#lifes a queue

Alright, as you may know from my intro post, Liz is kidnapped on her sixteenth birthday.

Originally she was supposed to flee after a group of radicals (they call themselves 'the black crown') tried to kill her. See, in my first draft Liz was meant to be queen once she reached a certain age (again, I played around with age quite a lot, and some other factors that could lead to her taking the throne sooner rather than later). Some ppl really weren't happy with that, because Liz has no magical power whatsoever. So even though she is the rightful heir they want her twin brother instead. Otherwise they fear that the magical population (Tehokans) will lose power and strength in favor of non-magical people (Voimatos). To save her life and find alliances, she flees to Belena, an independent city where only Voimatos live. It is run by the 'Council of Thirteen'. Although they are actually striving for a completely different system of rule, the prospect of an allied queen who also has no magical abilities is at least a promising start.

Almost all of that is still happening but the major difference is that Liz now was never meant to be on the throne in the first place. Her parents have decided that Tim is better suited to rule and keep the slowly crumbling peace in the kingdom. They claim that he is the legitimate heir and that Liz is simply not a strong mage, which is why she aims to become a fighter in the royal guard. Liz is generally treated rather subordinately. All in the name of protecting her of course. However, having to put up with yet another king who favors the status quo is not very popular with the Voimatos. Which is why the red alliance, an organization rooted in Belena, tries to intervene by killing all the primary heirs to the throne, aka Liz and her siblings. Their assassination attempt fails when Liz does not respond to their weapons, as she is not a Tehokan. They then decide to take her with them to obtain a political advantage. It think this idea has so much more potential and works in a much better way with Liz as a character. In the first version Liz would've had to leave her country, her people, her family. She'd have never chosen that. She'd have rather died, you know? But for her personal development and to gain a better understanding of the real world and their problems, it was extremely important that she left home. So someone (aka me i guess) had to force her hand a little. This way she still ends up in Belena and learns about what is really going on in the kingdom while also being in line with her character. It also allowed me to add a little (more) family drama which is something that I personally, as a reader and writer, love.

Okayyyy, that's it for now I guess. Let me know if you could understand my reasoning, if you'd have chosen similarly or if you'd have kept the first idea. Also, if you want to, tell me about your story, your character, or some of the changes you made, big or small (I believe that sometimes its the small decisions that make a particularly big difference in the end).

The Spiritual vs. The Biological: The Filum Aeternum represents a pure, sacred, and egalitarian connection created when the Creator split Sephiroth and Bianca's single soul at Creation. Conversely, the Alpha/Beta/Omega dynamics in this world are not a natural order. They are an invasive, predatory biological framework engineered by Jenova’s cosmic infection to twist Gaian biology into a weapon of conquest.

The Psychological Paradox: Keeping the romance alive post-madness while charting Bianca’s eventual descent into Sephiroth's cosmic delusion creates a harrowing dark romance. It shifts the narrative from a simple survival story to a psychological countdown where her human socialization and defensive instincts are continuously eroded by absolute biological gravity.

Why This Echoes the 1990s Film Species

This AU heavily mirrors the central thematic horror of the 1990s sci-fi film Species (which centers on Sil, an engineered alien-human hybrid driven by an absolute, single-minded biological directive to find a compatible mate and propagate her lethal species).

The structural and thematic overlaps include:

The Single-Minded Propagation Directive:

In Species, Sil is not malicious in a conventional human sense. She is completely ruled by a predatory cellular drive to reproduce. In my AU, Sephiroth’s descent into madness mutates his biology from a standard Alpha into a Solitary Apex—a world-consuming Alpha-Omega predator. His desire for Bianca post-breakdown is not born out of human sentimentality but a terrifying, ancient alien mandate. Because Hojo engineered Bianca (Project Nexus and labeled her Subject N) using S-cells specifically to serve as a permanent biological lock for Sephiroth’s mutated instincts, Sephiroth views her not as an external person to court, but as an essential, missing piece of his own biological machinery. He feels entitled to her because her entire celestial anatomy was forcefully re-engineered to be the definitive vessel for his cosmic lineage

The Inescapable Biological Gravity

Sil from Species possesses pheromonal triggers that instantly manipulate, attract, or paralyze targets. Similarly, my world treats pheromones as localized sensory pathogens. When Sephiroth enters his mutated state, his scent—infusing the winter-frost with the terrifying chill of the cosmic void—exerts an absolute, inescapable biological gravity.

