Tanya thought that writing a paper on the potential applications of ancient magic would be her ticket to being assigned to boring, useless, SAFE research work far from the frontlines. But her crazy theory turned out to work well beyond her expectations, and now, as the head of Division Y, she has to manage the mad scientists and occultists under her command, the eldritch monsters they have created, and the demands of their superiors for more miracles to fight the Great War with.
Is this all Being X's plan?!
A Young Girl's Weaponization of the Mythos
by Zahariel is a The Saga of Tanya the Evil/Cthulhu Mythos crack crossover fanfiction.
This Fanfiction contains examples of:
- An Arm and a Leg: Nearly all of those selected for Projekt W are soldiers who were maimed beyond the help of modern medicine.
- Artificial Limbs: A derivative of Projeckt P [Puppen]. Weiss is revealed to have one.
- Awesome, but Impractical:
- The Eikons are, pound for pound, stronger than any of the vampires or Tagers the Empire can field. Recruitment is very difficult, however, as they can only be created on one specific day per week, with only up to a dozen living mages able to be converted at a time. Compare this to Projekt U, which specifically resurrects dead mages, and Projekt W, which is offered to maimed and dying soldiers; because of these criteria, neither Projekt stands to really lose anything by trying, on the chance that the conversion should fail, nor do they have a true ceiling on how many can be converted at once. The Eikons are also extremely hard to keep control over, their conversion having turned them into full Knight Templar fanatics, whereas Division Y soldiers retain their full mental capabilities and judgment. They become less impractical after De Lugo and Archbiship Beauvais flee for Ildoa, where they get the Vatican's backing and Schugel's input to improve their process.
- Projekt K summons several eldritch horrors, known as the Children of the Horned Goat, that can utterly destroy any force and are used to great effect during the Dacian invasion. Tanya opts to seal it after its first deployment, because they are completely indiscriminate in their carnage, making it a bad idea to deploy them anywhere near other Germanians, or civilians of any nation.
- Projekt V is an artifact that "thins the barriers between the different levels of reality, allowing the human senses to perceive things usually beyond their abilities, and allowing the senses of the creatures inhabiting this Beyond to perceive the humans in turn". It is deemed to be one the most dangerous Wunderwaffen ever developed, and completely wipes out the Francois' Rhine Front command in less than an hour and a half; however it requires considerable setup to be viable, such as a spy already embedded in the target area.
- Better to Die than Be Killed: Elya is given strict instructions to kill herself if she is unable to get clear of the area of effect of Projekt V before it goes off.
- Berserk Button: Aside from desperation, the other reason Tanya first used the Kosmosblut was because Severin Vianto demanded that she kneel and beg God for forgiveness. Given her adversarial relationship with Being X, she does not take well to such a demand.
- Curse That Cures: The Rite of Union used in Projekt W to turn someone into a Tager has the side-effect of completely healing the target to full health, including restoring any missing limbs or body parts, which is why crippled soldiers are prioritized for recruitment.
- Deadpan Snarker: Understated, but Lergen has slowly over time developed into this.
- Entertainingly Wrong: The Albish's belief that Lergen is the actual head of Division Y, rather than Tanya. Specifically, the lack of any formal protest over Tanya enlisting at the age of seven, Lergen's recommendation that caused her to be transferred to Division Y, Lergen himself originally being in Personnel before moving to Operations (where he often ends up as field commander for missions involving Division Y assets), and finally, Tanya's identity as the Lady of Stars, has the Round Table utterly convinced that Tanya is actually one of Div Y's earliest super-soldiers, and Lergen a secret mastermind who was perfectly placed to oversee her development.
- Faking the Dead: Doktor von Schugel, by way of making the Empire believe he was vaporized along with Elenium Labs.
- Godzilla Threshold: Tanya makes her first use of the then-untested Kosmosblut serum in response to the Francois' surprise attack with their new Eikons. After that incident, she keeps a vial on hand just in case, which she uses again to fight the dragon terrorizing the Nazzadi.
- Heel–Faith Turn: Inverted with Doktor von Schugel, who betrays and defects from the Empire upon becoming Being X's pawn.
- In Spite of a Nail: Despite never establishing the 203rd, Tanya gets the principal members of her canon battalion, anyway, with Visha being raised from the dead as a pseudo-vampire, and Grantz taking the offer to become a Tager after being fatally maimed. Weiss, König, and Neumann all get recruited while remaining normal humans, being attached to the division as aerial mages.
- The Red Baron title "Devil of the Rhine" still gets attached to Tanya, although in this case it's to the Werwölfe under her command, rather than Tanya herself.
- Despite Tanya having no involvement with Elenium Labs in this timeline, Schugel still receives "divine inspiration" from Being X which prompts him to sabotage the Type-95's safety features.
- Lensman Arms Race: After Tanya inadvertently shows the viability of occult superweapons, the other nations make their own attempts to keep up. Division Y under Tanya makes use of Lovecraftian rites, the Francois under Archbishop Beauvais (and later, the Holy See) use Christian/Being X-sourced "miracles", and the Albish under the Round Table make use of Ancient Kemetian/Egyptian wards. The Unified States, rather than use any sort of magic, recruit the local equivalent of Nikola Tesla in order to develop countermeasures.
- Limited Advancement Opportunities: Division Y is arguably the most strategically important organization in the Germanian military, but its commanding officer is stuck at the rank of Major because Army regs require a War College degree to be promoted any higher, and Tanya is too valuable where she is to be spared from her post to attend the college while the war is on. This actually gets at least one person demoted after transferring to Division Y because keeping him at his original rank would have a Major commanding troops who outrank her (Lergen is an exception, as he's an officer of Central Command authorized to command Division Y troops in the field rather than a member of Division Y himself. He's not in Tanya's chain of command, so he remains a Colonel).
