AU Thursday: Tell Me Where To Find Shelter – The Absurdly Complicated Multiverse Version

Okay, so – remember this post about me vs my brain on the name of this AU (I'm still a bit torn between the current one and "Fallout of Darkness")? In which I revealed that I'd considered an even more complicated AU situation that brought Victoria and Emily in again via Portal and BioShock? And mentioned I'd likely talk about it one Thursday in the tags?

It's one Thursday – let's go ahead and talk about it, just for funsies. Now, for any potential fanfic purposes, I have basically settled on a "Sole Survivor Victor and Fledgling Alice" FO4/VTMB crossover. But when I first started coming up with crossover stuff, one of my first thoughts actually involved the Portal series – specifically, how Cave Johnson might have reacted to the Institute. And that reminded me that the Perpetual Testing Initiative is a thing in the sequel, and that reminded me of the "tears" in BioShock Infinite, and – well, for a tiny bit there, I had a crossover that more or less spanned every game in my Steam library, starring characters from Corpse Bride and American McGee's Alice. XD Let me try to break it down for you:

-->Obviously, for Fallout 4 and Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines, we have Sole Survivor!Victor and Fledgling!Alice, as per standard

-->I'd also already come up with a concept for Emily in BioShock – have her be a Wintry Houdini Splicer who, thanks to not completely overdosing on the cosmetic Plasmids, still retained her mind (if not her original skin and hair color)

-->That left Portal and Victoria, so I whipped up a backstory where Victoria ended up in Aperture Science as a test subject after her family's money finally ran out for good; she'd be part of the Perpetual Testing Initiative, with a modified portal gun that can make non-test-ready areas testable (that is, she has a gel sprayer to allow her to make surfaces portal-able)

-->Now, how do we get these all together? Well, you could figure out a way to have them all exist in the same universe (it would take some kludging, but I think it could be done), but as you probably already guessed, I went for "something makes it so they can access each other's universes." Portal already has a canonical multiverse thanks to the PTI, and BioShock has its tears, so I just had to think up ways to get Fallout 4 and Bloodlines involved. I figured something could go wrong at the Institute to get the former on-board (teleporter accident?), and the latter. . .well, the best I could come up with is that weird portal you use to get in and out of Ming-Xiao's inner sanctum interacting weirdly with one of the other methods. Though I guess a Tremere doing something inadvisable with blood magic also works. . . Basically, reality ends up getting ripped open and portals between all four worlds open up, and the characters stumble through them. Much WTFery ensues.

-->I never got very far with the potential plot for this absurdly complicated crossover, though, mostly because I never satisfactorily answered one of the big questions about the verse – where are the counterparts? That is, where's Alice, Victor, and Emily in Test Subject!Victoria's Portal verse, where's Alice, Victor, and Victoria in Splicer!Emily's BioShock verse, and do we have the same set-up with Fledgling!Alice and Sole Survivor!Victor in their verses? I came up with three potential answers, but never fully settled:

1. The Easy Version: For whatever reason, none of them met the others in their respective universes – Sole Survivor!Victor wasn't pushed into marrying Victoria and ended up with the default Nora, for example. They’re all meeting for the first time here, and finding they like each other. Makes life a little easier, but never really appealed to me.

2. The Funny Version: The others do exist in the other universes, though in varying states – Fledgling!Alice has her standard set up with Victor, Victoria, and Emily; while Victoria's verse now looks more like my RP verse "Aperture Wage Slave" (where Victor is a very disgruntled scientist at Aperture, and Alice also a test subject – Emily's probably part of that group too). This sets up some pretty amusing culture clashes between counterparts (Aperture!Victor probably thinks his company was somehow responsible for Sole Survivor!Victor's apocalypse despite not being in the same world), and I like the idea of people in various universes doing double-takes whenever two or more of the same person is together. However, I felt like the fun was dampened a little by Victoria and Emily being dead in Sole Survivor!Victor's universe. . .

3. The Angsty Version: Which is when I came up with the variation that the others did exist in all the other universes – but those who the "main characters" knew died right in front of them. For example, Fledgling!Alice arrived too late to save Victor and could only hold him as he died in her arms, while Splicer!Emily maybe saw Victoria murdered by some of her less-sane brethren during the fighting when Rapture was really going down the tubes. Naturally, this leads to the characters having some pretty distinct feelings when they see alternate, alive versions of their friends/loved ones/guy she felt really guilty about not being able to save. (And makes Sole Survivor!Victor, who would get that angst no matter what, stand out less.) Interesting story potential, but it did occasionally feel too dark.

-->Honestly, this AU was mostly about fun mental images from the main four all interacting with and trying to understand each other's worlds, with two particular ones that I kept coming back to:

1. A Super Mutant Behemoth getting loose in Bloodlines' Los Angeles, with the gang having to team up to try and take it down before it does too much damage – and LaCroix absolutely losing his shit (specifically at Strauss, because he thinks it's an escaped Tremere experiment – "WHAT DID YOU DO?!" "NOTHING THIS ISN'T OURS" "WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO STRAUSS")

2. Cave Johnson Destroyer Of Worlds – aka Cave realizing vampirism means immortality when he gets a look at the Bloodlines universe, getting himself Embraced (he'd go Ventrue if he could), then making plans to use his new state to take over all of the universes on display, with a particular eye toward grabbing Rapture and/or Columbia first so he can also use Plasmids and Vigors to his advantage. If this weird overcomplicated thing had a plot, it would be taking down this version of Cave before he could ruin everything. Like he does.

And that's about it, really. Like I said, the idea didn't stick around that long – I quickly realized I was setting myself up for the same overcomplicated, overthought nonsense that basically killed my BioShock AU, and dialed it back down to the current "three games, one movie" crossover. But hey, what's this tumblr for if not to tell you all the weird crossover ideas I have? XD