Overbrove

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
--Aldous Huxley

Self-Made Man: The Awakening and Ascendance of the Magician Daniel Obrove
It was an easy mistake to make.

How was Daniel to know that, for every parallel reality he traveled to, there was a strong likelihood that that plane would be inhabited by a parallel version of himself? How was the mage to know that the princess who had bestowed a kiss on his lips was one of those same parallel Daniel(le)s?

In hindsight, it became the best mistake he had ever made.

Daniel Obrove was visiting that world in order to secure a particularly useful spellcrafting reagent. The royal family happened to have a large store of the mineral, and the king was offering it as a reward for banishing a powerful demon menace. The kiss from the princess was a small bonus for services rendered unto her father.

Now, smooching someone who was by and large himself wasn't the worst thing Daniel ever had ever done, but it sure made things awkward when the girl revealed she had been aware of his identity the entire time, and had waited until after the kiss to tell him so. She told him more besides. Daniel was made aware of the full truth of the Hither and Thither: That with a potentially infinite number of worlds came the potential for an infinite number of Daniels. The remarkable truth of reality was that it was iterative in every aspect, both in its environments and in the people living there.

“How very interesting,” said Daniel, before he left for the portal-gateway home. It's not that he didn't find the princess's insight fascinating, it was just that it was improbable that he'd ever meet any of those alternate Daniels ever again. He had no reason to care.

Time passed, and Daniel continued to study magic, expanding his knowledge and pushing the bounds of human limits, until he ran into an troublesome roadblock. Try as he might, powerful though he might have been, Daniel Obrove was still only human.

He had attained the rank of archmage at that point, and was possessed of an impressive array of spells, some of which (thanks to his travels off-world) the other magic users of his plane had never seen before. Still, Daniel's capacity for magic was restricted to whatever his human body was able to handle. He could only draw on so much magical energy without overloading and injuring himself, and the really impressive spells he would have liked to try required a lot of power at once. He couldn't partially cast a spell and then draw on ambient mana produced from the environment, because then that too would run dry and require time to renew itself. He could have transformed his body, incorporated aspects of all the monsters and similar entities he had witnessed performing magic far beyond a human's capabilities, but he had grown proud over the years--proud of how much he had achieved working within the bounds of his very human limits. No, he needed an infinite power source he could draw on without waiting for it to regenerate, all while still retaining his humanity.

Daniel looked abroad. He remembered the words of the girl from years ago, how she said that she was himself in every way but a few. An infinite multiverse meant infinite bodies to draw from, and since those bodies were technically all him, they were his to do with as he pleased. To the mage, this wasn't a breach of any moral code. He was simply using resources that were rightfully his.

The girl went first. The princess, by now a queen, was taken from her court to have her body warped and twisted into an immobile, organic mana font. She became a renewable supply of energy, more efficient than using what was produced from the surrounding area, and capable of being drawn upon from much greater distances. The woman became the first of many extensions of the archmage's cache of mana. With her "help," he had become twice the wizard he had been before.

The work continued. Daniel accrued knowledge of where to find more analogues from summoned informants, whisked his alternate selves off their home planes, and seeded their transformed bodies throughout the world.

With additional external stores of energy came the opportunity to push his research further. The Ur-goblin portals, the key to his initial step towards understanding the multiverse, were re-configured so that they could be called upon without the need for a stone frame. Daniel could now slip between dimensions much easier than before. As well, he began to get creative with the portals, and with the instances of himself called through them. A human body fired at high velocity from a portal could be just as effective as a fireball. Calling on dozens of Daniels who were rendered braindead from birth could be as crushing as a rockslide. The archmage could still defer to traditional means of spellcasting, more so with his expanded supply of power, but he began to favor utilizing "himself" as a weapon. This was his newfound specialization.

This was Egomancy.

Cursed Earth: Details Regarding the Archmage’s Domain
When not moving from world to world attending to various arcane errands, the archmage Daniel Obrove lives on a corrupted instance of his homeworld, planet Wisteria. Over the centuries, the planet has been altered in several ways to suit the wizard’s needs.

One key feature of the Egomancer’s planet Wisteria is that it is thoroughly seeded with the mana fonts that Daniel Obrove uses to fuel his larger-than-life magicks. Generally when the archmage sets foot on a world, he expends a small amount of his own power to produce a supply of nodes within the near vicinity, then expands outwards from his initial position as required. The archmage has spent a lot of time on planet Wisteria, and has therefore had more time to expand his cache of energy than on any other world. Planet Wisteria hosts Obrove-analogues-turned-magical-batteries in every possible nook and cranny, spread throughout the world from pole to pole. Wherever he goes, the archmage is never without a vast supply of power.

One application of all the power stored on planet Wisteria is moving the world itself from one universe to the other. This is a task which Daniel Obrove has only attempted once, as the exertion drained his entire network of external mana nodes, leaving him slightly vulnerable until they could generate more power. Not only did the act move the planet’s entirety across dimensions, but it also overlaid it with another world, effectively causing one planet’s surface to overshadow the other. Some evidence of this still remains, such as several dessicated pagodas, shrines to forgotten divinities, or the grasping skeletons of the half-buried populace.

The location that Daniel Obrove spends the most time in while visiting Wisteria in the high stone-wrought tower he built over the ruins of the former mage’s college. Within are the archmage’s many secrets, including his expansive library, his private alchemy lab, and a menagerie of rarer interdimensional specimens. Many of the latter are analogues, instances of Daniel Obrove if he were born as an animal of some sort. In fact, much of the tower’s serving staff is comprised of multiversal duplicates, enthralled to the archmage through a complex fabric of binding spells. The tower also hosts kitchen and dining facilities, the archmage’s living quarters, and his throne room.

Outside on the grounds of tower are several places of production dedicated to manufacturing tools for the archmage’s use. All of these are made by employing Daniel Obrove’s analogues as a “raw material.” Metals possessing an intrinsic value of “Obrove-ness” are forged into enchanted weaponry, Obrove plant life is grown to feed the populace of Obrove servants, and an Obrove center for Obrove science researches further applications of Obrove-based technology. To say that the archmage is obsessed with himself is perhaps putting it lightly.

The most prevalent topographical feature of planet Wisteria is probably that the topography is very consistent. Beyond the main grounds of the tower, all is scorched and blackened earth, the result of an early display of the archmage’s power. Dotting the landscape are the aforementioned living mana fonts, but other than that, seemingly no life grows on the surface. The oceans are dark and oily due to mass disposal from Daniel Obrove’s manufacturing projects, and the skies are persistently dull and grey. The only exception to any of this is a miles-long wedge of lush plant life radiating out from the Egomancer’s tower. The garden persists, despite its harsh surroundings. Why the archmage allows this inconsistent enigma to remain, or why it was put there in the first place, to this day remains a mystery.

The Hither and Thither Expanded; Or, Drawing Back the Curtain!
Overbrove is the alternate universe analogue of the baroness Daniella Obrove. He is not the lady's past self, her blood relative, or a close acquaintance. He's the Dan who has made the multiverse his plaything, whereas Daniella serves as director of Wisteria Acres Livestock Wholesale and Golf Course.

Additionally, Overbrove is not the same as the younger Daniel Obrove you may have seen getting into shenanigans. Their timelines run parallel to each other, rather than consecutively. Overbrove is one possible future for the young man, but he is one which the young man has yet to achieve. Savvy?

Other Obroves, each of them inferior in their own special way, can be found on their alt list, here.

There are more "Danalogues" to come, eventually, so we kindly ask that you...

STAY TUNED!