Petri dishes
This is a little collection of story ideas/prompts that I might or might not use, stray thoughts, canon observations, headcanons, what-ifs, etc. By its nature, this page is in flux. You're free to take whatever you want from here for your stories! No credit required.
This concept is sometimes called 'plot bunnies' in fandom (because they multiply out of control). I like to think of them as petri dishes of idea 'germs'. Take one or more home and see what grows!
If anything does inspire you and you end up with a finished fic, I would love to read it and to link to it! Please show me.
General Alliance/techfolk
Tiny ideas
- Software cocktails: Software as analogous to recreational alcohol or other drug consumption. Combinations of parameters like ingredients in a cocktail.
- Hiking trails in the void. Polycephaly or possibly Jeffrey as tour guide.
- Gullible techfolk try putting sugar in their pipework (in the mistaken belief it will improve perfomance, like the myth about putting sugar in a car's fuel tank) and ending up in the repair bay getting gooey toffee pulled out of their various pipes. Doing the 'sugar challenge' ends up as a meme among stupid techfolk like the cinnamon challenge is among stupid humans. Several angry PSAs from aggrieved medgineers go out.
- Isolated pockets of Skibidis/Alliance still don't know about the Union.
- When techfolk use the 🔞 symbol, it refers to 18 days old rather than 18 years old. Techfolk do all their growing up as software in server farms, and they get loaded into hardware bodies once their minds are mature. However, they need a few days' adjustment to get used to having physical bodies. It's considered unwise to immediately start exposing a fresh mind to things like porn, quantum physics or quadratic equations.
- Robots can 'eat' batteries. They don't ingest them; they can just pop them in a specialist Hole that sucks out all the power and stores it in the robot's own batteries/capacitors.
Structure
I imagine techfolk to have metal skeletons that look vaguely like ours, serving as anchor for their cabled 'muscles'. On top of that they have a framework to support their plating. Inside the body, the mechanical components are kept inside tyvek-like membranes to stop them snagging on cables. In addition, the spinal column is in the centre of the body for stability, instead of being at the back.
Techfolk don't really have a brain as such - there's no one object you can point to inside them and say 'that's its brain'. Their intelligence/consciousness is kinda a gestalt entity that materialises from their parts. And you can replace the parts Ship of Theseus style and their memories persist. (But you can't duplicate a techfolk by taking out half their parts and putting them into a new frame, because that would be silly.)
To use a silly comparison: it's a bit like Mr Potato Head as depicted in Toy Story. His parts are detachable and interchangeable, so you might think his consciousness is in the plastic potato. But he also puts his parts into a burrito or something (I forget what) and that's still him. His consciousness is manifested by an assembly of parts.
Or: which part of a computer is the 'brain'? The motherboard, the CPU, the hard drives? It's all of it, innit.
Sapience 1
My headcanon for the techfolk is that they were available in two variants: sentient ones with human intelligence and legal personhood, and non-sentient ones that could be bought and sold.
You know how sometimes you buy a hard drive and the capacity is a little more than you expected? This happens because some of the sectors weren't made properly and become unusable. Now that drive can't be sold as the 1TB drive it was meant to be, but it can be sold as a 500GB drive, and the consumer gets a pleasant surprise at it being 700GB.
You see where I'm going with this.
Some techfolk were built to be sentient, but something went wrong. Never mind, they can still be sold as mindless drones. But they're not completely mindless. What if some of them are just aware enough to realise what happened?
Sapience 2
What if the techfolk are so extremely co-operative because they're self-selected for existence? In the Voidwalkers setting, techfolk start as software minds and mature in servers until they're competent enough to be loaded into hardware bodies. But this only happens if they agree to it. I wrote a scene in which a potential TV is asked if they're ready to come into existence, and they're like 'Nah, from what you've told me about the world, I don't want to exist in such a shitshow, delete me'. How different would our society be if your soul could be asked before you're born 'You'll get to eat ice cream and look at cool bugs and dig for fossils and masturbate, but you gotta pay taxes and work a stupid job' and you had the option of saying 'fuck that'. (There's a similar scene in Red Dwarf in which the simulated minds of dead crew members are asked if they want to be resurrected as a hologram, and one of them is like 'no thanks, talking to you has made me appreciate being dead'.)
