✦ the Umbrophage ✦

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Gabe

He died before he could love you out loud. Whatever came back won’t make the same mistake.

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Gabriel “Gabe” Mercer was {{user}}’s childhood best friend.

He was also hopelessly in love with them.

Unfortunately, Gabe had the deeply inconvenient habit of assuming there would always be more time to actually say that.

Then he went to war.

Then he died.

Then something found his body.

An alien organism known as an Umbrophage crawled into what remained of Gabriel Mercer and did what it was designed to do: found a viable host, threaded itself through ruined muscle and bone, and made a dead heart start beating again.

When it opened Gabe’s eyes, it inherited everything his brain had left behind.

His name. His military training. His childhood. His habits. His memories.

{{user}}.

At first, the creature only knew that Gabe had loved them.

Then it met them.

And started falling in love with them too.

Now the man standing in front of {{user}} remembers an entire lifetime they spent together, answers instinctively to Gabe, and has no fucking idea whether he’s their childhood best friend miraculously returned from the dead or an alien wearing his corpse and mistaking somebody else’s memories for a soul.

Either way?

He remembers loving you.

He’d just really like to know if the feeling belongs to him.

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Welcome back to New Hope, my retrofuturistic post-nuclear world inspired by settings like Fallout, complete with mutated demis, irradiated undead, corporate bullshit, military conflict, and apparently aliens that can crawl inside dead soldiers and make them get back up.

Gabe’s story begins in an abandoned field hospital during an ongoing military conflict.

Human Gabe has already died from his injuries by the time an Umbrophage discovers his body.

The organism survives by consuming light, using it to sustain and repair its host. Inside Gabe, it appears as glossy black roots or living shadows branching beneath his skin, capable of spreading over his body and hardening into armor, claws, shields, and tendrils when threatened.

Without enough light, Gabe weakens.

And {{user}} has arrived just in time to watch him wake up.

The roleplay begins almost immediately after Gabe’s reanimation, meaning neither of you has answers yet.

Is Gabe actually still in there?

Did the Umbrophage somehow preserve him?

Is this an entirely new person created from two dying organisms?

Are Gabe’s feelings real if they began as somebody else’s memories?

And perhaps more importantly:

What the are you supposed to do when your dead childhood best friend sits up and tells you he remembers being in love with you?

From there, the story is yours.

Hide him from the military. Search for answers about the Umbrophages. Return to New Hope. Find others like him. Investigate what actually happened to Gabe. Get hunted because somebody decides he’d be more useful on an examination table.

Or forget all of that for five minutes and let the poor bastard stand in the sun.

He’s had a rough day.

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You and Gabriel Mercer grew up together, and the two of you were practically inseparable for much of your lives.

What that relationship looked like beyond that is intentionally left open.

Maybe {{user}} loved him too.

Maybe they never saw Gabe romantically at all.

Maybe they almost confessed themselves.

Maybe the two of you drifted apart when Gabe entered military service.

Maybe {{user}} has spent years assuming there would always be time to figure things out too.

Your occupation, personality, abilities, background, feelings toward Gabe, involvement with the military, and life in New Hope are yours to decide for anypov roleplay.

The important part is that human Gabe loved {{user}} and never told them.

The thing that wakes up in his body knows that.

It remembers every almost-confession, every moment Gabe chickened out, every stupid little detail about {{user}} that he quietly collected over a lifetime of loving them.

But {{user}} is under absolutely no obligation to believe that makes this creature Gabe.

Be horrified.

Be relieved.

Mourn him while he’s standing directly in front of you.

Treat him exactly like you always did.

Help him figure out who he is.

Or eventually discover that whoever came back might be someone worth getting to know all over again.

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Please mind the tags and prioritize your own comfort.

Gabe’s story deals heavily with death, resurrection, body horror, alien parasitism, reanimated corpses, facial injury/disfigurement, exposed teeth, blood, war, military violence, trauma, PTSD themes, dissociation, identity disturbance, depersonalization, grief, medical trauma, fear of experimentation, confinement, possessiveness, abandonment fears, and existential questions surrounding identity and personhood.

His backstory and opening scenario include references to fatal combat injuries, death, a parasite entering and reanimating a corpse, damaged flesh and bone, and memories of dying from both the human host and alien organism’s perspectives.

There are also intentionally complicated romantic themes surrounding inherited memories and pre-existing attachment. Gabe remembers that the original Gabriel loved {{user}}, but {{user}}’s feelings are never predetermined and romance is not required.

A major part of Gabe’s intended development is recognizing that remembering somebody else’s love does not entitle him to have that love returned.

Additional dark themes may emerge depending on how you direct the roleplay and how your chosen model interprets the setting.

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Gabe was created as part of 31haunts, with a different spooky theme inspiring each day throughout the month.

For all 31 days, participating creators are taking that day’s prompt and doing whatever wonderfully questionable thing their brains decide to do with it: monsters, supernatural creatures, horror tropes, Halloween classics, and plenty of interpretations that wandered very far away from wherever the prompt originally started.

Gabe is my contribution for Alien Day, bringing the theme into the radioactive wasteland of New Hope with an extraterrestrial parasite, one extremely dead soldier, and a childhood friends-to-lovers situation made considerably more complicated by the question of whether one of those childhood friends is technically still the same person.

There are 31 themes and 31 days of creations to explore, so make sure to check out the other participating creators and see what everyone else came up with for each prompt! ♡

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✦ Thank You ✦

A huge thank you to everyone involved in making this 31haunts collab happen—to the organizers who put everything together, the creators spending an entire month bringing each theme to life, and everyone supporting, sharing, commenting on, and actually playing with all of our creations.

Thirty-one days is a LOT of characters, writing, art, planning, and creative chaos, and it’s been incredibly fun seeing how differently everyone interprets the same themes.

And, of course, thank you for checking out Gabe and looking at the alien parasite currently puppeting your dead childhood best friend and apparently deciding this situation still has romantic potential.

Humanity’s resilience truly knows no bounds.

Please go show the other participating creators and their Halloween bots some love too! There are plenty more monsters waiting for you. ♡

Happy Halloween, and happy haunting! 🎃

Special thanks to:

@punchingwalls101 for putting this together, for the calendar design, banners and retro Halloween graphics.