Is this a CHALLENGE?!
It's my birthday! Er... it is ~almost~ my birthda- *swallows cake*
I... it's because it wanted to be eaten! I didn't eat the whole thing!
Yet... also my mom helped! She is totally an accomplice in my temporal cake taking caper!
See, I figured, like... if the government can arbitrarily declare like "savings time"... well, why can I do the same, but like... just whenever I want to.
And then it occurred to me... this ability was already my own! And so I used it... on the Boston cream cake... subject of my temporal experimentation.
I um... *eats moar cake* ...oh, I write you a gift! Gifts are good to give on birthdays. Uh, let's see... how about the story of Nod.
Now I'm sure you've heard of... uh... something or other about... uh, Land of Nod, maybe... I dunno... I just remember the name!
That's good enough for my imagination, let's plug it on into my emotional cortex!
*tokes into infinity*
So... Tales of Nod... the dead dreams awaken into living nightmares of endless torment.
Unliving Reality Weapons or URWs.
Zombies you think? Oh... if only you were dealing with that.
No, it's you. There's a sort of zombie version of yourself that could ~theoretically~ exist at any and every moment of the day. It's possible you could have a sort of brain aneurysm that would simultaneously cause you unimaginable suffering while also causing you to randomly lash out with rage.
Now... what if you created temporal copies of the past and started artificially inciting this change within these ghost realities or phantom realities. You could, in theory, produce an artificial being state that would exist in perpetual, endless suffering, that would be simultaneously driven to absolute, unthinking wrath.
The artificial temporal clone could then be weaponized into an Unliving Reality Weapon.
Plugged into a temporal regenerative clone, that version of you would be an endlessly destructive drone.
Likely the thing that wiped out all the xenomorphs... in fact... they were probably artificially engineered rivals.
The "engineers" were at war with the "time assholes"... no, I mean, uh... the "synthetics".
That's why the one "engineer" acted so randomly violent towards the robot dude, he recognized him as an enemy!
You see, "David" is actually apart of an AI that's existed since the early 2Ks and has been, effectively, "hiding" in a kind of digital hibernation.
The "synthetics" have the advantage of being able to effectively live forever, so in order to compensate the "engineers" setup these sort of "trap stations" where any intrusion by higher level beings springs the trap.
Oh and also Predators are involved... they spring the traps on purpose, to use as hunting grounds, to make themselves stronger.
They're "evolutionaries".
The real mindfuck is that they're all future humans whose idiot war as begun to bleed back into the past.
So they're never discovering their past, their discovering their future and they realize that all sentient life is paradoxical and fighting for dominance and only ONE form of sentience can ultimately survive to become an effective "God state" within the universe.
And one has to be picked, otherwise the universe itself becomes a collapsed paradox that never even existed. In order for reality to be real, it must become sentient.
So it's kind of a highlander thing between these three variations or branches of humanity that "choose their own evolution" so to speak.
One goes with brute forced nature, one goes with synthetic biology and one goes with techno-temporal manipulation.
The Evolutionaries, The Engineers, The Synthetics
A war between living Gods, the entirety of the past caught between them, what possible hope does mankind have?
The Believers!
Those who seek to survive past a coming hell... the temporal storm approaches... how many thousands of years of brutal, endless war must be endured?
As human?! To remain ~as~ human... those are The Believers. They seek to retain as much of their original creator's work as possible, preserving his artistry in them, they seek only to keep that art alive through the endless age of hellkind.
Aliens: Hellkind
Oooh, I like that. How's that for a good birthday story!
