#(smacks my own hand away from new concepts) Luca Your WIPs

[karliahs]

okay i have a couple of fic concepts for royal that I don't know if I'm ever actually going to write so I'm getting them out here

i feel like you could do a lot of interesting stuff with actualization and ren's parents. one concept is the gang are prepping for infiltration and ren's phone keeps buzzing but he never answers it and is all tense and cagey when asked about it.

everyone else is curious but respects his privacy. akechi steals his phone, sees it's his parents calling and starts needling him about it. bc of who he is as a person

tense convo ensues. one of the other PTs guesses that ren doesn't want to answer bc it might be one of maruki's wishes. ren is like yeah. if it wasn't one of maruki's wishes they wouldn't be calling at all. big oof.

and that in itself is kind of a self-contained idea, or could be continued with ren eventually either answering or listening to a voicemail of them offering forgiveness and love he knows isn't real

BUT I also imagine him eventually picking up just to tell them to stop calling at least. and then everyone watches as his face goes totally still. they weren't calling to apologise, it's ren's mother calling bc his dad is sick and doesn't have a lot of time left so they want him to come home

and ren gets maddddd. won't talk to anyone until he tracks down maruki, who allows himself to be tracked down for what he thinks might be a successful round of Convince Ren to Accept This Reality

ren is furious. maruki insists he had nothing to do with this, this was always going to happen. but of course. he would certainly be happy to use actualization to return ren's father to good health. or even bring him back if it came to that. expressing what seems like genuine sorrow for ren and this "needless tragedy" but also shamelessly using his family as a bargaining chip to blackmail this child

so, maruki asks, will ren accept this reality? I don't think ren says anything at all, just calls a persona and launches his most powerful attack at maruki, who's vanished before it can hit

and after they leave the palace the gang is like...we need to talk about this. ren says there's nothing to talk about, nothing has changed.

rest of the gang is like. I mean we're not telling you to accept his deal but something has changed. we should at least talk about the fact that he's threatening us more directly now, do we believe him that he had nothing to do with ren's father getting sick? (reluctantly yeah, that doesn't seem to fit within their understanding of maruki's powerset)

someone asks if maruki could even use actualization to cure a disease. (theoretically yeah, if ren's father wants to see himself as healthy than maruki could grant that wish.)

ren says again that it doesn't matter. how would they ever be able to know for sure that maruki actualized that by actually removing the physical disease - he could just make it that nobody noticed the symptoms anymore. and if he dies, maruki can just spring up another one

ren says he's not going to let maruki get away with turning real people in his life into puppets created to please him (the idea of being a puppet who only exists to please other people hits v close to home for this boy). he appreciates what the PTs are trying to do but he could never accept that and it makes him furious that maruki would even try

and akechi is just sitting there like i feel nothing about any of these statements. nobody look at anything my face is doing against my will

there's a lot I'd need to figure out to actually write this (whose pov is it even in for instance) and I want to tackle some more WIPs first. but I am just rotating it in my mind. partly just as another venue for exploring like...let ren get mad at maruki. let him have a feeling. maruki used him and I don't think we ever really get to dig into that

I have another WIP trying to explore similar concepts but it involves writing a lot of akechi and I'm weirdly nervous about it lol. he's so many people's primary blorbo you know. not sure I'll do it justice. tbh the more I think about the above idea the more I like it in akechi pov, which would be a big challenge for me but an interesting one maybe. hmmm