Cosmic Locations and Concepts
The Abyss - the representation of all that exists, and a crossroads between all worlds and times, life and death, named after the deep ocean-like appearance it has taken in the eyes of a few who experienced it. Cuppy perceived it as composed of strings dubbed "data streams" which circulated information throughout the multiverse, a la an akashic record. It is also associated with the color Azure, a trait shared by Richie's runes and their basis, the Seiryu, or Azure Dragon in eastern mythology. Abyss has parallels with the sky and heavens as well. Moses interprets it as Bondye, the Voodoo creator deity. The Abyss is akin to the collective soul of all things, or God itself. It is a repository of infinite power and knowledge, and souls pass through the Abyss between lives. Past life memories are often forgotten, and it is difficult to maintain individuality within the Abyss; individual people are likened to drops of water falling in the ocean. A shade infection of the Abyss is the cause of the ensuing antibody response, and the unlocking of the Backyards/wandering corridors. Crocus seeks to assimilate the Abyss into himself, to destroy and recreate the cosmos.
The Backyards - an amalgamation of the collective unconscious, dreams, and nostalgia of all souls, accessible by wandering corridors which drift in and out of being. The Backyards are fueled by whim, and its entrances are only visible to those in control of a daydream state, or else happened upon by accident. The Backyards are composed of countless lesser yards that overlap, divide, and overtake each other, undulating like a living thing. It can be likened to the dreamscape of the Abyss. Yards reflect the psyches of those within them, for good or ill, and can be linked to each other to create pathways between different worlds and times. Yards can be secured as personal sanctuaries by mastering one's own mind, having it gifted to them, or taking it by force from a previous territory holder. Dream logic dictates the laws of physics within, and in order to bridge large enough gaps between yards or a yard and a distant world, "keys" are required. These keys are incarnated from such things as new insights, personal discoveries, renewed resolve, or the realization of new connections. The right intersection of yards will lead to the Eye of the Abyss.
The Void - an infinite expanse of freezing empty darkness which forms the space between planes of being, and which acts as the Jungian shadow of the Abyss, embodying and collecting the negative emotion of all things. Those whose realities were erased from existence may survive a fall through the Void into another world, but it has massive physical, spiritual, and psychological adverse effects, such as amnesia, depression, or insanity. Those lost in the Void almost always become overwhelmed by depressive nihilism and their own self-inflicted mental hells, becoming drained of their will and fading away. The Void is also the spawning ground of shades, who personify its hungry emptiness. Shades are likened to the shadows of lost souls passing through the light of the Abyss, reflecting beings who failed to be born or survive evolution. They may also represent those who have had their identities or souls destroyed. Shades are intrinsically tied with the Void, the same way whole souls are tied with the Abyss.
Ether Fog - overlap between the Abyss and the physical world. Ether fog clouds are likened to miniature big bangs, the fog itself being called ether, and being a thing in between matter and energy. They are described as the violent upwelling of worlds, likened to clashing continents, trying to overtake each other. They are dense with information of the Abyss, and overload intelligent things that near them. Telescope dragonflies and other entities with detached or dreamlike consciousness are exempt, as the fog shares the same properties of the Abyss. It is difficult to retain sense of self near the fog, as the living aren't meant to touch the Abyss. The fog gates act as spawning areas for foreign bodies from other worlds. These bodies may emerge by breaching a backyards/corridor by force, or from the souls of things near death being routed through the Abyss to another world unnaturally. Proxy bodies are formed of the ether itself, which acts as the building blocks of creation.
Interstice - overlap between the Backyards and the physical world. An interstice is an overlapping gray area between a liminal physical location, and the Backyards proper. They may exist where boundaries between the physical world and the Backyards are thinned, such as haunted places like Leap Castle, or in areas considered to be of spiritual significance. Powerful enough memories, wills, or other psychic detachment can be used, similarly to the "keys" used to navigate the Backyards, to bind wandering corridors to a given location, thus creating an interstice. The Misty Glen complex in Station Bay is an interstice, created by merging Dares's phantom pain, embodying his memory of childhood and the Misty Glen branch he lived in, with the burnt-down remnants in Station Bay. The power of the Backyards regenerated this complex, and turned it into a backdoor for Crocus to expand his sphere of influence into the city.
