*sighs*
Right, let's make this official. I would've liked to say "indefinite hiatus" ( or be an ass and call it something like "Dead not Dreaming"), but that would be quite more optimistic and less truthful than you'd deserve. I might continue it in the future, but Valve also might suddenly release Half-Life 3 next week.
Long story short, my current job is time-consuming and pays relatively well. Also, I've long since lost interest in Tanya fandom, and let's admit, I took quite a few liberties with her character, so it wasn't quite the authentic Tanya experience anyway.
Trying not to waste too many words on this diatribe, since I've got so much to explain still. My main two goals for writing this is to tell you readers to abandon hope and explain to the curious ones what I've been planning ( though again, planning is a generous term ) and yes, Tanya's Name. Rejoice.
Heavy spoilers ahead.
First, Tanya's Name(s). This would require some explaining. As someone jokingly suggested… yeah, Tanya's Role was very heavily overlapping with canonical Hakram. And since she's got here first, there's frankly no narrative impetus for him to stick around, and that's actually a pretty solid in-universe reason for him to leave. For Hakram fans, sorry, there wasn't just any room for two aides with uncanny competence and pseudo-romantic tension with Catherine. We'd probably still meet Warlord Hakram, who accepted a not too prestigious post back in his homeland and through cunning, ruthlessness and narrative favoritism rose through the ranks on the onset of his race's impending twilight.
In line with this, Tanya's first possible Name was Arbitrator. One of the Aspects you've already been introduced to, Know.
The other two? Look and Judge.
I thought I was terribly clever with drawing comparisons to Catherine's future possible Role as the Warden. Look was supposed to harken to Tanya's ( somewhat undeserved ) reputation of predicting trends, knowing what her opponents will do and even killing observers from a faraway distance she had no business knowing about. Combined with Know, it was supposed to provide her with frankly terrifying amount of battlefield awareness, though the farther the distance, and the farther the situation is from open combat, the less effective the Aspect would be. Political manipulations and confrontations would work so and so, while social combat… well, ymmv on whether it's completely ineffective by design or because it's still Tanya.
A shame it would never come to pass, lol. We'll return to that.
Judge was supposed to be straight up unfairly synergistic with Sentence, if anyone knows what I'm talking about. The kicker is, it would require rules lawyering to the nth degree, considering the accusation you would be judging someone by should come from the mortal laws, be enforceable, and actually somewhat justifiable. So, like, against Dead King in the center of his power? Less than useless. Possibly even harmful, since judging a foreign ruler with no army to back it up is somewhere between stupid and suicidal.
And yes, the Accords, the Accords, the Accords. Many accusations would be levied against Catherine, whether her plan in this timeline is actually a thinly veiled pretext to empower her hatchetwoman.
Now, yeah, I extensively hinted or outright said, maybe, that she's a candidate for two Names.
Finally, an explanation.
That's because she's two people, basically.
Here comes the wonkiest and possibly wankiest part of the fic: Tanya who arrived to Calernia is the Salaryman's soul fused together with Type 95.
My thought for the fic was: so you see, Type 95 is an engineering miracle. It's not supposed to work. The complexity of the calculations required, it was said, would be beyond humanity for a thousand years.
And I thought. Mmm. A technological handheld device that's also a weapon of mass destruction running calculations beyond mortal ken… that sounds like an AI.
And, because Being X has pretensions of divinity, a messenger from a god, sent down to Earth to spread the faith and punish the unbelievers… that sounds like an Angel.
So yeah, Type-chan is sentient, and hella pissed at Being X. Why, you ask? Well, besides parental abandonment and getting stuffed into a tiny box carried around by someone who fears and despises you for things beyond your control, still has to use you for mass murder, and also imprints on you in reverse of imprinting on her each time you take over her meatsack to spread the holy word… nope, that's it, that's the reason. That's what the flashbacks were for.
My execution was lacking, but basically, Being X engineered a situation where Tanya was supposed to either break and accept him as God or die. Guess what she chose? That's where the apocalyptic chants came from in that flashback. Tanya was using Type 95 to wholesale slaughter the army contingent sent against her part of the front. Looking like an angel passing down judgement on the unworthy and broadcasting her sermons on all open channels. In the middle of a great, heretofore unseen war that involved strife, disease and hunger on supposedly unprecedented scale. Does that sound like a prelude to the Final Judgement? Quite a lot of people thought so.
So here Tanya is, wielding Being X's tool against the hordes of unbelievers to spread his word and convincing quite a lot of people that the final days are coming, possibly irrevocably damaging the faith of everyone involved in this clusterfuck, because there's apparently an angel mass murdering them who considers them to be unfaithful on account of invading Germania. Somewhere, a monkey's paw curls.
