Derek had been a god for approximately four hours—or what felt like four hours; time in the Hunter's Dream moved with the lazy indifference of a cat that had been asked to do literally anything—and he had already made two important discoveries about his new existence.
Discovery Number One: Being an infant Great One was, in almost every conceivable way, worse than being a thirty-two-year-old Arby's employee.
At Arby's, he'd had hands. Hands that could grip things, manipulate objects, hold a controller, flip a bird at customers who complained about the curly fries being too curly. He'd had legs. Legs that could carry him from Point A to Point B without requiring him to perform a full-body undulation that made him look like a piece of macaroni having a seizure. He'd had a mouth—a proper mouth, with teeth and a tongue and the ability to form words like "hello" and "please" and "I quit" and "what the fuck."
As a baby Great One, he had none of these things.
What he had instead was: approximately seventeen eyes (he kept losing count because some of them were in places he couldn't see with his other eyes, which was a sentence that made his brain hurt), an indeterminate number of tentacles that ranged in length from "stubby" to "slightly less stubby," a body that was best described as "if a caterpillar and a sea cucumber had a baby and that baby was also somehow a god," and a mouth that was less a mouth and more a general orifice region that could produce sounds on a spectrum ranging from "wet squeak" to "eldritch frequency that makes reality uncomfortable."
He could not walk. He could not talk. He could not feed himself, dress himself, or use the bathroom—though he was increasingly uncertain whether baby Great Ones even needed to use the bathroom, and this was a question that occupied a disturbing amount of his mental bandwidth.
Discovery Number Two—and this was the one that really stung—was that his encyclopedic knowledge of Bloodborne lore, painstakingly assembled over years of gameplay, YouTube videos, Reddit threads, item description analyses, and one very intense two-week period where he'd read every single post on the Paleblood Hunt document three times, was catastrophically inadequate for his current situation.
Because FromSoftware never made a goddamn sequel.
"Okay," Derek thought, marshaling his mental resources with the grim determination of a man preparing for war. "Okay. Let's do this. Let's catalogue everything I know."
He was lying on the workbench in the workshop. The Doll had placed him there while she attended to some task or another—she'd said something about "preparing the Dream for its new master," which sounded very important and official but which he suspected mostly involved tidying up—and he'd been left alone with his thoughts.
His thoughts, as it turned out, were not great company.
"Bloodborne lore. What do I know? I know a LOT. I am a LORE MASTER. I have watched every VaatiVidya video at least twice. I have OPINIONS about the Fishing Hamlet. I can recite the description of the Madman's Knowledge item from memory. I am PREPARED."
He paused.
"What I know: Yharnam is a city built on the ruins of the Pthumerian civilization. The Pthumerians discovered the Great Ones—cosmic beings of immense power who exist on a plane of reality adjacent to the waking world. The Great Ones are sympathetic in nature, and they yearn for a surrogate, which is why they keep trying to have babies with humans, which is deeply fucked up but also kind of sad if you think about it."
He wiggled a tentacle thoughtfully.
"The Healing Church was founded by Laurence, who discovered the old blood—the blood of the Great Ones—in the tombs beneath the city. The old blood had miraculous healing properties but also turned people into beasts, because of COURSE it did, because this is a FromSoftware game and nothing good ever happens to anyone without a catch that involves body horror."
Another tentacle wiggle.
"The hunt was established to deal with the beast problem. Hunters were empowered by the Dream—MY Dream, now—to fight the beasts. Gehrman was the first hunter. The Moon Presence created the Dream to... to..."
He faltered.
"To... trap hunters? Use them? Feed on them? The game never ACTUALLY explains what the Moon Presence wanted. It just shows up, does a creepy hug, and then you either die, kill Gehrman and take his place, or eat three umbilical cords and fight it and become a worm."
The frustration that had been building in his many-hearted chest suddenly erupted like a geyser.
"AND THAT'S IT. THAT'S ALL I KNOW. Because Miyazaki—you magnificent, inscrutable, foot-obsessed BASTARD—decided that one game was ENOUGH. One game! ONE GAME to explore an entire universe of cosmic horror and gothic architecture and blood ministration and nightmare dimensions and the nature of evolution and consciousness and WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL HAPPENED TO THE FISHING HAMLET!"