Undershadow - the boundary between the physical world and the Void. In the same way wandering corridors are found in liminal, novel, nostalgic, or uncanny places, fissures into the Void connect to shadowy, cold, or lifeless places, often underground, owing to the unconscious association between the likes of catacombs and creepy caves with gateways into the underworld or Hell.
Black Rain - concentrated negativity in the form of a corruptive, mutagenic liquid that calls out and tempts those seeking power to absorb it in order to rapidly evolve and become more powerful. It is both secreted by shades, and can spawn them. Those who are contaminated by the black rain are earmarked for soul harvest, and the liquid acts as feed for livestock. Additionally, the black rain amplifies the worst aspects of anyone who is infused with it.
Phantom Pains - the psychic remnants of those who have lost their souls or had their identities destroyed, generally taking the form of blank white sheets. They embody the last traumatic memories, unfinished business, or lingering wills of people who were erased from existence, yet still somehow left a stain of themselves on reality. These pseudo-ghosts are usually bound to repeat their last moments forever, but can be broken from this cycle should they sense someone with high vitality to leech off of, in a desperate bid to fill the void left behind by their lost souls.
Wandering Corridors - the liminal pathways into the Backyards, which drift in and out of being, and which require control of a waking dreamscape to perceive. They cannot be found by logic or conscious intent.
The World of Forms/The Borderlands - a windmill area interstice in Riverview where Crocus nests, along with his organization, Shadow Nexus. The different doorways there connect to other spheres of influence he can visit, like Station Bay. They are all created by using a binding agent like a phantom pain to anchor a wandering corridor to a physical location. Each door leads to an interstice Crocus has created elsewhere. Additionally, while warping from point A to point B through the doors, Crocus can emerge into or from any Backyards/corridors whose drift path happens to intersect with that shortcut at a given time.
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Primary Settings
Station Bay
A metropolitan chrome city on the East Coast, characterized by comingled modern skyrises and integrated parks, and the current headquarters of the Institute. Richie flees here to let the heat die down from previous crimes, but incurs the wrath of the Clawed Jester, a serial killer, when he stumbles into his territory. The city contains a massive disused and overgrown greenhouse boxed in by 4 towers, and which is directly adjacent to a likewise disused parking garage. Beyond them both is a blue apartment complex largely reclaimed by wilderness, whose communal backyard strip boarders a forest on one side of the fence, and a reservoir on the other. On the opposite end of the city, Southeast of here, is a large junkyard including several scrapped cars. The apartment complex premises are thin places between worlds, allowing the chosen few to find gateways to the interdimensional Backyards. Though the entrances vary, the primary exit seems to drop explorers off in the junkyard. The city is subject to escalating Ether Fog leaks, sudden violent chasms into the boundaries between worlds, from which crazed beings are invading and rampaging in pursuit of a mystical power. The difference between the Backyards and the areas marked by these fog banks is likened to the difference between cave entrances and fissures or sinkholes opened up by earthquakes, with the fog leaks being inherently dangerous on all levels.
The city also contains an integrated grade-high school building near the primary park area, which features a walking tour area of abstract art sculptures, some of which double as playground fixtures. When Cuppy moves in with Richie, he attends this school under the guise of a younger child to collect urban legends and rumors circulating among the youth that aid in Richie's investigation. One of these rumors points toward the massive combination sanitary-stormwater sewer system, a design phased out of newer city plans because of ecological issues, which is undergoing renovations and has left long stretches of it unmapped, abandoned, and decaying. The maintenance tunnel is shown as the primary link between the Ether Fog boundaries and Station Bay, where hostile Foreign Bodies - "Ferals" - usually rush through to try to escape into Station Bay's physical world. As such, the Institute heavily monitors this area, and employs Tracers - digital constructs that fatally obstruct Foreign Body materializations - to do routine sweeps of this tunnel network. The occasional glimpses of Ferals and the creepy aura that emanates from the sewers powerfully enough to make normal civilians feel inexplicably uneasy leads to the grade school urban legend that trolls live in the sewer - an image Richie independently imagines as well. It is later shown that the connection of Ether Fog leaks to this area, and the compulsion of the Ferals to invade, is enabled by the high concentration of Black Rain running through the sewer pipes, created by the influence of Shades passing through.
