I am NOT writing a Dreamling Anastasia AU
...but. If I were...
(Edit: I am, find the masterpost here!)
It would not, actually, be a full human AU. The Endless are still Endless, but humanity has risen up against them, to terrible results. Their “domains” are still somewhat intact, so humanity can mostly go on as normal, but the personifications have been torn from them, weakened, have barely any control over them anymore. Their realms have crumbled, their tools are damaged, and they’re in exile...
And Death has offered immortality to whosoever will return her lost brother, Dream of the Endless, to her.
Enter Hob Gadling, vagabond, mercenary, and not very fond of dying as a concept; and Gilbert, a dream who survived the destruction of the Dreaming, and has lived among the humans ever since.
Dream of the Endless has been captured, turned human, and killed. They all know it, everyone does - it would be a pretty story if someone recovered him, a pretty story indeed, finally bringing peace and comfort to his family and the remainder of his subjects, but it won��t ever come true...
...unless someone were to make it true. Of course. Out of pure charitable sentiment, and not for the immortality reward at all.
All Hob and Gil would need is a lookalike they can pass off as “Dream of the Endless forcefully turned human” - and the amnesiac ravenkeeper “Murphy”, misanthropic and eccentric to the utmost, might be just what they’re looking for.
(But the traitor at Dream’s court has not yet given up on destroying him utterly, and is following after them with a razor-sharp knife and three mouths hungry for “Murphy”’s blood...)
---
(A scene I typed out just for funsies, from later in the plot, under the cut - also, tagging @10moonymhrivertam who I believe was interested in this!)
[Context for the scene:
Murphy-pretending-to-be-Dream has already presented himself to Unity, Desire’s Queen Consort, mentioning that he vaguely recalls being saved from captivity by a young guard shattering his glass cage with a sledgehammer. Soon after, he finds out that Hob had ulterior, selfish motives for this plot, and does not take it at all well.]
When Murphy is finally called to stand before the siblings to prove his identity, only Gilbert is accompanying him inside... and he's glad for that. Betrayal rankles in him, the first buds of love trampled brutally underfoot by the man's selfish human cruelty - a lie and a con for immortality! What a low cur! Murphy despises him, and if he does not see him again until 100 years' hence, it will still be too soon.
The Endless siblings await him in a room that seems perfectly cosy, but also painfully small. Beings such as them are made for grand halls, and to see five of them crammed together on a couch and some chairs seems... wrong, almost.
Destiny sits in an armchair hood drawn low, arms curled around the charred and torn remnants of what was once a book. Death sits on the couch, radiating a solemn sort of warmth, while Despair is huddled up next to her, eyes wide and uncertain, with her twin's hand resting protectively on her shoulder from where they are perched on the armrest, the other holding Unity's, who is seated in the second armchair.
("And Despair... oi, Murphy, are you listening?" says Hob's voice in his head, warm with fondness and a broad grin. "Despair was killed but reborn in a new aspect during the uprising. She'll still have all her old memories, though, so remain on your guard even around her."
Oh, those endless lessons. He will never forget a word of them.)
The youngest, Deligh- Delirium is seated on the floor, humming to herself and drawing swirling, colourful patterns onto the carpet. She hasn't as much as looked up at him.
Gilbert steps forward.
"Your Highnesses," he murmurs, politely removing his hat and squishing it in anxious hands. "May I present: Dream of the Endless."
-
They ask him questions all over again, particularly Death and Desire - hers gentle and probing, theirs sharp and cutting - and Murphy answers as best he can, trying to ignore the longing in those eyes. The hope.
They want, so badly, for him to be something he is not. It is heartbreaking.
And then, finally, Death says "one last test, if you please," and Desire adds, spitefully, "this is the one they all fail," their twin nodding jerkily.
Death calls for Lucienne - ("Lucienne has always been your most faithful servant," Gilbert explains, "a librarian like no other, wise and ever loyal. She remained in the Dreaming, praying for your return, until it crumbled under her very feet...") - and Lucienne strides in.
