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Look Outside Posting part 9

Spoilers for the Fungal Lair!

Y'know, I actually think Phillippe might have once been human too.

The other disguised fungus people all were human. Sylvain and Jean-Pierre are positively identified by more than one person as members of the custodial staff, and Claire looks like she has a body under all the fungus. (She also says "Humans are so stupid. I can't believe I used to be one.")

The reason Phillippe's personhood, specifically, was in question, was what he says in combat. "There was never a Phillippe."

"I don't even have a name! I'm a mushroom! This was all an act! Phillippe was never real!"

Physically, his true form is pretty similar to the other three. The only real delineation is what he says, and the fact that, instead of a human form, he's choosing to look like a whimsical moth that just barely passes scrutiny as a benign Cursed.

I don't think he was an actual moth, or some other animal, either. He has a French name fitting for the setting. He's familiar with idioms, and fairy tale tropes, and the concept of taxes, and heteronormativity. (And he thinks moths follow light because they like it.)

Recall what Claire says: humans are stupid. Jean-Pierre calls Sam a "pathetic little mortal". This demonstrates a certain attitude within the fungal circle.

I do believe the Spore Mother's best and most ruthless actor is simply embarrassed about what he used to be.

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My Sybil theory

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Look Outside posting part 8.5

Here are a few interesting tidbits from the combat files.

The furnace ticks are actually completely immune to cold damage, which might mean they're the source of the frost covering the Furnace. Not even the Pompom family is that cold-resistant.

Speaking of, Argot, the big tongue enemy in the freezer, is classified as "Frostbitten" for a reason. They don't look the part, but they have the same damage resistances as the others.

Most of the Freds inflict their associated emotional status effect when they hit you. Tumor Fred is no exception - he's able to share his Pain with you. If he actually hit you, that is.

"Corruption" damage is a type dealt by nightmares, and any other attacks that do spooky, eldritch, soul-withering things. Humans are weak to it, and the cursed vary in their susceptibility. The nightmares (duh), generic toothy mutants, rats, fungus, and the SWAT truck's tongues resist it, while Lyle, the onlookers, Panopticon, and Stargazer are weak to it. (Noticing any commonalities there?? 👀) And the entire tooth family, oddly enough, are completely immune to it. (In theory, you could safely hit Joel with the Hellsword! Edit: I have been informed that that's not the right kind of corruption damage. You could hit LEIGH, though.)

There's one damage type that's only referred to as "flesh" damage, that no enemy uses. There are exactly three sources of it: Tumor Fred's tumor grenades, the Hellsword, and Hellen taking her mask off, for some reason. Humans are weak to this too.

Leigh's two forms as an enemy are almost negligibly close in stats, perhaps suggesting that her giant monster form is less physical than it appears. The Grinning Beast is also one of the aforementioned toothy mutants - guys like Tumorhead, Eyecluster, Famine, or Fangipede, who don't really have a nifty theme to speak of. Stargazer's victims, like Spine, also fall under this category. These are all immune to flesh damage. Thus, Leigh is one of the only ones who Hellen could take her mask off in front of without any harm.

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Look Outside Posting Part 8: Madness

(Branching off of this earlier post)

Considering how benign the Visitor's motives are revealed to be, it's weird how dangerous its victims are. There are a lot of ways to break a psyche that don't make you try to kill people; by no means is that the default state of a human brain.

Most people, upon transforming, will go insane. What this looks like, exactly, varies. Panopticon is murderously protective of a staff-only room. Edwin's concept of normal human anatomy is altered, causing him to benevolently dismember people. Crawling Hand wants to like... squeeze you.

But the end result of all of these is still wanting to harm and kill people.

Judging by the disparate states of mind involved, it's not that that's just the kind of insanity everyone gets, either. The nature of being turned predisposes a person to aggressive behavior, as an effect alongside other mental symptoms.

(The actual reason is that they're enemies in a video game. Shh. Ssshhhh.)

The few firsthand accounts we get suggest that insanity is often brought on by all the new stimuli from a changing body overloading the brain. I personally have a theory adding onto this, that the primary cause of it is the growth of new brain matter connected to the existing brain.

This explains the unpredictability of the psychological effects, why the physical extent of transformation doesn't always correlate with sanity decline, the origin of the new aggressive impulses that the conscious mind tries to justify, and the lack of an adjustment period needed for Cursed to control their altered bodies. It also tracks with some unusual cases- Jeanne, Laurent, and possibly Rat Hole all had new brains form entirely separate from their existing ones, the predatory impulses of which were very clear.