The presence of the Black Rain corrupts the instincts of Foreign Bodies to invade Station Bay in pursuit of the "elixir of life" to propagate rapid evolution and attain ultimate power. In truth, the elixir is the Black Rain itself - condensed negativity - that induces dangerous demonic mutations and insanity in those who absorb it. The Shades are incarnations of the pain, regret, sorrow, rage, and despair of beings who were never born and rejected by reality. They have begun to infect the Abyss - the singularity between all possibilities - due to the presence of the Flower of Evil, itself the ultimate form of mankind's collective shadow. The abuse of these dimensional gateways by Ferals manipulated by the Shades have continued to weaken the barriers between fantasy and reality, allowing Shades to manifest more frequently and in more powerful forms to feed on souls by exploiting the worst fears of their victims.
The Shade scourge is stabilized by Crocus - a rare Super Shade - who holds nigh-omnipotent control over the city, and who masks his intents toward Richie during a brief confrontation to direct him into the Backyards to accelerate the boundary deterioration. Crocus is a rarer form of Shade who was once human, but whose humanity and soul were consumed by hordes of lesser shades who merged to become his new body, built on the foundation of his worst traits. Crocus - a god-fearing preacher in his past life - envisions himself as a messiah prophesied to create utopia, and award souls to the Shades who follow him. To this end, he seeks the total collapse of reality and the consumption of all souls, in order to remake an ideal world from the ground up and evolve into perfect beings.
Crocus's mere presence distorts reality - citizens are apathetic and aggressive, the weather is dreary, entire sections decay and sag, neighborhoods degenerate into overcrowded slums, violent crimes are omnipresent, and the city itself cannot be located on a map.
Carnival Top is Station Bay's most popular tourist attraction, a combination casino resort, hotel, and theme park located on a sub-island accessible through the Gamble Gate. The main plaza is the center of the park, with five smaller island surrounding it, connected by bridges, and each housing a different themed casino - Medieval, Cyberpunk, Feudal Japan, Aquarium, and Carnival. The Carnival island is the centerpiece of the complex, and where most of the circus shows and events take place. Carnival Top has ties to the criminal underworld, who facilitate pit fights in the secret arena below the Carnival hotel area.
Tide Town
A sprawling nautical city made entirely of interconnected docks, piers, boathouses, rigging, and marinas, floating on an endless sea under a shroud of eternal night. The city's origin and purpose are unknown, but it acts as a catch basin for those who drifted from worlds destroyed by shades and other calamities, due to its proximity to the Void. Unfortunately, that closeness to the Void means that shades are seasonably able to materialize during the lunar eclipse. The city has higher levels of docks laid atop docks, connecting the higher and lower tiers with rope bridges and ladders, forming a nautical causeway. There are smaller replicas of the city surrounding it, raised on thousands-meters-tall pillars and bridged by sloping water channels with tracks for guided refugee ferries, to evacuate to relatively safer higher ground in the event of shade invasions or severe storms. The city also boosts a pharmaceutical lab able to produce euphoria pills to counteract the will-drain effect of shades, and highly effective healing potions created from a kelp native to Tide Town, which can heal severe injuries in seconds, but which have massive side effects if overused. The city is patrolled by town guard, who have a fortified defense location in the Sniper Tower, which must be reached by guided raft and can only be ascended by a water-powered lift. It is designed to withstand protracted shade assaults, and features things such as holy silver, boiling water traps, and flashbang cannons. The entirety of Tide Town is lit by tiki torches which rise out of the sea at dock intersections, and its streets are water channels akin to Venice. The only known natural landmark of Tide Town is Coral Road, a miles-long stretch of pink coral that connects Tide Town to Blue Terminal, and which is only seasonably available above water on account of the changing tides.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Blue Terminal
A surreal, watercolor bay at the end of Coral Road, named for being home to a train station whose tracks run along the sea itself. Aspects of typical Americana small town features and buildings drift about the captive section of ocean, akin to a great lake, like floating islands or lily pads, complete with traffic lights and random front lawns. It is marked by giant braziers which boast ethereal blue flames. The Conductor who operates the train is able to ferry those who reach it to various worlds connected by their tracks to Blue Terminal, but requires a 'ticket' to afford passage. Like navigating the sub-levels of the Backyards, these tickets must come in the form of insights and, failing to provide any, memory is sacrificed instead. Like the apartment complex in Station Bay, and the Borderlands, Blue Terminal is an Interstice, in this case between Tide Town and the Backyards.
