I Woke Up on a Mind Flayer Ship… and Gods, My Eye Hurts!
William Conwell only wanted one peaceful evening: start a fresh Baldur’s Gate 3 run, make a character he wouldn’t hate in two hours, and, for once, actually get past Act I without deleting everything out of spite.
After endless tweaking, experimenting, and contemplating his life choices, he finally crafted the perfect protagonist: Vrinn, a half-Drow Storm Sorcerer with wild white hair, storm-touched eyes, and zero facial hair. A sleek, striking, “I’m absolutely the main character” kind of look.
He clicked BEGIN ADVENTURE.
The screen flashed white.
And William’s soul vanished from Earth.
Across the planes, on the world of Toril, fate was twisting.
A young half-Drow, Vrinn, had just been seized by Mind Flayers. Terror drowned out every rational thought as he was forced into a pod, a tadpole driven behind his eye. His heart couldn’t bear the shock.
It stopped.
His soul slipped away.
And at that exact moment, William’s reincarnating soul arrived.
Not gently.
Not cleanly.
But violently, crashing through the dying body’s fading life-force and slamming into the middle of the ceremorphosis ritual.
The result was something the multiverse was not designed for.
William awakens submerged in viscous alien fluid, lungs burning, mind fogged. Lights strobe. Flesh and steel writhe together around him. The Nautiloid groans as explosions tear through its hull.
And something wriggles behind his eye.
But what should have been the birth of a new Mind Flayer… isn’t.
The ceremorphosis sequence was interrupted, its biological rewrite colliding with William’s reincarnating soul. Instead of transforming him, the tadpole is forcibly fused with him, its instincts mixing with his consciousness, its psionic blueprint overlaying his human soul.
The Storm Sorcery meant for Vrinn is overwritten, the Weave itself bending under the strain.
In its place, new magic awakens, cold, psychic, alien.
A mind not entirely his own.
An Aberrant Mind Sorcerer, formed from a merger that should be impossible.
Dripping with mucus, breath hitching like a bad Wi‑Fi signal, and magic sparking at the edges of his scrambled brain, William hauls himself out of the pod. The Nautiloid is in full catastrophic meltdown mode. Somewhere, voices are screaming. Overhead, tentacles thrash through the sky like they’re auditioning for an avant‑garde interpretive dance.
All he wanted was to hit “New Save Game.”
Instead, he’s stuck in Faerûn, inhabiting a body that should’ve been deleted from the character creation screen, packing powers that read like patch notes from a bugged update, sharing headspace with an Illithid parasite, and nursing the sneaking suspicion that the universe clicked the wrong file.
Still, if this is the glitchy respawn he’s got, he’ll make it work. Maybe even have some fun. After all, if the multiverse shoves a cosmic horror into your brain, you might as well see what kind of cool tricks it comes with.
William_Conwell · Video Games
I liked the premise, the beginning, and parts of the story overall. The problem is that we have Maggie Stark as the protagonist, who has been shown to be someone who could be Tony Stark(her brother)‘s equal or near equal. THEN she also has the super soldier serumn like Steve or Bucky, with all the training HYDRA could provide, such as the Red Room like Natasha. Why is that bad? It isn’t. Until her presence in the MCU does basically nothing to change how the story goes. Major events stay basically the same, except some have an extra person in it- such as when going into the past to get the infinity stones, she joins Steve, stands there while he gets the scepter, rushes off to help with the cube, gets slapped by past-Hulk, rushes back to see Steve basically defeat past-Steve, knocks out past-Steve, and then has to go with Steve and Tony to the past. WHERE she follows Tony to get the cube, and nothing changes… except she’s in the scene. Her role in this story amounts to basic emotional support to the Avengers and Bucky. Of course that’s downplaying it a bit to make summarization easier, but still… she’s by no means fulfilling the role cut out for her. She doesn’t even do the snap instead of Tony, so all I can think of her being there is to give Bucky a happy ending, and help Pepper raise Morgan. Of course, a lot of that is just expectations vs reality. It’s just disappointing there. Overall a good novel though.