When Sephiroth invades Bianca's nest post-madness, it triggers a profound psychological horror directly reminiscent of Species. While her conscious, rational mind screams in terror at the arrival of an apex predator, her chemically overridden body instantly halts its defensive panic because his overwhelming Solitary Apex scent convinces her primal instincts that the ultimate protector has claimed the space.

The Corruption of Divine / Primal Innocence

Just as Species deals with human labs tampering with alien DNA to create a monster disguised as a beautiful woman, Hojo tampered with Bianca’s pristine, foreign celestial anatomy. He used invasive S-cell infusions to degrade her celestial purity into Exocrine Scent-Slick (ESS) and chemical vulnerability, making her the perfect vector to anchor Sephiroth and eventually act as an Patient Zero (spreading Jenova's pathogen to both Heaven and Hell.

Canon-Compliance & Timeline Integration (FFVII Remake Era)

Timeline Note: These notes map out specific milestones from Crisis Core through the Remake era. While the events of Before Crisis and Ever Crisis do still occur within this AU's history, they are omitted here for the sake of tracking this specific narrative thread.

The Crisis Core to Remake Timeline Notes

The Pre-Fall Training: Before Genesis defected and Sephiroth fell into the Lifestream, Sephiroth provided Bianca with basic tactical and defensive conditioning, capitalizing on her innate magic.

The Slum Anomaly: Following the Nibelheim Incident, Shinra PR maintained a public narrative that Sephiroth's high-society Omega housewife was safely accounted for or mourning. In reality, Bianca used her nightmare, shadow, and illusion magic to mask her unique starlight-and-ozone scent profile, blending seamlessly into the volatile, Mako-choked underbelly of the Midgar Slums to evade the Turks.

Joining AVALANCHE: Seeking protection and driven to oppose the corporate destruction of the Planet, Bianca aligns with AVALANCHE. Her ability to cast defensive barriers and her residual military training make her an asset, while her hidden status as Hojo's "Subject N" remains a ticking biological time bomb.

The Dubcon Nest Intrusion: Placing the dubious-consent encounter towards the end of the Remake (the game and not the trilogy) timeline matches the escalating, claustrophobic dread of Midgar.

Dropping of the Plate: The chaos of the Plate's collapse floods the Slums with raw, unshielded Mako emissions, triggering sudden "hormonal weather storms" and intense cyclic crises across the populace. Driven by the environmental static and the proximity of Jenova's biomass, Sephiroth's manifested form hunts her down, violently overriding her sanctuary. She will reunite with Cloud and his party after this, but still not tell them about what really happen. They think it was a random Alpha and not Sephiroth.

The Shinra Building Abduction: When the party infiltrates Sector 0, the proximity to Jenova's headless torso acts as a massive biological radio tower, hyper-activating the A/B/O pathogen. Sephiroth utilizes Jenova’s physical form to assassinate President Shinra, torment Cloud with ancestral memories, and abduct Bianca right out from under the party's nose.

By having Sephiroth tear her away immediately before the Jenova Dreamweaver encounter, I establish a narrative parallel: the party is left to fight a manifestation of illusions and hallucinations, while Bianca is dragged away into a very real, biological awakening before the highway and 'the world beyond' (Singularity) through the portal that Sephiroth created. Still have to figure out where Bia is during this part.

The Psychology of the Post-Madness Dark Romance

To preserve the romance post-madness without diminishing the cosmic horror, the relationship must evolve into a mutually shared delusion. Bianca’s eventual submission should not be a flat, passive defeat, but a terrifying evolution of the Filum Aeternum.

The Shared Mindscape: Because the Red String of Fate permits telepathic communication and direct memory access, Sephiroth's fall into the Lifestream did not sever their link; FWC canon states that the red thread between them cannot be severed, unless by Sephiroth-Prime (The Main FWC Seph). The bond flooded Bianca's psyche with the staggering scale of his cosmic revelations. Post-madness, she isn't just hearing a madman. As Sephiroth's mind fractures under the parasitic weight of Jenova's pulse, he uses their soul-bond to peer into her memories. He is looking at Bianca's history of Heaven (Caelora) and her father Asmodeus's domain in Hell (Umbralyth), mapping his own world-consuming god-complex onto the divine and demonic realms she used to belong to.

The Incurable Scent-Starvation: Separated from him, Bianca's endocrine system naturally defaults to Nest-Rot, where her own exocrine glands saturate her environment with an acrid, agonizing feedback loop of concentrated chemical terror. Her eventual choice to join him becomes a desperate search for equilibrium. She surrenders to his madness because his dominant, freezing Apex scent is the only force capable of silencing the agonizing static in her own S-cell-infused blood.

