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Windwood Syndrome:
infodump version1. The Bloom

About 15-20 years ago the Bloom happened. Flowers, creatures made of goo from another dimension, started emerging all over the globe. Deprived of their own free will, they merge with the first human body which finds them, and the human's free will becomes the flower's, or the other way around — they're one now.They called themselves symbionts.Symbionts can change form on atomic level, read mind of everything containing anything resembling a brain; they can change their own minds in the most literal way and invent new feelings and sensations; they can become new people or different people at once; they can create copies of themselves and control them remotely, being literally at several places at once; they're basically immortal unless something like other symbiont kills them or the symbiont decides to stop living.
By the time of the story's beginning, more than a half of the world's population are symbionts. They have reasons to lay low, though, otherwise the Earth will be destroyed by a certain alien race but it's not very relevant at the beginning of the story.But there's always but. Some people are immune to the Bloom effect. They can't become symbionts.Some of them know about the Bloom and the symbionts, some don't.2. Kristina

Kristina is immune and boy is she angry.She's a head of the windwood health sciences centre, and her goal is to beat immune-ness, so that everyone who would like to could become a symbiont.She has a vision — not literally, she's blind — but she's pretty certain about what kind of a world she wants to see.She maintains the reputation of a philanthropist but of course she experiments on human subjects in secret. And not only human — there's a creature made of a flower and imperfect copy of Kristina'd mind, which later escapes.The creature is called Person and suffers from severe PTSD.Kristina considers every casualty a tragedy but to her the consequences of hesitation in saving humanity are much more tragic.She's certain that she's doing everything right.
People who aren't close to her see her as a nice person, almost angelic. Sometimes she creeps them out a bit but they feel uncomfortable admitting it because they think it's only because of her blind stare. It amuses her and she likes to scare them on purpose and then pretend-apologize for her disability, making the situation more awkward.
Charles, her symbiont servant, is loyal to her to the end. Even when he doesn't fully understand the logic of her actions, he's certain that Kristina works in mysterious way. It doesn't stop him from critiquing her, though, but in the end he always does as she says.
Jean, her wife, sees Kristina as an eldrich monster.Kristina suffers from schizophrenia. Luckily, she's in remission; although due to the fact that she talks to Windwood she's certain that the remission is an illusion. And it makes her angry.
She is skeptical of windwood syndrome and believes in it at the same time.3. Roger

"Windwood is a completely normal town" says Roger as he just got in there.
However, he has to admit that everyone he meets here is weird, but it doesn't concern him. First friend he makes here tells him, "everyone here is either autistic, either queer, or just plainly crazy" and claims they're "all of the above".Windwood syndrome is a non-existing diagnosis made up by locals and those who spread rumors about this town. They say, "the first symptom of windwood syndrome is admitting that it's real'. When asked about its "symptoms", they describe cliché madness with crazy laughter and smiles and, apparently, quite sincere happiness.But even though it's made up, people somehow always know if you're from Windwood.They say, if you move to Windwood, it either will break you and change you so that you won't recognize yourself anymore, either you are already so crazy that you will fit fine in here, or you just run away eventually after a year at best.Windwood has extremely cheap housing and low crime rates and still is half-empty.They say, Windwood has a mind of its own. Even if that's true, it has a sense of humor so it carefully calculates every its appearance as a sentient being so that it could be easily explained by someone dreaming or hallucinating. Souvenir shops all over the town sell merch with the same character, and nothing surprizing in people dreaming of the same face.Roger claims, Windwood is normal and doesn't even notice that half of his friends aren't even human.
Roger claims, he's normal and feels like he fits here.He feels like a regular guy, boring even, despite having a psychopath-level low empathy and lack of a decent amount of human feelings. It doesn't bother him and doesn't get in the way of him trying to be the best person he can. Actually, it's hard to find things that really bother him. Basically, he's always happy. Even when he misses hid best childhood friend who also is his first crush.Symbols and associations

Windwood Syndrome associates for me with the butterflies and the color blue.
Butterflies are the symbol of change, rebirth, victory over death.
Also the main character, Roger, feels like his friends are like a collection of butterflies to him.
Later he's being kidnapped and treated as a butterfly by the main antagonist, Alice.Color blue feels otherworldly and overwhelming. It's biblically accurate angels if they were a color.
Actually, it's mostly Roger. His enormous blue eyes feel otherworldly and unnerving, and he is, in a way, a biblically accurate angel too.But he's not the only character in the comic.The Bloom is associated with the colors purple and green. That's because 2 reasons:
First, Joker vibes, since the main location is Windwood.
Secondly, in the beginning of me working on this setting the flowers were supposed to be fusion of a plant and a crystal. For some reason, crystals were always pink or purple.Windwood personification is always black and white. She can't produce color, so she relies on her residents to do it. She needs color and it's never enough. That's why she needs more residents, the more weird and vibrant the better, and she's quite upset that people run away from her.Another symbol is mushrooms. Like mycelium can spread for kilometers unseen by human eyes and still being a single organism, the symbionts can be incomprehensible for human perception and only show parts of themselves at the surface.Also there is a mushroom species endemic to Windwood. Especially to the Roger's toilet in the house he accidentally purchased the day he arrived. That's where he made his first friend, a mycologist who used to sneak into this house and study the mushrooms or just get high on them.The special windwood mushrooms are also black and white; and people call them laughing mushrooms because of the shape of the cap and the way they crack and show plates resembling teeth.And also when stoned you start to laugh uncontrollably.

Character sheets


They're old and obsolete but that's more than nothing.