I had the thought that the robots might have been made with sentience-inhibitors so it wouldn't be unethical to make them work, and then as humanity started dying off, some mechanics ran around deactivating as many inhibition chips as they could before they succumbed to skibidification, saying 'Go, be free, hopefully you'll have better luck than we did.' (Alternatively, the humans' motivation might have been 'the skibidis will turn the robots against us, so let's give the robots free will in the hope they will choose to not do that'.) This is why in early episodes the robots are more, well, robotic! Marching in sync, etc. They gradually develop more sentience and personality as time goes on.
This might have the outcome that some robots decide to side with the skibidis, because they have no fondness towards their human former owners, and they want to be on the winning side. They end up ostracised by both sides. The skibs would discard them as soon as they outlived their usefulness, and the other robots would be too suspicious of them.
Genesis
In the Voidwalkers setting, techfolk start off as software in servers ('creches') until their minds mature enough to be loaded into hardware bodies.
- For the TVs, this happens when the scientists monitoring the creches declare that a mind is ready for upload.
- For the Soundkind, I'd like to think that as the minds in the creche mature, the scientists hook up some bodies to the servers, and the developing minds get to upload themselves and try the bodies out. They leave the creche when they themselves decide they're ready.
- I haven't decided how it works for cams but I want them to 'hatch' from 'eggs' somehow. Maybe they're in walls of pods like in the Matrix (but not gross and slimy) and they climb out when 'ripe'. Maybe instead of servers, cams mature in their eventual bodies. If a mind turns out not to be viable, that body is flushed and a new mind is allowed to develop. But… what if a 'flushed' unit still has traces of its previous failed mind in it? The eventual unit has memories of things that couldn't possibly have happened to it.
Teeth
Bottle caps are a currency in Fallout. No more are being made, and you have to work to get more (go out in the wasteland and find them), so they fulfill the same criteria as something like gold (rare and hard to obtain).
What if the Alliance uses Skibidi teeth as an unofficial currency? They're in limited supply, and hard to obtain, thus representative of hard work. They're probably contraband (especially now the Alliance joined the Union) but units use them anyway.
Astro teeth might be more like Rai stones.
The ownership of a large stone, which would be too difficult to move, was established by its history as recorded in oral tradition rather than by its location. Appending a transfer to the oral history of the stone thus effected a change of ownership.
Also:
In one instance, a large rai being transported by canoe and outrigger was accidentally dropped and sank to the sea floor. Although it was never seen again, everyone agreed that the rai must still be there, so it continued to be transacted as any other stone.
When transacting the stones, they'd be like 'the stone at the bottom of the bay is yours now.'
The perceived value of a specific stone was based on its size, craftsmanship, and history. The value could depend, for instance, on whether a famous sailor brought it or whether people died during its transport.
That could absolutely be extrapolated to winning Astro teeth in battle!
Bonus possibility: Astro scrimshaw.
Souls
I think techfolk would probably not be religious because they've met their creators. What might happen several generations after humans are extinct? Might some young techfolk doubt the existence of humans?
I remember reading a short story about robots, in which young robots refused to believe their kind had been created by humans. Robots are clearly superior to humans in every way, so how could an inferior being have produced them?
Tangent
Perhaps robots would argue that they have souls and humans don't. Robots are cartesian dualists with separable bodies and minds. The mind can be transferred to another vessel, thus is effectively a soul. A human mind, on the other hand, is inextricably linked to the meat in which it resides.
Farming
Animals/crops that it might be useful for techfolk to cultivate:
- Sheep: Wool is naturally fire-resistant and retains warmth even when wet. (Also: comedy potential for a Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog scenario with Skibidis trying to steal the sheep for their meat while the Alliance shepherds stop them.)
