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#also - not being able to sleep in the afterlife plus the infinite darkness plus the unwanted company could equal time feeling longer that it
demonboyhalo · 3 years
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Ranboo brings up such a good point about c!Wilbur lying about the afterlife. While we know time is fucked bc cc!Wilbur made it canon, the characters have no clue. honestly, I'd argue it makes more sense for Ranboo and the others to doubt Wilbur's words rather than believe him straight up. I mean, They have zero proof that Wilbur isn't the same guy who blew up L'Manburg. For all they know, he could have spent less than a day in limbo before Dream revived him...
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Now and Then Synopsis and Character Cheat-Sheet
As of writing this I’ve completed the prologue and Chapters 1 and 2, and have outlined the rest of the series.  It is by no means a finished project, therefore this synopsis will not be inclusive of every little detail.
With that in mind, here we go!
Shawn Dalton is a normal kid.  He’s a middle child, a high schooler, and a neighbor to a whacky pair of siblings.  He has four sisters, a school bully, and lives a normal life.  The story starts on a school day.  He’s woken by his sister Lily in the morning, gets water thrown on him by his sister Lucy, goes to school, gets bullied... a normal day.  A normal week.  A normal life.  The only kink is that his little sister Lucy is friends with the little sister of his bully, Rogers, and he learns a secret about his bully that he definitely shouldn’t know.  Rogers, who he’s always assumed was a cis boy, is, in fact, a trans boy, stealth at school and closeted at home.
Shawn keeps this information to himself.  He could pursue it, find out more about Rogers’ home life, but... nah.  He decides to just live his life, and he’s doing fine... mostly... until the night his mother hits a drunk kid in the family minivan and he gets strangled by his seatbelt.  He dies.
This... this is where things get weird.
Shawn wakes at the beginning of the story, with a vivid sense of deja vu.  He’s woken by his sister Lily, sees Lucy coming with the water... and ducks just in time to avoid getting a faceful of water.  He gets to school and the same thing happens--he sees the hit from Rogers’ coming before it happens, and ducks just in time.  He’s still beat up, but now he’s beginning to suspect something is off.  He has memories that he shouldn’t have, of things happening before.  It’s as if a literal ghost of another timeline is hanging over his shoulders, telling him what to do.
And the ghost has one (or really two) very important things for him to do.  First, it stops the crash that would have killed Shawn and the drunk kid that Mama Dalton hit.  Then, it gets Shawn to investigate Rogers’ home life.  
It’s there that he learns another secret, an even larger and darker one--that Rogers is abused at home.  And Shawn, a boy with a heart of gold, decides that even though Rogers has bullied him for years he can’t just sit on this secret.
So first things first--he recruits his sisters and his neighbors (who are Rogers’ aunt and uncle, the adopted siblings of Rogers’ mother) to help him talk to Rogers about it.  It goes about as well as expected, and he winds up with a concussion.  He then decides to face Rogers’ mother directly, to confront her about abusing her children--and in doing so causes his own death a second time.  Rogers’ mother is not to be trifled with, and his already concussed brain makes matters all the worse.  He dies a second time.
And then there were two.  Two timelines, two ghosts, two deaths.
It’s here that he finds himself in the afterlife.  His recently deceased ghost falls into soulsleep, the healing sleep that all new ghosts fall into upon entering the ethereal realm.  The first ghost, however, is wide awake--and this time he sees a bunch of ghosts, who are waiting for him.  It’s six ‘bandits’ (mutated ghosts) and one spirit-jumping human.  They offer Shawn’s ghost a deal--a wish, that will take him back in time to the beginning of the story so he can try again.  He’s suspicious, but he takes the wish--with the caveat that Shawn #2 also comes with him.  Chapter 2 closes at the beginning of the story, with Shawn waking up to two ghosts hovering over him.
From there the story is a series of timelines, each getting progressively weirder.  Behind the scenes, the bandits watch Shawn and Company through a series of cracks in spacetime as he travels back in time again and again.  One of them is a genie/human hybrid ghost, whose ephemeral body grows wishes like tumors, so they have an almost infinite amount.  The downside to this is that every time Shawn uses a wish to get back and add another ghost to the timeline, he causes another crack in spacetime to appear, and his amalgam ghost and the world around them gets a little more unstable.  Still, he’s determined to find the perfect timeline, where everything goes right.
In one timeline, Shawn joins Rogers in bullying people.  In one timeline, Shawn overshoots and the amalgam ghost attaches to his mother before he’s born, causing himself to never be born in the first place.   In one timeline, there’s a fungal zombie virus that nearly wipes out the planet.  In another, the world is full of magic and there is a war between light and dark being waged.  Etc, etc, etc.
The universe, meanwhile, is slowly unraveling.  Shawn’s amalgam ghost has caused dozens if not hundreds of cracks in spacetime and the ethereal realm is folding in on itself.  There’s also the question of the Bandits--one of which holds a secret that may very well be the key to the perfect timeline.  Will Shawn be able to get to it before everything falls apart?  Will the gods come in and wipe out all the Bandits before he can get to the secret?  What would Shawn give for the perfect timeline?
Stay tuned to find out!
CHARACTERS: 
Dalton Family: 
Lucy, 4 years old: an exuberant and stubborn kid whose only wish in life is to wear a skirt on the first day of school.  The only problem?  She’s trans and mom won’t let her!
Ana, 8 years old: a kid who always has a witty response, Ana is the bookworm of the family.  
Shawn, 17 years old: the middle child.  He’s fairly meek and doesn’t stand up for himself much.  He has a weak stomach but a heart of gold.
