maristellarium

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(probs going to be taking that break after all so I leave everyone with the last important news that I love noan and I'm adding him to the yully friendship circle immediately)

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(DIYGCSYUCSGYGUCSUYCS THIS DISGUSTING OLD MAN REALLY PINNING DOWN YULLY IN LIKE TWO SENTENCES (even if he has no way of knowing the real motivation behind this "greediness" of hers))

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(me steepling my hands, thonking.

i played through the ark beyond and empyrea's interlude last night, and i just realised....... yulia also has a very significant chance of seeing the same kind of hallucinations/phantoms from the red tide that tempt everyone else...................

considering her motivation for even joining the military was to locate people from her past life - she would probably be insanely easily enthralled if she saw any of their illusions beckoning her to the tide.

this is ofc not considering any possibility that her supposed increased stability against the virus (like when connecting to corrupted/ascendants) would grant her a similar increased immunity to the tide. but if the tide is able to manipulate people's minds at all in the first place, causing them to see people who clearly aren't there and cause them to lower their guards enough to follow them against all obvious reason - well, it doesn't sound too far-fetched to me!!

in any case, very fun and chewy thonk for me.......... esp if i imagine this happening during the chapter where the tide itself debuts. oh the fun dramatic chewiness of yully getting unwittingly lured to step into the tide bc she saw phantoms of her mother and friends, only being stopped by the gray ravens strong-arming her back. huhuhuhuhohohoh)

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(YIPEEEEE SSS+!!!!!!!!!!!!)

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(i cant believe wanshi's affection story has him extremely accurately nail down what yulia is like. as if i couldn't adore this man enough already)

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so i got curious and checked to see if the codex has the commandant birthday story, since i missed opening the game on the birthday i inputted for my own profile and i think the codex does have the story archived, thankfully!!

well the first version anyway. turns out there's a second one that i haven't seen and therefore have no access to. :')

anyway, the birthday story that i can access is super cute regardless, and quite enjoyable in terms of characterization too!! very fun to read.

one interesting tidbit stuck out to me though, this line:

it's interesting bc i think it can apply quite well to Yulia in relation to her Deep OC Lore particularly owo

considering she's a reincarnated person, it's quite possible her birth date doesn't actually match the one she had in her former life - especially when i consider that in said life, the calendar type has long since changed from Georgian to a completely new (and made-up) version to accommodate the centuries that have since passed.

im sure at some point she's spent a bored afternoon converting the calendar dates to see when significant dates, holidays and birthdays from that different calendar line up with the Georgian one, and most likely, a part of her still follows the calendar style from her former life - at least where it concerns more special dates and also just for her own internal thinking.

all of which is to say - to Yulia, she probably feels like her proper birthday is supposed to be the one from her former life.

her current birth date on Babylonia is likewise something of a formality, just the date of her rebirth and her current life's start. a less significant detail, a touch of flavor to describe the person everyone believes her to be.

but as she celebrates this date with other constructs and friends, she'll probably shift from that perspective and start to appreciate both birthdates instead.

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since I finished ch17, I've had a particular thonk, and that thonk basically boils down to me rewriting a part of the story to fit more with Yulia's Deep OC Lore implications - for complete funsies. because I can. and I said so.

will preface by saying this is just for my own amusement so this doesn't really need to apply for interactions. if you want. maybe. ww

anyway tl;dr my headcanon is that Yulia woke herself up from her coma somewhat on her own. sorta. there was a little deus ex machina bit to it, but at least half of it was her own efforts.

as for how that even works - Deep OC Lore Time!!

so in Yulia's original setting, there was a place known as The Dreamland - a pocket dimension which only select individuals were allowed to access, and with this location being created, safeguarded and maintained by higher beings (that tend to resemble angels).

technically speaking, accessing the Dreamland entails separating the soul from the body, after which it is transported through a preset route bypassing the third and fourth and fifth dimensions to reach the Dreamland's hidden location; upon arrival, a physical vessel constructed from the soul's preferences and experiences is formulated around the soul both to house it and to protect it while it's detached from its source body.

from the layman perspective though, anyone who can access the Dreamland just needs to be at a deep level of unconsciousness - usually at the REM stage of asleep, or otherwise actually knocked out for a period. of course, being in a coma also counts as being unconscious enough; for those with access permissions—the Dreamers—they will often be pulled into the Dreamland in such an event, where they have the privilege of being able to continue having conscious experiences while their actual body heals, as well as use the Dreamland's monitoring systems to keep tabs on what's going on in reality if they wish.

anyway you can see where I'm going with this headcanon, yeah?

so for the events of ch17, while Yulia is indeed in a coma, her soul has since been whisked to the Dreamland. and got stuck there.