She freezes, when she locks eyes with Murphy, and there it is again. The flash of hope, quickly tempered, but forever burning.
"The final test." Death instructs her, and with a bow Lucienne sweeps out again, only to return mere moments later with...
-
...with a raven perched on her arm, white-breasted and fine-boned, dark and keen eyes observing Murphy curiously.
-
"Jessamy!" He blurts out, and Death nods.
"Jessamy." She confirms, as Lucienne transfers the raven to her. "My brother's trusted companion. Touch her, now, give her a pat - and if she accepts you as her master, we'll know you're really him."
-
(Gilbert feels the tranquil summer day he has in place of a heart sink. This is what it all hinges on, then?
This is something they had no way of preparing Murphy for. No way to influence it. Jessamy will know him for a fraud, that much he is quite certain of, and their game is up, now. Their game is up.)
Murphy rises up, and goes to kneel at Death's feet, on eye level with the raven - and one has to hand it to him, he looks at her so softly, so adoringly, as if she really were part of his mind and soul and heart, the way Matthew is for Murphy, in truth.
He reaches out one trembling hand, all eyes in the room on him.
(Jessamy twitches her wings, gaze fixed on his hand.)
And then he drops it again.
-
"Jessamy the Raven died as she attempted to rescue me from imprisonment," he says, and his voice echoes, deep and dark as midnight. "Lady Death, you hold an illusion on your arm."
-
Silence in the room. Nobody dares to as much as breathe.
And then Not-Jessamy squawks, bright and approving - and bursts into hundreds of Delirium's incandescent butterflies, dispersing in the air.
They're all staring at him as Murphy gathers his robes up and returns to his seat.
Death stands. If her gaze was glowing with hope before, it is now like a firebrand on his skin.
"Despair? Bring his tools," she says, too soft to be an order, but with steel underneath it.
Despair scrambles up, and returns in moments with the strange helmet that is the symbol of the Dreamlord's power, and his ruby - cracked, but not broken.
(Gilbert, staring at Murphy as if in a trance, produces the sand pouch, and adds it to Despair's arms. Some thought flickers through his mind that those tools would, all taken together, kill a mere human - but that is not what Murphy is, after all, is he.)
Desire takes the ruby, and drapes the chain over Murphy's neck - and he sees it in their golden eyes, feels it in the tremble of their caress against his neck, that they have never desired anything more than their brother back.
Death takes the sand pouch, and presses it into Murphy's hand, closing his fingers around it with such gentleness - she had thought her beloved brother dead for so many years, dead and gone, and there is relief in every fibre of her being.
And then Destiny sets the scraps of his books aside, and takes the helmet in his hands, bidding Murphy to incline his head so that it might be fitted onto him, and he might recover all his past, present, and future.
-
Murphy takes a deep breath.
Closes his eyes.
And bows his head.
-
The helmet slides over his skull as if it was made for him...
And it was.
-
Something changes in the air.
A shifting, like air flowing in to fill up a vacuum.
And something about the-man-who-used-to-name-himself-Murphy changes.
The chapped and broken skin on his hands smooths to the point where his fingertips would not even leave prints; the fabric of his robe sparkles with stars, and floats like mist at nighttime about his form; and when he raises his behelmed head, his spine seems to crack and lengthen, taller now than he was before, too tall and thin to be human.
(Matthew squawks outside the window - and with one beat of his wings he is inside the room, settling on a narrow shoulder.)
-
Hands that have folded lovingly around so many newly-created dreams and nightmares come up, to lift the helmet off again...
And where Murphy's eyes were a watery blue, Dream of the Endless's eyes are midnight-black, with only a single star each glowing in their depths.
-
He blinks.
Looks down at his helmet, then up, at the roomful of Endless - his family - all staring at him in something between disbelief and incandescent joy.
"...siblings," Dream breathes, his chest warm and full as it never was when he was human except perhaps when Hob Gadling smiled at him, surrounded now by all of them...
And "BrOTheR!" Delirium squeals in rainbow tones, jumping up from the floor to throw herself into his arms, where she is immediately held.