That doesn't explain the reason for this behavior, though. Let's look at some theories:

Aggression helps Cursed spread/protect/feed themselves.

Cursed are tough to predict because they aren't natural creatures. They neither evolved nor were designed, and they certainly don't need help spreading.

As for it being useful, I'm not convinced of that. They universally fail to flee when heavily wounded, and it's not clear if they even fight amongst each other or technically need food at all. Their aggression is to the detriment of their own survival.

Aggressive Cursed are just easier to encounter/more likely to survive.

Hiding seems a lot more beneficial in the chaotic immediate aftermath of the Visitor's arrival, and Sam is going through (closed-off) houses pretty dang thoroughly. I'm sure there are a few that go unseen, but there's not enough room in the walls for all of them. There's also a distinct lack of Cursed corpses about.

Predation is the most elementary motivation for a complete mind to have, therefore the new brainlets develop it.

This makes some sense for something like an amoebic blob of goo that devours organic matter, but not so much for creatures that don't particularly seem to want to eat you. Their focus is on the killing part.

They also don't seem to be particularly unintelligent. The independent brains of the characters mentioned previously could speak and devise plans.

Aggression is innate to the Visitor's mind in a way that isn't obvious.

Recall from post 1 that the Cursed have been modified to act as extensions of the Visitor's body. Their tendencies might be reflecting a less conscious function of the Visitor's nervous system.

Thinking about what they actually do, very few of the dangerous monsters are going out and hunting people. They rove around a small area and attack if they notice someone enter it, and for the most part they don't pursue someone who leaves line of sight. The less is left of their human cognition, the closer they stick to this script.

It resembles guarding a territory, but they don't choose valuable places to defend, either. They just sort of evenly space themselves out wherever they happened to end up.

They also generally don't express negative emotions toward you, the intruder, to explain their aggression. They commonly simply feel positively about the pure act of killing, or don't seem to know what they're doing at all.

It makes me think of an immune response.

All living things have their own smaller intruders. Those that parasitize the Visitor could easily be just as complex, or more, than you are.

The Cursed are performing the important function of unseen, unknowable independent elements of the Visitor's physiology: to capture and destroy invaders.

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I did some tallying for every enemy, companion and NPC in Look Outside, in the interest of statistics.

Excluding all non-unique enemies, non-humans, and those being influenced by other Cursed (like the fungi or Rafta's polycule), there are 130 distinct Cursed in the apartment building.

I wanted to see what the prognosis might be for a given person who was turned. Here's a pie chart!

Safe are those whose sanity made it through apparently intact. They might defend themselves if attacked outright, but they show no signs of aggression. Examples: Fred, Hellen, the cafegoers, the sewer kids.

Those who fall under Conditionally Dangerous are often violent or at least unstable. They can, however, usually still be reasoned with or pacified somehow. Examples: Leigh, Jeanne (the heads), Steve, Taxidermy, the rats.

The Indiscriminately dangerous are those that attack on sight. They still typically have some sort of varying internal motivations to do so, but, at least from Sam's point of view, they cannot be held at bay except by killing them.

Zeroing in a little more, witnessing the Visitor yourself actually seems safer than we initially gave it credit.:

These are divided between those who witnessed the Visitor personally, and those who were infected by another Cursed. (I did have to make educated guesses about the origins about a lot of the enemies, and some were excluded for a lack of clues.)

It makes sense that being infected would be riskier, since that causes a similar mutation to the transmitter, and aggressive Cursed are more likely to attack and infect people.

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the existence of the hellride or whatever its called makes me very confused. does hell exist in look outside? does heaven exist? was hell created when the hell ride looked at the visitor, or did it always exist? how did the hellride even look at the visitor??? its a car!!! what on earth.!!!! was it created when people in a carpool looked at the visitor?? then how would the car be transformed??

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It's time for some Look Outside posting. Are you ready?

I'll be analyzing the mechanics of the Visitor's effects a bit. Sam meets most everyone in the apartment building, and often gets firsthand accounts from them too, so we have a pretty good set of samples to draw from. Yay!

Part 1: The Why

First up is my personal theory for why being observed by the Visitor affects humans the way it does.

Here's what we know about it: (Spoilers, kind of.)