His outburst manifested not as words—he still couldn't speak—but as a psychic pulse that rattled the tools on the workbench and made three bottles of blood vials fall off a shelf. One of them shattered on the stone floor with a sound like a tiny, accusatory exclamation point.
From somewhere outside, the Doll called: "Is everything alright, little one?"
Derek made a sound that translated roughly to "FINE" in worm-speak, though it came out more like a deflating accordion.
He forced himself to calm down. Deep breaths. Could worms take deep breaths? He didn't have lungs, exactly, but he had... something. Respiratory bladders? Cosmic gas exchange membranes? Whatever they were, he inflated and deflated them in a rhythmic pattern that was somewhat calming.
"Okay. Okay. Focus. What ELSE do I know?"
He closed most of his eyes—leaving three open to watch for the Doll in case she came back, because he'd learned that being caught in the middle of a psychic tantrum was embarrassing even when you were a worm—and dug deeper into his memory.
"The Great Ones I know about: Oedon, the Formless—exists only as a voice, connected to blood, might be the father of Mergo and/or Arianna's baby. The Moon Presence—dead now, eaten by me, rest in pieces. Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos—left behind by the other Great Ones, found by the Healing Church in the labyrinth, source of the old blood? Maybe? The game is UNCLEAR. Rom, the Vacuous Spider—used to be a scholar, ascended to Great One status through eyes on the inside, hides the ritual that holds the blood moon at bay. Mergo—the infant Great One whose cry echoes through the Nightmare of Mensis, child of Queen Yharnam, may or may not be dead depending on how you interpret the 'Nightmare Slain' message. Kos—or some say Kosm—the dead Great One on the beach at the Fishing Hamlet, mother of the Orphan, whose curse created the Hunter's Nightmare."
He paused, mentally tallying.
"That's... six. Seven if you count me. Seven Great Ones in the entire known lore of the game, and at least three of them are dead, one is formless, one is a spider, and one is a baby. I'm also a baby. We're half BABIES."
The frustration surged again, but this time it was tinged with something else. Something colder. Something that felt a lot like fear.
"And that's ALL I KNOW. That's all ANYONE knows. Because FROM SOFTWARE DIDN'T MAKE A SEQUEL."
He thrashed on the workbench, his tentacles slapping against the wood in impotent fury.
"You know what they made instead? ELDEN RING. They made ELDEN RING. And don't get me wrong—don't get me WRONG—Elden Ring is a fine game. It's a FINE game. The first thirty hours are incredible. The open world is beautiful. The sense of discovery is—"
He stopped himself.
"No. You know what? No. I'm going to say it. I'm going to say the thing that every Soulsborne fan thinks but is too afraid to say because the Elden Ring subreddit will descend upon them like a horde of Radahn fanboys wielding downvotes like colossal swords."
He took a deep, shuddering breath through whatever passed for his respiratory system.
"ELDEN RING IS OVERRATED."
The words—thoughts, technically, but they carried the psychic weight of a declaration—echoed through the Dream like a thunderclap. Somewhere in the distance, a flock of messengers looked up in alarm.
"THERE. I SAID IT. Come at me. COME AT ME, Elden Ring fans. You know it's true. You KNOW. Once the shiny new open world wears off—once you've ridden Torrent across your fifteenth identical field, once you've cleared your thirtieth copy-pasted catacomb, once you've fought Godskin Duo for the eighty-seventh time because FROM SOFTWARE decided that reusing bosses as regular enemies was an acceptable design philosophy—you realize that the game is an ocean-wide puddle."
He was on a roll now. Forty hours of exhaustion-fueled gaming energy had been transmuted into righteous indignation, and it was flowing through his worm body like cosmic lightning.
"The lore is a MESS. Not mysterious, not cryptic, not the beautiful interconnected web of environmental storytelling that made Bloodborne and Dark Souls great—a MESS. George R.R. Martin wrote a mythology that's basically 'what if a family of gods had a really bad divorce,' and Miyazaki scattered it across forty-seven item descriptions that contradict each other. Who is Melina? What is the Erdtree ACTUALLY? What happened to the Numen? WHY DOES MIQUELLA LOOK LIKE THAT IN THE DLC? Nobody knows! Not because the answers are hidden in clever environmental details—because the answers DON'T EXIST."
He flopped onto his side, panting—metaphysically, at least.
