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EB: karkat we did it, we actually made it happen, we are here! just like you said we would, we are...
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EB: wait a sec let me check...
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EB: ...somewhere...
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John: Be past John
You got everything. Four of you were not only god tiers, you were top of the god tiers, gained so many levels that you lost count weeks ago. Conquered barely opposing Derse, built consort civilizations with complicated and distinct cultures, ectocloned and alchemized pretty much everything any of you ever imagined. The Medium was yours to command and rule.
Or at least you would be, said Doomed Dave trying to fix everything once more. Your session was empty, unwinnable, devoid of any meaning, as Jack Noir the unbeatable enemy escaped it and all that left didn’t matter at all.
The trolls were doing much better. Somehow they managed to restore their universe to quite a usable state, with them alive on Alternia. There were minute differences, they reported, like with their Ancestors alive outside of their timeframes, but it was way better than having no planet at all, with no universe to boot. How they did it was unclear even for them, but the basics as Karkat explained were:
CG: YOU HAVE TO ACTUALLY WIN THE GAME, YOU MORON.
Not that they haven’t their own problems, like Jack Noir gone missing and by all accounts last seen in their universe, but at least they got something useful to do. So when Doomed Dave passed the plan from Future Karkat for transferring kids to Alternia, you agree wholeheartedly.
CG: FEFERI’S DAYMARE BUBBLE CHAIN WILL DRAG YOU TO US, YOU FUCKING POOR EXCUSE FOR A GOD.
CG: I SOMEHOW FEEL OBLIGATED TO WARN YOU, EVEN IF I KNOW THAT YOU WILL IGNORE MY WARNING ENTIRELY AND I DON’T EXACTLY KNOW WHY I EVEN BOTHER TO TELL YOU ANYTHING REMOTELY IMPORTANT, AS MY WORDS JUST BLOW THROUGH YOUR HEAD WITHOUT ANY VISIBLE REACTION WHATSOEVER.
CG: BUT BACK TO THAT WARNING SHIT, THE DAYMARE BUBBLE CHAIN IS A FUCKING PERMANENT SOLUTION.
CG: SET IN STONE.
CG: FOR SOME PARTICULARLY NASTY VALUE OF ETERNITY PROBABLY.
CG: YOUR DREAMS, HOWEVER NEGLIGIBLE THEY ARE IN THAT REALM, AND MOST OF YOUR PATHETIC SUBCONSCIOUSNESS WILL BE THERE, IN DREAMBUBBLES, SHARED FOR ALL OF US TO SEE.
CG: AND DON’T EXPECT ANY FREE PASSES. ALL YOUR PRIVATE, EMBARRASSING SHIT WILL BE OUR TO SEE AND MOCK. AND GUESS WHAT. NO-ONE IS EVER GOING TO LET IT GO.
EB: i expect it’s mutual? the dream sharing i mean.
CG: IT PAINS ME TO ADMIT BUT YES, IT IS. BUT DON’T EXPECT TO SEE ANY GROUNDBREAKING STUFF, GAMZEE’S RAINBOW-SHITTING UNICORNS COVER MOST OF THE SHARED SPACE ANYWAY.
EB: we’ll see karkat! after we’ll do the hard part, rest seems easy!
CG: YES. ALL YOU NEED NOW IS TO DIE SUCCESSFULLY.
Karkat: Execute the transfer plan
Everyone was involved, all twelve of you, but it was Feferi who was the important one. It was she who modified the dreambubble chain, conversed with horrorterrors and her lusus and made all the preparations. The rest of you just gathered supplies and transportation, so kids would at least have the fighting chance to actually survive the transfer.
You remember your own transfer with horrid details. All twelve of you dead. No place to escape from your own dream bubble, lovingly fondled by eldritch tentacles of horrorterrors, passing through alien geometry of their beaks and mouths, only your thoughts and memories to keep you company, and all the good ones surprisingly absconded. Then Feferi came with the dream bubble chain construct, and things were marginally better, as you were still in deep shit, just not so alone anymore. And then Fef’s lusus, alive and well just like your whole universe, dragged the chain from the Furthest Ring to Alternia or something. You still don’t really understand the process, you just know that you suddenly were alive, well, right next to a tentacle monster from hell and deep, deep underwater. You’ll do quite a lot for John not to experience the same sickening drowning episode right after, or even before, finally meeting him in person.
You won’t admit it, but you are very, very excited about that last fact. As far as you can tell, all of you are.
So you wait with two submersible ships and plenty of bottled oxygen far below Fef’s hive, regarding Gl'bgolyb’s tentacles with repulsed esteem. You wait and you are prepared, and quite anxious, nervous and strangely happy to see them, to see John and Jade, and Dave and Rose too, and you wait and wait and wait...