Being perceived by the Visitor causes humans to transform into unique monsters, on varying timescales. Its perception inherently changes things when it observes them, but humans and other animals are especially affected. What it does to them is "communicating... in a way".

Humans that transform tend to have a "theme" related to what they were near or what they were thinking about when contact occurred.

The Visitor only perceives living things when it, itself, is perceived by them in some manner. This is why looking at a photo or drawing of it will also cause a person to change.

The Visitor's interstellar size means that it takes time for the rest of its body to be aware of what each part is seeing.

The Visitor, prior to meeting Sam, had no concept of itself as distinct from other beings, as it has never met another living entity before, and it's used to independent things that it communicates with just being other portions of itself.

Now here's my thoughts:

When the Visitor looks at someone, it's assuming this is an unfamiliar piece of itself, and it forms a connection with them in the same way it would a neighboring chunk of its own nervous system that isn't physically connected closely enough for signals to travel all the way between them quickly.

The bond forged by the Visitor starting to perceive through someone puts their whole body in a volatile, changeable state due to having a steady portion of its attention.

When it does this, it can barely make sense of the human thoughts and concepts coming from the new "neuron". When a new one is especially salient to it, it reinforces the concept, trying to think about what that is - often through (what it thinks is) the node of itself that's picking up that idea. The human.

Think of it as rotating a cow in your mind, except to do this, you turn someone else into a cow. And then rotate them.

And of course, the human body isn't an alien monster neuron, so when it gets beamed with one of the person's own thoughts reflected from the confused Visitor, in its volatile state, it starts to distort.

The people whose new forms reflect a clear concept are products of this. Consider the case of Rana, who resembles a spider. In her story, she's an arachnophobe, and was worried about a spider she lost track of back in her house.

She's not a realistic spider, though - she's black, and hairy, and prominently fanged, with way more than eight glowing red eyes haphazardly arranged all over her head. She's an arachnophobe's idea of a frightening spider.

The monsters who sort of just resemble monsters more than any idea in particular, like Lokjaw, Stretchface, or the wacky creatures seen on the roof, could be products of more abstract thoughts, but they could also be the few that received an alien thought from the Visitor rather than having one of their own fed back to them, resulting in an unpredictable change.

When a witness goes back inside, and the Visitor can't back up the signals it's getting from them with its own perception of the area, its attention eventually wanes, and they're set aside in favor of other nodes whose feedback makes more sense to it, concluding the peak period of mutation.

Next time: a little on "contagious" transformations.

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Pages from the upcoming revamp of Rust and Humus

(artist link)

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Pages from the upcoming revamp of Rust and Humus

(artist link)

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Trying to figure out a way for nonlethal samshadow to work in the span of only 15 days, and my beautiful idea is that Shadow still doesn't really know why Sam got Scared, but it sees Sam look up stuff on his laptop and realizes it can do research on humans while he's gone. So Sam just comes back to his laptop open and his search history being shit like "human lung removal effects" "human dismemberment" "death" "dying" "human heart removal" "human dead" "things that hurt humans" "human pain why?" And Sam like "WHO THE FUCK HAS BEEN GOOGLING GORE ON MY LAPTOP???" Everyone just stares at him in bafflement except Dan who insults his laptop's specs, as if he would ever use such a subpar machine. Hmph. Meanwhile Shadow is in the corner thinking to itself "oh god humans die if they're killed??? 😦 Uhhh... Oops."

Sam figures it out eventually and is horrified that Shadow was going to rip him apart but also finds it weirdly sweet that it was putting in the effort to learn. And they kiss about it or something idk.

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Monty thought that was the most badass thing ever. All the explosions, swirling colors and lights, finally going all-out with their most hardcore weaponry. He entered a sort of zen state until he finally reached for another bomb and found he'd used the last of his entire stock.

He was pretty satisfied with all of that. Not even the screaming and running around still going on in the absence of any opponents could keep Monty from drifting away from it all.

The dull laughter gradually slowed to a stop. Monty's mouth hung slightly open as he gazed into the middle distance. Something lit behind his eyes.

He began to burn.

The pillar of violet fire had taken seconds to completely engulf Monty's form. They had to leave him there on the roof, silent and still standing there, motionless. He felt a flicker of concern for Xaria for just a moment when the others left his view, but the thought was consumed, leaving only a deep sense of peace.

They did come back for him later. He wasn't violent, thankfully, but it was difficult to discern whether Monty was still in there. He seems to have finally burnt himself out.

