DUNNO WHAT OTHER ANON WAS TALKING ABOUT BUT I CARE. tell me about it
I have been meaning to answer these for like a hot week. Take my hand(s). Come with me. This AU is excellent if you don't care too much about canon and if you want to permanently ruin the way you watch Eleven's run w the Ponds. This is also just straight infodumping.
This post is both shorter and longer than I expected. I can talk about this for ages so this is truly one of those topics that’s like If You Have Any Questions At All About Fobwatched Rory!Master AU GimmeGimmeGimme I Will Always Be Down To Talk About Him/Them.
The gist is that this is an AU where Rory Williams is still Rory Williams. It’s just that Rory Williams should not exist? It’s just that Rory Williams Definitely Did Not Exist until some busted TARDIS fell into a backyard in Leadworth in the 90s and sat there to rot. It’s- It’s just that Rory Williams is a front. Was made up. Rory Williams is genetically human. Rory Williams has a fobwatch that has been harboring the Master for as long as Rory Williams has existed.
The background is that the year is 2012 and this is a headcanon being tossed around because the Master has not even been alluded to in Eleven’s run. Criminal. This premise was promptly stolen by me and ruined my brain for the next 12 years. There are a handful of fanfics that explore this premise, it’s been Too Long since I’ve read any so I truly don’t have any recommendations right now.
So. We have Rory Williams.
You may ask me “Hey, Andrew, in 2012 when other people were playing with this headcanon, was there anything in canon that could have supported this? Not because you NEED to justify headcanons and AUs with hard canon. I’m just curious.” and I say thank you for specifying. YES. Definitely. Totally.
I hope this helps :)) No straws were being grasped :)) It will be like 3 more years until Missy is introduced :))))) Some of us were starving :))))))))
So now that that’s some fun fandom lore established let’s settle this bastard (the Master)’s timeline…
From the Doctor’s timeline: Eleven has not actually seen the Master. Eleven’s last time seeing the Master was Simm!Master being dragged back to Gallifrey before the regeneration tour. The Master is dead.
From the Master’s timeline: Missy is dying. Missy is trying not to die and is effectively kickstarting a new regeneration cycle.
There are two priorities here: Get far away from the Doctor and get far away from any version of themself. In fact that new regeneration cycle might take time to fully develop. Doubly in fact, the Master’s TARDIS is not in good shape.
Solution: chameleon arch.
Rory Williams is not meticulously planned as a human. Rory Williams didn’t even have a name made up when the Master was both regenerating and going under the chameleon arch. There was no planning or time to plan. There was just going, and hoping for the best, because the chameleon arch will sort itself out just fine. (wrong)
Amelia Pond moves to Leadworth with her family as a young girl.
The night Amelia Pond settles into a house with a crack in the bedroom wall, a TARDIS crashes in someone else’s backyard in Leadworth. And Brian and Mallory Williams suddenly remember that they were supposed to be renovating their daughter’s bedroom (that strangely looks like a home office at the time), and put Rory Williams to sleep on the couch after he comes wandering in from the woods out back.
Rory Williams meets Amelia Pond the literal next day, and immediately, unknowingly, the youngest 7 year old in existence Fucks The Master’s Whole Shit Up For An Entire Millennia.
About a week later, the Doctor crash-lands into Amelia Pond’s backyard, and there is literally too much going on for him to even get a HINT that his Best Divorced Enemy is taking a ✨Mental Health Break✨ a few blocks over.
Amelia tells Rory all about the Raggedy Doctor she met and he does not question the weird anxious feeling in his stomach at all, because this kid is dealing with other things, like transgenderism and hanging off of Amelia Pond’s arm and also her Every Last Word. He will get dragged into games of Raggedy Doctor until they are at least 15 and will look at all of her Raggedy Doctor fanart and trinkets and listen to her borderline religious obsession with this character and is the only person in Leadworth aside from Mels to not look at her funny or tell her its all A Bit Too Much when she starts ranting about him. He decides early on he wants to be a doctor. Or maybe a nurse.
curb your enthusiasm.mp3
Everything from Eleventh Hour on is… Pretty accurate. The Master isn’t even really involved. The Master is in an old antique wristwatch somewhere in the Williams’ house, buried in boxes in Rory’s closet. I’m sure there’s a joke there somewhere.
Rory Williams is just. Like that.
The Master has no hand in Rory Williams’ sheer inability to die.
Every time Rory somehow evades inexistence the Master is pleasantly surprised. It makes absolutely no damn sense how this random human managed to escape death multiple times. It makes no damn sense that he just so managed to become an Auton just so he could guard his girlfriend for 1000 years (for the Doctor, but it’s important that every move this man makes is in Amy Pond’s name. The Doctor doesn’t even cross Rory’s mind when he decides to watch over the Pandorica.).
Rory Williams does not think much about how anxious he feels in the TARDIS. Somehow, the TARDIS makes him feel claustrophobic. Somehow, he feels like he isn’t welcome there, though nobody around him would give him that impression, ever. He does not think much about how he understood how the TARDIS worked immediately outside of the one article he read on dimensional travel. There is a period of time where he thinks the sickly feeling he gets in his stomach looking at the Doctor is just him needing to unpack weird feelings around his own bisexuality and Amy teases him relentlessly for it, because honestly, it’s just mortifying that it’s the Doctor of all people.
Around the Power of Three, Brian Williams is downsizing. It’s just him living in Rory’s childhood home now, no reason to hold onto all of these boxes of things.
Brian discovers an old, busted wrist watch in Rory’s childhood bedroom, buried deep in his closet shelves where he frankly never even touched. There’s some part of his memory that tells him it was from Rory’s grandfather, some hand me down, a gift for a christening, something. Rory should have this watch. Rory would want it. Next time he sees Rory, he gives it to him.
Rory is now aware of the watch. The Master is now aware that Rory is aware of the watch. The watch has gotten incredibly claustrophobic. The Universe resetting itself doesn’t take away Rory’s centurion stint, and it doesn’t apply to streams of consciousness that are hidden in dusty Time Lord tech. Rory does not want to open the watch- there is a part of Rory deeply self aware that if it’s opened, he will no longer exist. Every fiber of Rory’s being feels compelled to open the watch. The Master does want to open the watch- but the Master does not, cannot have, the watch opening around the Doctor. Neither man wins in this scenario.
You are the Master. You explicitly chose some random coordinates and fobwatched yourself into some random human with a random backstory. You somehow wound up best friends with the person obsessed with your ex that you were AVOIDING. You all traipse around his TARDIS together. You die and come back multiple times for this girl, this woman that you hooked onto immediately. Your daughter marries that same fucking ex. You couldn't have pranked yourself harder if you tried.
You are Amy Pond. You shouldn't really exist but you do against all odds. And you do not deserve any of this.
When the Master comes out(ha.) it is messy and awkward and nobody has a good time. There is no discernible reason why the Doctor should believe the Master going “oops !! oopsie !! well this is awkward isn’t it !!!!” while wearing the face of his best friend’s husband, and a very good friend of his own, and also technically his father-in-law. The Master is also aware of this. The Master is, actually, feeling kind of guilty that he killed Amy Pond’s husband right in front of her?
The Master has been locked in a state of half-regeneration for 1000 years. The Master has been in Rory Williams head, and likewise the Master has had Rory Williams in his own head. The Master is softly aware that there is something different in him this time around. There is something that feels decidedly human, sickly and overly emotional and cagey. There’s also just plain dysphoria when he looks in the mirror as himself, as the Master and not Rory, for the first time, something that absolutely fucks up the Master who is A. A Time Lord who has regenerated dozens of times B. Up until this point frequently operates on the idea that “Any Working Body Is A Good Body”.z
Eleven hates his guts. Amy is not fond either. (I am convinced that if that watch opened up without the Doctor around at all he would’ve immediately snatched up Amy and forced her to be his best friend even if she didn’t want to. I am certain that if Rory opened the watch at a few specific points the Master could’ve absolutely just willingly whisked Amy away to be his own companion and they would be sooo fucked up together.) It is uncertain to everyone involved whether or not River knew this was a possibility, let alone something she knew would even happen. The Master is spiraling. The Master is also lonely, both in the present and in the memory of being Missy. The memory of a Doctor who doesn’t exist yet. Rory Williams is a ghost that haunts the Master until he regenerates. Rory is in his sudden knowledge of how to properly bandage a burn. Rory is in his hesitation at saying the coldest and cruelest thing he could think of to get a reaction out of Amy Pond. Missy is in the inside joke he quips to the Doctor before realizing that the joke hasn’t happened yet. Missy is in the way he wonders if the Doctor even had a chance at remembering this regeneration of his since the whole timeline is disrupted, so does it actually matter what he does with it? Between Rory and between everything that happened with Missy and the Saxon Master and Twelve, is he actually what he perceives as the Master anymore? Or will another version of himself eventually just come along and put him down like a sick dog for not performing correctly, too?
Rory haunts the Master in the way that the Doctor can’t look at the Master’s face without revulsion for ages. Until the Master is grasping at straws, and suddenly insisting that the Doctor look him in the eyes. And he does- he just barely does. It’s not what he was expecting, but he does it. The Master grabs at his wrist and there’s a desperate insistence to the way he says it, the most pathetic “Say My Name” to ever fall from any regeneration’s lips, and when the Doctor does say “Master…”, it’s only to follow up with “Master… Are you okay?” because NO he clearly isn’t. The Master is quite obviously never okay but this is different, nothing is working the way it used to, nothing sounds right and even the Doctor isn’t doing it right and it’s clearly(/s) all just because of Fucking Rory Williams.