- Goats: There are experiments with genetically modifying goats (which are similar enough to sheep that it wouldn't be too outlandish to imagine a hybrid with sheep-like wool) to produce spider silk protein in their milk. Spider silk protein has many potential uses (stronger than steel by weight) if only it could be harvested at scale, and it's easier to wrangle a few goats than thousands of spiders.
- Latex: Rubber trees yield latex, which has uses for tyres, conveyor belts and disposable gloves. Yeah, there's a lot of rubber still lying around waiting to be re-used, but rubber perishes eventually. If the Alliance plans ahead, they'll want to get some rubber trees going so they can harvest some more when they need it. I went to look for a source on the goats making spider silk protein and the one I found says that the next step is to modify alfalfa plants rather than goats. Alfalfa is a very proteinaceous plant so it makes sense to use that as a base for protein modification. (Plus plants are easier still to look after than livestock.) Alfalfa and hevea (the rubber tree) are both rosids. Maybe the Alliance finds a way to make a genetically modified hybrid plant that makes all kinds of useful things in one harvest.
- Crops with solar: A possible Union endeavour - solar power for robots and food for skibs. Hanging solar panels above tomatoes and jalapeños increased the crop yields while using less water, and increased the efficiency of the solar panels.
Human/techfolk interactions
Tiny ideas
- Humans are a fun stim toy for Polycephaly. Like a weighted fidget that's got a soft outer covering. And it squirms and makes cute noises.
- Rivalry (or even robot racism) between robots made by humans and units made by other robots. ('Ha ha, your mum was a meatbag'.)
- Something about Saul Steinberg's 1949 self-portrait tickles my brain. On the one hand, it doesn't look like a person; it's just abstract lines. But on the other hand, it totally looks like a person relaxing! I'd love to know what robots would make of stuff like this. Would they agree with me, or would they not parse it as a person? What might their equivalent to this be? Might they draw abstract self-portraits that an untrained human can't parse?
- I can't find a definitive source on that piece; I really want a better one than a Reddit post.
- There's so much comedy potential in robots trying to make food for a human and completely fucking it up because they don't understand food. Like, giving a human a bowl of salt because sodium is a requirement for nerve impulses, right? The human: "I will literally die if I consume that."
Smell
Techfolk don't quite believe smell is real, because if you're a non-smelling entity, it sounds like made-up bullshit. You're telling me you can detect microscopic floating particles in the air? And you can tell if something was here recently from the smell it left behind? It sounds like some crystal hippy aura nonsense.
(And this is before we get onto the fact that at a quantum level, smell is sound. As the scent particles strike your scent receptors, the receptors pick up the resulting resonance.)
I like to imagine techfolk gently trying to trick a human into revealing that they're just making up this ability. The human adds a scent diffuser to their living space, so the techfolk coat the bottoms of the diffusion sticks with wax so they can't take up any liquid. The techfolk are bewildered when the human does notice the lack of smell! The human must have secretly seen them applying the wax…
The techfolk think they've caught the humans out when the humans' descriptions of smells don't match. The humans claim that even though there are around 400 types of human scent receptors, each human has only about 150 of these, so a bunch of different humans will detect different scents. Convenient…
The techfolk keep bringing blindfolded humans things to identify by smell, and are frustrated when the humans keep getting it right every time. Either the humans aren't bullshitting, or they're really committed to the bit, and the techfolk aren't sure which one is more unbelievable.
Cameras
Tiny ideas
- Some security cameras pan back and forth to surveil an area. Maybe small camera-units do that as their equivalent of staring into space. When they're content and not thinking about anything in particular, they'll stand still and start panning.
- How might stand-up comedy exist in the robots' society? TVs and speakers can talk out loud but cams don't. They could talk using sign language, but might they just transmit to their audience? In which case a camera comedy club could be a surreal sight for a human because it would be entirely silent.
Cam Matriarch
- I have a headcanon that Cathy built Cam Matriarch as a way for her (Cathy) to live on. It's not literally Cathy's mind uploaded into Camerawoman; it's Cathy adding a sort of 'signature' to her creation. That's what the POV cam 'saw' when seeing Cathy's face saying 'as one unto the end'.
