I'll confess I don't know the base of the AU but I badly want to know about that Saya no Uta AU. I have never seen anyone say they had a Saya no Uta AU for anything.
Oh, this one will be fun!
CW: heavy blood/gore. I'm not joking. Do not read if this kind of stuff disturbs you. Also cannibalism mention and body horror.
To catch you up on the base universe (Pillars of Eternity), it is a fantasy RPG with a unique world and races. The biggest component of this game world is that souls exist, and that when a person dies, their soul travels through a Wheel to be distributed to the next person. Soul essence is also very powerful and can be used to power various wonders and technologies. The player character is a Watcher, someone who can see and manipulate souls.
The second game takes place on an archipelago where various factions compete for resources and dominance while a god tracks his way through the islands to get to a lost city. It falls very heavily into dark fantasy (especially the first game), but in a cool way and not a GoT-wannabe kind of way. It has many settings that are (awesome) super dark and gruesome. I love it so much.
My OC Amali is a death godlike. Her base race is human (though any race can be a godlike), but when she was in-utero, the god of death imparted some of their essence into her, giving her horrifying features and a few abilities related to death and dying. Amali is a poor artist from Old Vailia (a culture resembling Renaissance Italy but in decline). She's also a cipher, which gives mind reading and mind manipulation powers. Her love interest is TekÄhu, an NPC who is a native of the Deadfire Archipelago. TekÄhu is also a godlike, but unlike Amali, TekÄhu's culture hold the godlike in high regard. TekÄhu especially received special treatment and privileges because he is a marine godlike, a super rare type of godlike not available to player characters that holds special importance to his culture, unlike Amali, whose culture view the godlike with suspicion and disdain, especially death godlike.
Amali is what TvTropes would call a Nightmare Fetishist. As both a person and an artist, she is absolutely drawn to the dark and macabre. Her drawings are all drawn in painstakingly, almost disgustingly meticulous detail, meant to "pull back the curtain" and showing the ugly and often overlooked side of the world. Despite this, she is a very pleasant and passionate individual, having more of an anti-nihilistic view than a depressing one.
Okay, now on with the AU!
Because of Amali's fascination with the dark and frightening, I always thought it would be fun to see how she would react if she were struck with the same affliction Fuminori had, to see the world as some sort of gore and fleshy hellscape, to see everyone around her, including her loved ones, as awful oozing monsters that were barely recognizable as the people she knew before.
I'm not exactly sure how Amali comes to be "infected", but I imagined a huge dramatic change right in the docks of Neketaka. Idk, Amali and her party are there, and Amali detects horrific disgust for absolutely everything coming from a young man from Rauatai (the setting's version of Imperial Japan). The sheer hatred this young man is broadcasting is completely overwhelming and Amali goes to find him. She makes the mistake of trying to telepathically reach out to him, and is overwhelmed by the horrific images in his mind. She passes out right there on the docks.
Amali wakes up to a nightmare. The wood and stones of the docks and streets and boats and houses are awful edifices of bone and sinew bobbing up and down an ocean of sludge while fleshy bits stick out of everything. The sky is a mesh of rotting rust with an oozing and pulsating sun overhead. The once salty air reeks of bile and rot, but is also...faintly sweet? (The fish guts now smell of floral perfume). And Amali is surrounded by monsters, creatures of exposed flesh and pulsating ooze with horrible alien appendages, gurgling monstrosities of every size and form, each unique in how disgusting they all are. When Amali comes to on the dock, she does not recognize where she is, nor does she recognize her party members (including her lover TekÄhu and her best friend Aloth), who have gathered around her. At first Amali freaks out, even pointing her gun at TekÄhu when he tries to come close. She runs from her party members, and they give chase, pursuing her right through the docks of Neketaka. Amali manages to lose them, having to navigate this fleshy and alien nightmare, until she reaches a high point over the docks, where she realizes...the very shape of those pulsing towers of flesh, the shoreline where bone and sinew meet sludgy water, the structure of the streets...holy shit, one of those bone ships docked in her spot looks suspiciously like the vessel she herself captains...Amali realizes with dawning horror that this aberrant hellscape...is Neketaka.