"Bloodborne's lore is cryptic because it's DEEP. Elden Ring's lore is cryptic because it's SHALLOW and wearing a trench coat to look taller. And I will DIE on this hill. I already died ONCE, and I came back as a WORM, so clearly death is not a deterrent for me."
He lay there for a moment, seething, his tentacles curling and uncurling in agitation.
"And the worst part—the WORST part—is that if FromSoftware had made a Bloodborne sequel instead, I would KNOW things. I would know what happened to Yharnam after the hunt. I would know the full history of the Pthumerians. I would know what Oedon actually WANTS. I would know what lies beyond the cosmos, and what the Great Ones really are, and what the HELL the One Reborn was supposed to be, and—"
He made a sound like a kettle reaching full boil.
"—and I would know HOW TO BE A GREAT ONE. Because presumably, if there was a sequel, someone at FromSoftware would have sat down and thought about what it actually MEANS to be a Great One and what a baby Great One DOES and how the Dream WORKS and all the other questions that the original game DELIBERATELY left unanswered because Miyazaki thinks ambiguity is a substitute for worldbuilding!"
He paused.
"...I love Miyazaki. I love him and I owe him everything and Bloodborne is a masterpiece. But also, I am going to HAUNT him. I am an eldritch god now and I am going to reach across the dimensional barrier and give Hidetaka Miyazaki the WORST nightmares of his life until he announces Bloodborne 2. Assuming I ever figure out how to do anything other than wiggle and scream."
The rant, mercifully, ended. Derek lay on the workbench, spent, his tentacles limp, his eyes half-closed, surrounded by the tools and trophies of a Dream that was now his responsibility to maintain despite having absolutely no instruction manual.
No instruction manual, he thought bitterly. No sequel. No strategy guide. No wiki. No VaatiVidya to explain things in a soothing British accent while cool fan art plays in the background. Just me, a worm, in a universe I only partially understand, with nothing but my incomplete lore knowledge and whatever instincts come with being a baby cosmic horror.
I am so incredibly fucked.
It was at this precise moment—this nadir of existential despair, this rock bottom of interdimensional crisis—that Derek's body made a noise.
Not his mouth. Not his tentacles. His body.
A deep, resonant, undeniable gurgling sound that started somewhere in his midsection and radiated outward like a shockwave of pure biological urgency.
He was hungry.
Not "I could go for a snack" hungry. Not "hmm, I wonder what's in the fridge" hungry. HUNGRY hungry. The kind of hungry that transcended species, transcended dimensional boundaries, transcended the very concept of mortality. A hunger that was primal and cosmic and deeply, desperately personal.
His tentacles curled inward instinctively, and his many eyes went wide, and his entire worm body began to vibrate with a frequency that communicated one thing and one thing only:
FEED ME.
The Doll appeared in the workshop doorway as if summoned by his distress. She was carrying—
Derek squinted with all seventeen eyes.
She was carrying a small, ornate bowl made of what looked like carved bone, filled with a shimmering, silver-white liquid that glowed faintly in the Dream-light. It looked like if moonlight were a soup. It smelled like—
Every single one of Derek's senses lit up simultaneously. The smell hit him like a freight train of pure want. It was sweet and metallic and ancient and it reached into the deepest, most fundamental part of his new biology and grabbed it by the throat and said THIS. YOU NEED THIS. THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE.
"I thought you might be hungry," the Doll said with a serene smile, as if she hadn't just walked in carrying what was apparently liquid crack for baby eldritch gods.
Derek's tentacles reached for the bowl with a desperation that was frankly undignified. He squirmed across the workbench, his body leaving a faint trail of iridescent slime—oh God, he left SLIME, he was a SLIME creature, this was a new and horrible development—and nearly launched himself off the edge in his frenzy to reach the bowl.
The Doll caught him easily, one hand scooping him up while the other balanced the bowl with the practiced ease of someone who had apparently done this before.
"Patience, little one," she murmured, settling back onto the bench—the bench creaking, as it always did, in response to the sheer volume of Doll that was being applied to it—and arranging Derek in her lap.
She dipped two fingers into the silver liquid and held them out to him.
Derek stared at the glistening droplets on her porcelain fingers. His hunger screamed at him. His dignity whispered, faintly and without much conviction, that this was perhaps not the most noble way for a cosmic deity to take its first meal.
