Haunted
(Tw for Janice and Janice related activities, also eyestrain. And super far down, super complicated timeline jargon that will probably become outdated sometime soon so, beware.)
I'm starting to talk like you do.
I can't remember
WHO I AM.
THIS IS WHAT YOU WANTED, RIGHT?!?!
(Recommended song for the long lore read)
There's times where Doom's husband looks at him, and he can tell by his eyes alone, that that's not Mephy.
It wasn't enough for Janice to abuse Mephiles. It wasn't enough for her to continously try and kill his child out of blind jealousy and rage and in a fight for control. No she had to go beyond petty domestic abuse.
Although she's dead, she never left. She toys with Mephy in his sleep and makes him experience all of his worst fears and memories night after night, she fucks with his words and makes him a liar and a manipulator where only his most subtle of actions speak of who he really is, she turns him into a monster when he's angry enough that she can take the reigns, she's all but destroyed what little hope there was for him to be normal, turned him into her puppet.
All this and he has no idea he's haunted, that when he killed her she never released her razor sharp grip from his skin, and no one else knows either, everyone believes, that's who he is, that's who he always was. But Doom has always known something's not right. No, something's completely fucked when Mephiles looks at him like this. When he goes quiet, and all that's left is the molten, unadulterated hatred in his eyes.
However it's only there for a brief instant and then it's gone. It's a short enough window where Doom doesn't question it, he only assumes it's Mephy being upset, this is just how he is.
It fills Janice with great pride to know she's still fucking up her husband's life from the inside out. Just like she did all those years ago. The only thing that's changed for her is the body that she's in.
So, as you could probs tell, the other one was a warmup. You literally can't go into the Janice stuff raw without a bit of a warmup, yanno? This is the main course, and i hope you all enjoy~ i despise her but she's also been seeping into more of the lore lately, whether it be mentions of her or her signature color. So naturally i figured, yanno, why not shed some more light on this fucking boogeyman of a woman. She is the villain of my entire au, after all. At least, of the Corrupted/Neutral branch.
Now, warning, this is gonna get hella confusing, I'm gonna be talking about updated timeline nonsense. Stuff that i had to grab notes for, and i rarely have to do that with my au. So if you'd rather hop off now, this is your time to do so. Otherwise, class is in session.
The Corrupted/Neutral branch consists of:
- Corrupted
- Neutral (Genderbent doesn't count cause it's just Neutral but fucked in a completely different way)
- Second Chance
- Doomsday
- Kidnapped
- Abandoned
- Found
- Cult
- Arcane
- Overprotection
- Faithless
- Faith
- Hopeless
- Hope
- Rekindled
- Restored
- Liberation
These are all of the, at the moment, timelines that have happened the way they did because Janice existed for the first Mephiles, Phantom.
She drove him crazy. Just like Neutral Mephy, he killed her and spent three days pacing and ripping his face out of all the pictures in the house. He found the purple emerald which heightened his madness. He sacrificed Janice's kids to the void for power in the case he ever didn't have a chaos emerald on him, ensuring the Void's grip on him. He committed 06, yet he didn't forgive Sonic and Elise, so he died. As a ghost, he tried, and tried, and failed, over and over again to find a version of himself who would agree to forgive them and reset time to fix everything. Then he trapped that Mephiles, Neutral Mephy, for 15-16 years in the void and made him patch the Neutral Timeline so that what happened to Corrupted wouldn't happen to Neutral.
In doing so, he woke up his own dead children, and they began consuming time and space. So Phantom fucked around with the Neutral timeline, to create other timelines. Mainly Second Chance, Doomsday, Kidnapped, and Abandoned. Those four Crys's and Ames's were yanked into Corrupted with Neutral Crys and Ames, and the five pairs of counterparts were forced to fight their baby variants to protect every timeline.
Every timeline that has cropped up after that is a split, a twin, married into the timeline, or a child timeline of two other timeline.
