@Elias, We're making this happen. I don't mind you suggesting edits to things I've written, but please at least bring it up with me first.

@Anyone else, This is a work-in-progress (or, by the time you read this, maybe abandoned?) fanfic by Andrew and Elias: what if Origin Story took place within Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere?

Although I'm calling these “Chapter n”, that doesn't mean I actually intend for them to be as long as normal book chapters.

After experimenting with storing herself with Con & Eden, Mary-Mary only manages to escape from the Spiritual by traveling through Invention's Perpendicularity into the Cognitive, wanders around a bit, then back to the pseudo-Physical. Con, being traumatised by her disappearance, ends up hiding even more. Mary-Mary explores the Cognitive more and eventually finds the top-secret prison where Davy is, and steals him.

Mary-Mary and Davy find the edge of Citropolis's Cognitive and break out of it, then wander away from it towards Roshar (I think I'd prefer to skip Silverlight because I don't want to have to make up what that's like, although that does leave us with a language barrier. Maybe they just learn Veden or Alethi the normal way, or we could find a different excuse. Also, skipping Silverlight leaves them to be more surprised at Roshar.)

They arrive in Shadesmar and meet some spren. Davy finds out that Con's there. The Cryptics are fascinated by Con, who's terrified. They learn some stuff about Roshar. The spren learn some stuff about Citropolis. At least some of them say the first ideal. Mary-Mary tries out some interactions of her Spark with Rosharan stuff.

They travel to the Kholinar Oathgate to try to escape Shadesmar, then discover they can't use it and work out a way to get out with a combination of Mary-Mary's Spark and her connection to her spren instead. They get used to Roshar's Physical Realm for a bit. I think some more stuff should happen here given that it's such a new experience for them. They are running out of Citropolitan food, complain about having to eat instant noodles, meet Hoid, and learn about the king's feast from him.

They gatecrash the feast where Galivar is assassinated because they don't like Rosharan (or I guess specifically Alethi or Vorin) food and they think the fancy food at the feast might be better. I think Mary-Mary, being a bit of a foodie, would be more interested in and accepting of unfamiliar cuisine than Davy and Con.

They con Brightlord Davar into buying a fake Shardblade that's actually just a wand.

Shenanigans while they avoid getting caught by the Skybreakers.

I think Elias said more stuff about wanting them to interact with the events of the Stormlight Archive but I don't remember the details.

They should also be making progress with their Ideals during all of this, not outstripping the canon Stormlight Archive characters but not falling too far behind either. As Con makes progress, he spends less and less time stored and more time actually dealing with issues in the real world.

Hoid visiting Citropolis during the events of Origin Story, giving one of the other characters cryptic advice or something.

Mary-Mary's Spark transports things to the Spiritual Realm while making a Connection between them and herself so that she's able to retreive them. Davy's ability to transform things into air doesn't edit what the soul of the thing thinks it is like Soulcasting but just adds another layer on top. Sparks generally don't work on aluminium but there is no aluminium in Citropolis.

Citropolis is an enclave of Physical within the Cognitive Realm, created (or at least transported there) by Whimsy and Invention. The area of the Cognitive that corresponds to Citropolis is some distance away inside a giant aluminium dome. It is the forest from Titania's dreams. The souls of objects appear in the forest as other objects, unrelated to their physical forms. Most of them are plants and stuff, as it's a forest, but there are also other strange things that don't fit, as it is Whimsy's domain. I'm imagining things like toys and delicate garden furniture. Whimsy's Perpendicularity is hidden in the botanic gardens, and Invention's is deep in the abandoned train station. The area that the Old Guard used was land, so it corresponds to Citropolis's sea. I sort of want the areas around the perpendicularities to be accessible without a boat and the souls of all Citropolis's objects to not just be underwater but without it being a bead ocean like Shadesmar, so maybe it's a mangrove swamp or something? That feels a bit like a tacky solution to not much of a problem though. I guess I also don't want the area corresponding to the city to just be featureless. I think a steampunky aesthetic would fit well with Whimsy and Invention, with the more Whimsy-aligned things tending more natural and decorative, and the more Invention-aligned tending more mechanical.

Fitting in with the theme of things in the Cognitive being inverted, if Davy's prison is deep underground, I'd like it to appear as high in the sky in the Cognitive. That way it obviously stands out and it's likely Mary-Mary will visit it. The old subway (which is already connected to a Perpendicularity), mines, bunkers and underground nuclear waste storage facilities (if they exist) would also be highly visible landmarks. Correspondingly, Citropolis's skyscrapers would correspond to deep underwater, perhaps with the souls of their contents intertwined with the roots of the mangroves.

[I don't like having a very in media res start, but when I tried to introduce the scene by writing out the scene that actually happened in the game where Mary-Mary plans the experiment with Eden and Con, that felt much more awkward. It still feels awkward, like too much is happening at once. I'm not sure how to fix that though, because there is a lot happening at once. I think it would be better if there was some build-up, so the reader is expecting the experiment to make a lot of weird stuff happen, but I tried that and it was even worse. I think there's something a bit Alice-In-Wonderland-esque about the narration style, at least until the point where it switches more to her thoughts.]