Hunger won. Hunger always wins.
He latched onto the Doll's fingers with whatever mouth-adjacent apparatus he possessed—it turned out to be a ring of tiny, soft, suction-cup-like structures arranged around his primary orifice, which was a description he never wanted to think about again—and fed.
The silver liquid was—
Oh.
Oh.
If every meal Derek had ever eaten in his human life—every burger, every pizza, every lovingly prepared holiday dinner, every gas station hot dog consumed at 2 AM with the kind of shameless hedonism that only a man with nothing to lose can achieve—if all of those meals were compressed into a single drop of flavor, they would not have come close to what this was.
This was sustenance in the purest sense of the word. Not just food for his body, but food for his being. It flowed through him like light through a prism, filling cracks and hollows he hadn't known existed, nourishing structures he couldn't name, feeding a hunger that went deeper than biology into something fundamental and cosmic and necessary.
He could feel himself growing. Not physically—not yet—but expanding. His awareness sharpened. His connection to the Dream deepened. The tenuous, fragile thread that bound him to this reality thickened into a cord, then a rope, then a cable. He was more here than he had been a moment ago. More real. More present.
It was, without exaggeration, the most profound experience of his life. Both lives. All possible lives.
It also felt suspiciously like he was being breastfed by a doll, if you substituted fingers for the obvious alternative, and Derek's higher consciousness—the part of him that was still, stubbornly, irrevocably Derek—filed that observation away in the mental folder labeled "THINGS I WILL NEVER ACKNOWLEDGE OR DISCUSS WITH ANYONE EVER."
The Doll dipped her fingers again, and again, and each time Derek fed with a little less desperation and a little more... enjoyment? Contentment? The kind of deep, bone-level satisfaction that he imagined a baby must feel at its mother's breast, except he was a cosmic worm and she was a haunted sex doll and the milk was made of moonlight and this metaphor had gotten away from him entirely.
"That's it," the Doll cooed, and the warmth in her voice was so genuine, so maternal, that Derek felt his many eyes sting. "Drink deeply. You need your strength."
What is this stuff? Derek thought, too blissed out to even attempt communication.
As if reading his mind—she could DEFINITELY read his mind; he needed to stop thinking about things—the Doll answered: "It is the essence of the Dream itself. Condensed, distilled, made nourishing. It is what sustains the Great Ones when they are young. The Moon Presence fed on the blood echoes of hunters—a parasitic feeding, cruel and selfish. You will feed on the Dream, which feeds on you in turn. A cycle. A symbiosis."
So I'm eating myself, Derek thought. I'm eating my own Dream. That's... either profound or disturbing and I genuinely cannot tell which.
The feeding lasted—minutes? Hours? Time meant nothing in the Dream and even less when you were a worm baby having a religious experience via finger food. When it was over, Derek lay in the Doll's lap in a state of satiation so complete that he felt like he'd been inflated. His body was warm and heavy and thrumming with energy, and his tentacles hung limp and content at his sides like the arms of a man who had just eaten an entire Thanksgiving turkey by himself.
"There," the Doll said, wiping her fingers on a cloth that she produced from somewhere—where did she keep things? Did she have pockets? The dress didn't seem to have pockets, but the dress also didn't seem to be designed for a body of those proportions, so clearly the normal rules of clothing didn't apply. "Better?"
Derek made a sound that was the worm equivalent of a satisfied belch.
The Doll smiled.
The messenger incident happened approximately thirty minutes later, and it was, in Derek's defense, not entirely his fault.
The messengers—those tiny, pale, creepy little homunculi that inhabited the Dream and served as its postal system, its shop clerks, and its general-purpose nightmare workforce—had been avoiding him.
Derek had noticed this almost immediately after waking up. In the game, the messengers were everywhere: clustered around the workshop, poking out of baths, offering items and weapons with their weird little baby hands. They were a constant, comforting presence, like haunted garden gnomes.
But since Derek had become the new master of the Dream, the messengers had been... skittish.
He'd catch glimpses of them—pale shapes ducking behind tombstones, tiny faces peering out from cracks in the cobblestones, round eyes watching him from the shadows with an expression that was somewhere between "awe" and "please don't eat me." Whenever he turned his attention toward them—all seventeen eyes swiveling in unison, which he was beginning to realize was DEEPLY unsettling from an external perspective—they'd vanish into the ground like prairie dogs fleeing a hawk.