The only words anyone has been able to coax out of him were a "Yes" (in answer to asking him to come back to the room), and infrequent, monosyllabic observations of his surroundings.

Most people are somewhat scared of him, despite all the other "monsters" around, and his apparent harmlessness. He can no longer tell anyone, but his current appearance is more or less lifted wholesale from an album cover he saw once.

(Xaria)

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Look Outside Posting Part 7.5: Lyle

Okay, this one is just something I noticed and couldn't incorporate into any grand theories.

Before the Visitor, Lyle was taking black and white photos. His darkroom is lit by a standard red safelight, which is only usable for black and white photography - color photography needs either a different, very specific wavelength that it can tolerate, or total darkness.

(Looking at the photo yourself while developing it has you provide color with your own organs.)

After the Visitor, Lyle's, erm, "homemade" photos are in full color, and use instant film, needing only minutes to develop in air, not even needing his darkroom.

He's been upgraded! Possibly against his will, considering he was using the more old-fashioned equipment before.

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Look Outside Posting Part 7: Seconds

"I was fine, I... looked at the thing b-before. There isn't much else it can do to m-me!" says Lyle, returning your photograph of the outside.

"Haven't felt any new heads budding in a little while. I'm afraid that going outside could give me another growth spurt, though," says Jeanne.

That's funny. Which of them is right?

My first theory hypothesizes that the bodies of witnesses eventually settle down as they leave the Visitor's field of vision, and it gradually loses interest in them. This fits better with Jeanne's belief, that being exposed anew could cause another burst of development for the mutations. Do we have any evidence for that happening?

We still don't know for sure that Jasper is Cursed, per se. He only took a "tiny peek", through a filtered lens.

But the evidence is for that being the case, at least to some degree. There's the bright red eyes that are a lot harder to buy as natural than those of the other three astronomers; the mask, and the insistence on robes while well within the interior of the building; the suspiciously hidden hands in the ritual scene; and Beryl's statement that he has, in fact, changed since looking through that telescope, even if she attributes his demeanor to other things.

His possible forms on the rooftop all share a similar eyes-n-worms motif as well, while the others don't really have such a uniting factor. Already having a little bit of eyes and/or worms under there might dictate the form he takes on further exposure.

For another example that's a little more concrete, let's look at Sybil's flesh-vines. She spent months slowly breaking down into goop - but it's clear that she must have had a sudden, massive burst of growth on the night of the Visitor's arrival, because of the meat walls and sealed doors. The giant lump in the parking lot, or the blocked-off women's restroom, would definitely not remain unnoticed. The only obvious thing to provoke this sudden change is seeing the Visitor with her own eyes.

Lyle does look the same, whether he's uncloaked before or after seeing your photo. I suppose he does have a point, though, about there being not much more it could do to him, and it seems a bit less attention-grabbing to simply see an image of it again.

My headcanon is that he gains his fourth toe then and doesn't notice.

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This made me go check the line about what he actually wants Deltora for, besides revenge: "I need it for the gems and metals beneath its earth, and for its calm southern harbours, perfect for launching ships of war."

Neither of these things is actually ruined by paving over the whole continent! At most, it'll get rid of the handy workforce of subjugated citizens, and make it slightly harder to provision servants running mines or harbors there. And by this point, the downright embarrassing amount of plucky heroic resistance probably makes it worth the cost to finally get rid of them. He just had to set the Mirror up to give the initial hint for the first map piece when he finally ran out of patience.

The magic and wildlife of the land has pretty much always just served as an active hindrance to the Shadow Lord. He ultimately couldn't ever get a dragon of his own, and he did already drive those to extinction and settle for a knockoff version, so it's not unprecedented for him.

Plus, the map fragments just made it easy to get to the right location (and encouraged a certain order, meaning there was time to set up bonus countermeasures at the less easily accessible ones like the Del and Isle Sisters.) They still had to fight the scary things in question.

Gosh, I gotta read Landovel already. I miss Deltora.

ive said before that the shadow lord was stupid as fuck for letting lief find out about and attempt to destroy the four sisters when he could've just kept his damn mouth shut and won, but the degree to which he turned that quest into a very easy scavenger hunt was beyond ridiculous. why would each sister's guardian have a map to the next one that they drop when they die?? i know it was a setup to unleash the magic concrete if all four were destroyed, but the way he lined them up makes it seem like the magic concrete was his preferred outcome, and that can't be true. his goal has always been to conquer deltora and win control of all their natural resources and weird magic shit, not pave over it. he wins if the concrete thing happens, but it would be a pyrrhic victory at best because all he'd walk away with is a really big parking lot. did he finally, after thousands of years, just reach the point where he was like "you know what, fuck deltora, this is way too much trouble." and give up?

