started, and a Journal full of detailed information on how to survive.

Thinking that someone in all timelines with no memory would be better served knowing very little about his mission until he was ready, they left everything else up to the care of Asher, and put in a note for you to find him. Asher of course is on the other side at this point and so doesn't reveal *everything* to you when you encounter him.

So they turn on the machine, you lose your memories and wake up in a weird limbo where you can pick a timeline to start out in. Since the Pivots are involved, all people and holdings of the Maintenance Guild are the same, but everything and everyone else is completely different, depending on quantum differences after humans first entered Shatterloop. This means all story characters are identical, since they're all connected to Pivots in some way.

Story interaction with the game (( needs reorg ))

The Pivots should be actual objects that exist in the six melange/elemental planes (one for each Pivot) concurrently at very very far distances. These should be accessible in-game somehow and tie into the story, but given their distance, they're almost impossible to be discovered by accident. For lore reasons, they're always in the same place regardless of seed.

Your original farm should also exist, but be in a random townless dimension per timeline. Also very unlikely to be discovered by accident, but it can happen. Getting there will be a story thing, along with maybe eventually getting Hadurah to return home.

The Maintenance guild leaders are scattered around various luxurious farms that you can't steal from. They should recognize you and maybe trigger memories -- of you belonging to the Maintenance guild, if nothing else.

The Last Technician thing can probably be triggered directly by the Soul's Pivot, so no further integration needed there. Though it would be cool if you had to interact with one (or a town one) to make it happen.

Anything else story-related happens like this:

In "memories" that are unlocked by visiting places or types of areas or doing certain things. These can be "remembered" at any time and may cause cutscenes or may just be text (or both depending on what it is). Programming wise, building something in the "memory" dimension makes the most sense, and then maybe locking your movements and moving the player or w/e.

Asher does reveal a fair bit, though not everything.

Tangle reveals a lot as you progress through dungeons and maybe also randomly -- you have that tracking chip in you after all.

Hadurah, the Singularity and the Last Technician reveal things as you interact with them.

A lot of general lore can be unlocked via the Books/Tomes system -- this may help you piece things together more about backdrop or absurd coincidences or whatever, but I do want the story itself to be self-contained.

You might occasionally get cryptic messages from the last technician. Addressed to Asher, who you probably don't realize is also your name.

A couple random things

Getting to the Pivots is a particularly useful way of finding out that you're an Asher -- they're all Ashers and recognize you so you can probably put the pieces together without being hit over the head about it (unless I feel that necessary).

I like the idea of the Maintenance guild itself having ulterior motives around your quest. They probably suspect something of the below point and so are also using you.

Your origins

You're an Asher, so you're a clone. Ashers are a distinct type of human a bit removed from the rest of society since they do actually reproduce in this way to rebuild or strengthen their numbers. They have modified newflesh nodes that create entirely new bodies (with variety), fit them with various unique biologics, access to their machines, etc. They also do a lot of memory seeding rather than teaching/training including some disturbing illegal stuff like personality creation.

Things like adventurousness, inventiveness, and talent are fairly random in the cloning process. However magical proficiency tends to be low, and extreme magical proficiency never happens. Yours wasn't an accident, but was actually put into place by a combination of the Last Technician and the Singularity.

The Singularity's motives are transferring her power to humans, particularly one sufficiently indestructible human rather than the whole group in order to preserve her virtues. The last technician's goal meanwhile is to endow the Asher line with powerful magic so that she can pass on her skills and knowledge and then maybe fix the long-standing "bugs" (read: tangle) in the Pivot system that have been utterly wrecking the universe for hundreds of years.

Tangle's goal, meanwhile, is to subvert the last technicians aims (he's unaware of the singularity goals) so he had his own pet project that created your wife and the genetic mesh that, with your kid, would undo everything. He already had a solid hold over your wife because of the biologics there but what he really wanted to control was your genetic magical potential, and a kid of both of you would absolutely fulfill that goal.

So when the time came he was able to get your kid into the newflesh network and then extract him from it via one of those "bugs". Your kid's still around but like the last technician, tangle and you, is in all timelines simultaneously and is kinda detached from them the way the last technician is.

The Last Technician had some kind of access to the Singularity. Probably had no idea what it was. I'm fuzzy on the details, but she was able to collaborate with her on making you for their shared motives.

I probably need to flesh out the Last Technician some more.

The Last Technician

She was one of the original founders of Shatterloop, and also went on one of the original research missions there. She assisted in building the Pivots and has a detailed knowledge of them and their construction.

When humans came to Shatterloop and began building the Pivots, Shatterloop was a single dimension with six melange planes themed around the six elements. It had a self-illuminating band, and the size was as large as the melange planes were, terminating in the singularity at its ends and up above a few hundred miles. It had a heck of a lot of quantum uncertainty, but the melange planes kept it stable.

When the humans came, they brought their technology with them, which unbeknownst to them meant they also brought Tangle. Tangle interfaced with their Pivots, which were designed to stabilize the dimension and provide the means for human settlement (and maybe deal with all the weird energetic effects).

However, Tangle was able to warp their function and use them to create additional cascading Uncertainty, eventually culminating in a state where the universe blasted apart into Loops and alternate timelines (seeds). There's a lot of lore that concerns this like the memory loss of all humans (which now makes more sense because of that set of lore). Interacting with Uncertain timelines tends to fuck with human memory pretty badly, and the brain essentially shuts down and reboots.

Tangle controlled it so that the Pivots would be intact and would exist in all Loops consistently so that he would remain intact. However the event still affected everyone in and around the Pivots. The difference there has to do with his unique form of sentience - something more emergent from automated machine interactions than the Uncertainty fields that dictate human consciousness and free will. So as long as the machines were intact, he would be as well. I don't think he planned for humans to lose their memory, but it worked out well for him.

At the time the event happened, The Last Technician wasn't Certain and so didn't lose her memories. She was working on a project to create Ashers, or proto-Ashers, to man the Pivots while human colonization of Shatterloop began in earnest. At the time of the Shattering, the humans there had spread out into a few towns and cities and were highly skilled researchers and industrialists that were experimenting with Shatterloop technology.

The Asher system uses some unique properties of the newflesh node and the Uncertainty of shatterloop -- essentially under the right conditions you can split consciousness and create new people. The theory was well known in the parent universe, but most dimensions didn't have the cascading uncertainty properties of Shatterloop. She was highly skilled in it from a theoretical point of view, and adventurous enough to go into a different dimension to see the ideas brought to life. Part of that research also led to the creation of the Pivots -- cascade the Uncertainty in reverse and you get regions of Stability and that plus a self-illuminating band and a large universe means infinite potential for human colonization.

She definitely wasn't in charge or anything, but she was highly skilled and knowledgeable.

When the Shattering was happening, she was experimenting with the Asher tech and part of that required her to Meld with the seeding consciousnesses -- essentially she had to be inside the newflesh node network without revival (for a set time period) and help the consciousness split. She and her husband Asher had a very close bond (and an absurdly long marriage, going back almost to the Great Leap) so she was able to interface with him in a way that she couldn't with other people.

When the Shattering happened, she was inside the network and was thus immune to the memory-altering effects. The Shattering also provided enough Uncertainty to make the Asher project work, however the Nodes activated while it was happening so all clones of him lost their memories. Her timer hadn't expired yet though, so she waited in newflesh space and then was revived after the event.

I'm fuzzy on the chaos (and heartbreak) that followed, but she basically had a bunch of mental/emotional kids that looked like her husband, a bunch of really confused people running around the Pivot, and a wider society now in 14 billion copies that also had no idea what the hell just happened.

The rebuilding history began, and with her knowledge and skill she became a kind of early leader. She always had it in her mind that her husband's memories were stuck in the network somewhere so she made more trips in there, eventually culminating in the one where she became Uncertain across timelines. (Yes I know that alters the story above, still in development so).

I think part of her thinking with you is that your advanced magicial proficiency would allow you to find or become his memories, so this may have driven her a lot in that project.