It bothered him.
Not because he needed them for anything specific—yet—but because the messengers were, in his mind, the good guys. The little helpers. The friendly faces in a world of unfriendly everything else. And the idea that they were afraid of him—of him, Derek, the guy who cried during the Sif boss fight in Dark Souls because he didn't want to kill the puppy—was deeply offensive to his sensibilities.
So when he spotted a lone messenger poking its head out of a crack in the workshop floor—just its head, those big glossy eyes and that wide, lipless mouth, watching him with the nervous intensity of a rabbit that has just noticed a fox—Derek decided to be friendly.
Hey there, he thought, projecting warmth and kindness and I-am-not-going-to-eat-you vibes with every fiber of his being. Hey, little buddy. It's okay. I'm cool. I'm friendly. I'm—
He reached out a tentacle.
In his mind, this was a gentle gesture. A wave. A "hey, come here, let's be pals" extension of a friendly appendage.
In reality—in the cold, hard, visual reality of what actually happened—an infant eldritch god, a cosmic horror made manifest, a being of impossible biology and unknowable power, extended a writhing tentacle toward a creature one-tenth its size while staring at it with seventeen unblinking eyes.
The messenger shrieked.
Not a normal shriek. Not even a messenger shriek, which Derek was familiar with from the game and which sounded like a dog toy being stepped on by a ghost. This was a scream—a full-throated, utterly terrified, run-for-your-life scream that was remarkable both for its volume and for the fact that it was coming from a creature approximately six inches tall.
The messenger launched itself out of the crack in the floor, scrambled across the workshop on its tiny, malformed hands with a speed that would have impressed an Olympic sprinter, and threw itself behind the nearest piece of furniture—which happened to be the empty wheelchair.
From behind the wheelchair, Derek could hear the sound of frantic, panicked chattering, like a squirrel that had just witnessed a murder.
"I—" Derek tried to say, which came out as a sad, deflated wheeze. His tentacle, still extended, drooped pathetically.
More messengers appeared. They bubbled up out of the floor like pale, fleshy mushrooms, drawn by the scream of their compatriot. There were five, ten, twenty of them, emerging from cracks and crevices and impossible spaces, and they all turned to look at Derek—
—who was lying on the workbench, tentacle outstretched, seventeen eyes wide with guilt, leaving a trail of iridescent slime, looking for all the world like the larval stage of every nightmare these creatures had ever had—
—and they all screamed.
It was a chorus of terror. A symphony of shrieking. Twenty-plus tiny nightmare babies wailing in unison because the new boss was a tentacle monster who had tried to touch one of them. The sound was extraordinary—high-pitched, wavering, and so loud that it rattled the bottles on the shelves and made the fire in the hearth flicker.
"WHAT IS HAPPENING?!"
The Doll burst through the workshop door with a speed and force that sent it slamming against the wall. She stood in the doorway, one hand braced against the frame, her silver eyes wide—and Derek was briefly, inappropriately distracted by the fact that her sudden entrance had caused certain aspects of her anatomy to bounce with a momentum that was frankly cinematic—before the screaming recaptured his attention.
"They're scared of me!" Derek wailed internally, projecting the thought outward with enough psychic force that the Doll clearly received it, because her expression shifted from alarm to understanding to something that might have been amusement.
"Ah," she said.
"I JUST WANTED TO SAY HI."
"Yes," the Doll said, her voice carefully neutral. "I see."
She stepped into the workshop—each step sending ripples through her dress that Derek refused to notice, he REFUSED—and knelt beside the wheelchair where the original messenger was still hiding. She extended her own hand, palm up, and made a soft, soothing sound.
The messenger peeked out. Its eyes were the size of dinner plates relative to its head, and they were wet with tears.
"Come now," the Doll murmured. "The new master means you no harm. It is merely... young. And enthusiastic."
The messenger looked at the Doll's outstretched hand. It looked back at Derek. It looked at the hand again.
Slowly, tremblingly, it climbed into the Doll's palm.
The Doll stood and carried the messenger to the workbench. She held it out toward Derek like an offering.
