Chat I was looking at quinii09’s fumblenon and got a horrific idea for a (made up) mental illness.
How to put Phainon through his cycles in a modern au without typical magic:
A dreaming illness, where the characters dreams are just of the exact same day they just lived, on a constant loop. As the night of dreaming progresses, the dreams become more and more distorted until they become full on night terrors of that very day, eventually they may or may not wake from the night terrors.
And then the next night it repeats.
Again
And again
And again.
Every night, replying the day that had just been lived in increasingly more terrifying ways, where the situation devolves dictated by your subconscious in ways you cannot fight against.
And you remember all of it.
That would drive a character mad quickly. And nobody else knows.
Eventually you could find ways to medicate with its own host of other problems, but eventually you have to sleep.
And the cycle repeats.
Cause you can have about 100 dreams a night