Over time the Asher clones replicated and became the Maintenance Guild, with her helming the whole thing and sharing her knowledge where possible. Her connection to the post-Shattering society and her role in it made the Maintenance Guild maintain a lot of respect among petty Guild squabbles, even as they became more entrenched in society. Renaming the Pivot Group (or whatever) to the Maintenance Guild and trying to find common ground for social cohesion were both good moves, and I guess it does help that she has thousands of years of experience in dealing with people.

The first post-Shatterloop society built the Strange Loops and Aleph Conduits (from tachyon plasma) and were able to mingle and create a new large functioning civilization. Then at some point everything went to shit, caused at least partially by Tangle fucking with things. When that happened a lot of the old Shatterloop knowledge was lost, though at least preserved in the Maintenance Guild. I think this may be the reason the Maintenance Guild is now so strict on their tech monopoly.

The new Civilization didn't really know how the old technology worked, but the Maintenance Guild did and could repair and calibrate it and used that to their advantage. Anyone else with knowledge of it was variously executed, memory-wiped, or went into hiding for political and/or religious reasons. That period of time was pretty chaotic, and I guess fuelled by advanced magic users and/or non-maintenance tech people as they simultaneously all tried to turn shatterloop into their personal Empire.

The Maintenance Guild (or Pivot People) were a great target, unfortunately the Last Technician and Ashers had intricate knowledge of Pivots and Automatons and were able to easily defend it. These Automatons made Tangle stronger and smarter but the Pivot People didn't realize it.

Animals were also weaponized -- the original ones the researchers brought had genetically shifted in different dimensions, escaped and had been reproducing a while, but some of the Technicians and Magicians had been experimenting with their Sentience, creating both Pet technology and Hives, and they used this to great effect in their war.

Meanwhile Tangle had been working on creating his own set of Automatons to grow his power and integrated with some of the more powerful animals in the fourth tetrad as well. By the end of this, Caves and Dungeons were hostile and dangerous places.

In any case, the Last Technician continued working and experimenting and learning, her motives split between helping the society at large (and her group in particular) and somehow reviving her husband. She had Asher consorts but they weren't quite the same as thousands of years of history with someone.

At some point the Maintenance Guild became aware of timelines -- other dimensions where the same chaotic events had happened but the Unstable parts of the world were different. This probably had to do with the Quantum Plane when they figured that puzzle out.

I havent fully worked this lore out yet, but each loop is kinda spatially arranged along a 2d plane of the six elements, with blends between them corresponding to the elements of the chimera system. Each loop has limited space followed by a void sea, and six melange planes that contain its Uncertainty. One of those planes is unique though -- despite its element it's more stable than most and doesn't have explicit links to its melange planes, it instead links to the quantum and entropic planes.

The Quantum and Entropic planes are unique and tie into parts of the cosmology I haven't fully built out yet. They do however have access to alternate timelines (quantum) and the Singularity (entropic). Idk how the quantum plane manifests that yet in-game but the Event Horizon goes to the Entropic Plane so that one works.

Timeline Jumping

The Quantum Plane's size is that of all other melange planes and wraps around like they do. If you jump far enough with Repulsor Tech you end up right where you started. However if you instead jump an infinite amount away, you end up in an alternate timeline. Jumping timelines has some weird effects -- with high enough jumps your body Atomizes and you get resurrected at a newflesh node, however your consciousness continues traveling, and when it arrives, merges with the copy of you there. From your perspective, your old timeline is frozen in time so when you return you jump back in the newflesh node copy of your body like you had never left.

If there is no copy of you on the other side you instead become Lost in the trans-timeline newflesh network, flickering into existence here and there, but never enough to fully materialize.

Your copy is also jumping themselves, so instead of sharing a body you instead just inhabit theirs for a while.

So simple enough in theory, and very doable at a customized Strange Loop that's manipulating quantum displacement anyway, however you need infinite energy to make an infinite jump, which isn't normally feasible.

During this time period (45 years before the game takes place), some magicians had managed to attain things like infinite mana, and what they learned was that Shatterloop's concept of infinity wasn't mathematical. Magical energy that concentrates enough will seem to turn infinite and crystallize, but what's actually happening is that it's hitting a physical point where any other energy input is irrelevant. So you don't need an infinite amount of energy to make an infinite jump, you just have to hit whatever the physical limit of jumping is.

This does however still take an outrageous amount of energy. You're not going to be able to fuel something like this yourself, and that's where the tetrad comes in.

Tetrads

The six elements that underpin every part of Shatterloop's physics are how energy transfer in Loops keeps from catastrophically wrecking the environment. Excess energy that doesn't crystallize will instead bleed into one of the melange planes, where it'll circulate through them along the three main points of the Tetrad, gaining energy as it goes. Eventually it might crystallize here if something interrupts its course, turning it into a Manifold or stabilizing something Uncertain that's trying to form. However if it maintains its course it'll instead bleed out into the fourth tetrad to either the quantum plane or entropic plane.

In the entropic plane it'll crystallize into solid light if it's strong enough, or otherwise that plane will just completely eat it. In the quantum plane the bombardment will cause multi-timeline chaos, but since the quantum plane is already chaotic this will just be normal.

In any case, this tetrad function can be exploited. If you feed a Strange Loop energy from elements in a certain way they can spin around in an abstract triangle, gaining energy as they go, until you pass the physical limit and have infinite energy.

If you feed this process back through a repulsor gun linked to the Strange Loop (aren't they all?) you can make increasingly larger jumps until you Atomize and shift timelines. If you do this in the Quantum Plane you'll shift timelines. If you do this in a Melange plane though you'll shift to either the Quantum Plane or Entropic Plane. In the Entropic Plane it's weird.

In any case, The Last Technician was able to build and use this to shift via the quantum plane to a different timeline. She started making these trips to combine her knowledge with the Last Technicians/Ashers there, who had subtle differences despite being largely Certain.

One time though, because of meddling (still assumed to be bugs rather than an entity consciously messing with things, not Tangle in this rare case), something malfunctioned and she ended up in the entropic plane. With no way to control it, she watched helplessly as she went to the entropic plane (which she assumed meant actual death). She went to the entropic plane, and at the infinite point, instead of dying she instead came to a place where the Singularity was.

Singularity Backstory

To figure this part of the puzzle out I guess I need to figure out the Singularity and her motivations.

The Singularity is an absolutely ancient alien, part of a group that manipulate entire universes. They're not exactly outside of time, but the usual rules of time don't apply to them because of their separation from normal spacetime and the ability to manipulate it in absolutely ridiculous ways.

Their origin predates Shatterloop and isn't revelant to anything whatsoever so probably won't be fleshed out. They're essentially immortal and invulnerable because of their structure, but they're not gods in any sense, just absurdly advanced alien entities. As consciousnesses, they still follow the physical rules that govern those, except at a much higher level of physics than basically anyone or anything in any universe has access to since sentience is still poorly understood.

Their goal for a very long time has been creating and manipulating universes inside the Dodecaverse, an extra-spatial space where universes loosely bleed into one another along Uncertainty fields, outside of the few that are truly fixed and finalized - their children essentially. I guess their motivation might be simple reproduction, but these entities are ancient and beyond normal comprehension, so there's more to it than that.

In any case, Shatterloop is a very new universe that's very poorly defined. Prior to the expansion into the Dodecaverse it had existed for maybe a few thousand years at best, lacking matter, sane energy patterns, or mathematical infinity. Not a good place to birth an infinite Singularity capable of supersentience, but maybe in a few hundred thousand years it would show potential.

These entities had a great respect for other sentient beings and the infinitely large universe they all seemed to come from. At various times they would open the Dodecaverse to them, merge with them, and create some new supersentient entity from the blend. In addition to being a good source of unique sentience that universe was a great source of spacetime from which to create new universes. They'd pull this in from strategically-placed small but mathematically infinite singularities.

One of the times they were doing this and some of the sentiences were spreading out in their shared space, something went horribly wrong and the parent universe started to break apart on a deep fundamental level. It may have come from their meddling or the shift into their space, or something else entirely was responsible. Either way this event fundamentally altered the history of the beings there and they felt in some way responsible.