- Locked into Strangeness: Tanya after using the Kosmosblut, increasingly so after each successive dose.
- Meaningful Name: Overlapping with Bilingual Bonus, all of the Projekte under Division Y have (German) names that in some fashion relate directly to their purpose.
- Mistaken for Superpowered: The Albish Round Table convinces itself that Lergen is an ancient Eldritch Abomination they call the Not-Man (shorthand for a term meaning "something that looked like a man but was not") when he's actually just an ordinary, non-magical human who happens to be someone the head of Division Y trusts to use her troops and resources in the field when she can't be there personally.
- Mythology Gag: While investigating the creation of the Eikons, Tanya muses on the idea of a highly-mobile, rapid-response mage unit, answering directly to Central Headquarters, and considers forwarding the idea on to General Zettour. Not only is this canonically what the 203rd is, but it was Tanya herself who came up with the idea in the first place.
- Nerves of Steel: Lergen overcomes the effects of Tanya's Kosmosblut-altered eyes by accepting that he is indeed small in the infinite universe but still has a duty to do.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
- The deployment of the Eikons backfires horribly against the Francois. While they're very powerful, their insane fanaticism makes them uncaring for collateral damage or even outright hostile to their own countrymen. This pushes the populace and the soldiery to surrender to and side with the Empire.
- The Albish-supported partisans in Legedonia, while they do cause some trouble for the occupying Imperial force, do more damage to their own countrymen. Already fed up with their government for having started a stupid and pointless war and then abandoning them, most Legadonians prefer to freely cooperate with the Empire.
- The Kemetian ritual that the Round Table casts to protect Londinium from any Division Y incursions successfully prevents them from infiltrating the city with Projekt S, but instead it leads the Imperials to encounter the Nazzadi. After Tanya kills the "dragon" that was preying on them, they quickly become eager recruits in gratitude, the wealth of new magical knowledge from both the newly-discovered world's ruins and its still-living people giving the Empire an even further edge in the magic arms race.
- No-Sell: Lergen to Merlin's assassination ritual, because it's specifically designed to target a man-shaped Eldritch Abomination and he's just an ordinary, non-magical human.
- Not Enough to Bury: Deliberately invoked, as Schugel's means of Faking the Dead.
- Our Vampires Are Different: While the results of Projekt U still bear some resemblance to the vampires of lore – blood-drinking, flight, vulnerability to sunlight – their incredible strength, speed, and durability makes Tanya describe them as "less Dracula-style vampires and more knock-off undead Supermen".
- Our Werewolves Are Different: While it may be named Project W [Werwolf],
Word of God outright states the results to be Expies of the Tagers from CthulhuTech, rather than the transforming wolf-men of lore. - Properly Paranoid: Tanya is ridiculously strict about safety procedures, but given that any mishaps could result in an Eldritch Abomination destroying the world, one can't fault her for making sure that everyone is taking the appropriate precautions.
- A Rare Sentence: Lergen is hit with this, in the aftermath of Arene.Suddenly, Lergen was hit by the thought that he was discussing the dissection of angel-like beings with a little blindfolded girl sitting in a wheelchair inside a Cathedral, with her vampire bodyguard listening on the conversation while a werewolf kept watch outside. This was definitely not what he had signed up for when he had joined the Army.
- Red Baron: Tanya's Kosmosblut-induced form is known as the "Lady of Stars". Her canon title of "Devil of the Rhine" goes instead to Projekt W's Tagers.
- Shout-Out: Division Y's chief medical officer is Doctor Iosefka, and was recommended to Division Y by Professor Gehrman, head of Projekt P (Puppen).
- Skewed Priorities: Somewhat Played for Laughs. Lergen faces down an Albish mage ambush without even flinching, even going as far as to deliver a "The Reason You Suck" Speech before said ambush is driven off, but the thought of being associated even further with Division Y, even if only in the eyes of enemy Intelligence, makes him break out in a cold sweat.
- Silent Scapegoat: Lergen accidentally gives the impression that he's the actual head of Division Y to the Albish commandos that attack the Empire's Rhine Front command post, which he reluctantly keeps up at Zettour's behest in order to aid their counter-intelligence efforts.
- Spared by the Adaptation: Anson Sue, faced with unknowable and incredibly effective superweapons instead of a highly skilled yet clearly mortal mage battalion, opts to surrender to Tanya rather than lead his men to pointless deaths. He does get stabbed by a Legadonian partisan, but is saved from death by Tanya.
- Super Prototype: The first batch of Eikons led by Severin Vianto were noted to be superior in performance to all that came after them, which Grantz takes to mean that the Francois' process must not have been refined if they can't keep their quality up.
- The Albish have convinced themselves that Tanya is one for all the various creations of Division Y.
- Technical Pacifist: The Nazzadi. Though they have no problem with defending themselves or with killing inhuman creatures, generations of desperately fighting to stave off extinction have left their species unwilling to take a human(oid) life if it can at all be avoided. Tanya ultimately chooses not to press the issue, acknowledging that it would be hypocritical of her to do so.
- The Apocalypse Brings Out the Best in People: When a Class 9 being becomes fully embodied in the middle of the Russy Federation, everyone from Albion to the States to what's left of the Russy army team up with Division Y and the Germanian military to stop it and save the world.
- Unfazed Everyman: Lergen is rapidly becoming this.
- Utility Magic: One of the main contribution of the Nazzadi. While Division Y has plenty of eldritch horrors on tap and occult rituals calling upon things man was not meant to know, the magic of the Nazzadi is far more prosaic. Unsurprisingly they specialize in spells meant to aid in survival such as those that purify food and water or neutralize poison.
