#fulwish

4.3 SPOILERS AHEAD

order of events

enroute, bragi, dorothy, and some other fools fuck around with Oroboros and "steal its shadow" - i think this is the same as stealing oroboros's taste buds. it's repeatedly mentioned that ashveil's "shadow" is capable of tasting different flavors of path energy.

Ruan Mei: Consider this: What do taste buds provide? March 7th: Yummy flavors? Ruan Mei: Precisely. Ruan Mei: Savoring something's "aftertaste" is an act of "elation." March 7th: So Aha stole… the original Primum Mobile of the Voracity?

- march speculates that "aha" stole it, but an emanator/pathstrider of elation would be acting in aha's interest, right? like the lord ravagers act for nanook? - so a group of masked fools stealing a shadow could be the same as aha stealing the voracity's primum mobile

dolly is the navigator of the astral express (idk when she becomes it)

enroute (now named isee), led by his aha-cursed shoes of Being Where No One Fucking Wants Him, joins the astral express

akivili disappears

dolly steps down as navigator. enroute/isee becomes the new express navigator

nanook ascends. isee watches through the telescope - allegedly, this is what should inspire isee to veer toward Destruction. but then why the fuck does he give ashveil something to HELP him against a lord ravager later on,,,

isee's fucked-up navigator hunger games happens. the express crew dwindles to only two members (Isee and this rocky person)

isee leaves the express. falcon amundsen joins the crew and becomes the next navigator. he rallies people to clear the silver rail, re-growing the express crew. IDK what happens with the rocky guy

mikhail joins the express

falcon dies. granholm becomes the next navigator

mikhail, tiernan, and razalina stay behind on penacony so much happens. the majority of penacony's early lore happens.

ashveil's home, kronstadt, is destroyed by Lord Ravager Zulo

ashveil meets isee. isee tells him about oroboros's stolen "shadow" "According to Isee, it was one of many remnants left behind when the Express first carved paths along the edges of the Cosmos." he is Lying he got that shit as a masked fool

tiernan gets lost while fighting the Swarm with the Lampmoth family. he's rescued by galaxy rangers (ashveil formed the org at some point lol)

the galaxy rangers (inc. ashveil, tiernan, and loretta) fight Zulo a la oroboros's shadow "I led the Rangers to suppress the shadow and devised the plan to assassinate Zulo. But I never learned why it was there in the first place." MF IT TOOK YOU SO MANY AMBER ERAS TO GET AROUND TO IT....

tiernan can't go back to penacony, so he watches over the sin thirsters who are former rangers

celenova ascends, replacing zulo

isee, now officially Lord Ravager Asat Pramad, shows up on Planarcadia and starts fucking with it. he adopts Graphia, imbues her with Destruction, and shows her how to use Voracity to imaginate or something idfk

the astral express crashes on planarcadia (is this when granholm dies?). this inspires graphia to fight back against the destruction

world in canvas, blah blah blah, literally the majority of planarcadia's known history happens, dw about it

belebog's eternal freeze finally BEGINS, by the way

the ENTIRE high cloud quintet arc happens now, btw

oswaldo schneider's despicable ass colonizes planarcadia and de-canvas-ifies it

a Long Time passes

himeko meets asat pramad at her mother's funeral. asat pramad is pretending to be ryusuke, her father

himeko finds the crashed astral express

herald of death stuff og himeko dies fulwish is hella trauma'd

imaginae-himeko becomes the navigator of the now-revived astral express

fulwish gets truman show'd, then leaves the planet and studies in the same school as the Herald of Death. then she comes back and starts fulwish tv and her cult and stuff. asat pramad provides the Shuhu flesh somehow

anyway

this is messy and probably has mistakes. i was just trying to grasp the gist. and My God what a gist it is. i could tell you where amphoreus, penacony, and xianzhou histories fit into all this, but i have yet to figure out precisely where early phantasmoon game history + evanescia fit... the thing with the 8 mourning actors?

i also left out most of the stuff on enroute's early shenanigans, because all of it is basically folk tales and we don't really have a solid timeline for any of it.

bragi, isee, mikhail, and several others involved in this whole timeline are even older than ashveil, who is literally older than BELEBOG'S ETERNAL FREEZE. LIKE. does this put into perspective why ashveil treats blade like he's Young even though blade is an old fucking man....

AGAIN. THOSE FOUR ARE ALL OLDER THAN THE ENTIRE KNOWN HISTORY OF BELEBOG, BASICALLY???? AND THREE OF THEM ARE STILL ALIVE

The Happiness Surgery (HS) of the Research Society of Happy Smiles (RSHS) is a major plot point of the Planarcadia story so far - so I wanted to look a bit into it and theorize as to what is going on here. Note: Anything that is not covered in the main Trailblaze Mission I will provide a reference for.