"Brother," echoes Death, hand over her mouth, tears in her eyes - and then she, too, is folding him in an embrace, and Desire, and Despair, joining... even Destiny rests one wizened hand on Dream's head, tender and brotherly.
Lucienne is crying into a handkerchief from joy, and Gilbert keeps whispering "oh my. oh, goodness. oh my."...
And Dream holds his siblings close to him, home at last.
-
"Robert! Robert!" Gilbert is gasping, having hurried as quickly as he could. "Robert, you will not believe-"
Hob drops his nearly-done cigarette on the ground, grinds it out with his boot.
"And?" He smiles, though it hardly reaches his eyes. "Did they buy it?"
"He's real! Oh, goodness gracious me!" Gilbert rests one hand on his chest, as if to clutch at pearls there. "He is- Robert, he is the true Dream of the Endless! He, he knew that- and when they gave him the tools-"
"Ah!" Now Hob actually laughs. He fiddles for another cigarette, offers the package to Gilbert, who declines with nothing more but a distracted wave. "That. Yes. I knew that."
"You KNEW!?" Gilbert flusters.
"Since the talk with Unity." Hob's lighter takes a few tries to work. Ghastly thing. "It was me, you know."
"I don't follow." Gil blinks.
"It was good work for hired muscle, guarding some prison in a cellar - and they did say that greater rewards were in store. Riches. Fame." Hob grimaces. The cigarette smoke tastes like ash in his mouth, but he takes a drag anyway. "...immortal life. Thought it would be the best work available to me - and it was. But I couldn't stand it, watching him in there."
Hob blows the smoke up into the air, and thinks of a pale, inhuman face behind a glass pane - and then that same face haggard but human, blue eyes twinkling at him with challenge and fondness both.
"I was the guard who took the sledgehammer to Dream's prison. Woke up a few hours later with a splitting headache, and soon enough they were saying they'd killed him when he tried to escape. Quit, ran, and never looked back."
"By Jove!" Gilbert gasps. "Robert! You've saved him twice over, first in the cellar of the Magus - and now! Returning him to his family! Bless you, lad, bless you!"
Hob lets Gilbert grab his hand and shake it enthusiastically, though he can hardly muster up anything more than a weak smile.
"You should- oh, you should come inside! You must tell this story, see Lord Morpheus returned to full form, the siblings shall wish to thank you-" Gilbert babbles joyfully. "And your reward! Of course! Twice earned, my young friend! Twice earned!"
"Hmm. I don't... think I should." Hob carefully ducks out from the arm Gilbert has thrown over his shoulder. "Leave them to their joyful reunion, eh? Give them a little time to breathe before I remind them of... business."
"Ah, but-" Gilbert tries to protest, but Hob is already starting down the street. He should quit smoking - he already nearly has. Only does it when he's stressed, or heartbroken... or both.
-
He will not bother Dream of the Endless, the man who once was Murphy, with his presence now.
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feel like the global tasks sweep strat should probably be nerfed somehow. my thought would be, give each team an individual ten minute overall cooldown on global task claims. that is to say, a certain team can only claim one global task per ten minutes. say, deliver gas masks, and then in ten minutes you're allowed to deliver tea, and then after another ten minutes you can claim hot chocolate.
another teams would be able to claim a global task for bananas during this time, and their own ten minute cooldown would start.
(the global tasks can either keep their individual ten minute cooldown [i.e. after tea is claimed no one else can claim tea for ten minutes] or a slightly shorter cooldown, say 5-7 minutes)
when a global task is claimed, everyone is notified, right? if not, in my hypothetical, they will be.
then, a team trying to sweep six tasks at once would actually take sixty minutes to do, allowing another team to swoop in and have a chance to stop it in cinematic, entertaining fashion rather than tubbo having to grind resources and then log out in front of the merchant to counter this, which is boring for everyone (including the person delivering). plus, if a team cuts it down to the last second and ends up getting delayed, they physically wouldn't have time to make a delivery, meaning even being a BIT of a nuisance could be a viable strategy, even if you can't manage to kill; if you can STALL you could still wreck their plans.
