This is a premise for Dragon Age sort of SI fic that I came up with but never started work on because I lack the sheer mathematics expertise to write it in full. I'm putting it out here in the hope that someone may become interested enough to pick it up or if someone has the knowledge and time to maybe start a slow collaboration with me on this story idea.
Premise: A (sort of) self-insert in the world of Dragon Age. Why is it always called Self Insert anyway? This is not myself I'm inserting into this scenario. I'm not a masochist. This character is another person entirely. But I digress… A normal Earth woman wakes up one day in the body of a brood mother deep in the Deep Roads, surrounded by Darkspawns and dead corpses that are supposed to be her breakfast. Yep.
Tentacles and Mathematics
1/ The unlucky lady is Cassandra "Cassie" Mironoff, a high-school math teacher. Cassie once dreamed of becoming a mathematician, the kind that works on patterns and equations in the same way a painter works a canvas or a poet works the verses and rhymes, when she was a teenage math whiz some ten years ago. But reality means bills that need to be paid and an adult life lived responsibly like society expects her to. After a year of unsuccessful job hunting after college, Cassie settled and became a small town high school math teacher. Life is dull and predictable and tedious for about all of four years, until it suddenly isn't.
2/ The first sight that greets Cassandra is hundreds of little Darkspawn grubs surrounding her, climbing on top her body and weaving about under her. Her second sight is the Deep Road chamber filled with meaty globs and rotten corpses that is her nest. The first thing Cassandra smells is the stench of meat and blood and rot and smog. She tries to flee this nightmarish vision but finds herself rooted to the floor through a mass of flesh and lumpy breasts. She sees her tentacles, sees her 'children' sucking on her teats, becomes vaguely aware of her new monstrous nature.
3/ After a period of delirious horror and panic and abominable hunger satisfied only by the sweet bloody meat forced into her mouth by her 'children', madness settles in on Cassandra hard and fast. In a way, this madness is a mercy.
4/ For an undefinable amount of time, Cassandra floats in a state of feverish madness, her mind and sense of reality completely shattered by her new circumstances. As she floats in fitful waking dreams, Cassandra starts delving into topics that comfort her the most. For her, that means the aged mother and sister she leaves behind and the math that she runs through her head the way a poet plays with stray verses in his mind. Thoughts of family are too painful for Cassandra in this new reality, so the only thing she has is math. She starts with the basic: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. Then gradually goes on more complicated topics: algebra, geometry, arithmetic, logic, etc… Cassandra plays with numbers and shapes as she dreams her way through life as a brood mother.
Galileo once said that mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe. There is beauty in math. The universe and its every living and nonliving thing are coded in numbers and equations. This is something Cassandra has always believed in, despite the dreary years of her work as an unappreciated high school math teacher. She recites Pythagoras theorem as she feeds on the corpses the Darkspawns bring her, counts Pi as she nurses the youngs that emerge from her bottom-most orifice.
In this nightmarish reality, math and its many joys are the only things that keep Cassandra from devolving into an animal with absolutely no sense of self. She clings to its with all her might and desperation. It is the only thing that survives from the old Cassandra. Slowly, eventually, within this state of madness and through the beauty and logic of mathematical sciences, Cassandra finds a new kind of sanity and recreates a new sense of self.
5/ Cassandra becomes more and more awake, more and more aware of herself and her surrounding. Once she gets past the fact that she is now a multi-breasted tentacle monster and her daily diet consists of thinking and feeling humanoid creatures, Cassandra starts feeling things other than hunger and madness. She feels curiosity. She feels amusement, a dark sense of humor. She feels wants. She wants things now, things other than sweet bloody meats and many youngs from a single brood. She wants things for herself. She desires. She wishes to know, to count, to create beautiful mathematical patterns out of this ugly chaos she is stuck in.
6/ Eventually, Cassandra learns a little of this world by feasting on living humans and dwarves and absorbing their knowledge. She becomes aware of a world above ground, a world with some similarity to that vague, faded world in a corner of her shattered mind. Slowly, Cassandra gains control over her new body and over her brood of 'children'. Slowly, Cassandra develops a desire to go above ground. She wishes to see the beautiful patterns of this world. She wishes to find an answer.
7/ Cassandra goes about preparing her brood. She is vaguely aware that the world above ground is hostile towards her children and herself. She needs to prepare. She needs to arm her children. She needs to raise them above the animalistic state most of them are in. She needs to teach them 'patterns'. Math has so many applications, from building to engineer to philosophy to war strategy. Cassandra is no expert on any of these fields, but she holds the key to them all. She knows the language of God. Cassandra proceeds to teach her children.
8/ Years go by as Cassandra prepares until one day, she and her brood are ready. After a great battle against the tiny dwarves, she surfaces above ground. Around this time, the events of Dragon Age Inquisition begin.
9/ For a short while, Cassandra and her brood keep a low profile. The world above ground is beautiful. It is full of patterns, full of things that make elegant sense. Cassandra rejoices in the symmetry of Sycamore leaf clusters, in the Fibonacci spirals of sunflower seeds. But Cassandra also hungers and every time she hungers, she feeds. The sweet bloody meat above ground are more often alive than dead, and with every meal, Cassandra learns more and more of this world. In this way, she eventually learns of a budding organization, a certain Inquisition, with a particular irregularity at its heart.
The so-called Inquisitor is a phenomenon never before witnessed. Cassandra wishes to see for herself what strange new patterns exist within this Inquisitor creature. Anything Cassandra wishes, her children will get for her. And in the case that her children can't get it, then she the mother will just go there to that Inquisition and see for herself.
So…. the reason I never start working on this premise despite how interesting it sounds is because… I'm really bad at math. I can do basic plot and direction and characterization, but a large part of this story is basically Cassandra making sense of this new world and her new self through the universal language and logic of math and that's something you can't cheat.
This story is basically = my fascination with Galileo's statement of math being the language of god + my desire to try my hands at a SI story + my trollish tendencies + my desire to blow the plot of DAI and its pro-religious agenda to kingdom's come.
So, what do you think?