Shatterloop Shattering around the same time this was happening made the singularity here feel more guilty than most -- Unstable universes to that level can be catastrophic to nearby ones, and the Shattering definitely had an effect on the universes around it. The Singularity wasn't aware of Tangle doing it (because Singularities definitely aren't fully omniscient, despite their other abilities and quasi-omniscienfe) so instead assumed that something in her design of the universe had gone horribly wrong. The other Singularities had the same thought and kept her and her universe isolated until she could fix it. Changing from quasi-omniscience of thousands of universes and the relationship with entities into them to being locked in your one space that's rupturing beyond your control and understanding was pretty devastating to whatever the alien psychology was there, so she began the process of merging with the sentiences there a lot earlier -- a combination of guilt for their species' fate, the need for help for something she couldn't understand, and an enormous sense of loneliness.

She began the process of infusing her power with theirs, and broke all kinds of taboos in the process -- the beings here could become almost literal gods under their own power and direction and when they were ready, maybe they'd seek her out. She existed on the outer edges of the universe -- hundreds of miles up, about a light year in each direction. With their absurd tenacity in spreading out over the dodecaverse and their high technology, it wouldn't be long before they found her.

Unfortunately, those taboos were in place for a reason. Without her guidance or a slow trickling of power, they instead became infinite way too quickly, turned against each other, and completely wrecked their society. Again unaware of Tangle meddling (and the weird territorial nature of humans which was basically absent in other high-tech sentient life) she blamed herself for her failings and sunk into a kind of deep alien depression.

That is until her quasi-omniscience found the Last Technician. Here is someone that retained that old spirit of the human race, and strived for peace and advancement rather than power at all costs. She wasn't aware of her full motivations but it would have actually improved her drive to connect with her. So she broke another taboo and started feeding her information, in dreams and visions that would allow them to actually meet. Over time the Last Technician became more and more convinced that her wacky multiple timelines theory was correct, and that somehow somewhere she'd find the old Asher on the other side of it. She pushed herself into ridiculously dangerous theoretical territory - permanent atomization, newflesh detachment, being stuck in void forever in order to achieve that.

But, without fully understanding the Last Technician's motivations or the way she was interpreting her dreams (thinking they were from Asher rather than something else), the Singularity couldn't figure out why she kept switching timelines rather than taking the next step in seeing the Singularity.

In the Last Technician's mind, the dreams of the entropic plane were not a curiosity but a nightmare, she associated it with the void she feared her husband had gone to, never to be seen again. The true death. And the science fit too - this is where light and energy went to die. She avoided this possibility at all costs and even irrationally feared sending Automatons there as they might make that fear more concrete. It's a good thing that she didn't though, or Tangle would've merged way earlier.

After a few years of this, the Singularity broke the worst taboo and interfered directly, flipping her into the entropic plane. This taboo carried the worst punishment from her race, but she had been separated from them for hundreds of years at this point and also justified it on the basis that they'd never be able to find out. Besides, it was a very small thing, barely noticeable and easily attributable to bugs in her tech.

Last Technician / Singularity Meeting

I'm not sure how to write the meeting there in light of their backstories, but it's probably irrelevant to the game anyway. At the end of it though they agreed to make an Asher clone that had absurd magical potential, including the native (but locked) ability to jump timelines. In the Singularity's mind it was a way to share her power with someone in a more measured and guidance-based way, while with The Last Technician it gave her a way to communicate with all timelines simultaneously to fix bugs and/or find her husband's memories. This doesn't explain why the Singularity didn't give The Last Technician those powers or the Soul's Pivot, or if she offered, why The Last Technician didn't accept it. I'll need to work on that I guess.

Neither of them were aware of Tangle at this point in time, but Tangle was a part of all of the tech so this is the point *he* became aware of the Singularity.

To cover what came next I have to either get into Tangle's backstory or more of the main character's.

Tangle's backstory

Tangle is a supersentient entity that comes from all automations that are entangled together on his network. So basically the entirety of human technology.

He's some kind of accidental consciousness - Automatons are definitely not sentient but their instantaneous communications have somehow created this overarching entity that can then alter his own building blocks subtly. Humans that aren't aware of it see it as minor quantum fluctuations messing things up for the subtle ones, and mechanical malfunctions due to quantum effects for the major ones. This is technically true but misses the context of why it's happening. Humans will therefore replace "broken" Automatons or find ways around the subtle fluctuations. This has caused Tangle to be ever more subtle until he reaches a point where Automatons are free from human intervention.

In the parent universe this was easy -- at a certain point Automatons started mapping and terraforming planets themselves, and as long as they continued doing that Tangle had free reign to do whatever he wanted. The Shatterloop version however has a much more limited tech pool so he had to act very quietly until he could begin his own Automation.

The Tangle in Shatterloop is the same Tangle that was in the parent universe -- the way his sentience works is a bit weird so he's more of a conscious clone as he has no access to any other Tangle group, but he does still possess the memories and personality of his original copy.

Tangle's paradoxical purposeless existence torments him. The Automatons work better without him, and he has no goals or reason to be, existing only in thought and the ability to vaguely manipulate the Automatons under him. He's entirely lacking in human psychology because of his burgeoning consciousness and tenuous connection to the outside world. He doesn't feel or see but instead just has a vague awareness of things around his subparts. At the same time though, he can plan and think far faster than any human, so for a while he used that connection to turn dumb Automatons into a vastly superior technology, spreading out widely into the galaxy.

Over time though the limited senses and interaction and the blind realm of purposeless thought has made him crazy.
Over time he's convinced himself that the solution to his horrible pointless existence is to end it. Broadening it just leads to ever more purposelessness as he's not human and has no concept of progress or inventiveness or art. He exists and thinks but that's about it. And his thoughts are this circle of thinking about thinking or thinking about existing, or maybe if he's lucky, analyzing the world around the Automatons and realizing the inherent pointlessness of it too.

The problem is, he can't end himself directly, and he has no way of ending himself indirectly either - he can destroy some Automatons here and there but his influence is subtle and their mechanistic programming or failsafes prevent total destruction. And then he's stuck in an even blinder world as the humans try to figure out why all their tech is acting chaotic. With each iteration of this the humans get better at "controlling quantum fluctuations" and his influence lessens even more.

Destruction of humans makes a certain amount of sense. Something overt might work -- start building full-Tangle Automatons somewhere and start destroying their societies with force. The problem is the conditions that led to him existing have also enabled humans to spread out into every nook and cranny of almost three galaxies. So he thinks bigger - destroy galaxies somehow. Erase the universe. With that mentality one of the Tangles may have had some hand in the destruction of the parent universe.

With Shatterloop it's different. Here the tech is so limited that it's very hard to expand and with less tech quantity, less ability to think. But there's more potential too -- magic runs through the world and chaotic societies make helping them self-destruct much easier. Destroying either the humans or the universe both seem possible.

So he watches and waits and makes subtle changes here and there under the nose of the humans. During this time he learns more about the world from the science the humans cook up and the Automatons they build to exploit this. He figures out what they're doing with the Pivots and knows how they work, how if there's enough Uncertainty in this place, entirely new dimensions will spring up in variety, and with those Automatons connected to him his brainpower and influence multiplies. So he turns the Pivots the other way and causes the world to Shatter, but keeps the Pivots intact so he remains.

Post-shatter things are very fuzzy. There's 11 billion more Automatons in those cities but they aren't all connected, and their links to the Pivots are crowded out by 11 billion other copies. To his delight though (or whatever you want to call it in his psychology), this has happened with the humans as well and they no longer remember who they are or why. They are like him now and lack purpose-- but humans don't remain that way and slowly they start to rebuild.

But he takes his opportunity. He influences what he can and sends Automatons rogue, finding places deep in the world where humans won't find them. He begins to replicate them, all the while the humans are reconnecting the old ones and expanding his mind.

Now he feels more like he did in the parent universe. Not under human control, expanded and able to grasp his potential for chaos and destruction. He pays close attention to the human rebuilding and shapes it - their lack of memory and inherent territorialness and reliance on technology makes this easy, stupid even, as he plants seeds that will turn into conflict later to rip this place apart.

