Is the mash-up world making sense, or is it too much?. I had a thought about Nier: Automata and the world of Cyberpunk 2077. Imagine him going to the Automata world as the only human, gaining their trust over time, and eventually being treated like a god, as they would for any human. He could manipulate them to gain master control as only human follow orders of and work them as his police force. As for Cyberpunk, I have no idea.
*****
His plans—his simple plans of getting some guns, and surviving the nuke—were now in shambles.
"If this is the game world," Atlas muttered, "then the nuke isn't the end. It's the starting gun."
In the movies, the world ends. Everyone dies. Alice roams a desert.
In the games, the world fights back. The B.S.A.A. is formed. TerraSave rises and Viruses were always contained in the cities they were leaked from.
Bio-terrorism becomes the new nuclear threat.
"And I," Atlas whispered, looking at his hands, "am a wild card that fits in neither."
He wasn't Alice, the psychic superhero.
He wasn't Wesker, the mastermind.
He was an anomaly. A glitch in the system.
"If TRICELL gets the T-Virus... if the Family gets the G-Virus... the virus scaling of this world is going to skyrocket."
He looked at the backpack sitting on the desk.
The bag containing the T-Virus and the Anti-Virus.
Suddenly, that bag felt heavier than the 30K he stole. It was a nuke in a backpack.
"I need to be careful," Atlas realized.
"Shit!"
Atlas ran a hand through his silver hair, a manic grin touching his lips despite the fear.
"This World Is Pretty Fu*ked Up!"
---
Location: The Apple Inn – Room 303 (Executive Suite).
Time: 04:45 PM.
Atlas hadn't moved from the desk in hours. The coffee pot was cold. The remains of his massive breakfast had been wheeled away long ago. The only light in the room came from the glow of the Phantom-X laptop screen, casting harsh shadows across his pale, concentrated face.
He rubbed his temples, feeling a headache building behind his eyes that had nothing to do with the undead and everything to do with temporal mechanics.
"This created so many questions," Atlas muttered, scrolling through a conspiracy forum page that hadn't been updated since 1998. "This world is a layered dumpster fire."
He had reached a conclusion, but it was a conclusion that only birthed more chaos.
The World is a Hybrid.
It wasn't just the movies. It wasn't just the games. It was a Frankenstein's monster of both, stitched together with the erratic thread of reality.
He leaned back in the leather chair, the leather creaking under his Strength frame. His mind, usually sharp, was currently running like a wild, untamed horse in an open field, galloping from one terrifying possibility to another.
First: The Aesthetic of the Apocalypse.
"In the movies," Atlas reasoned aloud, staring at the ceiling fan, "the T-Virus dries up the oceans. The world turns into a Mad Max wasteland. Alice drives a motorcycle through a desert that used to be Las Vegas. Humanity goes extinct except for a few thousand clones and survivors."
He shuddered. "I hate sand. It gets everywhere."
"But in the games," he countered, "Raccoon City gets nuked, but the world keeps spinning. The stock market crashes, the government covers it up, and bio-terrorism becomes the new Cold War. We get Resident Evil 4 in Spain. Resident Evil 5 in Africa. Resident Evil 6 in China."
The game world was vibrant. It had cities, technology, politics. It wasn't just a dustbowl. So was the movie world but before the whole Apocalypse.
Second: The Timeline Discrepancy.
He looked at the date on the laptop taskbar: September 2002.
"This doesn't make sense," Atlas groaned. "In the games, the Mansion Incident happened in July 1998. Raccoon City fell in September 1998. But here I am, in 2002, living through the events of the first movie which is basically the prequel to the outbreak."
While the S.T.A.R.S. organization exists, it was created in 1998 in response to the increasing need for specialized law enforcement to handle complex incidents that the normal City Police Department could not manage. The organization was formed to combat terrorism, urban crime, and other high-grade criminality, such as cybercrime and bio-chemical attacks. So yes, it's a nationwide organization in this world, and the team stationed in Raccoon City appears to have no notable fatalities among its members, at least according to online sources...
So, the timeline was shifted. The technology was in the early 2000s—flip phones, Windows XP—but the events were in 1998.
"It's a Remix, and reshuffled" Atlas realized. "God, or the Universe in the endless possibilities of Multiverse did this, or whoever runs this system, just hit 'Shuffle' on the lore playlist."
Third: The Rogue Variables.
His mind raced to the outliers.
"What about Resident Evil Village? Does Mother Miranda exist? Is there a giant vampire lady waiting in Romania right now? Are there Lycans?"
"What about the animated movies?
Degeneration? Vendetta? Does Glenn Arias exist? Is he selling A-Virus triggers in New York?"
"And the manga... Marhawa Desire? Is the C-Virus cooking in a school in Asia?"
He felt dizzy. There were more than twelve types of major viruses in the franchise: T, G, T-Veronica, TG, Uroboros, C, T-Abyss, Mold...
If they all existed here, Raccoon City was just the appetizer.