Riverview
A delta-based town on the west coast of the US which was home to a series of blue duplex apartments with aesthetic similarities to the abandoned complex in Station Bay, and stretched beside the Nocturne River. This town was home both to Crocus in his human life, and to his eventual victim and archenemy, Dares Ardael, a fledgling empath and psychic whose soul was harvested to generate a phantom pain embodying his lingering memory, which Crocus then fused to the abandoned complex in Station Bay to create an Interstice. As such, the resulting Interstice reflects elements of Dares's idealized childhood, and of Riverview itself. The appearance of the Abyss as a great underwater expanse is taken from Dares's dying visions while drowning in the Nocturne River. Cuppy eventually manages to enter and interact with Dares's phantom pain while undergoing a near death experience of his own, thereby learning the circumstances of the complex in Station Bay, and its connection to Crocus, the Borderlands, the ferals, and the corridors. The real town's status is currently unknown.
The Jester's Garden
Luchesi's personal Backyard, shaped by an amalgamation of his childhood memories, experiences while homeless on the streets, and his own warped imagination toward tormenting his captured victims with living nightmares. The centerpiece is a greenhouse of stained glass windows with a fountain at its center, seemingly paralleling the greenhouse adjacent to the complex where Richie and co make camp. Luchesi is able to bridge this garden to other real world locations via wandering corridors when the right circumstances align, in order to ambush and abduct victims into his realm.
Garden of the Forged
A tranquil, ephemeral, semi-aquatic garden whose innermost circle houses marble statues of past heroes and legendary figures, as well as a pond akin to a wishing well full of coins. It is occupied by a rain spirit named Droplet, who tends the garden and has protected it from corruption, awaiting the arrival of the intended Forged Ones.
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Misc Terms and Concepts
Forged Ones - those who inherit the will of the Abyss.
Candidates - those from various worlds or timelines who are able to fall outside the scope of known possibilities, and can act against fate, surprising even those deemed omnipotent. They are the front runners to become Forged Ones.
Shades - vengeful incarnations of the unborn or those whose identities or existences were erased, they are ordinarily mindless personifications of the Void who are instinctively driven to consume the emotions and souls of others, in order to recreate themselves as complete, ensouled beings and finally be born. They have an intuitive grasp of the insecurities and worst fears of their prey, and parasitize nightmares or paranoid delusions to gradually wear their hosts down over time. Victims who lose their souls to shades may be left behind as vegetative living corpses, and will eventually fade from all memory as reality retcons itself around their erasure. Those with strong wills who fall to the shades may leave behind phantom pains. Shades are only free to manifest physical bodies within the Void and Undershadow, or during liminal events associated with all things unsettling or ominous, such as eclipses or traumatic events.
Angels/Antibodies - the autoimmune response of the cosmos, who target and eliminate beings and phenomena whose existence threatens the stability and survival of the worlds. Once mindless drones, they are now shaped by human beliefs and religion, and can become self-aware to the point of self-righteous fury and prejudice toward those with unnatural abilities or circumstances. By their nature, shades and antibodies are archenemies to each other.
Foreign Bodies - Institute term for objects and phenomena that come through ether fog clouds
Ferals - living foreign bodies that the Institute considers hostile, usually incensed by the presence of Black Rain in the city
Tracers - constructs designed to detain and destroy emerging Ferals. They come in two varieties; physical tracers are machines that are cheaper to produce and can act autonomously, but which are easily observed by civilians and can be destroyed by sufficient firepower. Purely digital tracers are immaterial and draw energy from a power network adjacent to the sewer, a red tunnel dubbed the Focusing Array. They are extremely expensive to produce, and must siphon power from the city's electric power grid, but can't be physically fought off by conventional means. They are designed to lock onto the signature of a feral as the creature is still materializing from the ether fog, and annihilate them on the molecular level.
Biosuits - Institute creations that weave harvested feral fibers and attributes into innocuous clothing in order to endow their wearers with special enhancements, generally greater strength. These suits can still retain remnants of the wills - and grudges - of the ferals who were killed to create them.