Mary-Mary held her brother's hands and disappeared. It was a simple thing to do, no more effort than putting something in her pockets, only in this case, the thing she was storing was herself. The tricky part was reappearing again afterwards, which was in fact the entire point in this experiment. If you reappear in your own hand but your hand is itself in storage, where to you appear? She intended to find out.

She disappeared, and although this was the second time she had done so, she was still unprepared for the experience that followed. There is no space where she is, or altogether too much, it's impossible to tell. There's a dying cat, and a wardrobe to die for, and all the other things she'd been carrying around for the last four years. There are two vast incomprehensible powers, which she is sure she never picked up (and would not have survived had she tried). What there isn't is any time, just a single moment, a single opportunity to enact the plan she entered with: to leave again. She strains at the task that was usually trivial: moving something from her inventory back into the world. She strains and panics and grasps at anything that is available, any connection to the familiar, and all at once, at the same moment that she arrives, she is gone.

She fell a short distance to a wide metal platform, and squinted at the unexpected brightness. Not the infinite brightness of the non-place where everything exists at once, but merely the ordinary brightness of a sunny day, which is still much more than she expected. How long had she been gone? Was the apartment building she disappeared from no longer there? She took out her phone and waited for it to find a network connection to tell her when it was, while looking around at her surroundings. She was standing on an enormous gear wheel, with numerous smaller gears and mechanisms surrounding it, many of them apparently floating in the air. The machinery seemed to be at the peak of a tower, and moving off the gear to the relative safety of a nearby walkway, she could see down to a dense forest canopy below. The sky was bright silver but with no apparent sun, and clouds in various pastel hues drifted around it. Lines of smaller towers with pipes and more walkways between them stretched out in several directions from the large machine where she stood.

She checked her phone's progress at finding a network, and was not at all surprised that it hadn't found one. She sighed anyway. A part of her had hoped that there would be an easy solution to finding her way back home, but she was becoming increasingly concerned by the possibility that her home, or Mayor forbid, all of Citropolis, might no longer exist.

Wherever she was, it was clearly at least somewhat inhabited, given the machinery, although it was hard to see what such a ridiculous looking machine could actually have been built for. It was better at least than being stuck in her inventory. Unless this somehow was her inventory? She couldn't see any of her stuff here, but it was a strange enough place, it was worth a try. She picked a tree she could see down below, and tried to unstore it, holding her hand out over the railing so the tree would just fall down and not crush her. It didn't work. The tree was clearly not in her inventory, therefore this place wasn't either. Still, the landscape felt too surreal to simply be how the world had ended up, especially the clouds. She squinted at them suspiciously. How did that work? Perhaps this place was part of someone else's Spark, not Mary-Mary's inventory, but Titania's dream forest or something? It certainly had plenty of trees. Maybe someone had a Spark that interacted with hers, like Cass's did, and was able to save her? She knew she out to be grateful if that was the case, but couldn't help but feel a bit annoyed that whoever it was hadn't even left a note to tell her where to go.

If it was Titania, it would probably be better to look for her on the ground. Mary-Mary could see a long way from up here, but not much through the forest's canopy. What was it Titania did down there? Had tea parties and cavort with fairies or something? Maybe paying more attention to all the chats about the strange powerful old Sparks would have been useful. Too late now.

She headed down the tower's staircase towards the forest floor, but as she neared the bottom, she could see that the trees emerged from deep clear water. The roots were broad and tangled, so it would be possible to clamber from one to the other, but she didn't feel like risking getting her clothes wet. Although her Spark would allow her to dry herself in an instant, separating the clothes from the water would still be annoying. With no solid ground, the catwalks between the towers seemed like a much better option for getting places, assuming she could find a destination, so she climbed back up to the large machine.

Arriving at the top again, she was distracted once more by the strange machinery. If this place was all part of someone's Spark, it didn't necessarily need to have that much logic to it. Nobody really knew what gave each Spark their particular powers, and they were often counterintuitive, but there did tend to be at least a theme to each one, and if this looked like a machine, it probably had some purpose. She may not have been an engineer, but she did have one advantage here (that she'd been meaning to test anyway, and assuming the test actually worked), a sense for intent. It didn't really seem to be what her powers were for, but sometimes when things didn't work, she could feel that the intent attached to the objects was wrong, so maybe she could use that to satisfy her curiosity (and maybe get a clue for where to go) here too. She stepped back on to the large central gear, pressed her hand against it, and focused her mind on asking it the questions, “What are you for? What do you want?”.

The gear's answer was stronger than she'd expected. It thought it was a building, a transport hub, a place to help people to get where they wanted. Did the tower move? That would be quite a sight.

“Can you get me where I need to go then?”

“I am old, and broken, but I still have one destination left. I can take you there.” The gear's answer was not in words, but she could feel what it wanted, how it regretted what it had lost, and the opportunity it still presented, so she asked it one more thing, “Take me there”, and it did.