Minor update and long-term plans

Hello, dear readers. I don't want to repeat myself all the time, so here's the short of it: things are better than before but still far from great, I'm working of Saturday but get a day off tomorrow in exchange, and I plan to put together a two-part release before the end of the week.

Aside of that, there have been something on my mind as of late. With volume three, we are roughly at the halfway point of the story (well, more like one-third, but I plan to tighten up the pacing, so word-count-wise we are at about 50%), and I was thinking about where to move on after the story concludes. I have quite a number of story ideas, some fit for shorter stories, other for longer ones, so I figured I might as well bounce a few premises off you as stress relief, and because you can never start working on drafts and world building early enough. So, here are the possible future stories I may or may not work on once The Simulacrum concludes in about... two years? Let's go with that. 

-Option 1: Becoming the Mask (working title)

Setting: Ancient Mediterranean age fantasy world. Set in an archipelago with city-states, each separated on their own island by an unsailable sea, originally all parts of a single magitech empire that fell down ages ago. The islands were originally connected by magical gateways, and after centuries, one of the islands manages to figure out how to reactivate them and sets out to re-establish the empire by conquering all the other city-states. 

Plot:The MC is a general of the new empire and a distant relative of the emperor. Upon conquering one of the cities, he gets entangled in two colliding assassination plots, leaving him bleeding out under the ruins of an old temple of a nameless god only worshiped in this city. While trying to escape, he puts on the old mask he finds among the ruins to hide his identity, but unbeknownst to him, it was the last remaining artifact of said god, with it housing a sliver of his consciousness. Worse yet, once he wears it, he can no longer remove it. Then, just to make things even more hectic, the survivors on the city mistake him for the avatar of their god, descended to save them, so now he has to play and eventually embrace the identity while leading "his people" in an exodus to escape the empire, all the while the mask keeps taunting, trolling, and occasionally helping him.

-Option 2: The Torchbearers 

Setting: Eclectic high-fantasy world. The spirit of the world itself was dying due to physical laws becoming too entrenched in reality, so it began summoning people from modern day earth. In particular, it summoned people with deep understandings of fictional metaphysics, from fantasy RPGs to Chinese internal alchemy cultivation, and granted them the power to warp reality in order to establish these systems. They become the legendary Torchbearers, who bring the Flames of Civilization to the world, each one of them expanding the plane itself by creating new areas to explore and more systems for their inheritors to use. However, these systems get weaker with each generation, so to maintain itself, the world-spirit keeps summoning more people, leading to a cyclic rise and fall of civilizations in a constantly expanding world, with Embers of old civilizations occasionally becoming relevant again when a Torchbearer with a compatible system appears.

Plot: The MC is a native of this world and a sergeant living in a trade city making its living by exploring the nearby gigantic forest, the remnant of an unrecorded ancient civilization and its system. However, the appearance of a new Torchbearer in the Empire causes the world to shift and it sends a giant horde of monsters to the town, and in the stampede, the MC's daughter dies while he was defending the ramparts. Stricken by grief, the MC gets drunk and causes a scene during the victory celebrations, and ends up falling into the moat and dies, only to reawaken fifteen years prior. After the first shock, he decides to turn his life around, saving his future wife and daughter in the process, and to do so he joins the professional explorers hunting in the forest, only to discover that his return to the past has something to do with the very first Torchbearer and his unique system, and that the man is none too happy about him rewinding time like that.

-Option 3: Cloud Factories

Setting: Steampunk low-fantasy world. The setting revolves around the titular cloud factories, enormous, self-sustaining flying cities. These were originally created as giant manufacturing- and weapons-platforms in a cataclysmic war that destroyed most of the planet's surface. At this point in time, the surface has mostly recovered, but there's a huge divide between the sky-dwellers and the surface-dwellers. The main source of magic in the setting is in the form of the Enkindlers, people who are capable of creating spirits of various level of sentience that can power their machines and even work as rudimentary AI, and Mechanists, who are capable of instinctively creating and assembling complex machinery using a form of telekinesis, even while lacking basic understanding of how said machines work.