Telescope Dragonflies - cyborg insects created from fresh dragonfly corpses, both to act as city-wide surveillance drones, and to infiltrate the ether fog clouds to gather intel on their inner workings, due to their immunity to the ether fog's usual side effects on both sentient beings and pure machine consciousness.
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Factions
Shadow Nexus - an organization of likeminded shades founded by Crocus, whose members are powerful enough to retain human shape and intelligence, they seek the destruction and rebirth of all that exists, to acquire new souls and become perfect beings. Normally, they dwell in the World of Forms with Crocus, but thus far, only Crocus himself has appeared.
The Institute - a secret government task force dedicated to the research, detention, and elimination of invading ferals and otherworldly phenomena. Both its leader, Director Mason, and the organization as a whole are unwitting pawns to Crocus.
Cultivator Corporation - an international conglomerate with a monopoly on military designs and contracts, acting as the front for a crime syndicate involved in global black market affairs and terrorist activities. They sponsored the Dragon's Dominion tournament per corrupt CEO, Lord Byrus's designs, to collect combat data on the world's most powerful fighters. A hidden third party connected to the corporation is now targeting those who attended the tournament to induct as brainwashed assassins.
Death Roll - a crime cartel and most common venue for outsourcing Cultivator Corporation dirty work to its swathes of hired muscle and cutthroats.
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Main Characters and Character-specific abilities
Richie
A street urchin, thief, and brawler who is inadvertently drawn into the selection process for the Forged Ones status. His body is wrapped by twin Azure Dragon tattoos, also known as Seiryu, which refer to one of the Four Auspicious Beasts in Chinese mythology. These tattoos are in fact sentient runes of unknown origin which Richie has had since birth, and which regulate an inherited draconic power that was only recently awakened by traumatic events. Richie designates the tiers of his tapping into this power as four "Levels", which each have different effects and embody different aspects of the Dragon:
Level 1 - Richie's fists are engulfed by the heads of his dragons, increasing his punching power and granting him a degree of aerokinesis, able to rapidly punch to displace compressed air projectiles that fly at subsonic speed and hit like powerful shockwaves. He can also use this form to coat his fingers in blade-like gales, or compress a huge quantity of air into a bomb-like attack. This form symbolizes the wind under a dragon's being as they take flight.
Level 2 - Richie gains incredible reflexes and short bursts of super speed, clocking in at Mach 1 at its current highest threshold. This level is subdivided into two forms. The first is conscious and requires active decision making on Richie's part, while the second is automatic, "programming" his body to move in predetermined ways when he senses subtle shifts in his immediate environment, or encounters certain stimuli. Although he isn't truly fast enough to leave behind afterimages, his automatic reflexes are so precise that he can move between the frames of human eyesight as interpreted by the brain, leaving an illusion of himself by glitching out his opponent's brain. He cannot perform this feat under observation by multiple people. Richie is also prone to ligament damage or dislocations in this form. Level 2 symbolizes the powerful legs of a dragon.
Level 3 - Richie coats his body in metallic azure dragon scales to act as powerful armor against all blows, blunt, edged, and ballistic. His defense isn't infallible, and becomes harder to maintain the larger an area it is spread over, or the thicker the coating applied. He is able to coat his fists and feet in scales to augment his striking power, in tandem with a minor strength boost this form grants him. At full power, the scales seem to acquire a flickering blue fire effect that acts like wind. At full strength, the scale armor renders Richie immovable, and his muscles locked in place, until he disengages it, which has situational use for needing to hold his ground, or hold an enemy in place. This level symbolizes the impenetrable hide of a dragon.
Level 4 - Richie's runes themselves rise from his body like living serpents who can coordinate with and be worked into attacks, and which combine attributes of the three previous levels. Richie can jut his runes from his limbs both for stretched range attacks, or at the point of impact for a secondary shockwave while already inside the opponent's target area. The dragons themselves have powerful bites, and can contort in different ways as well as seamlessly shift and coil around Richie's body as they see fit, rearranging their placement across his skin. The azure light they give off is akin to that of the Abyss, and can be used, at full blast, to destroy Black Rain and shades. This form also takes the highest toll on Richie, and burns through his stamina the quickest. It symbolizes the indomitable will and might of a dragon.