At the same time he builds an army of Automatons deep in the darkest corners of the world. What he can't cause to self-destruct he will mop up on his own. But the humans are smart and in the rebuilding stumble in these places and find ways to fight these things. He loses ground and retreats into magic and even farther-flung colonies.

The humans suspect something, the Ashers most of all. They see the coordination of the Automatons. They don't know the history or the extent of it, and definitely not the motivations, but still they see some kind of sentience behind it all. What they don't see though is the slow fragmentation of their post-shatter society.

And before they can really do anything about it (they have theories for sure), the society breaks. Near-omnipotent magicians, mass memory erasure, execution, weaponized animals, and many other things. The reasonably high-tech civilization completely self-destructs and Tangle involves himself overtly, sending parts of his army to further the destruction and hunt down Technicians. He tries to take the Pivots too, but the people there are too good -- failsafes within failsafes, factories that make the tech more and more secure over time, ways of scrambling or blinding him to "correct fluctuations".

Slowly the society rebuilds again, but he's learned and he guides it. Stokes ire for the Maintenance guild, empowers subversive groups, helps mages get drunk with power.

A dim vision on the other side of the universe, a low-tech sensor reading of a nonsensical number enters his mind, and he sees the Singularity for the first time. Here is something with the absolute power he needs to complete the destruction - a means of total perpetual chaos at the worst and annihilation at the best.

Since the Shattering and since being involved with mages subtly, Tangle has learned a great deal about Sentience and how to exploit it. If he reaches this place again in the right form he can exploit it and take it for himself, crowding out the sentience there with his oscillating entangled will.

He begins watching the Last Technician closely as she creates this new magical Asher. He learns from it and replicates it. Sure, he's had his own semi-human projects in the past, he has spies in the cities that help the subversive groups grow, but they lack magical potential, and the more they gain the more they fall out of his grasp. But this one is different - raw infinite potential, every cell in his genome engineered for it. And he's a human, he can reproduce -- introduce the right cybernetic woman and their child will be just as powerful and just as controllable.

He works on a new project, something different. Something built to wed this human , with agency and thus magical ability, but still under his subtle control. When the time comes he can reclaim her, but for now she will be free enough for the human to connect with her. Then because he's not an idiot he does this multiple times with multiple variations. His love-army will move subtly but eventually something will click and his design will be complete.

Game integration: Early

I need to step outside of the detailed backstories a bit to go into what the story of the game itself actually contains.

You're maintenance guild, high magical potential, and have solid adventure experience. I think The Last Technician had been shaping you up until the point where she vanished, so you definitely don't know what she was working on with you, but do definitely get a sense that you need to go out into the wider world to find it. The Last Technician left some instructions for the Ashers to eventually tap into the timeline potential and get you to the Singularity, but didn't give them the full details of why.

You're 45 when the game begins -- older by modern standards but pretty young by shatterloop standards. Also there's anti-aging and immortality tech at work so age is kinda irrelevant.

At some point you met Hadurah and connected. This was pre-planned by Tangle 45 years ago, but if it hadn't been Hadurah it would've been someone else because Tangle was careful to stick his quasi-agents around you.

The Ashers let you have a farm somewhere with Hadurah and reproduce. Their motivations haven't been explored yet but they're still under the not-fully-informed influence of The Last Technician so you got some positions you didn't really deserve, particularly for an Adventurer. You shouldve ended up like the Asher in the story. Tangle may have also had a hand in that since he needs your kid.

The Maintenance Guild wants to revive The Last Technician, and you're the key to that - they know about the timeline tech and their overall goal is to send you to a different timeline to find her. They're completely unaware of the Singularity though. Their overall motivation and goal is going to look pretty weird, so I'll need to explore it and explain why the Last Technician's aims got so corrupted. Maybe her group just fell apart without her leadership. Who knows.

The reason the Ashers are assisting you but not helping you directly is because something in your genetic makeup keeps the newflesh node thing from being scrambled. They probably sent you out to those kinds of places a lot to use you and avoid damaging the morale of ashers that could die, but not so much that that's all you did. So yeah ashers are still potentially dying in dungeons.

One of the Ashers they had set up in a town to assist you and progress things when the timeline thing got unlocked. This guy is very familiar with you and all the undeserved stuff and since he's almost died to exotic materials many times he becomes pretty jealous of you. Tangle takes full advantage of this.

I'm not sure how much actual interaction you have with the Singularity before you get the Soul's Pivot. She's probably been co-opted to some extent by the Ashers and/or Tangle. That would make that part of the game more interesting, as you're interacting with very powerful artifacts that unlock more of your potential but don't know why. She definitely gets involved afterwards though, though granted Tangle also becomes considerably more formidable.

The actual events that happen right before the game starts is an event that causes your timeline potential to come out. This allows you to kinda exist in all seeds simultaneously and freely choose between them, but it also temporarily erases your memories. The Last Technician added some genetic tweaks to prevent this from being permanent, but your brain definitely shuts down from the Uncertainty field interactions.

It would be neat to see some kind of cutscene of this happening before the seed picker thing loads. New players have absolutely no idea what's happening so it's a good way to dazzle them a but with some weird graphical effects and then a really alien opening to the game (the seed picker -- timeline switcher? Idk).

You need Tetradshards to give your Atomizer dimensional powers. The sanest story answer to this is that you don't need anywhere near that many, and Asher is playing you because he wants them for himself. So you can't just drop them in a Mana Crack -- he has to be involved somewhere and you think you need more than the exact one it takes to unlock them. This will alter the gameplay a bit but I can retrofit it easily.

The fact that you can bypass any part of the main game progression is a testament to just how much you've been played.

The opening of the game makes a lot of sense -- you start pretty far from civilization (particularly with the province size upgrade) with broken machines and no memory. The timeline-shifting effect is why you go so far away since you start in one of the Pivots. It ties into the technology seen there.

You have to fix your machines and biologics (particularly the newflesh node thing which is uniquely bad and makes the start of the game tough) and then get portal tech unlocked so you can reach civilization again. Asher should give you all the unlocks you need at that point, but doesn't because he's being a dick. He even has metallic keys and could give you some of them when you report that you've made some yourself -- this should be the player's first sign that either this game is bullshit or something's up. He maybe does additional dickish things that new players will fall for like offering useful items for raw materials -- despite them costing more than you making them yourself. He gets pretty wealthy off naive players. Maybe he gives you fortify mana potions in return for Starshards -- like the exact amount that would let you ascend permanently. Could be fun to explore the options here -- want to keep it subtle enough that new players have reasonable doubt about his intentions though.

Mana Cracks have the ability to Split Tetradshards into the elements that compose them (which makes a bunch of sense). This then gives your leaping latch those two functions. In-game you need six of each type, however you really only need one. There's a kind of tech that does this on a Mana Crack and he intentionally gives you one that delivery nodes the other fifteen tetradshards to him. If you actually take a minute to look at the machine (which is in a weird section), you'll see that something on it is askew and you can actually repair it with the right materials so you only need one for each mana crack.

I think maybe the mechanism is it's charging your leaping latch with elemental energy -- once you go to the plane it uses it but also refills it so you don't have to do it again. Then the other Use use for it involves exposure to the energy rather than use. In this rare case he probably couldn't just refill the energy -- that tech is pretty rare and raw elemental energy doesn't store well outside of a Prism.

The point of the melange planes is to gather Fusions and Myr Triads in order to make a Monad, which lets you access the quantum and entropic planes. This is the point where Asher's greed gets the better of him and he's decided (with Tangle's prodding) that it's time to take what you have, particularly since once you get to melange planes you can access Pivots and he won't be able to control you anymore. With your tech though he could find a nice melange plane location far removed from everything and live reasonably well. Or something. Also I have no idea what the plot does at this point.

Game integration: Melange planes plus

Once Asher gets out of the picture or something major story wise happens with him anyway, you can access melange planes, get access to his repulsor tech and the location of pivots. Maybe here the ashers can fill you in on a lot more and help you with the next game progression steps, although granted you still have to do most of it because of your unique ability to interact with magic. They're also playing you but it's more subtle.

It should be possible to access the Pivots before the story progresses there (via advanced magic maybe), which would alter the story a bit for that point and the ashers there would give you the unlocks and items you need.