What We Know:

Pioneered by the RSHS

Is done via a "needle, long and thin" going into the brain and erasing the sense of pain (Bequea's Happiness Report)

Process afterwards takes approximately a month before full effectiveness (Happiness Surgery Notice)

Likely has something to do with the anterior cingulate cortex (Medical Record: Fulwish *I'll cover this in more depth later*)

Fulwish:

Fulwish's backstory is a tragic one. She lost her family to the Herald of Death and fell into a suicidal depression because of it. However, she says that she was saved by the Mutual Aid Society (MAS) and that due to MAS she found happiness again. From there she reportedly founded RSHS and became a media tycoon, pushing for happiness and Elation across Planarcadia. However, there's a few small bits missing. How did she become a media tycoon?

In the readable Person of the Year in Elation: Fulwish, it is stated that Fulwish was introduced by the MAS to a show called Please Be Happy. Please Be Happy is a reality TV show that was produced by Seafield TV Station and was on the brink of cancellation due to a scandal. This scandal is actually covered in the side quest A Bouquet for the Blessed. The quest reveals the story of Bequea who also lost her family to the Herald of Death and became depressed afterwards. The show was meant to showcase her recovery, but instead it faced difficulty because she simply wasn't recovering with the methods used by the show. This lead to the show fabricating her "happiness test" results, which was then revealed and caused major controversy. However, Fulwish and her newly discovered happiness turned the show around, leading to major success and even promotion by the IPC.

Fulwish then went from the show to buy the TV Station and rebrand it to Fulwish TV and produce a variety of successful content as well as rebranding the MAS to the RSHS. 

In short, Fulwish had a sudden bout of happiness that rocketed her to success and crowned her as the head of the media in Planarcadia. But her happiness didn't just come from nowhere.

In her speech in the Trailblaze Mission, she says that it was brought by the MAS and the happiness she saw there, even in people that were broken. While I don't doubt that, there is more to the story. The readable Medical Record: Fulwish shows a medical checkup done by the Cranial Neurology Department of some medical facility. The record shows that Fulwish came in with the complaint of "an inability to describe negative feedback received by the self, and an inability to actively express the pain perceived by the self. Meanwhile, the patient exhibits hallucinatory symptoms, described as the ability to sense the inner desires of others." The doctors then proceeded to perform an Electroencephalogram (ECG) (cerebral lobe structural imaging) to scan Fulwish's brain and found no "foreign bodies or visible damage". They did note there was also "mild non-pathological tissue growth detected at the Synesthesia implant site." with an unknown cause. While we don't know where the implant site is, it can be presumed to be somewhere near either the auditory or language processing sections of the brain. A few of these sections are near to another section mentioned later in the report, and as shown in reports of patients with brain tumors, pressure on the brain can lead to all sorts of weirdness.  The report continues with the Wishpower detection that was done and found "low-frequency undetectable imagery" in the anterior cingulate cortex that "hasn't significantly affected the cranial nerves". The anterior cingulate cortex is a portion of the brain that is responsible for attention, rewards-allocation, decision making, and most important for this, emotion. With this area specifically being affected by wishpower, it is a reasonable conclusion that this is what is causing the abnormalities in Fulwish's behavior. Additionally, it appears that the doctors also tested the empathetic abilities of Fulwish, and found that they were successful in "describ[ing] the desires of others." However, she experiences "intense hallucinations and loses all rationality [...] appears to fall under hypnotic or telepathic phenomena."

Theories:

In a previous post I suggested two possibilities: mara and mask fragments. However, a new theory has occurred to me while doing research on Fulwish. What if it is a combination of Elation and Abundance through wishpower? 

Fulwish stated that she was saved by the MAS who had a desire to save themselves and be happy and was also found to have wishpower localized in her emotional center of the brain along with some other notable growth possibly nearby. So, what if through wishing to be healed enough, Fulwish created enough wishpower to use the abundance (or create some form of it) to heal herself? 

I'm sure some of you are thinking that there is now way only one person could generate that much wishpower, and I agree. But Fulwish was not only with the other members of the MAS, but she also soon after joined the Please Be Happy show, which could have potentially generated a good amount of wishpower through her fame and the audience's support. That certainly could have developed something that would have an effect on a person's brain. Of course, there would be a price, which seems to be the state that Fulwish found herself in with empathetic hallucinations that sent her into a logicless haze when used. 

But how would this be transferred to others? Well I think it was an experimental process designed to use the faith of the person being changed along with some other materials. We know from Bequea's Happiness Report that the surgery is not always entirely successful and can leave a person feeling incredibly numb. Additionally, in the Happiness Surgery Report, they discuss cutting off friends and family as doubt can convince you to not get the surgery (or perhaps, potentially screw the surgery up?). Regardless, that piece of advice is straight from How to Cult 101.