who silently narrates the confusion of his fight...

Notes

color plant (?) Element Mineral Playing Card Pokemon Type Instrument (?)

#008080 Brain Coral Death Prehnite XIII - Death Normal / Poison Square Wave

song of...

Deacon Blues
Steely Dan

Note: Ida's life is depressing as shit sorry.

Life Under Crystallization

Ida is a senior biology researcher at the Megalopolis laboratory, and the only marine biologist left in the bayside city. All he cares about, even as Crystallization worsens, are deep sea invertebrates, especially his Chondrocladia lyra specimen "Sandy", the one true love of his life.

Ida lives a primarily regular and uneventful life. He lives in a shitty apartment in a dying city, which for his entire life he has seen slowly choked by a threat seemingly beyond anyone's control. He is appropriately upset about this, but doesn't see any alternative. He's a heavy smoker and was previously an entirely shitty person until an electricity ghost haunted him and made him aware of gender thoughts and fucked up his mind's eye.

Relationships

Ida has had a very hard time forming long-lasting relationships since his youth. He was raised by a single mother who held bitter resentment for her estranged husband and his mistress. In high school, as a "different" teenage girl, Ida was a rude and abrasive jerkass to everyone around him, especially to all the guy dweebs he was friends with. He graduated as salutatorian in 1983 and was very upset about it. He then went on to college, where he became a bitchy lesbian who hated every woman he dated. In 1988 he went directly to work at the lab while simultaneously working on his doctorate.

While he grew out of his abrasiveness in adulthood, Ida is still generally unpleasant to be around, constantly dry and pessimistic and complaining about something arbitrary. Along with subconscious identity struggles, he grows to be quite lonely and unhappy with himself. In 1994, after a brief encounter with the lab's resident ghost Rosina, he begins privately identifying as a man, which is a revelation that makes much of his life make a lot more sense. However, with nobody to talk to about it, he feels as lost as ever.

Late Phase Gamma (Y2K/2000s)

In 1999, Ida meets Delfyne Stedelein, a woman he is instantly enamored with. After Delfyne correctly and spontaneously refers to him as a man, they immediately fall into what Ida believes is love, and after a very strange week end up married. Delfyne reveals herself to be a witch, which throws Ida for a loop - as is the norm in the Megalopolis, he doesn't recognize magic at all. He finds himself struggling with the idea of Crystallization as magical retribution, and with the credibility and existence of Delfyne herself, but is able to prioritize the fact that she's his dream woman over anything else.

Their relationship is intense but incidentally mind-numbingly atrocious. Delfyne's horrifically naive nature and Ida's dry and pessimistic personality cause the instant destruction of their marriage. They piss each other off enough to divorce within another two weeks, realizing that they cannot possibly live together.

While their marriage has ended, their relationship continues off and on - Delfyne will not stop popping up to remind him that she exists, and as living in the city gets more stressful, Ida spends more and more extended periods of time at her house in the woods. This is to both salvage the only remaining facets of their relationship that worked, as well as giving Ida the chance to rest, research, and overall disappear for a while. Delfyne introduces him to psychedelics, which helps curb his smoking habit for at least a while.

Phase Delta (Late 2000s)

It's the late 2000s, and Crystallization has begun to spread at a rapid rate with alarming new effects. Ida is now in his forties and is having a hard time coping with getting older. He's more stressed than ever, losing his composure, and is back to near chainsmoking. Delfyne is struggling to understand the changes he's experiencing, and his patience grows thin...