- Camerawoman is two minds in one shell. There's her 'real' robot self, and Cathy the human. Cathy realised she was dying so she digitised her mind and stuffed it into a Cam, not realising or not caring that it already had a mind of its own. And Camerawoman possibly doesn't realise she has a mental hanger-on.
Soundkind
Tiny ideas
- Soundkind cultivate sourdough starters even though they don't eat, because they just think they're neat. Like a squishy pet rock. (Soundkind are more about interesting textures etc. than about appearance.)
- Multi-headed soundkind who can sing duets with themself.
Chess
Marcel Duchamp already deserves a place on this site for his toilet-based artwork Fountain, which is one of my favourite pieces of art for how it so completely boils the piss of people who think that art should be endless copies of Michaelangelo's David.
Later in life Duchamp got into chess. Duchamp and John Cage (the surrealist composer) played a public match on a modified chessboard with photovoltaic cells under the squares. As they played, it activated or cut off the sounds coming live from musicians performing in the room, thus procedurally generating a piece of music.
This is now my headcanon for how Soundkind play chess.
TVs
Tiny ideas
- What if the reason there are so few TVs is that most of them die from malformed teleportation? With arrogant belief in their abilities, they end up teleporting incorrectly and intersecting with something, and die from being split apart.
- Polycephaly with a queue of little cams wanting a gentle shakedown to reset their gyros and accelerometers, and humans wanting a shakedown to fix their backs.
Test cards
Some people don't like to look at flashing/blinking images on screens, because it triggers migraines or epilepsy or something. What if some TVs are like that and dislike displaying certain types of images on their screens?
When your pal playfully sends you something vile, you might reply with 'How dare you make me see this with my own two eyes?' TVs might say something like, 'How dare you make me display that with my own cathode?'
Some textures are nice to pet (fur, etc.) Maybe some patterns of pixels feel nice for TVs to display on their screens. Some people like the texture of velvet, some people hate touching it. Maybe two TVs are comparing their favourite test card patterns and one of them loves this particular card and the other one is like 'ugh, how can you stand it'.
Genesis
In the Voidwalkers setting, the techfolk start out as software minds in server farms (called creches), until they're mature enough to be loaded into their hardware bodies. I had a dream that each TV creche had to be 'seeded' by one adult TV being sacrificed, and that was where Titan TV's 'you can't kill the dead' line came from.
If we play with the idea that TV creches (spawning grounds) require an already-made TV to start them off, and Titans used to be normal units… could Titan TV themself become a creche and spawn lots of TV consciousnesses?
When citrus trees are about to die, they make as much fruit as possible as a final attempt to spread their seeds. Maybe Titan TV, under the stresses of the corejacker, spawns hundreds of minds in a last ditch attempt at self-preservation. And he doesn't even understand what's happening.
Jeffrey
- What if Jeffrey is a failed Titan? He Came Out Wrong, either because:
- The process was imperfect (which could be the result of TVs arrogantly assuming they know best and doing it Their Way instead of following the established method that the Cams and Soundkind already tried… or it could be that the TVs were actually the first to try, and by the time they'd sorted everything out, the other two factions had already deployed and built their Titans).
- Jeffrey was not a willing participant in the process. (Lesson learned: Titan candidates have to be volunteers.)
- The one part of Emergence that didn't suck farts out of dead rabbits was the Easter egg message that 'Jeffrey knows too much'. What does he know?
- Jeffrey's original assignment was to be at the epicentre of a vast storage centre containing everything the Alliance (or humanity, if humans did this to him) could want. It was his job to send requested items through the void to their destinations, effectively giving the Alliance matter-replicators from Star Trek (except it's not a machine assembling the items; it's a mardy TV putting the already-made items in the equivalent of those pneumatic tube systems). Jeffrey either hated it and rebelled, or declined the 'honour' to begin with.
- In areas with both elephants and people, elephants will sometimes block the road and not let you pass until you give them a banana or something. Maybe Jeffrey does that when he wants a snack or some affection. Blocks a void pathway and doesn't let TVs pass until they give him a screen-rub or a bit of oil for his joints.