The Devastation of Hell: When she finally succumbs and stands by his side, her transformation into a patient zero recontextualizes the romance on a cosmic scale. Their union ceases to be a localized corporate crisis for Shinra and transforms into an apocalyptic threat, as her retroactively leaking Jenovan-celestial essence begins mapping Jenova's punishing biological hierarchy directly onto the demonic legions of the Abyss, breaking the sovereignty of Asmodeus entirely.

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The Science of "Stercoraceous" Medicine

During the Renaissance, medicine was still heavily dominated by the classical theories of Galen and Hippocrates, who viewed health as a balance of four primary bodily humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.

Disease or infection was interpreted as a systemic imbalance, and treatment often relied on like curing like or using aggressive topical to draw out corruption.

To my horror, I discovered that fecal therapies, known historically as stercoraceous medicine, were not fringe quackery. They were mainstream. Prominent physicians regularly prescribed poultices composed of human feces, dried cow dung, or bird droppings to treat everything from venomous bites and quinsy to deep, hemorrhaging tissue wounds.

The logic behind it was as bizarre as the application itself. Ancient and Renaissance texts argued that excrement possessed powerful "drawing" properties capable of pulling bad humors and heat out of a inflamed wound.

Physicians were even aware that patients found the treatment utterly repulsive. Their brilliant solution? They began mixing the excrement with aromatic herbs like thyme, lavender, or rosewater to make the foul paste more palatable to the patient's nose.

Archaeologists in Turkey even uncovered a 1,900-year-old Roman glass unguentarium--a small bottle typically reserved for perfumes--that chemical analysis revealed was packed with human feces mixed with thyme. The practice was so deeply ingrained in Western medical heritage that it persisted straight through the High Renaissance.

I sat at my desk, looking from my screen to my cup of coffee, utterly fascinated. What we now recognize as a guaranteed recipe for lethal sepsis, tetanus, and gangrene was, for centuries, considered state-of-the-art trauma care.

From Research to the Page: Making the Discovery Work in Drafts

Discovering something shocking in research presents a dangerous trap for a writer: the info-dump. When you spend three days reading academic papers on 16th-century dung unguents, the temptation to force every horrifying detail into the story is almost overwhelming. But effective worldbuilding requires restraint. The goal isn't to lecture the reader. It's to immerse them.

In my original outline, the protagonist's companion suffered a deep blade wound during a tavern skirmish. I had initially planned a standard, romanticized scene where a wise old apothecary cleans the wound with wine, stitches it neatly with silk, and wraps it in clean white gauze.

After my research trip down the dung rabbit hole, I realized that scene was completely dishonest to the era's medical reality. I completely rewrote the chapter to lean into the authentic visceral terror of Renaissance healthcare.

Instead of a clean, pleasant apothecary shop, the scene became claustrophobic and sensory. I introduced the sickening contrast of fragrances: the sharp, sweet scent of crushed thyme and dried lavender fighting against the unmistakable, pungent reek of a freshly prepared dung poultice. The sensory contradiction alone immediately grounded the reader in a historical world that felt alien, filthy, and real.

The historical reality built instant, high-stakes conflict between the characters. When the surgeon brought out a wooden paddle slathered with a steaming, greenish-brown paste, my wounded character didn't passively lie back. He panicked. The scene transformed from a dry medical pause into a desperate, physical struggle. The protagonist had to actively fight off the well-meaning doctor, terrified that the "cure" was going to kill his friend faster than the blade.

My research also led me to a fascinating paradox of the era: the "Powder of Sympathy" or "Weapon Salve." Because patients frequently died of horrific infections after surgeons applied dung poultices to their wounds, some Renaissance thinkers claimed that treating the wound itself was too traumatic. Instead, they invented a magical salve applied directly to the weapon that caused the cut, while the actual wound was simply washed with clean water and wrapped in clean linen.

Unsurprisingly, the patients whose wounds were just washed with water and left alone survived far more often than those slathered in bird droppings. In my draft, I had a street-smart rogue protagonist reject the official physician’s expensive dung poultice, opting instead to pay a charlatan for a sympathetic weapon salve.

Ironically, by falling for a superstitious gimmick, the protagonist accidentally saved his friend's life simply by keeping the doctor's foul remedies away from the open flesh.

Falling down the Renaissance medical rabbit hole changed more than just one chapter of my manuscript. It reshaped my entire approach to historical fiction. It reminded me that the past is not just the present with cooler clothes and candlelight. The people of the past operated under radically different logic, paradigms, and daily horrors.

When we allow ourselves to explore the truly strange corners of history, our stories stop feeling like modern reenactments and start feeling like living, breathing, beautifully bizarre worlds.