Plot: The MC is a young Enkindler, who burned himself out in the process of creating a single, completely sentient spirit. Since he wants his spirit friend to have a proper body, he decides to enroll into an academy for Mechanists, even though he doesn't have the power to be one, solely based on his technical knowledge. He quickly gets paired up with the headmaster's daughter, who is a Mechanist whose machines just never seem to work as intended, and the two of them bond over their shared interest in taking apart and figuring out how the technology that everyone takes for granted actually works. There is also a "benevolent" conspiracy going on in the background, run by the "Utopist Society", whose over-complicated and often bumbling efforts to reunite the sky- and surface-dwellers leads to a number of hijinks the MC and company has to deal with.

-Option 4: In The Court of Count von Krayzeefuchs

Setting: An over-the-top high-fantasy world where humans seem to be the dominant race, but only because the other fantasy races think they are weird and keep their distance. 

Plot: The MC is a courtier in the kingdom of Farlandia (not to be confuse with Nearlandia), who is sent to the court of the titular count running a Monty Python-esque territory with his crazy subjects and inbred children. After overcoming his first shock, the MC is then forced at dagger-point by the count's daughter (whose father is actually a stable-boy the countess fancied for a while, and thus the only relatively sane member of the family) to elope with her so that she can escape her certifiably insane family. During their escape, the pair accidentally falls into a hole in the forest and stumble upon a sprawling clockwork-punk city run by all kinds of fantasy races, from fairies to orcs, and upon taking them in, it is revealed that all those legendary tales about great evil necromancers and demon lords were a huge ploy set up by the, to keep the humans occupied. Now that they stirred up the beehive, they force the MC into becoming the new "Dark Lord", with the count's daughter serving as his over-the-top second-in-command, to create a huge theatrical charade to strike fear into the hearts of humanity and keep them from warring with each other and oppressing the peasants all the time.

-Option 5: (As of yet untitled)

Setting: A typical sword-and-sorcery fantasy world, except DnD-style alignments are enforced.

Plot: The MC is a mid-tier demon living in an enormous wasteland only inhabited by demons. They are all red, flamey, and thoroughly unpleasant and sadistic, but they are being contained by the surrounding fantasy races and their nations. It's mainly because they don't have a king to unite them, and so they fight more among themselves than with outsiders. However, due to a bonk on the head, the MC "loses" his Always Chaotic Evil alignment and recognizes that he's living in a hellhole, but can't leave because demons are killed on sight everywhere else. As such, using his wits and creative application of his powers, he attempts to create something resembling a society in the wastelands, but it's easier said than done when everyone around him are dumb as rocks at best and comedic sociopaths at worst.

-Option 6: Land of the Grey God

Setting: A single continent with a handful of city-states on it. Each city-state houses stone called an Opaline (name pending), which projects a field around it that stabilizes the world. Outside of this stabilized zone, the flora and fauna mutates all the time, rivers and mountains can appear and disappear overnight, and there's just general chaos. Furthermore, sometimes people inside the field also get affected, usually due to some kind of strong obsession, and if they start mutating, they get exiled outside into the chaotic wastes before they could hurt anyone. The people wielding and safeguarding these stones are called the Seers of the Grey God, and they are near-omnipotent inside the area of effect of the Opaline.

Plot: In the past, two cities merged, and to cement this union, their Seers got married. This created a tradition, where the descendant of the current Seer couple would inherit the first Opaline, while their spouse would receive the second one, thus becoming the next generation of Seers. However, in the current generation, the Seer couple gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. In the end the girl got to be the next Seer with an arranged marriage partner, and the boy, in a fit of rage, steals the other stone and runs away into the wastes. Not being fully trained, the chaotic environment ends up mutating him all the same, and at the urging of the other exiles, he leads them in a war against the cities, ultimately ending in a grand battle between the exiles and the coalition led by his sister. However, upon the two of them clashing on the battlefield, the two stones resonate and cause whole world to rewind, and the two of them find themselves in their preteen bodies, back at the moment when they were first directly exposed to the stones.
The real story starts here, whereas both of them act like nothing happened and thus each of them believes only he/she traveled back in time, and try to "guide" their sibling in a way to avoid the future they experienced, leading to all kinds of hi-jinks, such as them trying to foil an assassination attempt independently, and they both interpret the effects of the other's actions as part of the assassination plan, resulting in an enormous mess. There is also going to be an ongoing mystery about the Grey God, the wastes, why people mutate, and more.

So yeah, as you can see, I'm not hurting for ideas, some better and more fleshed out than others. Either way, I just wanted to share this and see what you guys think. So, until the weekends, cheers, and have a jolly good day.