Kari, 18 years old: the traditionalist of the family, but also the most forward-thinking.  She wears a hijab and favors dark lipstick.  She and Shawn get into the most shenanigans due to being the closest in age.  In the timeline with the Light VS. Dark war she goes by the name Vi (short for Violet) and kicks major ass.
Lily, 21 years old: The eldest of the pack and the most reserved.  She hates being the eldest and would like nothing more than to be left alone.  Gay and closeted, she has a secret girlfriend that no one but Kari knows about.
Mama Dalton, ?? years old: Born in Pakistan to an arab family, Mama came to the US seeking a better life.  Her husband still lives in Pakistan with her father, but she has all the kids.  She works as an arab-english translator for the hospital.
Rogerson Family: 
Mandy, 7: the ‘baby’ of the family, Mandy is a quiet girl.  She’s friends with Lucy and tells her secrets sometimes.
Seb, 14: A little snot.  He is only rarely targetted at home and is very fond of their mother despite being scared of her temper.  He rarely changes over the course of different timelines--he’s pretty consistently awful.
Danny ‘Rogers’, 17: trans boy, bully, and abused kid, the ‘eldest’ sibling.  He takes the brunt of the hits at home and then turns around and hits people at school to feel powerful.  Often portrayed as a dragon.  Is sometimes sympathetic, sometimes antagonistic, and sometimes neutral, all depending on the timeline and the actions that Shawn takes.
???: the real eldest sibling, who was disowned by their mother when he got a girl pregnant at 13.  Mandy is technically his child, but Ms. Rogerson is raising her as her own.
Ms. Rogerson: the abusive mother herself.  She is consistently an antagonist and rarely if ever has a change of heart.  Emotionally and physically abusive.  Often portrayed as a hydra.
Uncle P: the brother of Ms. Rogerson.  He’s depressed as heck, struggles with his weight, and is just about the closest thing that the Rogerson kids have to a father figure.
Aunt Morgan: the sister of Ms. Rogerson.  She and Ms. Rogerson don’t get along because Morgan is trans, and Ms. Rogerson (and their foster father) is very against that.  She’s into fashion, loves kids, and has a different hair-do every day of the week.
Mr. ----------, deceased: The foster father of Ms. Rogerson, P, and Morgan, plus a few others.  He and his wife split over irreconcilable differences after he took the stance that his trans daughter wasn’t a woman.  He does not show up as a ghost.
Ghosts: 
Obscura: Morgan and P’s dead sister.  She and Morgan were fraternal twins and can sort of converse from either side of the veil, but only with each other.  Obscura can talk to other ghosts and Morgan can talk to other humans, but Obscura is the only ghost Morgan can talk to and vice-versa.  She has a hell of a lot of hair and wears glasses, while Morgan does not.
Old Lady Fortier: Morgan and P’s dead foster mother.  A very sympathetic woman who had empathy for everyone but bigots.  In a wheelchair.  She shows up very rarely from the other side.
Ralta: Part-time ghost.  He’s a kid who suffers from an extremely rare form of epilepsy that ejects him from his body every time he has a seizure.  He hangs around with the bandits just for funsies.  Morose, often isolates himself from other humans.  Feels like ghosts are the only people who understand him.
Bandits (basically ghost amalgams and glitches): 
Cilia: the combination of the ghost of a middle-aged woman and a bunch of bacteria.  Her head is the shape of a microbe and her hair is flagella.  She scares people when she smiles.  Very excitable, and the main driving force behind the bandits.  
Cytokine: a giant of a ghost, the combination of a genie and a young girl.  She grows wishes like tumors--they look like pearls.  She has one giant one in her head where her brain would be, which if removed will kill her.
Glitch: a normal ghost, except for the fact that he’s not all the way dead.  He was ejected prematurely from his body and his spirit had a weird reaction to the ethereal realm, causing him to soak up extra energy from the world around him.  He bleeds ectoplasm from an enormous wound on his shoulder.  Inquisitive and kind of dumb.
Key: A combination of a human boy and a sky walker (a being who is basically an angel, the creatures who take care of the universe).  Has a MAJOR secret.
Achos: comes from the Light VS. Dark magical war timeline.  In that timeline, there is magical technology that can basically create a copy of a ghost out of a matrix of tiny nanobots suspended by electricity.  The nanobots run off the energy of the ethereal realm.  The person they were copied from is (a massive nerd) a warrior with a massive sword he inherited from his big brother.  Has a tragic backstory and dies in tragedy, as well.
Terato: the official name for Amalgam Shawn.  At some point the pressure of all the ghosts cramming themselves into Shawn’s body begins to literally melt the ghosts together, creating a many-faced-many-limbed THING with like a hundred minds.  It’s... not pretty.
Various Other Characters (not inclusive): 
Alison: An old friend of Rogers who speaks out against him now.  Wary of everything.
Empusa, the mother monster: a monster who shows up in one of the timelines.  She has the body of a small child but an aura the size of a skyscraper, and she has enough power to fold reality.  She appears after a crack in spacetime cracks open her interdimensional cage.
Matrix: a superhuman who can unmoor herself from the linear flow of time, also from the timeline with the Light VS. Dark war.  She has crimped hair and Knows Too Much.
Wren: half vampire, also from the Light VS. Dark timeline.  She’s cool because in that timeline there are three types of vampires, and she comes from a lineage of siberian monstrosities that eat raw organs and can transform from human to vulture-like creatures.
Honestly the Light VS. Dark timeline is one of the coolest and most in-depth, I might elaborate more about it in another post just because it’s cool.
And there you have it!  A basic synopsis and character breakdown!  Cheers!
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