I didn't spend too much time on a "plot". It was basically an excuse to have Amali react to this new situation and imagine little scenarios of her and her friends dealing with it. Amali eventually returns to her ship and meets back with all her friends. She is truthful to her party members about what is going on with her and explains that she seems to be suffering from some sort of agnosia that is making the world around her seem like a living hell. However, she asks them not to disclose her condition without her permission. They all agree and are generally very supportive of her.
Amali has a lot of fun coming up with ways to deal with her new condition. It's still frightening and disturbing to her, and she would still rather go back to normal, but she enjoys the certain aspects of it that she can. Using her talents as an artist, she is able to find decorations and color schemes that are more pleasing to her. She also uses her sketchbook to draw everything she sees in this new perspective, including her friends. The people around her are super disturbed, but her friends are still supportive as they try to help her through this. She also learns that, once she finishes a painting or a drawing of something she sees, when she turns away from it and comes back, it looks just like its normal subject matter, which helps tremendously.
Food is also a lot of fun. Amali never resorts to cannibalism like Fuminori does, but at some point she figures out that the fish guts and other refuse from meat stores look and smell like lovely herbs and berries. Like with colors, she goes around collecting disgusting foods that are safe to eat. Most of her crew and party members are appalled, but some of the ones more inclined to macabre and dark humor (like Maia and Xoti) make a game of going out and finding what awful disgusting glop they can feed Amali. When she recovers, they make a point of never mentioning some of the things she ate while in her condition.
The hardest and most sad part of all this is TekÄhu. Whereas he was a very handsome man and the most beautiful person Amali has ever met, now he is the most grotesque of monsters. While Amali has no problem conversing with people in her state and connecting with them as people, she cannot bear to let TekÄhu touch her anymore. Amali feels horrible about this, whereas TekÄhu is just worried about her. (Also, Amali is demisexual and gray-ace with very intermittent interest/disinterest in sex to begin with; this is not helping). There is a sweet, if mildly disturbing moment, where TekÄhu covers himself in fish guts and puts on a cloak in the same colors Amali decorated her room in so that they could share a cuddle in the bed. (I should also mention that TekÄhu is very squeamish about horror and gore; this is a kind of a huge deal for him).
At some point Amali tracks Fuminori down, as he was the Rauataian young man from the docks, in her search for a cure. Fuminori still sees her as a disgusting monster, however, as a death godlike, Amali's deformities look like lovely crystals sticking out of her head and skin, so Fuminori can tolerate having conversations with her if he focuses on those. However, he is still super weird towards her and very unhelpful.
Fuminori's opinions on Amali are very weird. She is slightly less disgusting than the other "monsters". Fuminori hates not being the only person with this affliction--he wants Saya all to himself--yet at the same time he cannot help but form some sort of kinship with Amali?
Fuminori completely loses his shit when he catches sight of Amali looking fondly at TekÄhu. As you might know from the original Saya no Uta, when Fuminori develops his agnosia, he is absolutely horrible to his friends and to everyone around him, dehumanizing them and thinking nothing of killing them, and he blames it all on the fact that he sees them as horrific monsters and assumes that anyone with his condition would react the same way. Seeing Amali not being a complete monster to those "creatures" and even showing affection...? This forces Fuminori to grapple with his own morals and the fact that he had no excuse for treating the people around him like crap, and he. Just. Cannot. Deal.
At some point, Fuminori and Saya kidnap TekÄhu. When Amali gets to them, Fuminori offers her a sadistic choice: Saya can either change TekÄhu's body so that he becomes a creature like Saya (and thus look like his normal beautiful self to Amali again, but it will subject him to the most painful and torturous body horror imaginable), or Saya can change TekÄhu's brain so that he will have the same condition that Amali and Fuminori have. I haven't figured out how this AU ends, so I'll leave it on this cliffhanger.
Here's a drawing of Amali and TekÄhu commissioned from me and Tumblr user astrocassette because I love these two so much.