Cuppy
An amnesiac warlock and tinkerer with the ability to produce various kinds of strings from his body. He is also in possession of a slingshot, for which he crafts his own (usually explosive) ammo, a giant pair of scissors that can be separated and used as swords, and his supposed "brother", a marionette in his likeness, which can be puppetted, or walk on its own freely. Its "autopilot" mode hints at steampunk technology being incorporated into its body. Cuppy can use his strings for a multitude of tasks, such as creating webs, detecting vibrations, momentarily sewing wounds together to support those in battle, and even puppetting his own body to surpass his physical limits. The kinds of filaments he's able to produce are dependent on what he eats, as he can choose to either digest food like normal, or divert it to his string reserve. Depending on the materials he has on hand, he can create standard threads, ropes, bungee cords, garrote wires, steel cables, and more. If he eats enough protein, he can also create more permanent organic sutures to heal allies, without the consequence of more pain when the sutures would otherwise eventually break. In addition to his base abilities and synergy with his brother, "Cuppet", Cuppy can create smaller automated puppets to carry out basic tasks, and, using his blood, create "swap dolls" that take the place of whoever they represent when that person is hit by an attack.
Freyja
A demonic shapeshifter with the ability to conjure hellfire in both her human and hellhound shapes, as well as summon burning demonic arms to burst forth from the ground. She boosts a potent healing factor and great physical strength, which is further augmented by layering her human muscle over her wolfen muscle when assuming hybrid forms. She is completely invulnerable to heat damage unless she wills herself burnt by her own flames, in order to burn wounds closed. As a hellhound, her instincts and animal senses are extremely attuned, but this can also cause her to become overwhelmed and cowed by ominous feedback, such as the presence of black rain, or in the proximity of ether fog clouds. She hasn't bothered to explore her full potential, and remains unsure what other forms she may be able to take.
Chikita
A cryokinetic swordswoman and assassin from a variant of Feudal Japan. In addition to iajutsu mastery, Chikita is able to conjure and control ice and ice constructs, though her output is dependent on her stamina and the atmospheric conditions, such as temperature and ambient moisture. In addition to basic applications like firing freezing blasts or icicles, Chikita can also apply extreme cold to her own brain - impervious to frost damage - to disable automatic limiters on things like muscle capacity and fear response. Similarly to Richie's Level 2, this modification allows Chikita to utilize extremely quick reflexes. She also owns two magical artifacts - the first is her Katana, Yukihana, which contains the soul of a legendary warrior from her era. Yukihana has a psychic connection to Chikita and gives her (unwanted) advice, and will also glow blue in the presence of powerful auras or mystic energies. Her second item, Chinokiri, is a long silver pipe which houses a kudagitsune - a pipe fox spirit - of the same name. This spirit imbues Chikita's smoke with a life drain effect, and the pipe can be used to absorb fallen enemies to integrate their souls into Chikita's own, temporarily increasing her own physical abilities and cryokinetic output.
Holly
A double agent of the Institute who is actually a disguised member of an ancient alien race who contacted the Maya peoples centuries ago, and interbred to create psychic progeny who eventually took to the expanse of outer space. Her race is in possession of black box technology which circumvents the problem of FTL by somehow channeling the Backyards itself, acting more as a mystical arc than a true spaceship. Holly herself is of a seer caste who inherited Psychometry, the ability to read the energy signatures left attached to objects, allowing her to relive their histories and associations with previous owners among other things. She also possessed the ability to commune with the minds of her ancestors via a temple undercroft in the lost Maya city, in order to experience her home planet vicariously. Both this, and the bulk of her psychometric reserves, were lost when her "third eye" was eaten by Crocus. As a member of the Institute, Holly also has access to their tools, making use of a biosuit and microwave pistol.
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A Final Thing to Keep in Mind:
This story is, despite appearances, nonlinear. Causality is fucky, on account of the Backyards. Something to remember at all times is that the Backyards, and their gray areas, are free for all zones between different worlds, timelines, and possibilities. Schrodinger's cat, causal loops, it's all fair game. The Borderlands, for example, exist outside of time, and are why Crocus (The Faceless Man) is able to cause ripple effects that began well before he would have even been born. The doors in his world are doors to different continuums, essentially, and his omniscience is the product of what's essentially save-scumming. The greater logic of the story at play works as a kind of cosmic game of chess, with most of the characters being pieces.
Pieces that might eventually rebel against their players.