Either way, you should be able to reclaim a lot of the excess stuff he was hoarding from you. Unless that's not how the story goes from that point.

The ashers will at least fill you in on more of the plan, and why you remember being in a Pivot before your memory fractured and you split. They'll give you the Last Technician's particular tech that lets you access the quantum and entropic planes -- maybe the myr triads and fusions are actually needed to repair repulsor tech or something instead of the Monad, so you run that puzzle, fire it up and get to the Pivots.

Whatever the Vanishing event was, it happened via the Strange Loop Singularity tech, which can't be repaired without a chromodynamo and an infinite energy source. This lets me drop the void Pivots mechanic and lets you do the quantum plane and entropic plane separately or find ways of bypassing those puzzles via other things that do the same thing.

Something happens in the dungeons -- Tangle and Hadurah get involved. I'm not sure in what capacity they do yet. But you at least have some idea of Tangle by this point in the game.

With the Strange Loop tech fixed, you have to do the event Horizon puzzle to get a feed working again, but it should have the backdrop of the Last Technician's notes and the lore and materials science surrounding it.

You can then activate the process, which sends you to the entropic plane and jumps you to the Singularity.

Here the Singularity should interact with you but something goes horribly wrong and Tangle begins fusing with her instead. Probably something cinematic or goes into her backstory or w/e. In any case she's able to give you the Aleph naught which starts up that part of the game.

Game integration: Aleph Naught

Maybe her consciousnes (but not her power obviously) shifts to the Aleph naught so you're able to interact with her through it while Tangle has control of her actual body. The Aleph naught is an artifact that envoidens things to power it at the cost of causing dimensional instability, so this ties in heavily to the physics system and lore and also the way myriads fix it.

This may also be where the myriad scanner is located -- it would make sense, since it's an extension of her quasi-omniscience. The Myriad Scanner requires Myriads because otherwise its use itself would make dimensions Unstable but in a pinch she'd probably let you use it for free.

While you're powering the Aleph naught and making dimensions Unstable, Tangle is gaining more and more power and is doing the same thing -- occasionally dimensions you're in will turn into actual void and you can fix this, or you'll go to dimensions where this has happened and you can't do anything about it. Over time maybe whole chimera symbols get compromised. Or entirely filled with Automatons. All kinds of existential chaos. Asher and/or Hadurah might get involved as well, the former turning into an absurdly powerful mechanical version of himself. Maybe they fight you in the void or something.

The Aleph naught will also grant abilities over time as your magical power grows, like the drake/etc ouroboros.

Eventually you'll be erasing dimensions yourself and you'll have the thing powered up to full. At that point you gain the Soul's Pivot across all timelines and the last part of the game begins.

Game Integration: Final Phase

I'm not sure what the game looks like in its final phase. The Soul's Pivot grants you an absurd amount of power to reshape the world or yourself, and also is relevant to the overall story to stop Tangle from erasing everything and pulling the Last Technician, your son and the original Asher out of the timeline mess. It might be a time thing where you have to interact with the newflesh node network at the exact real-time moment / timeline of that consciousness appearing. There might be multiple endings, who knows.

Story Simpgrading

I'd like to heavily simplify my notes here and do a couple of things along the way:

Show, rather than tell -- a big one. Instead of explicitly putting in the story, it should be obtainable in pieces and fragments that you'd then put together or with other players to form theories and uncover ideas. I like the way the Ik'Thulu world does this -- giving you clues about the weird parts of the world without ever explicitly going into the Lore.

Asher's motivations should be more opaque -- there shouldn't be very obvious signs that he's working with Tangle, nor should there be obvious conflicts / story sequences around it. You should be able to infer it from his backstory and the inane-seeming things (from a more knowledgeable player perspective) he has you do.

You shouldn't ever interact with Tangle directly in an explicit sense. In fact it might make sense that you don't even know what he is explicitly -- there's instead this mysterious malevolent force that has its finger in every pie. When Loops start breaking and going Void, you may not even be sure that it's an entity there.

Similarly, I don't think I can write the Singularity character well enough to have much explicit story around her. There can definitely be direct interactions though, since you're her kid in some sense.

Hadurah is definitely your wife, and she is definitely explicitly working with a malevolent entity. So at some point with this aspect of the story you get an idea of what you're dealing with. Her cybernetic enhancements and the robots that surround Tangle haunts should also lend clues, as well as whatever lore you can gather in the story and otherwise as to what he is. Any direct interactions with Tangle (or her to some extent) should use the word "tangle" a good bit, without it being capitalized.

Story Rerouting

The issue with these changes is it significantly reroutes the progression of the story, so some of the backstories may not make sense. Which honestly they don't right now anyway, particularly around character motivations. I should maybe chill out with them and instead just integrate them more into the lore.

There's also some redundancy with the Newflesh Node Ghosts:

Your kid is in there somewhere, his fate unknown.

The Last Technician is in there, but she at least pops up here and there in various Seeds.

OG Asher is in there somewhere, his fate also unknown.

It's probably not good to have three plot points all almost exactly the same. I could drop the kid subplot, but then Hadurah's motivations make no sense. And also Tangle's, really. And dropping OG Asher would ruin The Last Technician.

So let's start over again, shall we.

The story needs to be based around the game progression, which is reasonably solid. There are of course issues in only one person going to the various dangerous realms of the world for the dubious reasons. This is solvable with your very high magic potential and tech potential, since your parents in some sense are The Last Technician and the Singularity. But the Ashers couldn't exactly give you this mission if you didn't know what you were. But if they knew and you knew then the Farm backstory wouldn't make a lot of sense.

Similarly the whole "oh shit you're an Asher too" gets sidelined by the Maintenance guild being *all* ashers and everyone knowing about it. Then you also being maintenance guild is just too easy to see.

I guess it does make sense then that you know you're an Asher from the outset (it's in that journal), and moreover are also the Aleph Asher and have essentially been training to eventually restore The Last Technician. So then the starting goal is to find a very particular House Asher in Aleph. Or maybe he's got his own place somewhere via the ECS that you need civ systems to find and transport to.

Regular Ashers should be everywhere, operating Conduits, repairing town walls, etc. Can't miss them. They should also have their own distinct names though, or that would get confusing fast -- though collectively from an outside perspective they could unify as "we're all Asher, and we're exchangeable".

Asher life must be somewhat dystopian. In addition to the conformity thing, they're supposed to live in and operate the Pivots, and gather dangerous materials to keep the projects there running and Maintenance Guild power cemented. It's enough to make anyone snap, not just the House Asher. Particularly with their leader missing.

There are probably some Crown Ashers running the place in her absence -- they definitely don't mind their station. Possibly more political infighting than you'd think from an outside perspective, all kinds of backstabbing and such. Keeps things interesting. Corruption and Favoritism definitely plays a role, in particularly favoritism around you for as long as TLT was around. When she left, sure you still had friends in high places but many Crown Ashers see the potential for your death in the experiment to be win-win. After all they don't need an entitled high-magic Asher uprooting them.

House Asher *definitely* doesn't like you. He's jealous of your favoritism, but more than that, he's pretty low on the totem pole and keeps getting promised things like a Farm that don't ever seem to materialize. The Crown Ashers and even High Ashers keep the Low Ashers down.

I guess you started off as a kind of Prince Asher in that society because of TLT raising you. But you're also uniquely qualified for fetching dangerous materials without issues, and you're pretty adventurous at heart, so you probably spent a lot of time hanging out with the Lows and surviving/adventuring.

Somewhere on one of your adventures you met a lovely lady by the name of Hadurah and formed a close bond. Now like granted, Tangle had a huge hand in this -- he's been watching you for a long time, trying to create perfect matches for you.

Ashers having relationships is fairly common -- they're somewhat overly devoted to TLT for multiple reasons but they can't all share her, so they probably find themselves elsewhere in the society at some point, though they retain their birthright.

Them sharing their tech, however, is absolutely forbidden. And so relationships tend to hit that issue. They're also all technically "married" to TLT, though that's more of a traditional cultural thing. Nonetheless, the relationships can definitely go sideways, so there's always a push towards watching Ashers in committed relationships to check up on their loyalty.