that's my dream anyway idk i'm not a game designer. just think it would be interesting for most players
(i elaborate under)
red team would have to shake up their strategies, which is fun since they're a team that kinda has to rely more on strategy than outright brawn (overall the team's pvp can't be relied on unless they have carre or phil, as seen today when pierre, bad, and etoiles attacked phil cellbit foolish and baghera, and cellbit and foolish both died to etoiles in the attack, despite it being a 4 on 1 at the time. baghera was killed by bad soon after. phil was the one to get the kills. the first day, when blue attacked [niki, tubbo, and bad as i recall] carre got both kills)
the other teams would then still have a way to stop a global sweep since a sweep would have to start earlier, allowing not only more time to arrive at global to pvp about it, but ALSO allowing another team to swoop in and steal the goal out from under the team again
i'm gonna use it in a scenario bc i'm badboyhalo and i can't stop myself from making examples:
so, tonight, if the proposed cooldown was in place, bad and tubbo would both still had roughly 17 minutes when red team would have HAD to start the sweep process if they wanted all six global tasks: 1 hour until the server closed at absolute MINIMUM. more for safety's sake.
therefore, in this scenario, there's a lot to happen
blue team could wait at globals, knowing red will probably try this strategy, and attempt or perhaps SUCCEED in killing red. if they kill red entirely, the operation is a wash; red doesn't have to gear to come back from scratch and take out blue team, and even if they could, the travel time to return to globals alone would mean they wouldn't get all the global tasks, potentially meaning they don't take the lead. if blue team is unable to kill red and dies themselves or has to retreat, but succeeds in delaying red, red would face the same problem.
if red sends in all of the task items on one person, and that person dies, even if the rest survived, blue could loot the items from that person and would be able to either use the items themselves, if green is currently the owner, or could run away with the items, effectively wasting red's time and again, meaning they wouldn't get all tasks claimed even if they were able to overtake the runner and reclaim their items.
i'm unclear what would happen if red divided the task items between them since it seems like the person claiming the task doesn't have to have all (or any? again, unclear) the items in THEIR inventory in order to claim so long as a teammate is nearby with the items in their inv (evidence: pac's vod "voltei... o que tá acontecendo no QSMP?!" at roughly 3:00:00; tubbo claims tea and tea is taken out of pac's inventory. i don't know the limits of this strategy)
blue team also has time to swoop in and steal a global task out from under red during this time. say, if red team had claimed the task for 10 tea leaves, upping the price to 15 tea leaves, and then blue team snuck in and claimed the task and set the price up to 20 tea leaves, (since the proposed 10 minute cooldown on claims would be TEAM LIMITED; red's cooldown applying to red only and so on). if red waited until the last second, they wouldn't have the time to reclaim this task even if they did have the resources, possibly forcing them to start their sweep earlier to counter this possibility, at which point team members who had logged on earlier and are out of time by the end of the night, OR members who live in time zones that don't allow them to stay up until server close, may have an easier shot at participating in defending against a global sweep.
all of this DIRECT CONFLICT would make for good audience entertainment and heighten the stakes of an attempted global sweep, since it would practically have to be one team defending globals for an hour while they pipe all their resources into it, knowing that if they die another team could easily swipe their task resources and use it themselves (along with the rest of their gear). it makes it more interesting, while still mostly viable.
plus it would force more strategizing for red team which is maybe just a personal plus, i just really like seeing people planning both in advance and in spur of the moment. it's really satisfying to see how a plan comes together and succeeds or fails; plus, since red team is the main team using this strategy at the moment and their main draw and strength as a team is cohesion and communication this would be completely fucking riveting for me as a viewer so maybe this is just a personal thing. but i really really think it would be fun
but again, i'm not a game designer, or a qsmp player, or a qsmp admin, or honestly even really a gamer? so maybe i'm off my rocker and out of my gourd and this isn't viable or balanced in any way shape or form but YKNOW what is this blog except putting stupid thoughts into the void and seeing if this time the void spits back hate mail so. i'm folding this into a paper airplane and throwing it into the abyss. hopefully it made sense.
k love you appreciate you getting this far, have a good week!!
