Wait a Minute... (Guy in Worm with Trouble in Terrorist Town powers)

[Phili]

I'm not actually sick anymore. I'm putting this up because I will be busy today and I want to re-expand my backlog of chapters, and I already had this written, so I'm afraid you only get this instead of a normal chapter. On the bright side, this does mean everyone gets an extra day to put in a guess if they want the full amount of points for the bounty before Chapter 28 goes up.

Behind The Scenes – 1



Well, here we go, a little thing I thought I'd do and see if there was any interest. If there isn't, I'll stop doing it, if there is, then I'll do more. I decided to do this one, because I am sick at the moment and it is throwing off my fingers and dexterity a little (which was something I didn't even know could happen, though I suppose it sort of makes sense). So this is something where it is less frustrating to constantly correct typos from my fingers not hitting the right keys.

These will be just a look behind the scenes so I can tell you all about things like what the original plans were, how things have changed, and any information that is unlikely to be answered in the story itself (at least anytime soon).

Anyways, to start off, I thought I'd say some things about how the story originally was going to go. Originally, Dave was going to actually be a Self-Insert instead of an Original Character, and Daf straight-up didn't exist in the original plan. I'm not actually certain when my plans derailed, but it was before I actually started writing, it was back when it was just an idea in my head.

Originally, I wasn't going to randomly decide what roles he got each day either, and he wasn't going to be able to respawn. Then, I was like "what if I started out as an Old Man in Brockton Bay?" and quickly deduced I would die before the day was out and I got a new role. As a Self-Insert, I wouldn't have had any ID, or an apartment, or any food, or water. If I went to a homeless shelter, I might get into a fight and die from being punched once; if I stayed on the streets I might get into a fight and die from being punched once (because Brockton Bay), or get too exposed to the weather and die because I took the equivalent of one damage from the cold and wind; if I went to the Protectorate, I might die if Shadow Stalker is an asshole and trips me and makes me fall, or if literally anyone doesn't believe me if I tell them I will die really easily and they try to prove me wrong by poking me with a tack or something.

The only thing I could think of that might have allowed me to live, was if I went to the Protectorate, showed I was a 'Parahuman', and claimed to be exhausted and that I would like a room and food and to be able to sleep the rest of the day and that I would do power testing the next day… since the next day I would no longer be limited to the Old Man and wouldn't be stuck on one health. The problem with that, was that it would trap me into a narrow set of things I could do, and it would probably register as extremely suspicious, and give me no answer to things like Armsmaster's lie detector. If I was stuck in the Brockton Bay Protectorate with no resources or connections, I wouldn't really be able to actually influence anything, because they are, by design, crippled by Cauldron to guarantee that they can't actually do anything. It might be another story for someone like Weld or Flechette, who has connections to people from their previous city, but I would be new and not even have any civilian connections within Brockton.

I couldn't find a way out… until I decided to make the main character an OC instead. But I still wanted a way for them to have at least some meta knowledge and an outside perspective, so they could look at Earth Bet, and say 'yo that's fucked up'. Thus, came Dave, who decided on his own name with no input from me. Thus arose the questions of, 'how did he get there? What does he know? What is the source of his power?'. And thus, came Daf, who has been saving souls with the power of glitter glue since last week.

I'm glad I did, because Dave is just so much better as a character than a Self Insert ever could be without drastic alterations. He doesn't care about Earth Bet's weird rules, he doesn't know how much the locals care about them. No thinker would be able to look at him and say 'he knows about Cauldron!' And he is just so easy for everyone to underestimate, because of his personality, which will make it all the sweeter when he starts going into action.

So, someone asked about this in the NSFW thread, but Dave's personality is actually caused by a mix of things. His base personality is actually his own as an original character, from before things ™ happened to him that resulted in Daf finding him, but a disproportional amount of his personality is now based on the Yogscast, because that is a significant portion of what he can actually remember, and he sort of built parts of his new personality around it. Because they are most of what he remembers, it is kind-of like he grew up watching them as his main role models of how someone is supposed to behave and think and speak. You might actually notice bits of personality from quite a few members of the Yogscast if you look closely enough.

That is actually part of why his intelligence might seem to shift so much, because sometimes he is really in the mindset of 'I am part of a group of idiots', but sometimes he will pull out Rythian or Nilesy's big-brain-logic moments (which, to be fair, they don't show as much in TTT, they show that more in Blood on The Clocktower). Other times, he will show aspects of Ravs's ADHD, or Zoey's catlike 'Okay, I'm bored now, bye' leaving halfway through an explanation that she asked for. Similarly, he might show Briony's blind trust in a random person (hi Bella), or he might show Lewis or Duncan's suspicious side gained from years of playing TTT.