Greed and I have a lot of elaborate headcanons and AUs for the characters from idV, but one of my personal favorites Iâve come up with is on whatâs going on with Lucky Guy and by extension the Manor Owner:
We know Lucky was at the manor before anyone else except maybe Leo, who certainly isnât talking about it now. We also know that Lucky Guy is just a nickname the original group of our gameâs survivors gave him, and he himself doesnât remember or wonât recount anything that happened before they got there.Â
We donât know how Lucky got to the Manor or why, but we do know that his only skill is that he has a better chance than anyone else at getting the chests to give him the item he wants. All the items he can get are other survivorâs props, as he has no unique prop of his own.
Now, with the Manor Owner, we have no idea who the manor owner is, what they might look like, or even what they are. We donât have any idea of what Miss Nightingaleâs relationship to the Manor Owner is, only that she relays communications from him to the manor inhabitants.
What if whatever entity the Manor Owner is isnât separate from the Manor itself? What if the Manor Owner is the Manor? What if the Manor Owner is the force keeping everyone there, running the magic and the games, keeping everyone in what seems to be a timeloop where they kill or die over and over again.Â
We know the physical building and grounds of the Manor do exist in idVâs reality, so I mean some kind of extradimensional entity that inhabits/fits itself over a real location, copies it and traps creatures inside the copy, where those creatures (prey items of some kind, although it probably feeds on the emotions generated during the games rather than anything physical) are under itâs direct control.Â
Miss Nightingale could be trapped just as much as everyone else. The Manor Owner is obviously very powerful, whatever it is. If that entity has access to multiple realities/dimensions, that would explain why sheâs a harpy when we know those probably werenât a thing even in the more magical time periods the human survivors and once-human hunters seem to be from.Â
And that explains Yidhra (Dream Witch). She could also be from ~elsewhere~ like Nightingale. This also explains why the manor owner is strong enough to trap an actual eldritch god like Hastur (Feaster), even if Hastur doesnât seem very strong for a god*.
Now, back to poor Lucky. Hereâs some of his in-game text:
It is perfectly natural for someone with nothing to rely on luck.Â
His world is like a slot machine that he always wins at. But who knows what will happen when he stops playing.
Lucky doesnât remember where he came from, and doesnât have any known connection to the world outside the Manor. All the other survivor and hunter props are separate from the maps themselves, while Luckyâs trait is to be able to affect a part of the map itself (the chests).
What if Lucky isnât from outside the Manor?Â
What if Lucky is something the Manor Owner made, another prop for the games. Itâs useful to have someone whoâs always there before the other survivors start showing up, who can show them how the play the game, who serves as motivation to cooperate. Whoâs memory has been wiped so many times that heâs getting buggy, but that doesnât matter if heâs not supposed to remember anything besides how to play the game anyway. Heâs an actual tutorial character who made it into the full game, after all, so why not assume the Manor Owner is using him for the same thing within the world of idV?
Lucky has nothing, no backstory, no name, no deduction lines, because heâs not from anywhere else. He doesnât have them now because he never did. Heâs part of the Manor. And if he stops playing the game, wellâŚÂ
What happens to toys when their owners no longer want to play with them? All those discarded dolls and puppets around the manor came from somewhere.
One last thing about this particular headcanon of mine: if the Manor Owner isnât exactly corporeal, how does he communicate with Miss Nightingale? He could just make her Know Things, perhaps, but this is a horror game and whereâs the fun in that.
But Lucky, everyone knows his memory is bad. There are mornings he wakes up tired without knowing why. Nights he didnât seem to dream. Nights when, if you happened to be in the hallways of the Manor, you might see him walking to the Illusion Hall.Â
If you followed him, you might see Miss Nightingale bow when he enters. Then you might see Luckyâs head jerk suddenly back, his body unnaturally stiff, and when after a long moment he moves again, turns to face Miss Nightingale with suddenly different body language, you might hear a different, deeper voice coming from his mouth.Â
And if they donât see you, donât catch you, you might run back to your room, climb into bed and pull up the covers, and try to forget what you saw.
Maybe itâs not the hunters you have to worry the most about after all.
*As an aside, my headcanon for Hastur is that heâs the extradimensional equivalent of a ephyra larva (the floating but still pre-jellyfish lifestage of a jellyfish) of his species. The lake cult was his polyp phase. His being in the manor may be sort of a combination of a wild-caught octopus spending a year in an aquarium before being released and a rich kidâs year abroad before college.