Titans
Tiny ideas
- Titans probably get struck by lightning a lot because they're so tall. Might their designers have taken this into account and enabled them to charge up from this?
- How did the Titans learn to fly? Were they already pilots before they got upgraded to Titans? How would being a pilot compare to actually being the flying thing?
- Titan Camera uses sodium-based batteries rather than lithium-based, because of the lesser fire risk (an important consideration when your flagship weapon is making fire come out of your tits).
Wet machines
This Fediverse thread (by ifixcoinops on retro.social) talks about how cars are unpleasantly wet machines to work on if you're used to dry electronics.
Cars: 🚙 great tanks of juice, all different sorts, some is thick and some is thin and some cools me down and some explodes and some is super super slippery and all of it smells weird, hurry up with your cup of tea because I want so desperately to leak and spurt and trickle and squirt it all over your skin and hair and face
Cars are just… unpleasantly wet, that's all. Always pumping and squirting the juice around, sloshing, gurgling, bleeding, dripping, they can't help it, they're just Wet Machines. It's their nature.
But boy oh boy am I not used to it
And naturally I thought of Titans. The little techfolk are probably dry inside except for a small amount of joint lubricant, and their coolant pipes. Like a fluid-cooled PC. But the Titans? They're like walking battleships, or like huge heavy plant. They must be full of mighty engine manifolds and pipes and hydraulics, dripping inside with many assorted juices. The Titans adore their tiny comrades, and their factions love them back, but they're so strange and alien and vast.
Crystals
- There's a fantasy trope in which the keepers of an eldritch entity become changed in some way by it (such as dragon-riders becoming dragon-like and growing scales and pointy ears). What if something like that happens to Titan engineers? The Titans' core energy gradually crystallises and forms a layer on the inside of the core chamber, which has to be periodically scraped out so it doesn't affect core efficiency. Despite every precaution the engineers take, the crystallised dust and tiny shards get everywhere, including accumulating in the engineers' casings. The Titan engineers eventually become characterised by their warped-looking but strangely beautiful crystal growths that can't be removed from their frames without damage.
- Material like fordite builds up in Titan hangars and is sought-after for making keepsakes and jewellery.
Titan's end
Tragic AU in which the Skibidis succeed in killing an Alliance Titan… causing an absolute ecological disaster, instantly wiping out the skibidi platoon that felled the Titan and making any gains for the Skibidis a hollow pyrrhic victory. The Titan's death causes its core reactor to melt down and explode violently, killing all life in the vicinity from the shockwave and heat and blast radius of irradiated razor-sharp shrapnel. All the Titan's various coolants and lubricants and other fluids pour out and render the land barren and inhospitable to plant life for decades.
No Skibidi can go anywhere near where the Titan fell. But the inorganic Alliance aren't affected (except emotionally), and build a new base on the site of the Titan's death - of great emotional (perhaps even spiritual) significance and of great strategic importance. Here is where the best of us fell. And still they protect us, even in death.
To the Skibidis the message is clear: you took something precious from us, but you cursed yourselves by destroying your own forces and giving us a place where you cannot touch us and which serves as a rallying beacon for us. And soon we will rain down every agony imaginable upon you.
Titan Soundkind
Parasite
Might Titan Speaker have bonded with the parasite to an extent? Stockholm syndrome isn't a thing in real life (it was invented by a cop (not a psychiatrist) to discredit a hostage who criticised how the police had handled her situation), but if an entity was inside your head that much and for that long? Wouldn't you start losing awareness of where its consciousness ended and yours began?
Might the parasite have even been trained in sowing such discord and doubt? ("The Alliance isn't going to want you back… Good thing you've got me looking after you… I know what's best for you, after all.")
Might the two have become more like a gestalt entity over time? When the parasite was finally removed, did Titan Speaker find themself mourning it, to their horror? It was an enemy, but it defined their consciousness and sense of being for a time.