Even after death and reincarnation, she technically maintains her access permissions to the Dreamland, as her soul has not changed or degraded to a point that her permissions have expired via incompatibility or would be rejected by the Dreamland's soul verification system. That said, this would be her first time visiting the Dreamland after her reincarnation - because the place has since been "deactivated" (due to the universal reset and stuff), with its Administrator absent.

despite this essentially defunct state of the place, the Dreamland's systems aren't actually offline - merely on a sort of low power, sleep mode state. which entails not pulling in anyone with access rights, like it normally would, but nonetheless remaining active and monitoring itself, its systems, and any exterior connections—to, say, a former dreamer who by all counts shouldn't even be alive, but nonetheless is, and also retains her access permissions.

so when Yulia gets unfortunately knocked into a traumatic head injury that entails prolonged unconsciousness due to health concerns, the Dreamland's systems briefly sparked to life and automatically grabbed her soul on an emergency basis.

and the thing is. this place is. basically running on low battery. on purpose. because there's no one with admin privileges to run anything properly.

so Yulia gets yoinked across a couple of dimensions, dropped into a deathly quiet void, and has no way to return manually like she would have been able to when the place is running as usual. sure, she could probably wait for her real body to recover in full and see if any lingering automated services will return her - but considering what the situation was before she landed there, she's not keen on twiddling her thumbs on a risky maybe.

so what has she been doing for the past three months in ch17? hacking into the Dreamland's systems using what user privileges she still has, either trying to force a return to her body or otherwise gain something akin to admin-level privileges so that she can write up a proper removal order.

of course, in-between all of that, she tries to keep a basic tab on what's going on on Earth after what happened in Pulia Park using the Dreamland's monitoring systems. but she only maintains these observations for the first month or two, when she sees how absolutely dire things are spiralling, and turns off the monitoring to focus on her hacking attempts.

at this point, I'm split two ways on how to go about this headcanon - like either Yulia does manage to wrangle something akin to admin privileges and hurries back the first instant she can, or. Deus ex Ishmael still happens, but differently.

as mentioned, the Dreamland is supposed to be maintained by higher order beings. perhaps, while Yulia is furiously headbutting her way through things, Ishmael happens to notice the interdimensional connection - and currently, immense distance - between Yulia's comatose body and her actual spirit far, far away. as such, she reaches out to the other end of that connection, pleasantly surprised to find a very conscious (and different-looking) Commandant, who has been trying to work around access privileges and system restrictions in an Observer-level creation that prevent any sort of flow or return between soul and body.

perhaps, intrigued by the fact that this Commandant is more aware of higher-order things and concepts than it would seem, Ishmael lends her a hand - using her own Observer status to act as a substitute Administrator or briefly force the Dreamland's systems to give admin rights to Yulia and let her return to her body. Ishmael may have also thrown in a little bodily restoration while she was at it, judging from the Commandant's apparent good health after 3 months of a whole coma lmao.

tl;dr of the Deep OC Lore - yully's soul for isekaied for three months instead of being in a legit coma, and so, she tries to reverse isekai herself back to her body. ishmael may or may not have given her hand in the reverse isekai-ing.

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(me sitting in extra depresso land thinking about how roland Might be feeling about this - potentially nothing bc he's just "playing a role" here, but i like to think at least some small part of him is like, 1% empathetic and just doesnt wanna admit it

but im also feeling extra waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah over this bc in the hypothetical scenario yully ever talks to roland about her specific goals in life - beyond her top priority of finding "familiar faces", she has quite seriously considered "finding a nice, quiet place with a cute house and a field full of flowers like asters and sunflowers" like literally.

bc one of her dearest "familiar faces" hoped to have a peaceful place like that for himself, and so, wanting to uphold that memory as well, yully lowkey wants to make that place a reality................

and now there's This whole convo and im like. waaaaaah...)

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Where is Karenina when she needs her... Her fortune today says to cuddle a cat, but the nearest cat-like anything for miles around would probably be in Babylonia's Engineering Department.

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// wuwa spoilers

(they really went persona - the masks were just foreshadowing.....)

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(goddddddddddddddd the pink and red and the flowers makes her resemble maria a bit and its making me so ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh marimariiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

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(QUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! GOD THIS COATING IS AS PRETTY AS I THOUGHT ITD BE!!!)

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The combination of 'unnervingly flawless self-control' with 'occasional tendency to engage in reckless, dangerous, and borderline self-destructive or death-seeking behaviour' in a character is SUCH catnip to me

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Trista Mateer, from "Aphrodite Made Me Do It," originally published in 2019

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(COZY CERBERUS.............)

(i literally logged in three days ago)

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so many facades. you lost track of which one is you. maybe none of them are. maybe you never were.