The first dream.
Info dump versionVampires are made of fungus, a parasitic worm and an altered human body.The vampire fungus
The fungus is endemic to mammals body and lives in a bloodstream but easily dies of the weakest immune system. So, basically, the vampire fungus is actually endemic to, well, vampires. Parasitic worm which vampires just call the worm, digests human blood and filters out all the anti-bodies which are deadly to the fungus, creating for it a unique livable environment. So the only place where vampire fungus can live is the vampire body.Generally vampires have less of a blood than humans or other mammals; it's concentrated at the center of the body, living out cold, pale or gray-ish skin and non-pulpable heartbeat. Fungus takes on itself a decent part of the blood functions.
Basically vampires have no immune system so the fungus does it too. It helps with quick regeneration, it quickly forms a membrane on fresh wounds and even takes part in brain functioning; and in rare cases forms a scar tissue.Fungus doesn't like the sunlight; that is to say, aggressive ultra-violet emission. Fungus likes it when it's cold and dark; so do vampires.Vampires can walk under the sun but not for long, if uncovered. Too much exposure to the ultra-violet will weaken them up to the point where they barely can walk. It depends on many factors like: are they exhausted of hungry, how much melanin there is in their skin and so on. Yes melanin with vampires works pretty much the same as with humans so an albino vampire would be a lot more vulnerable to the sunlight than a vampire with a darker skin. But both of them will probably hate the sun.Also the fungus makes a vampire allergic to blood. It's toxic to the fungus so if the blood touches the vampire's body, of worse, gets into their bloodstream directly, not through the worm, the vampire can get seriously sick.The worm and the larvae
The worm is their digestive system and so much more.
As the person becomes a vampire and their body transforms, the worm replaces the throat, the stomach and the fangs. Vampire fangs aren't actually fangs, it's more like proboscis of mosquitoes, and vampires use them as straws. This is the safest way for a vampire to drink blood, because this way blood doesn't touch the fungus in their mouth.The reproductive cycle of the worm is one day, and the blood takes a crucial part in it. The more blood the worm gets, the more larvae it produces. The more larvae, the more energy and building material for the cases when a vampire needs to grow back a limb or something.Blood isn't the main source of nutrition for a vampire. Mostly, it just feeds the worm.This is how it happens: during the night, a vampire drinks blood, and the worm digests it. During the day, the vampire sleeps, 8-10 hours, like a human. As the vampire sleep, the newborn larvae leave their body through mouth and nostrils and start feeding on everything they can find.If a larva finds another human and manages to avoid sunlight — so the fungus in its body is still alive — it crawles into their stomach through the mouth, attaches itself to the stomach wall and starts growing into another worm. That's how the new vampires form.But those who haven't managed to find another host, crawl back into vampire they got out from, and the worm digests them.For about the first two centuries of their life, vampires are unable to control who around them will become a vampire. That's why they used to sleep in coffins or simply far away from any human settlements or just make sure that the larvae get exposed to the sunlight and become infertile. Another unplanned vampire is usually either an unwanted competitor for resources or unwanted responsibility. Also it's plainly dangerous: if humans discover a vampire among them, they will start searching for others.Modern vampires, if living in apartments, sleep in bathtubs filled with organic garbage or, if they try to blend in with humans without scaring them off or attracting unwanted attention due to the smell, — with something neutral, like plain bread, wheat porridge of crackers (here goes the joke about the main character's white wife and his diet). Vampires struggle to differentiate smells that are attractive to humans from those which aren't. So many vampires delegate that task to humans by covering themselves in human-made perfume before going to sleep.As the larvae are at large and there's no potential host, all they do is feed. In a few hours, their size and weight increase 20-30 times. So if a vampire drinks blood and sleeps regularly, their body gets more than enough nutrients.If a vampire has enough body fat, some extra larvae which wasn't digested may store themselves in fat tissue until the worm needs an emergency snack or another limb needs regenerating. The larger a vampire's body is, the more blood they need daily, but with a lot of body fat, just as with humans, a vampire can last longer without feeding.Vampires can't gain or lose weight, their bodies stay in almost in the same condition as they were last time they were humans.Nutrition and looking for hosts aren't the only functions of the larvae.They also protect open wounds (fungus isn't enough as vampires have no immune system in the way humans do), help regenerating lost body parts — they concentrate at the place of the injury and dissolve, replacing missing tissues.They can store enough memory to perform quite complex tasks, like arranging said super-fast healing which is a complex task.Vampires develop a whole new area of the brain that governs larvae "programming". Before the larva separates from the worm, it's still a part of a vampire's nervous system. As the larvae is digested, it reconnects with it and larval memories become a part of a vampire's, let's say, subconscious. Or more precisely, that particular part of the brain.It's the same if a vampire absorbs another vampire's larvae.That is the reason why simply sleeping together has a special meaning to vampires: as their larvae intermingles, they exchange small parts of their memories and become closer on a level that's unattainable to humans.So that brain area is in charge for the purpose of every newborn larva. Mostly it's feeding and reproduction, it's "default settings", but if needed, they can do whatever the vampire's body needs.Very often that brain area becomes self-aware. If usually happens after the first two centuries of the vampire's life. So most of the vampires older than 200 have split personality. As the vampire develops full "larvae-programming" personality, they can fully consciously control the larvae. As the vampire becomes older, all the symbiots in their body — human part, the worm, the fungus — merge more and more, so the ability to control the larvae basically becomes the ability to control every part of the body.Very old vampires (~1000 years old) can make their larvae grow wings and then temporarily disintegrate into a swarm of flying insects.They start to be able to control their bodies' appearances and so on.The more blood vampire drinks every night, the faster the new abilities develop.An average vampire needs 1-2 litres of blood daily. Human blood is digested better, but the blood of other mammals will do as well.

Transformation and the first dream
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Coming soon