Project: Bonehead

Prologue

A long time ago, I had a question.

Could you change a prewritten world? Could you, by any chance, divert a story off course? The question ate at me constantly, as the answer could potentially prove whether the concept of free will was real or an illusion. And being a middle schooler who thought they knew everything didn't exactly hurt my ambition. To test this theory, I started on 'your choices matter' games. Every possible ending would be online; I'd just have to find them and work on diverting from there. Not to mention, I wasn't exactly a high enough being to find the predetermined ending of our universe, so I had to start small.

As I played, however, I began to realize something.

To simulate free will, you receive options. Will you do something? Or will you do something else? Usually, the number of available options ranges from 2 to 4, and if a game is thoroughly advanced, inaction will also yield a result. These decisions appear frequently, and the mix of those decisions gives you an ending. Perfect, except for one problem.

Not every combination of choices gives you a different ending. If your combination is too similar to another's, you'll end up with the same results. Not to mention the game forces you to make decisions when you know you could do something else. This is something the game refuses to let you do, as your optimal decision fails to have a corresponding ending. These minor but fatal flaws proved detrimental to proving or disproving my hypothesis.

So I decided to eliminate that flaw.

Being a geek growing up, I was attracted to the Isekai genre. A common trope I noticed was the main character ending up in a game, a prewritten world. This world would give the main character options to pick from, and usually, they would do so. On rare occasions, however, the character's choices didn't align with their interests. So what would they do?

They made a new option.

Making a new option is virtually impossible from the outside. To do so would require you to rewrite the game itself. However, from the inside, one can freely change the story of their prewritten world. They could put the narrative on a previously inconceivable timeline with seemingly no consequence. I found this intriguing.

With my limitations as an outside gamer in mind, I decided that the best, if not the only, course of action to change a prewritten world was to become a resident of it. I would have to put myself in the world and bend it manually instead of trying to beat a system manufactured to bring me back on course. I finally had my idea.

Now I just needed a place to start.