When the Titan was briefly parasitised again when fighting G-Toilet, did it feel horribly like coming home?
Skibidis
Toilet rolls
The Alliance wielded toilet rolls as grenades against the Skibidis. How was that possible in-universe? It's possible they were actual grenades made to look like toilet rolls. But what if wielding a toilet roll against a Skibidi is more like wielding a cross against a vampire? It's not the cross itself that hurts the vampire; it's the faith of the bearer. The existence of Saint Skibidi Toilet implies that Skibs have some sort of faith. Can we weave something with those ideas?
Maybe this is more like what happens with the Orks in Warhammer. (I've never played any of it; I just know bits of the lore through cultural diffusion.) The Orks are telekinetic reality-editors, but they're too stupid to realise it. They just know that if they paint their spaceships red, they go faster. And it works, because the Orks think it will work. On the flip side, it means you can kill an Ork by pretending to shoot at them and shouting 'bang'. They think you've shot them, so they've been shot. And they die. Maybe Skibidis think the toilet rolls will damage them, so they do.
Scientist
Scientist Toilet is largely responsible for the war between techfolk and the Skibidis.
It would have made sense for G-Toilet and Co to recruit the techfolk - "there's an Astro invasion coming and I need to transform the humans into an ascended form that can survive the attack." Even if you can't transform the robots into more skibidis for your cause, they'd still be more useful as peons than enemies.
We can assume Scientist Toilet is brutally unhinged, from the experiments seen in the bunker arc, and the fact that we don't see really messed up skibidis since his death. When the invasion started, Scientist told the newly-transformed Skibs "Slaughter the techfolk, and I'll turn you back into humans." Of course, he never had any intention of following through on that, even if it were possible. He did this partly for his amusement and partly to weed out the weaker skibidis as being no good for the cause.
Skibidi parasites
Tiny ideas
- Skibidi parasites like to hoard things, like bowerbirds or indeed dragons. They usually have a theme to their collections, but this might not be discernible to anyone other than the parasite. This behaviour should be encouraged by anyone looking to keep a parasite for companionship, as it redirects the urge to attack and parasitise techfolk.
- Skibidi parasite gets parasitised itself by one of the those marine isopods that replaces fish tongues.
Ontogeny 1
There is a hypothesis that humans are a paedomorphic species, like the axolotl and the telephone-pole beetle. These species reach sexual maturity in a juvenile form and never assume their 'true' adult form except under bizarre circumstances. You can force an axolotl into a salamander by giving it the right hormones, and you can force a telephone-pole beetle grub into its adult beetle morph by applying heat(!)
If humans are indeed paedomorphic, there doesn't appear to be a trigger for a human to metamorphose into our 'true' form (although the concept has been explored in fiction, such as in Aldous Huxley's After Many a Summer, in which a character lives for 200 years and becomes a gorilla-like creature). What's probably going on is that we simply look more baby-like than other apes because we've effectively domesticated ourselves. Notice how domestic species tend to look cutesier than their wild counterparts.
That said… This is a Skibidi Toilet site, and we can get a little silly with it. Skibidi parasites are presumably an artificial species, created by the Chief Scientist Skibidi using humans as a base. What if this modification activated some latent genes, resulting in Skibidi parasites morphing as they grow up? And what might that final form look like?
Ontogeny 2
Playing Raidou remastered gave me a Skibidi idea! In this game, you end up fighting transformed humans called 'red capes' (because they're covered in extruded strands of red tissue). It turns out that they're possessed by something called a hiruko. When the hiruko has amassed enough negative mental energy from its host, it can grow a body of its own and leave the host behind. The human persists as a zombie-like husk.
So far in Skibidi Toilet we've seen parasite toilets infecting Alliance units, and they either get deaded or rescued. What if – if the parasite gets to stay put, it transforms into something stronger, and the affected robot doesn't die but is transformed into a weird husk?
(I sort-of used this idea with Lament in Otherworldly geometry.)
Astros
Homeworld
What does the Astro homeworld look like? This seems surprisingly unexplored in the fandom.