Faith, Hope, and Rekindled are child timelines to Hopeless and Faithless, specifically, with Hopeless being married into the branch. Hope and Rekindled cannot exist without each other, while Faith can only exist by itself, technically creating a multi-timeline paradox
Overprotection is an early split of Neutral while Faithless is a later split from Neutral.
Cult and Arcane, twin timelines, are super early splits from Abandoned and Kidnapped (two more twin timelines), while Found and Liberation are later splits of Abandoned. The original Mephiles from Cult and Arcane, not the ones currently there, has been turned into Subject from Hopeless, while Mephiles does not naturally exist in Hopeless. The Mephiles's currently residing in Cult/Arcane, as mentioned before, was Abandoned/Kidnapped Mephiles. Yes that does mean there are 4 of this specific variant of him, and every single one of them are drastically different.
And Restored, is a split of Corrupted. A timeline where the ghost of Neutral Mephy is accidentally sent back to the very first timeline and stops Phantom from killing Sonic right before it's too late.
And of course, Neutral is the first split. The one that led to the creation of all other timelines.
Time is not relative. Time does not exist in a straight line. You cannot kill a timeline unless its strand residing in the void is destroyed/consumed. Time branches. It creates hybrid, child timelines with other timelines. It goes through similar reproduction to plants, fungi, and bacteria, spreading and growing their own strands within the void until eventually there will be an unending winding forest of them. If there is the possibility of a change drastic enough to change time, it creates a whole new timeline. And each timeline will crop up at different times, but every timeline will match up with each others' present, making the Void and time itself a truly eldritch creature.
Each timeline is biologically different in some shape or form. So you get errors. Deviations. Things that aren't possible in another timeline. People who act ever so slightly different on a fundamental level, or who look just a little off from their counterparts for seemingly no reason. If it weren't for these biological differences, timelines would not exist outside of mere tampering. Yet there are constants. Red strings of fate, the reassigning of souls, deaths that cannot be undone, only exchanged for other lives.
And all of this. Every single bit of this madness. Is due to Phantom, wanting to give the world another chance, give humanity another chance, live a normal life, do what he thought normal people did.
And he picked the one mortal woman who could fuck up reality itself and give the Void true sentience.
Sentience that has been influenced by people it favors.
Janice is my secret villain. Janice is the reason everything happened. Phantom would have never killed her and gone mad if she hadn't done the things she did to him. Things that i can only partially mention. And now, she haunts a handful of timelines by still being physically present, residing in the body of her unaware, suffering husband. The only being unchanged by time itself. She's a blight, a sickness. The creeping darkness that even the shadows are afraid of, that even the Void won't threaten. The only woman who can terrify a god. The only woman who can strike fear into an alien warlord with only a look. The only woman that can be felt and percieved by so many that don't even know she's there. Her red string of fate is forever tied to Mephy, to the point counterparts who have never met her, such as Null, still flinch at her glare and feel the intense urge to run if ever they are unfortunate to still cross paths with her.
She'd be so thrilled to see the mess she's caused.
WOOOOO OKAY EVERYONE WHO MADE IT PAST ALL THAT, GOOD JOB, HIGH FIVES ALL AROUND, ARE YOUR HEADS SMOKING CAUSE MINE SURE IS!!!!! I'm sorry i just get a huge rush whenever i get to go fully fucking mask off like this about my lore and how it works XDDDDDDD i genuinely doubt anyone else has made it this far so like, lemme know if you actually did and if you have any questions, i LOOOOOVE talking about this stuff XDDDDD
Also i totes didn't grow up as a massive Doctor Who nerd you're crazy shush-
Alright, i think i got like, one more thing lined up for you guys after this for today, you'll like it i promise, it's just Whiteboard doodles, and there'll be no long conplicated paragraphs so yanno you can get a break from my bullshit i sweeeeeaaaaar~ this is getting pinned tho. For like a while.
Love you all, see you then XDDDDD 💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖
