#especially when I think about option one and the possibility of basically cuddling Anno forever

[nutklcker]

I'm thinkin abt Anno rn and like

Imagine loving a Masked (romantically, platonically, or otherwise)

Wether you're an employee or a monster or whatever, you have a lovely little masked by your side all the time, and you collect scrap or hunt or just exist until eventually their body starts to deteriorate

And as a person, an organic thingy, you think it's dying and you mourn and spend your last days together, until eventually, one day, they stop moving

And then a few days later you notice the mask has fallen off, and you bring it with you as a keepsake, holding it with you for days, or weeks, or months, or maybe even years. Before eventually you just can't help it, you need to feel them, to see them, to hear them, to smell them, and you just need to be close to them again, and you bring the mask up to your face, it potentially fitting around your features perfectly, and it's like you feel them and see them and smell them again.

And then you feel their consciousness, and from her either can go two ways

Drunk on love and the grief of potentially reconnecting, you can't bring yourself to move the mask away, it feels like they're right there with you, you need to stay like this, because they feel so close. And eventually, the mask connects. And you can hear them and feel them and smell them again, but they're not there, they are but it's because they're within you. You share the same skin, you look with the same eyes and touch with the same hands, and you're perfectly together, whole once again, but in a new way that can never separate you two ever again. (*)

Or, the other option, you manage to pull the mask away, connecting the dots on what's happening, and you realize if you can just find a host you can have your lovely Masked back. So you spend time, maybe you hunt down a different Masked to use their body, maybe you go for the first humanoid thing you see like an employee or a Bracken, or maybe you are an employee and you send out a request for a new employee, recognizing you're dooming some newbie to death but coming to terms with that fate of theirs in order to have your loved one once again

And, there's a third option that's quite a but angsty beneath the cut

(*) Or, depending on your interpretation or wishes for how the masks work in this scenario, maybe once the make takes hold YOU die. And your poor Masked returns, recognizing this smell, these hands, this voice, and it's yours, but you're gone. And you've left them there, in your body, your decaying body. You had their mask, and their mask was basically immortal. But now? For them? You're gone, and the only physical remnant of you is theirs now, and because of the way their life works, that remnant is decaying, rotting, and eventually turning to dust. And once again they'll just be a mask, slowly falling off a body, waiting for someone to put it on.