"Gently," she said, and there was a note of warning in her voice that reminded Derek, suddenly and sharply, that this woman—this doll, this entity, this impossibly curved guardian of the Dream—was not merely his nursemaid. She was the protector of the Dream's inhabitants, and she took that job seriously.
Derek retracted his tentacle. Slowly. Carefully. He made himself as small as possible—which was already pretty small, but he tried—and projected the most non-threatening energy he could muster.
I'm sorry, he thought, directing the thought at the messenger with as much gentleness as he could manage. I didn't mean to scare you. I'm new at this. I'm basically a giant baby and I don't know how to control my... everything.
The messenger tilted its head. Its enormous eyes blinked once, twice.
Then—tentatively, like a mouse approaching a sleeping cat—it reached out one tiny, pale hand and touched the tip of Derek's nearest tentacle.
The contact was electric. Not painful—electric. A spark of connection that shot through Derek's awareness like a bolt of lightning, and suddenly he could feel the messenger. Not just its physical presence—its essence. Its fear, yes, still lingering like smoke after a fire. But beneath that: curiosity. Loyalty. A deep, ancient devotion to the Dream and whoever held it.
And beneath that: loneliness.
The messengers had been without a true master for a long time. The Moon Presence had been a cold, distant overlord—a parasite that used the Dream but never cared for it or its inhabitants. The messengers had served out of compulsion, not affection. They had been tools.
Derek felt something in his chest—hearts, plural—clench with a sympathy so profound it was almost painful.
I'm not like that, he thought, projecting the feeling with everything he had. I'm not going to use you. I'm not going to be cold or distant or scary. I mean, I AM scary, apparently, but I'm working on it. I'm... I'm going to be better. I promise.
The messenger stared at him for a long, long moment.
Then it smiled.
It was a weird smile—too wide, too many gums, not enough teeth—but it was undeniably, unmistakably a smile. And it was followed by a sound that was half giggle, half gurgle, and wholly, completely delightful.
The messenger patted Derek's tentacle with its tiny hand. Pat pat pat. Like it was comforting him.
Derek felt tears prick at his seventeen eyes and thought, for the hundredth time since waking up in this insane reality: I am a cosmic god crying because a tiny goblin baby patted my tentacle. This is my life now. This is what I am.
The other messengers, who had been watching this exchange with the frozen intensity of a nature documentary audience, began to emerge from their hiding spots. One by one, then in clusters, they approached the workbench. Some climbed up its legs with the nimble determination of pale little mountaineers. Others simply materialized from the floor nearby, rising through the stone like ghosts.
Within minutes, Derek was surrounded. Messengers perched on the workbench beside him, sat in clusters on the floor, dangled from the shelves above. They were still cautious—keeping a respectful distance, watching him with those huge, unblinking eyes—but the fear was fading, replaced by that same curiosity he'd felt in the first one's touch.
One particularly brave messenger—slightly larger than the others, with what appeared to be a tiny hat made from a scrap of hunter's garb—climbed up onto Derek's back.
Derek froze.
The messenger settled itself like a rider on a very small, very slimy horse. It grabbed one of Derek's dorsal tendrils like a rein and made a noise that sounded disturbingly like "wheee."
The other messengers erupted in chattering approval.
"Oh," the Doll said, and her smile was so warm and so genuine that Derek felt the Dream itself brighten in response, the ambient light shifting from silver to gold for just a moment. "They like you."
They like me, Derek thought, as another messenger climbed onto his back and a third began braiding two of his tentacles together. They actually like me. Oh God. Oh no. I've been a parent for five minutes and I already have thirty children and they're all goblins.
He looked up at the Doll, who was watching the scene with an expression of quiet joy, her hands clasped at her waist—a waist that served primarily as a structural intermission between two regions of extraordinary abundance—and her silver eyes glittering.
Thank you, he thought at her.
She inclined her head. "You are their master now. It is good that they know you are kind. The Dream has not known kindness in... a very long time."
The weight of that statement settled on Derek like a blanket. Heavy, but warm.
The basement was Gehrman's fault.
Or rather, the basement was the result of Gehrman having spent centuries as a prisoner in the Dream with nothing to do but maintain his workshop, grieve his lost student, and apparently renovate.
Derek discovered it two hours after the messenger incident, during what he had mentally dubbed his "exploration phase"—a generous term for the process of squirming around the workshop floor like a sentient piece of overcooked linguine while the messengers followed him in a chattering, fascinated procession, occasionally poking him or offering him small objects they'd found (a bullet, a pebble, a tooth of unknown origin).