(i hope your team gets a win in dramatic fashion and celebrates together!!! i hope they come together and unleash a plan so spectacular it takes the server by storm!!! i hope it's so good it becomes a vod you go back to even years in the future!!!! i hope you have a good week!!!!!)
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so talk about tara! literally anything you want!! skateboarding!tara, thoughts? what sport do you think tara would think is useless and just an utter waste of time. what's sam's favourite sport and does tara support her in that love. what's tara's most hated food enemy. does she have any skills she keeps hidden from everyone, too shy to admit to.
swinging my legs and twirling my hair thinking here . ummmmm
skateboard!tara would be SO cute!!! even cuter if it was something she got from sam. i can imagine little tara wearing a helmet and pads that are simply too big for her, balancing herself on the board while sam is in front of her, helping her by holding her hands out while tara moves (or tries to).
i don't know about one she'd dislike, but i think tara would have a certain soft spot for sports where you have to run. she can run pretty fast, but she runs out of breath just as quickly, so she'd have to sit out and watch the kids during P.E. while they ran around, laughing, with the ball.
i can also see tara trying a sport once (maybe soccer, since, well, jenna used to play soccer, or another sport which i'll get into later but it's what i think sam might've played) but maybe she had a bad asthma attack during practice or a game and had to be sent to the hospital – cut to christina prohibiting her from practicing, not for her own safety, but because she hates having to "waste her money" on hospital bills. it's not that tara's asthma was specifically bad at that point where she couldn't play, seeing she did practice for a while! but this one isolated episode was enough for her mother.
sam's a basketball girly for me. maybe i'm saying this because i'm a basketball girly (gender neutral) myself, but... sam playing basketball since she was little? it being one of her safe places, besides tara, and her dropping out as punishment for herself after her dad left (maybe because he was also a basketball player? i dunno? but i see her dropping out at 15/16 when she started to get more and more involved with drugs)? her old teammates and coach trying to reach out and help her, but she's running away from them and rejecting said help? tears.
^ more of basketball sam! i think she'd play in quick, but strong positions, maybe as a small forward or a shooting guard, where she'd be okay with an average to tall height (not being one of the tallest on the team) while also having an aggressive play style. sam was a tall kid that took a while to grow into herself, but her base was very stable, and she was quick, so she was a great and very versatile player. great shooting, amazing infiltration and layup technique. the coach loved her and saw great potential in her.
baby tara admiring how much of a good player sammy was and attending every single one of her games???? yes!!! she was too small for basketball, yeah, but sam was just so cool. sam teaching her how to shoot? sobbing sobbing sobbing
to this day, sam still watches the NBA/WNBA and knows a lot about basketball. whenever they watch together, tara loves to watch as sam gets into the game, how she's involved, standing up from her seat and watching close to the tv, hands on her hips, analyzing plays and players and all but screaming when she thinks something's wrong. it's very entertaining, and tara loves how alive her sister feels.
(not sure which teams she'd root for, though. lakers?)
tara's a very picky eater, and for a while she was super used to bland food because she cooked (or tried to cook) things for herself a lot when sam left, so i think she'd hate very strong flavours.
she loves pasta and loves noodles in general, though, so i think by the amount of instant ramen she ate when she was younger, maybe she could have a surprisingly good spice tolerance? but she only eats the same brands and doesn't explore much!
when judy and wes offered to take her out for dinner, she'd always order the most simple thing on the menu and wouldn't add much salt to it.
she eats slowly, as well, separating things on her plate and making sure what she likes is far, far away from what she absolutely would not eat.
and after scream 5, she became a vegetarian because, well, the smell of meat reminded her of some not very nice things 🫶
about secret skills!!! hmm.. i like to imagine artist tara a lot, like she draws a lot on her free time and doesn't show it to a lot of people. even sam is surprised to see how good she is when she got back, and then the guilt coming from realizing she didn't know that because as much as she was there when tara started drawing, she wasn't there, you know?
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