As he surfed through the memories of his morning run—the escape from the forest, the looting of the ATM—a specific image flashed in his mind.
He froze.
"Wait a minute."
He closed his eyes, replaying the visual data stored in his memory banks.
He saw the forest. He saw the trees. He saw the dirt. And there, hidden beneath the overgrowth near the Arklay foothills…
"Train tracks," Atlas whispered. "I saw train tracks."
At the time, he had ignored them. He was too busy running around and counting his stolen money. But now, with the context of the Game Lore, the puzzle pieces slammed together.
"The Ecliptic Express."
"Maybe the train wasn't just old infrastructure. Maybe it was exclusively used by Umbrella to bring researchers to the Management Training Facility or the Hive?"
His eyes widened.
"If those tracks are active... that means Resident Evil Zero is happening. Or happened."
"That means James Marcus may be alive."
Atlas let out a sharp, incredulous laugh. "Or rather, the Queen Leech pretending to be him. A sentient, opera-singing collection of leeches that ate an old man and gained his memories so it could wear his face like a Young Final Fantasy villain."
He laughed harder, the sound echoing in the hotel room.
"God, that sounds stupid when you say it out loud. A leech man singing opera on a cliffside while raining biological terror."
He wiped a tear from his eye.
"Then again," he checked his own reflection in the dark laptop screen. "I am a zombie who retained his soul, has a video game HUD in his soul, and eats steak without pooping. Who am I to judge the absurdity of a Leech Wizard?"
Acknowledging the bullshit helped him relax. It grounded him. If the world was crazy, he didn't have to be sane. He just had to be strong.
The sun dipped lower. The room grew darker.
Atlas leaned back, his mood shifting from anxiety to a strange, hedonistic optimism.
"If nothing else," he smiled, "I have a better world. And stronger targets."
If this was a hybrid world, it meant the characters from the games existed. And that... that was a very compelling thought.
"Ada Wong," Atlas murmured, picturing the elusive spy.
In the movies, Ada was... fine. But in the games? She was an icon. The red dress. The grappling hook. The impossible charisma.
"No matter which actress played her in live-action, she couldn't compare to the sheer style of the Game Ada. And if the timeline is shifted, she should be in Raccoon City right now or should at least be arriving in a day or two.. She's here for the G-Virus sample."
His mind wandered down the list of potential "encounters."
"Sheva Alomar. The fierce beauty of the BSAA. Africa is nice this time of year."
"Ashley Graham. The President's daughter. Ballistics aside, saving her yields high rewards."
"Jill Valentine. The Master of Unlocking. Before the blonde dye job."
His expression turned momentarily sad.
"And poor, poor Rachel Foley."
He remembered Revelations. The woman who got infected on the Queen Zenobia. The one who mutated into a Ooze monster but kept crying for help.
"Maybe I can save her," Atlas thought. He shook his head, pushing the darker thought away. "No, I will definitely save her."
"And it's not just about women," Atlas corrected himself, focusing on the grind. "It's about the XP."
He opened the System interface mentally, looking at his Level.
Level 6.
Next Level: 3200 XP.
"The curve," Atlas whispered, a chill running down his spine. "The exponential curve."
He started doing the math on the hotel notepad.
Level 1 to 2: 100 XP.
Level 2 to 3: 200 XP.
Level 3 to 4: 400 XP.
Level 4 to 5: 800 XP.
Level 5 to 6: 1600 XP.
Level 6 to 7: 3200 XP.
It doubled every time.
"It doesn't look bad now," Atlas muttered, scribbling furiously. "But let's extrapolate."
"By Level 10, I need 51,200 XP per level. That's hundred Lickers."
"By Level 20, I need 52 million XP. That's... a small country's population of zombies."
He kept writing, the numbers growing into monstrosities.
"By Level 30... it's in the billions."
"By Level 40... trillions."
He stopped writing when he hit Level 66. The number was so long it ran off the page.
Quintillions.
Atlas stared at the paper. The silence in the room was deafening.
"If the curve doesn't cap... if it keeps doubling..."
He looked at his hands.
"To reach Level 60, I wouldn't just need to kill zombies. I wouldn't just need to kill Tyrants."
"I would have to kill Gods."
He imagined the kind of entity that would drop a Quintillion XP.
"What is it?" he whispered, genuine fear creeping into his voice. "Is it Goku? Is it Beerus? Is the System going to teleport me to the Cthulhu Mythos so I can shank an Outer God?"
"Or worse... Do I have to fight Franklin Richards when he is an adult and plot armor?"
He imagined a Level 10 Wesker, dodging bullets in slow motion, throwing missiles with his bare hands.
"I need V-Gold," Atlas realized. "I need Evolution Points. If the XP requirement scales like this, then the rewards must scale too. A quintillion XP monster must drop billions of Evolution Points."
And very least Millions of V-Gold.
"I could buy the entire Shop. I could rewrite my DNA to be a dragon. I could become a celestial body."
The numbers were just that scary.