As nothing keeps happening for quite a long time.
Karkat: Wait some more
So you do.
And there’s still plenty of nothing happening at all.
Kids’ session is empty, entirely devoid of players as all four of them managed to achieve a Just or Heroic death. They’re offline in Trollian in the important part of that timeline, because, you know, they’re dead. You can’t contact them through dream bubbles because they aren’t part of your chain yet. They are simply not here, as you can clearly see in deep dark water between Gl'bgolyb’s tentacles.
You can’t stay there for day, none but Kanaya can, but you try anyway. Terezi convinces Gamzee to help and keeps you tightly secured as they ignore your angry rants when Vriska swims your ship to the safety of Fef’s harbour. Sollux with the other ship is there already.
Something went very, very wrong.
Karkat: Consult daymares
In the beginning your shared dreamspace was mostly a source of deep embarrassment. After two or three perigees you got used to it in a weird, discomforting way that reminds you how Sgrub broke you all, remodelled your own minds in ways you haven’t even start to encompass.
As it pains you to admit, sharing dreams and surface memories can be helpful sometimes. For instance, it can be a real blessing when one of you is a fucking sociopath with a tendency to murderous episodes. Those episodes proved to be foreshadowed by violent dreams and visions, so when Gamzee suddenly stopped having colourful dreams of a thoroughly stoned individual and projected bloody muted rainbows of hemospectrum right from the dark carnival, you knew it was time to intervene. So you did intervene, with shooshspaps and a feelings jam, and at least no-one died this time.
After the long wait for the kids to appear in your universe, you reluctantly go to sleep. Should everything go right (and you know it didn’t), they would be here (provided they were sleeping at the moment). You don’t really expect them here, but you are not a Hero of Hope and you don’t know when all hope is lost.
There is red all around you. Not rust red like Aradia’s, but deep cherry red of your own blood. You are in a big room, more like a hall, with floor and walls smeared with plenty of red blood. The air is stale and thick with the smell of butchery, and the light plays weird tricks as you are not entirely sure what is that thing in the centre of the room. It looks disturbingly hospital-like, bringing up images of metal surgical tables, leather restraints, sharp tools and pain. Someone is standing right next to you, looking in the opposite direction.
“Hello Karkat,” he says and you recognize John’s voice, his words are tight and unsure. “It is you, right?...”
“Where are you, you stupid lost pile of musclebeast droppings,” you start talking before thinking, worried out of your mind. “Can’t you do any little thing properly, how did you even manage to screw up the simplest thing possible,” you drop quiet in the middle of the sentence, when John latches onto you like some kind of poison ivy, hugs you tighter than you are comfortable, hugs you like his life depends on it.
It’s the first time you can see him in person, not only via Trollian viewport. You also know it’s the first time he sees you at all, pesterChum not being equipped with trans-universal video feeds. He is a bit taller than you, but slimmer, more lightly built. You have the feeling that you could snap him in half if you try, which is strange for a hammerkind master. You feel the strength of his arms around you, somehow desperate and not at all cheerfully careless like you imagined your first meeting (first hug? have you ever imagined your first hug?) would be.
Your hands react autonomically - the human disease called friendship that you contracted form John sometimes robs you of your own body control - and you hug him back, your right hand on the back of his head as he sobs into your shoulder, the left in the middle of his back, and you pat him and shooshpap like he’s flipped out Gamzee, and whisper some calming words that don’t really have meaning. You can see the thing in the middle of the room over John’s shoulder, and it makes your skin crawl. There is something on it, the hospital connection even more apparent with humanoid figure strapped on top of the metal surface, bright red streaks of pain swimming around like blood in water, clouding the view.
“Karkat,“ John sobs in your shoulder, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
You can see the gleaming metal of sharp, sharp knives sticking from the figure on the table. You can feel John’s fingers twisting though your shirt on your back, and you try to disentangle him to at least get a closer look on him, on his dream, on anything that could tell you what the fuck happened, what went wrong, where had you fucked up, how to fix something, anything.
“Don’t leave me... I thought that’s you... am I dead for good... at first...” John tries to explain with broken sentences that don’t really make much sense. “Or they died... I think they did...” The shimmering, unclear thing in the middle, covered in blood and knives and that red red redness that you hate so much gets sharper, more defined, and you are positive that it’s John there, held by leather belts around his wrists and ankles, blue clothes stained with blood, incisions on his chest and face, and it is his recent memory or a dream that you are sure is grounded in reality and WHAT THE FUCK. “I am sorry I couldn’t...” John whispers into your ear and he can’t end this sentence because he’s screaming, screaming in your embrace and on the table, screaming and crumbling and diminishing and waking up and there’s more blood on the table and from his mouth and then everything stops dead.