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Xaria always tries to play it cool, but unlike Monty, she actually knew what the stakes were in that fight on the roof. She held it together long enough to get away, and then utterly freaked the hell out.

Monty was changing too, going up like a burning paper. She wouldn't be getting any sense of grounding from his presence. The inseparable duo each transformed alone.

A rattling skeleton loosely tethered. A predator's profile, shrouded in darkness. At least for now, Xaria is no longer home. She might have gone into the ductwork.

(Monty)

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Sleep Paralysis Demon

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A quick addendum on the astronomers!

As I suspected, although their hands are the same shade of blue in their sprites, they are not blue people. They're wearing gloves, which they take off for the ritual, letting us see their actual skin tones.

...you want to move forward a little more, Jasper? So we can have a look at those hands? No? Okay.

Look Outside Posting Part 5.5

Something fishy is going on around here. Hold onto your asses, this is going to be my most earth-shattering theory yet.

The blue people are few, but they are present just about everywhere, and they're unmistakable when they're still human. Papineau. Xaria. Jeanne. Possibly Mutt (who's bluer in his overworld sprite). A suspicious number of blue mutants.

I don't think this can be wholly attributed to lighting or artstyle. The lighting is a little bluer in the hallway, for instance, but people who aren't blue are still not blue there when the door is opened. In the overworld, blue party members are still that color. The difference is pretty stark in the scenes where blue and nonblue people are side by side.

Take Claire as an example - she's partially blue, found in the same place as Jean-Pierre, and her not-blue patches are the same tone as him, but he isn't blue in the slightest.

What's more, it can't be a Visitor thing at all. Papineau and Xaria are not witnesses. Everybody finds it totally unremarkable and not worth commenting on - except, crucially, for Roaches, who sees fit to call Papineau "bIG BluE mAN". They can all see it, it's just NORMAL.

Okay. People can just be blue in Look Outside world. Why not? I mean, the astronomers have pretty unusual eye colors. It's just a thing that happens, I guess.

......but like, why?

I'm sure we can figure this out. Let's see now...

Blue skin is not unheard of in the real world, though it's waaay less common than "multiple normalized instances per apartment building".

The first way this has been known to happen is methemoglobinemia, a condition that's famously associated with the Blue Fugates, a Kentucky family from the 1800s who carried multiple copies of the gene for it.

With this condition, you produce a lot of methemoglobin - a faulty version of hemoglobin that incorporates iron ions in a different state than they're supposed to be, making it unable to bind to oxygen and do its job. The blood of someone with high methemoglobin is brownish, and the skin can take on a blue tone. Levels higher than that also cause adverse symptoms like headaches, seizures, and poor coordination.

This is unlikely to be the culprit, though. The last "blue" Fugate ceased to be blue in the 1900s, as by then they weren't as isolated and were getting medical care that cleared up their symptoms. Even if the gene was extremely common in Look Outside, the medication that treats it is readily available. The striking blue skin tone also seems to mostly happen with white people, and it wouldn't look anywhere near as noticeable with the majority POC residents of the apartment.

The other real-world possibility is something like argyria.

Pictured here is Paul Karason, a man best known for his extensive use of colloidal silver, an alternative medicine, in the belief that it treated a variety of health conditions. He's the most famous example of this condition, having taken it for about two decades.

Silver compounds are pretty harmless as far as we know, but taking them long-term causes them to be build up in deposits in the skin, gradually shifting it to a blue-grey.

It being a common individual choice in the setting would make some sense, and the gradual build-up would explain why some like Claire and Papineau aren't totally blue yet. (It might also mean Monty has it too, as he's sort of mildly bluish-grey?) Depending on the cultural context for it, I could see that being something Papineau would do as a traditional thing or for similar "health" reasons, and Xaria and Monty might do as a counterculture thing.

I don't think we have enough to say it's this one specific substance, of course. The shade doesn't really match exactly, Xaria is awfully young to have been taking colloidal silver for years, and I don't think there's any other signs that Look Outside was some kind of alternate timeline prior to the cataclysm.

But I do think the mechanism, normalized use of some substance that builds up in the skin, goes some way toward a possible explanation here.