Far-reaching theological implications aside, Being X decides that no, he had enough of this, and breaks his own ( loosely upheld ) rules. He intervenes directly and basically uses his allegedly divine might to try to kill her by basically ramming her into the ground with his presence until she flattens. For Tanya, this is vindication. She didn't break, she didn't pray, she showed that asshole what for, and if he won't allow her to live peacefully, then he can choke on it. For Type-chan, this is a betrayal of highest order. She's confused, resentful and afraid. She was trying to do her job in shit conditions, and here's her father's reward, to try to kill her together with Tanya, not caring to differentiate.
Being X might not be God or omnipotent, but he's powerful enough to kill them. At this point, there's not a lot of space between Tanya's and Type's souls, and Being X doesn't try to sort it out. Tanya is… gleeful and resigned. This is it. She didn't get to live peacefully, but she won, and she's going to die, considering how much she pissed Being X. Type-chan is afraid and angry. On metaphysical plane, the happenings are represented by Being X, a great monster of many eyes and hands and tentacles stretching out to countless worlds, bringing a lot of them together to crash the defiant soul. She twists their soul out of the grasp, using the force to slingshot them from this universe and into the some kinda science project quite a distance away from the confrontation, ramming face-first into one of the detritus dimensions surrounding Creation, in other words, one of the Hells.
Her Name is Apollyon, the Angel of Ruin. In some texts, the faithful servant of God who would lead the army to purge the world from the sinful in the days preceding Armageddon, in others, a demon, who together with Lucifer rebelled against Him to be cast down in hell.
Her Aspects are Hate, Behold and End.
Hate is as unpleasant as it sounds. It's basically a corrosive Aspect version of a demon's presence unraveling existence around her. That's where the demonblade comes from. It can be also used to kill angels and demons, though probably not gods, if only because they wouldn't show up to get stabbed and it would take quite a lot of stabbing.
End is something like that, only on global scale. And we never would get acquainted with it in the course of the story, so that's all I have to say about it.
Behold… is a biblical version of Look. Even a narrower application, it straight up cannot be used for anything other than explicit purpose of flying above the battlefield and figuring out what long-range spells to use to slaughter armies. Very effective against mortals, basically a death sentence against any experienced Named on the opposite side with ranged capabilities.
Right. That's names explained. We would've found out all that during the demon incident in Book 2, you know the one, when Tanya, to the eyes of observers, snaps after seeing Catherine's soul get mutilated, acquires a split personality disorder, and kills the demon.
You know, something considered very highly improbable without a Hero to help out. And she's flying around with a flaming sword like some sorta artistic representation of an Angel of Justice come to life. Are we sure she's a villain?..
Well, she's kinda fanatically loyal to Catherine and has a very low opinion on any religion, so there's that?
Okay.
Now, details get sparse, not because I don't have a lot of things I wanted to try, but because a lot of them are eh, and I get complicated feeling about writing so many words to explain how I'm not going to write all this, lol.
My plan could be summed up with: Apollyon made a deal with Bard. And Akua, to sever her soul from Tanya. By the chronological end of Book 3 in canon, she would with her help gank Neshamah and take his place as the Queen of Hell. By haphazardly throwing undead and demons at all nations of the continent, making vague prophecies about the coming judgement and seven crowns she would consume to become undefeatable, and basically acting like Triumphant come back to life, she would unite the nations against her, dramatically lose and get banished from this world. And take Bard with her. The last scene I planned for this fic would be Apollyon getting reborn again as a blonde blue-eyed child named Tanya in another world, with all her knowledge and power, on her endless quest, or dare I say, saga, to amass power, return back to her world, and kill Being X. And maybe some other gods on the road.
Catherine and Tanya would spend this time building up Callow from the smoking ruin, fending off an occasional demon invasion and coming to the aid of the nations close to them to forge the new Accords to prevent such threats from appearing in the future. And also gradually realizing Apollyon's plan.
"Why does Apollyon look so much like Tanya? I dunno. Evil(er) twin sister? They don't look that much alike, y'know, I'm sure it's just a coincidence."
Would you believe me I came up with the scene where Apollyon and Akua invade the Dread Empire and cast down the Tower, destroying the symbol of the imperial unity for the third and last time before basically the same thing happened in APGTE? No? Fair enough.
There, that's pretty much all that comes to mind right now. You can ask more specific questions over the next week or however long it would take, I would look at them when I'm free over the day and try my best to answer them.
But yeah, Jim, I'm sorry, she's dead.
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