Anyways. It’s about haunting your own narrative and it’s about how to best fuck up a Time Lord who was Too Human For Too Long. It’s about giving the Master empathy and both gender and social dysphoria and an identity crisis.
It's also about Amelia Pond and Rory Williams, two human beings who by all accounts should NOT exist at all, finding and loving each other because two TARDISes crash landed in Leadworth in 1996.
In Conclusion:
P.S. while I’m here: Him Face (Also important to note that if you’ve read this far in, congratulations, you get the added fun fact of knowing that in this the Master’s TARDIS is a horribly beat up and graffiti’d vending machine. It’s not stuck like that. It’s just how his TARDIS prefers to present, and shockingly, the Master’s TARDIS refuses to listen to a word he fucking says.)
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Not what i was thinking i was gonna post on halloween, but this software is so fucked up it’s scary. Gotta say, the way rain world levels work is utterly fascinating to me. Like, technically and visually. It’s important to note rain world is a 2.5d game here. Let’s get an image example: GW_A24 (which stands for garbage wastes single screen room 24 in room file shorthand)
Note the 3-dimensionality of the space, as well as survivor’s shadow on the curved stone pillar behind it. This is rendered as 2.5d in the gamespace. Now let’s look at the room render in the files:
A... flat .png image? Yes. Rain world renders this 2.5d world from a red depthmap. The overbearing redness may stick out, far from the browns and toxic greens of the room in-game. This is because the game applies palettes
In the bottom left corner, see the palette menu, note the fade palette? yes, rooms get not one but two palettes to play with, which gives much more colour depth and variance in a region.
toning down the toxic fade palette, we get nothing but the sun-bleached grey palette 9, and turning it up...
Yeowch! The toxic hues in full force. Obviously this palette, palette 11 couldn’t be used like this, but with palette 9 as a moderator, it manages to show the intense pollution of the garbage wastes.
Now, as for the origin of the png image, it is created in the rain world level editor. To someone who has not used the level editor, this may seem simple. To someone who has, the mere mention may bring a tear to their eye.
the editor is split into quite a few editors, but here is the most relevant one for this, the tile editor.
One look at this and you might think “hey, those assets look like they were drawn in MS paint, where are my 2.5d objects? And where are the objects lying on the floor?” To answer this, i must elaborate. The tile editor shows previews of the tiles. the actual models, or to resort to technical vocabulary, voxelstructs, would be too impractical to render within the tile editor. The models are, too, stored as pngs, descending from the closest layer to the furthest, with the editor symbol positioned last. As an example, have the “big brick” tile that features prominently. The amount of times a layer repeates is controlled in the tile’s line in the init (ie: [#nm:"BigBrick", #sz:point(2,2), #specs:[1,1,1,1], #specs2:0, #tp:"voxelStruct", #repeatL:[1, 1, 1, 7], #bfTiles:0, #rnd:1, #ptPos:0, #tags:[]])
The RGB layers are used to generate the 3d model for the render, and the black outlines are what are shown in the tile editor.
Non-grid aligned objects, or “props” are placed in the prop editor, and they do use the 3d layers. This is because it is necessary for the prop editor’s function. While the tile editor is limited to the three major layers, the (2.5d) world is made up of 30 pixel layers (well, gameplay objects exist between layers 5 and 6, and water starts either between layer 0 and layer 1 or above layer 0) , and props can be placed as starting from any of these layers.
These are all assembled to make a 2.5d level... in red, green and blue. Not yet in the red read by the game. And also notice: there aren’t any plants! plants are generated by effects, which you can see haven’t been fully applied yet. The dark space surrounding most rooms is one, called “BlackGoo”
I don’t really have the strength of will to elaborate on effects, so onto lighting we go: the sunlight in a room is generated from an often crude monochrome image, which is projected onto the layers of the room after effects are generated, many of the intricacies of the lighting exist through light angle and distance.
In the last stage of rendering, the harsh red lightmap generated by this projection is used to determine whether a pixel is sunlit or in shadow. Light distance and angle are also saved for the game, so that it generates the shadows of gameplay objects in accordance.
All of this isn’t quite how it works but rather... an approximation. The editor still has many strange things, but this is what i’ve worked out from my own experience with it, as well as the experiences both of the modding community and others who worked on downpour. So yeah, basically rain world rooms go between 2.5d and 2d multiple times and it’s fucked up and the level editor is probably possessed by some kind of evil spirit. This piece of software is the hardest i’ve ever had to deal with, and apparently it’s even weirder internally, like half the code is in swedish. I haven’t even gotten into describing how the blues work, and i won’t, because i have no idea how the blues work, just that everything that isn’t controlled by the palette is rendered as blue.
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