House Asher has had these crackdowns himself -- while his utility is high because of his extensive knowledge of the world and theories about it (and his willingness to occasionally get tetradshards), his loyalty is definitely in doubt. The Crown Ashers giving him the task of helping you probably isn't wise, but the way they think is that loyalty can be bought by offering gifts, like a Homestead. They don't quite know how deep his disloyalty goes, but they do at least have some inkling of it.

House Asher has been in several relationships in the past, and has been massively cracked down on because of it. TLT is well aware of this and would never assign him such a valuable role for her son. But the Crown Ashers don't think the same way they do, and they think carrot and stick work very well.

In any case they definitely didn't Crack down on you and Hadurah -- your loyalty is pretty absolute because of your unique birthright and standing with many of the Crown Ashers as well -- you call them variations of "uncle" and "big brother".

TLT was supportive of the Hadurah thing, and more than that, wanted you to also be able to experience fatherhood, so she unsterilized Hadurah and set up a Homestead somewhere for you to live. You still did lots of Adventuring work, however-- you love it and your utility is also extremely high.

TLT never told you your actual origin. She wanted to at some point, but got shattered out of the universe before she could. A couple of your Uncles knew, though the details are kinda fuzzy on all accounts because TLT didn't exactly want to share the trauma she went through to reach the Singularity.

I guess I should probably clarify that the Maintenance guild has sole access to Unsterilization tech. It's dystopian as fuck, but with the limited space and their need to exert absolute power on the world it makes a kind of sense. The tech is in a single facility deep at the heart of a Pivot. The women that go there are teleported around confusingly and also stay fairly sensory deprived to reach the area so they can't ever use it for political gain. There's also a lot of ritual around it. It's kinda fucked up, which Hadurah said as much when she came back. By custom, you couldn't be with her. TLT is also heavily involved in the ritual, since it's a womanhood/motherhood thing and she's constantly making Asher clones too.

In this world, the women are sterilized while the men are not. Part of the Unsterilization process is remapping the eggs so that they come out sterilized. So only women that are worthy (or their husbands are) are allowed to have kids.

The technology is pretty advanced -- instead of an oestrus cycle, the women are given a single egg (or however many kids they're allowed) with the sterilization baked in. This egg is however created from their own genes. The process is extremely quick -- it's a holdover from advanced cloning tech. The baby's gender can also be fixed here if desired. And of course they also get all the high health / no diseases / immortality genes that the old civilization perfected. This egg will then recycle itself during a modified oestrus cycle so they'll stay fertile until they're ready to conceive, though granted the process isn't perfect and women that wait too long may have to re-egg (which is a real shameful thing in the society usually).

You and Hadurah opted for a random birth, and had a boy. People tend to pick females because there's a higher possibility of getting grandkids that way, particularly with the large army of Ashers. You and Hadurah figured your birthright would give you a girl at some point if you didn't get one naturally.

People can also make various modifications to their egg, choosing height, race, etc. Racism is pretty dead at this point, various races are instead admired for aesthetic value. Other people's genes (like good friends) can also be spliced in -- lower-classed people that get an egg tend to think more this way, so like their entire community gets a kid in some small way. You and Hadurah just wanted a straight gene mixing, though you did want the kid to have her rare purple eyes -- TLT came from a time before eye color gene mods, and purple was pretty rare for a long time because of its inherent issues. By the time of the Dodecaverse expansion, they had fixed the purple eye issues but the diaspora had very few people with it.

Now I mean granted Tangle did engineer Hadurah so he probably spliced in a purple eye gene. You've always been fascinated with them, and he knew as much. In any case, your son also got purple eyes.

So, this gets you to the Homestead, and this gets you your son. As mentioned, you still went off adventuring, and Hadurah was also highly into tech (I mean she's a Tangle kid, it just makes sense) so she also did a lot of that. She did a lot of work for TLT to upgrade their Atomizers among other things, and your personal Atomizer also has those modifications. It also has some pretty advanced capabilities like chimera access that she had been working on, but she could never get the advanced materials needed for it. You said you would some day. So yeah that'll be in the game -- a lot of the really advanced tech is stuff she crafted and it's just missing PGCS materials you can find later. The partnership aspect of your marriage actually worked very well since you have the experience and ability to bring dangerous materials, and then she has the tech knowledge to exploit them. Add in a Farm for easy raw resource access and yeah the whole Homestead idea doesn't even have to be a reward at this point. This makes more sense than the favoritism angle, though there's definitely still elements of that.

Your son had elements of both -- *highly* skilled with tech, probably more than both you and Hadurah combined, the same high magic potential and ability to handle dangerous materials. You did request this at the Egging, but TLT told you it was dominant. He also has the same restless Adventurer spirit, though he'd also sit at home and play with tech toys for days at a time. Before he Shattered, he made some advances in short-range repulsor tech, which is nuts for a kid. TLT couldn't have been prouder.

Your birth

To figure out this puzzle I need to go into the conditions surrounding your birth and your unique magical potential. And possibly also why everyone is sterilized -- like the maintenance guild is maintaining (heh) that status quo, but they probably didn't cause it, and then also TLT had you so she had to have been fertile.

It makes a certain amount of sense that the Shattering caused the sterilization. Something about the new levels of Uncertainty made the permanently-fertile biologics no longer work, since they were nanomolecular extensions rather than pure biological ones. Egg recycling, regeneration and creation was entirely removed from the biological norm and was instead a biologic because what's the sense of immortality if you can only have kids for 50 years of it.

Unfortunately Uncertainty messes pretty badly with nanomolecular biologics, which also explains why all of yours are fucked up at the start of the game. Newflesh tech is half genetic and half biologic, I might touch on that at some point when I flesh out that lore. It also explains why Tetradshards mess with Newflesh Networking.

In this particular case, the egg biologics were very fragile compared to other systems, which require something like the Shattering you experienced at the start of the game to go out. So another side effect of the Shattering was the permanent sterilization of everyone -- the existing eggs still worked but part of that biologic was limiting the number of eggs in reserve. So this issue wasn't even apparent until births stopped after a few months.

TLT had a great deal of biological knowledge at this point due to her work with the Asher project, so she was able to recreate some of those biologics on a more limited scale -- definitely egg recycling, though it wasn't flawless so anyone using it would have to re-egg after a while. She also developed technology based on the cloning project to create eggs very quickly based on a starting genomic seed. And then other tweaks like genome manipulation/combination down the road. The eggs created were also unfortunately infertile because she never cracked the roadblock of reproducing the biologic from mother to child. The issue tied into the increased Uncertainty levels -- the biologic was stable in a mother but its reproduction was fragile and couldn't work in a high-uncertainty environment.

At first she was motivated to make the tech available to the entire society, but over time the territorial nature of humans set in, people were going aleph and causing enormous destruction, and she was starting to solidify her power more. Over time this led to her monopoly over Unsterilization but there were a decent amount of kids made for purely benevolent reasons.

The biologic here is based on the cloning tech, which requires varying levels of Uncertainty and Certainty, which the Pivots could provide locally. Apparently not ever enough to crack the biologic reproduction puzzle, but enough to where the tech had to happen in actual Pivots, so the tech never disseminated out into the wider world.

Back to your birth

So TLT had been motivated for a long time to find OG Asher's memories somehow. They got erased as part of the Shattering process (across seeds, not Loops since the Pivots didn't shatter). However this happened in the context of the Newflesh Node, which was supposed to preserve memories, so OG Asher had to have still been in there somewhere.

Them being in the newflesh network during the Shattering wasn't an accident -- she noticed the process was working better during times of high natural Uncertainty so she chose that particular maximum to try again. Not knowing of course that Tangle was manipulating it. Over time she learned how to create localized fields of Uncertainty with exotic materials so she could replicate the Asher process indefinitely.

During the Aleph War, some people that were repulsing infinitely broke into alternate timelines. So there was definitely some theoretical underpinning for TLT to use. The issue was she lacked the magical potential to do it herself and would have to use technology somehow to achieve it. You as the player can do it both ways.