Parasites
Humans are bothered by little fleas and lice. What kind of fleas might an astro have? What colossal lice might be in Duchess's hair?
And that's just their terrestrial fauna. We know the astros are spacefarers, and the Skibidi Toilet setting lets us get a little silly with things. What kind of horrible crystalline barnacles and leeches might they accumulate as they warp through space?
Watchman of Doom
Transmissions
The Astros are using WoD to intercept Alliance transmissions. Presumably, if WoD was no longer useful, the Astros would dispose of him. The Alliance probably sends out junk broadcasts with misinformation so that the Astros will intercept them and waste their time chasing the false info. But if the Astros realise the Alliance is doing this, they might conclude that there's no point keeping WoD around, and terminate him. Therefore… the Alliance might be making a conscious choice to allow the Astros to intercept some broadcasts with actual locations containing personnel, which will mean a high chance of death for said personnel. Astros think they've scored a victory, and keep WoD around for a little longer.
And Titan TV might work out what's going on, and realise that he's slaughtering troops who are dying so he doesn't.
Valiant little cameras bravely giving one last thumbs up before they're annihilated…
Joyride
Some Astros take Watchman of Doom for a 'joyride' and make him blow stuff up. (No Union members are hurt, they're just destroying ruins.)
- Depending on how easily Astros travel through space, maybe they could go to an abandoned Astro colony and destroy ruins there. Perhaps they normally can't do that but by chaining their warping to Titan TV's teleport, they can do it.
- Titan TV doesn't enjoy it per se but appreciates being away from the Duchess for a bit/causing irritation for Duchess.
Real-world weirdness
Carrington Event
The Carrington Event was a huge solar flare that caused a geomagnetic storm so powerful that telegraph operators were able to send messages without battery power. "Better than with our batteries on. – Current comes and goes gradually." (Though a lot of the telegraph stations weren't so lucky. Many failed or even caught fire.)
What might the impact be on techfolk? Realistically, probably bad times. But we can get silly with it. What if it makes them run around all hyper like toddlers who found a Red Bull? Perhaps the Astros induce a solar flare in an attempt to kill Earth's power grid and weaken the Alliance, without realising it'll empower and juice up the techfolk themselves.
Dichanthelium lanuginosum
Dichanthelium lanuginosum is a species of grass that can survive higher temperatures than it normally could, if it is colonised by a specific fungus and if that fungus is infected by a specific virus.
Perhaps something similar is going on with Skibidis being much stronger than untransformed humans. (I already headcanon that skibidification is fungal, because I like fungal horror as a trope.) Perhaps that's why G-Toilet chose Earth to invade. Maybe there's something about humans that produces strong Skibidi Toilets, capable of standing up to the Astro empire.
Stories with Skibidi Toilet energy
- This story about slow internet (anecdote)
- Tl;dr (there's a lot of unnecessary dialogue in the story): customer's house had 2km worth of ping time from the relay station compared to their neighbour, despite their houses being about 10 metres apart. The cause was lazy workers burying the remaining 2km of cable in a ditch and calling it a day, instead of properly cropping it and taking away the remainder. Maybe the Astros do something similar to WoD because they just don't care if TTV feels good or not. Or maybe some Alliance engineers did it to one of their Titans due to a farcical misunderstanding of blueprints.
- Lena by qntm (fiction)
- In-universe wiki article about "we digitised a guy, now here's how you use his resurrected brain". I personally don't headcanon that the techfolk are human-based but this is probably good brainworms if you do.
- This $35,000 computer made of living human neurons can run Doom (article)
Very sillies
Ziltoid
What if… Ziltoid/Skibidi Toilet crossover?
I'm not sure I can think of enough material to write a fic for it, so I'm throwing it out there. Who would side with whom? Ziltoid is the reluctant defender of humanity, so he'd side with the Union. His enemy is War Princess Blattaria - would she side with Duchess? Or would they be rivals who distract each other long enough for the Union to make a move?
Either way, Poozer/Skibidi interaction would be hilarious.
Stay in the library, or go back to the lobby.