Fic That Needs To Exist

Outer Wilds AU thoughts, spoilers for dlc included:

Spoiler: this is a spoiler button

I went on a spree through AO3's Outer Wilds fics, and found some of the sorts I expected - explorations of the Hearthians and their relationships, some explorations of the Nomai relationships, and a fair few "so what if the Eye had done something Else instead" AUs that explore possibilities for a post-game

One thing I haven't yet seen is, what if the Interloper's approach had lined up such that it went into Dark Bramble? What if most or all of the explosion had killed the plants & anglerfish but left the Wilds largely unscathed?

I could go either way about Poke, Pye, and Clary surviving that trip, there's potential in them having died and the Bramble yet again being seemingly a source of tragedy for the clan.

But mostly, I'm thinking... what if? What if they hadn't been able to get the sun station going but they kept living? Would they have taken another approach to their search for the Eye?

...Would they have found the Stranger?

And given how the Nomai were, tenacious and sometimes dangerously reckless in their search for knowledge, how persistently would they have tried to explore the station?

...Would they have pieced what the Owlks did - WHY they did it - before they found another way to bruteforce the Eye search?

...How would they have responded to that?

 

Followup from that,

Spoiler: * This, too, is a spoiler button.

I originally got on that train of thought with the notion of the hatchling somehow bounced back in time to shortly before the Interloper's approach,

Partly because of my abiding love of time travel fixit fic,

But largely my love of time travel fix some things complicate other things fic

Because like, okay, there's this 4 eyed alien in a profoundly dangerous ship - made of wood! Flame propulsion?? - with a resemblance to the beings of Timber Hearth and a device that lets them read Nomai writing, but not yet any means to translate their own speech back

Solanum was working with limited options, maybe the older adults who remember other systems and other species would better manage communication...?

But maybe the hatchling's best bet for conveying "that comet is bad news" would be a jaunt over to the Stranger for one of the light staves? At which point, who is this increasingly frantic alien and why are they broadcasting threats/warnings about the destruction of the clan!

At which point I had imagined the hatchling doing their self sufficiency thing, flying off, doing their damnedest to just ram the comet off course, and that's when I started mulling over the different AU of a no hatchling, wild chance direction of the Interloper as described above

 

an outer wilds thought: the hatchling worked on the translator tool with hal, so they'd presumably have at least some knowledge of the language even if their ability to do field translations fast is very bad.

it'd be funny to put them in a situation where they're left trying to assemble nomai sentences with a good knowledge of how it's put together and a bad off-the-top-of-their-head vocabulary and make them resort to absolute disaster sentences. grammatically awful in a "you have to know what you're doing here", "i understand you and hate it" kind of way.

 

Bilbo being actually raised by gandalf from babyhood, and traveling with him before the beginning of the hobbit

Alternatively, frodo being raised by gandalf as a promise to an aged Bilbo who ends up heading to the undying lands much earlier after the dwarf adventure

These would be two very different stories but I'd pay to read them if done well