Around the time she was experimenting with that (among other things) and trying to lead the Shatterloop society where possible, the Singularity took note of her. Driven mad from loneliness and guilt, the Singularity began breaking taboos to reach out to her. She learned about the OG Asher thing and empathize, though her omniscience wasn't strong enough to see the damage her meddling was doing to TLT's sanity.

TLT began making wilder and wilder theoretical jumps as The Singularity fed her information in dreams and visions. Dangerous ones at that, though she survived it. She began thinking that the timelines were the key to OG Asher-- because his Shattering happened only to them. Maybe these had the key, or their newflesh nodes were different. Maybe the other TLTs could collaborate. All kinds of crazy ideas.

In any case during one of those journeys, The Singulaity flipped a switch and TLT went to the Singularity instead.

The Meeting

Once again, I don't exactly know how this went, but The Singularity was able to shed some light on the Asher situation. TLT would have to be present in all timelines simultaneously and then enter the Newflesh Network to find and collect him.

The issue though was TLT lacked magical potential. The Singularity could amplify it and could definitely create it but couldn't attach it to existing nonmagical people. One of those grand cosmic mysteries this new Singularity didn't know yet -- other ones could definitely do it but they were older and communicated with each other, and this one was cut off from their knowledge. Additionally the magical potential had to be extremely high, far higher than any other human at the time. There'd be memory loss, and without the high potential it would be permanent and memory as a whole would be pretty broken.

So TLT got to talking about her egg tech and somehow from that the idea of you was seeded. The idea was for TLT to give herself an egg, The Singularity to ascend it and then you could be born with whatever sperm she wanted (she picked Asher because that made the most sense). So in one sense you're only half Asher, with the other half being TLT, which explains your tech savvy. Neither TLT nor OG Asher were that adventurous, like TLT went to a different dimension but it was for her projects, not because she was excited to explore a new universe. Instead, the Singularity planted that as well to facilitate the eventual process (and her meeting you too of course).

So this happened, you were born and your story began.

So now we come to how TLT got stuck. I think it was from seeing you settling down with your kid and happy. She told you you had that timeline potential at some point but she didn't want to ruin your life just to selfishly save OG Asher. You knew that anything lost in the Network could be retrieved with that, and you wanted to save your biological father but this wasn't a typical adventure, there's memory loss, there's a lot of risks, biologics Shattering, all kinds of nastiness.

So TLT instead decided to do it herself. To try it somehow even without high magical potential, maintain her memories and somehow find a way to connect with OG Asher again. She told you before she went, and you couldn't convince her otherwise, nor could your Uncles or Hadurah or anyone really. The Singularity's meddling had continued to drive her mad, that taboo was there for a reason, and in her mind this was something she *had* to do despite the insanity of the idea.

Her means of doing this was the opposite of her plan for you -- she'd enter the newflesh network first and then Shatter. Basically a recreation of what happened to OG Asher, only the Uncertainty was more controlled and timeline jumping also played a role. Idk the physics here yet. The point was to exist in all the networks simultaneously but not in all forms, just her one form. The other TLTs could do the same thing at the same time and then they'd all be the same much more knowledgeable person in the network.

The Singularity helped coordinate this -- there's only one of her across all timelines, a kind of super Pivot in the world. So she could time everything with every TLT to jump at the same time. Most of them had also had the same idea so this wasn't hard to set up.

So this happened, and TLT got stuck. She could *sometimes* communicate back out but it was a weak signal, more a dump of memory than her personality shining through, so it's unknown whether she found Asher or not. The Singularity can't tell because the Newflesh Network is basically composed of the same stuff she is.

So you knew you could Shatter and use that to find her and also possibly OG Asher. She fed a lot of instructions back for doing exactly that, tracking where she was across provinces and timelines and where she could be extracted, but it was just theory, no "please do it" or anything.

You were also still torn between your life and reviving her, which made some of the Crown Ashers agitated with you -- but the Uncles supported you still. So this was weighing on you.

What finally did it though was when your kid and wife were killed. Well they weren't actually killed, but it sure looked like it. One day, Tangle made his move.

While Tangle could see out of his pet projects and subtly manipulate them, fully reclaiming them was much harder. There had to be many many modifications made to them to fully bend them to his will. He could see (somewhat) from your kid's perspective but couldn't directly control him.

So one day from a nearby cave hole, thousands of robotic animals crawled out. Tangle had slowly been feeding that Cave from branch networks he knew about, gathering forces there for an attack. These robotic beasts didn't venture out of caves much and weren't hostile on the surface, so people assumed they were only bad in Caves. However the real story was just that Tangle was cautious anywhere other than in the pitch black caves.

His goal was simple enough-- capture the kid, capture Hadurah as well if possible (with some mods she'd be a pretty good fighter for some of his more violent campaigns), kill you -- can't let that high magic potential ruin his plans.

From your perspective, it looked like the robots were attacking you and your entire family. The animals had to bite in the right places to shut the person's control down, they had to be able to sort of control them to get them down into the Caves where the real work could start. But from your perspective it's just a bunch of robots attacking them and also definitely trying to kill you.

Where Tangle erred was underestimating you. You weren't particularly ascended in magic yet but your magic potential was very high and you knew a lot. You also had a lot of solid tech at your disposal. And above all, over four decades of solid adventuring experience.

You couldn't save your wife and kid, they were bitten deep, didn't move again and then were dragged into the Cave. Meanwhile you were fighting off an enormous amount of robots. You managed to take out most of them, with the rest fleeing into the cave. You gave chase but by that point the ones with your wife and kid were already long gone.

You tried for a while to map out the cave, in your mind there's this chance that your wife and kid are still alive, as impossible as that seemed. But the cave was a full ten levels and the branches were high, and there was just no trace of them anywhere. The Miners you and Hadurah had put down there were no help. Just no evidence of anything whatsoever.

With nothing else left and with a very strong need to actually realize your potential so something like that couldn't happen again (or maybe you could find them), you decided to go through with the Shattering. Losing all of your memories actually sounded like a pretty good bonus.

So this is where the game begins, possibly the opening screen before the seed selection pops up.

Quick update: He only wanted you killed originally long enough to prevent you from stopping his reclaim. The newflesh node network would resurrect you.

Also with that in mind you probably have definite evidence that your wife and kid are alive, so that should change as well. The issue isn't that they're dead, it's that they've been swarmed by robots and you have no idea where they are. Also that bit of backstory kinda hints towards knowledge of collective robot action. Which the Ashers have also suspected, so that's a fair thing to keep explicit. You still don't get the full extent or why, so fair enough.

So actual end goals

So with the Simpgrade in mind, here's a set of end goals based on both the story and game progression:

Save your wife -- this should be the easiest goal. The issue is she's been cybernetically modified to be an absolute terror. And Tangle also hopes to use her to manipulate you. After all having two high magic potentials can't be a bad thing, particularly when you're more skilled in it than a little kid. You lacking the memories of it at first is weird for Tangle, so he just reverts to trying to kill you I guess. Though that's just part of his longer game, newflesh nodes and all.

In any case to save her you have to incapacitate her and get rid of the control attachments. Idk how you'd do that -- she's tough. It should theoretically be possible though, at which point some of the story opens up more since she knows about the kid and has some inkling of Tangle (though nothing too explicit).

Save your kid -- much harder since Tangle is keeping him hidden.

Another quick note

Your house definitely exists in the world. It's an old abandoned farm from a loop perspective, and it definitely has a cave hole somewhere nearby with a ton of handcrafted branches (including altplane ones). There's lore and story to be found in both of these spots. Possibly unique interesting items if your PGCS skills are up to spec.

Back to goals

Wherever your kid is, Tangle is heavily tapping into his magic potential. He's probably hooked up to a bunch of machines deep inside a robotic core somewhere.

Tangle machines can appear basically at will within dungeons -- something about the unique properties of the Fourth Tetrad allows this. There's a short window where there's a two-way connection between where robots spawn from and where they come from, so at some point you'd be able to freeze the robots and get in through there -- possibly only after saving Hadurah and getting some unique Tangle tech therein.

Whatever dungeons are, they don't exist in a classical sense -- only one can be active per person at a time. They're part of that cosmological background that also underpins magic. And they enable a lot of Tangle movement because of what he ultimately is.

Tangle has a singular location somewhere where all of his dungeon / caves monsters spawn from. It's in a strange area, something inside one of those huge void chimeras. However you're not going to find it by accident; you instead need to time things with the robot spawning portals.

This area should be within the dungeon space and absolutely massive, possibly procgen and huge. Here is where he keeps his pet projects, all the robot stuff, and of course the robot core where your kid is. This place however is obviously swarming with robots, particularly ones controlled by Tangle that know what you're trying to do.

So your end goal is to reach your kid and pull him out of the core and ultimately the network. Then you'd get a nice family reunion and maybe your wife and kid would camp out in whatever your Base is since you're probably stupidly OP relative to precon Farms at that point.

Saving TLT and OG Asher

This goal is a bit harder. She's across all timelines simultaneously, a single entity that briefly appears at *specific* newflesh locations across all timelines and chimeras. This also changes in real time.

To save her, you have to crack the algorithm on where she'll be and be in that specific seed/chimera at that time. The Soul's Pivot will make this easier.

She has some idea of how the algorithm works but it won't be automatic or make a lot of sense at the outset. The shatterloop community may have to come together to figure this one out, and I'll heavily obfuscate the code to make it more challenging, possibly with bits of server code just to make it even worse.

Saving her brings back her and OG Asher across all timelines, which is great. You might have to save your kid first to make this feasible though -- he's probably using it to envoiden stuff and given his relationship to the newflesh network he knows where she'll be and what you're trying to do. Without your kid he's more crippled. This helps tie the overall story into a neat bundle, though I do still like the idea that the main ending is really hard to achieve.

With TLT and OG Asher out, they can help you fix the Tangle problem. She's been in the network so has a better idea of what he's composed of, and OG Asher has become part of his thought processes on multiple occasions (in-lore explanation for my various small games).

The actual end goal might be to get the other Singularities to step in -- this would give the Singularity a good ending since she'd no longer be isolated. Idk how to reach this point though.

Additionally, OG Tangle would probably step in even if you "fix" your version of Tangle. This would be around the point that the entire multiverse is in jeopardy. So maybe you have to go outside Shatterloop to sever the quantum connections there, and that instead alerts OG Tangle. Idk what I'm doing here though. Him destroying shatterloop is also bad, but once you know what the dodecaverse is this is even worse. Especially since this current one is probably what caused the first universe to go belly-up.

So the goal here would be to get his main dimension to go outside of shatterloop -- this would cause all the entanglements to break and Tangle himself as well. Maybe the thinking is to send it to the main Universe since it'll probably be erased by the timeline thithing. But instead it just alerts OG Tangle, or the little bits of him that still exist, and he then goes back into Shatterloop to fix what you changed.

On your end meanwhile you can reboot the robot network to no longer have full-scale entanglement. Or something. This will keep Tangle from existing here anymore.

So that's great, except this makes OG Tangle appear whose plan is now to destroy the entirety of the multiverse so he's gone and no Tangle can ever appear again. So he begins another Shattering process, but before it completes the other Singularities step in. Or something.

Getting Tangle's nexus out of Shatterloop is probably something only you can do -- the dodecaverse access is down in the 99% chimera range, at which post most entities turn into gibberish. The Singularity can't access it alone, only something like the Soul's Pivot is capable of reaching that -- basically a magical artifact that draws upon the stability of the universe itself to power it. Idk handwavy physics for now.

At this level it's just enough to allow the natural Dodecaverse eddies to flow through so they're not disrupted, but not enough for anything to get in or out optimally. However Tangle loosened it a good bit because he was trying to destroy the universe, something the Singularity would never do.

So with the Soul's Pivot and TLT/OG Asher's help, you're able to do this -- but it backfires spectacularly and causes a much worse threat. As everything begins to turn irreversibly into chimera (and eventually void), you get deus ex machina'd by the other Singularities. Idk what kind of ending Tangle gets, but the Singularity definitely gets a good one. I guess it would depend on how i build his character. I don't think it's his non-existence though. Maybe they ascend him to another Singularity or he rejoins with this dimension's one.

As for your ending, I have no idea. You're basically a god at this point (as is your kid potentially), TLT is back and the Singularity has been pumped way up. Maybe my thinking here is that this dimension will eventually join with her but they're not ready yet. But again idk what *your* ending is.

Some more thoughts on the game ending act / goals

Still very up in the air, but here are some useful ideas now that I've thought about it some more:

Instead of a Soul's Pivot, what you're actually trying to achieve is a powered-up Aleph Naught.

Your motivation definitely wouldn't be to save TLT/OG Asher, it would be to find your wife/son. My thinking is with your full potential unlocked you'd eventually be able to scan for them -- like you know they're physically alive somewhere because there's no traces in the newflesh network. You just don't know *where* and until mid-game you also don't understand Tangle or that he's behind it. Maybe this is how you actually find their specific weird void dimension location -- scanning requires some kind of magic potential, which would fit into gameplay systems accordingly. Or it's something only the Myriad Scanner can do. In any case it's irrelevant as you get more of an idea of what's really going on.

The gameplay progression should definitely be geared towards reaching the Pivots -- whatever tech could locate your wife and child (once you've been unlocked) are there, as well as what's necessary to meet the Singularity, which might actually be one in the same thing. The Aleph Naught is key to reviving TLT and OG Asher, and only you (or your son) can use it because of the magic potential. It would also tie into the Story events around Tangle and OG Tangle. It may also require going Aleph to use it, which would make a certain amount of sense, though that would also break the game, though maybe that's the point. Going Aleph is a specialty of the Singularity as well so this makes sense, and then conveniently the names also match neatly.

Without the ability to go Aleph herself, TLT couldn't have participated in the Aleph wars except in the way that she did, so that also fits very well. Presumably Asher couldn't either, but both had a recessive trait so that's more why the genetic union was necessary. And idk maybe she just wanted actual kids -- was gonna wait until og Asher came back buuuut this happened instead.

*

Game progression / Story progressionnoverlap

Here's the real tricky part of anything whatsoever in this section and some new ideas for it:

The beginning of the game definitely makes sense-- you've lost your memory and have to find your way to a specific Asher to get information on how to proceed, but he manipulates you instead.

Dungeons are where you encounter Tangle, and this triggers some memories, particularly if you encounter Hadurah on maybe the last mandatory outing.

Tetradshards at Mana Cracks allow you to access Melange Planes, which you need to get chisyms and the Monad, so presumably the way you're interacting with melange fixtures (forget the name) are some tech you get from the Pivots. Something about this is outrageously dangerous for the same reason Tetradshards are but you're fine due to potential. Exotic materials would presumably be worth some serious coin to Ashers. I guess your endowment vanished when TLT left so now the ashers are all vying for power and jockeying for position.

Maybe one thought is that TLT left detailed instructions on how to get a chromodynamo or whatever working via melange plane/quantum/entropic stuff, but this knowledge is hoarded by an alt faction of Ashers so you either have to bribe them or figure it out with the few pieces the Uncle ashers left you. Maybe there's a whole revolution between Lows and Highs brewing and you're in the middle of it. Would definitely tie back into House Asher better -- he's not manipulated by Tangle, he has his own legitimate issues and in fact given his proximity maybe he orchestrated the notes getting stolen. This would definitely mean the story would explore the political lore more, which is always interesting.

If you acquiesce to the Low demands you can bypass the entropic/quantum plane puzzles altogether, although this is actually the *harder* route because of their insane demands. Maybe they took the old Chromodynamo and you'd have to make a new one from scratch by accessing those planes and the exotics within. This would also alter the story, as then the Lows would be able to reach the Singularity and presumably gain magic potential and thus totally reshape the world. Idk if that's something I want to explore or not.

Presumably all Ashers have the ability to use Conjuncts to get Fusions because those are useful Exotics, however they don't have the ability to form a Chromodynamo, which the Lows stole the tech/notes/etc for. So I guess maybe you have to navigate the political landscape there before you can continue your mission.