He was investigating the back corner of the workshop—a section that, in the game, had been a nondescript wall with maybe a shelf or two—when one of his tentacles brushed against a seam in the stone floor.
Not a crack. A seam. Deliberate. Cut.
Derek pressed harder, and the stone shifted. A section of floor—roughly three feet square, hidden beneath a layer of dust and a strategically placed rug—tilted downward like a trapdoor, revealing a set of narrow stone stairs descending into darkness.
That's new, Derek thought, with the careful understatement of a man who has just discovered a secret passage in a pocket dimension maintained by a dead god.
The messengers clustered around the opening, peering down with expressions of mixed excitement and apprehension. The one with the tiny hat—Derek had mentally named it "Captain"—chirped inquisitively and looked at Derek as if awaiting orders.
I can't go down stairs, Derek realized. I'm a worm. Stairs are my mortal enemy. Stairs are to worms what... what Ornstein and Smough are to new players. An insurmountable obstacle that exists purely to cause suffering.
He looked at the stairs. The stairs looked back, inanimate and uncaring.
He looked at the messengers.
The messengers looked at him.
An idea formed.
Oh no.
Oh no, this is stupid.
This is SO stupid.
"Captain," Derek thought, projecting toward the hatted messenger with as much authority as a cosmic slug could muster. "How do you feel about carrying me downstairs?"
Captain tilted its head. Then it grinned that too-wide, too-gummy grin, and chirped, and six—eight—TEN messengers surged forward, tiny hands outstretched, and before Derek could reconsider his decision, he was being crowd-surfed down a secret staircase by a swarm of enthusiastic nightmare homunculi.
It was the most undignified mode of transportation in the history of the cosmos, and it was awesome.
The stairs descended deeper than Derek expected—two flights, then three, then four, corkscrewing down into the earth (dream-earth? Meta-earth? The geological classification of the Dream's substrate was a question for another day) with a tightness that suggested they'd been carved in secret, one stone at a time, by someone who didn't want anyone to know they were there.
Gehrman, Derek thought. You sneaky old bastard. What were you DOING down here?
The stairs ended in a room.
No—not a room. A library.
Derek's seventeen eyes went wide.
It was massive. Far larger than it had any right to be, given the modest footprint of the workshop above. The ceiling was vaulted, supported by columns of dark stone carved with symbols that Derek's new eldritch senses immediately recognized as Pthumerian. Shelves lined every wall, floor to ceiling, stuffed with books and scrolls and tablets and things that defied easy categorization—crystal spheres filled with swirling mist, jars of preserved... specimens... that he chose not to examine too closely, tools of brass and bone that hummed with a frequency just below audibility.
And the books. God, the books.
Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. Leather-bound, cloth-bound, bound in materials he couldn't identify and wasn't sure he wanted to. Some were clearly old—ancient, crumbling, written in scripts that predated human civilization. Others were newer, their pages crisp, their ink still dark.
Derek's breath—metaphysical breath, worm breath, whatever—caught in his throat.
Because if these were what he thought they were—if Gehrman, trapped in the Dream for centuries with access to the Moon Presence's cosmic knowledge and the inherited wisdom of every hunter who had ever entered the Dream—if the old man had spent his imprisonment not just grieving and maintaining his weapons but learning, studying, recording...
Then this was it.
This was the lore.
Not the fragments. Not the cryptic item descriptions. Not the environmental storytelling that required a PhD in literary analysis and a conspiracy board to decode.
The actual lore. The history of the Great Ones, the truth of the Pthumerians, the mechanics of the Dream, the nature of blood, the secrets of the cosmos—everything that FromSoftware had hinted at but never fully explained, everything that a sequel would have explored, everything that Derek needed to know if he was going to survive as a baby god in a universe that was rapidly becoming very, very real.
It was all here.
Gehrman's life's work. Centuries of knowledge. A library that answered every question the game had ever asked and never answered.
Derek looked at the shelves. He looked at his tentacles. He looked at the books.
He couldn't read.
Not because he was illiterate—he'd been a communications major, for God's sake, reading was literally the only skill the degree had given him—but because he was a WORM. He didn't have hands. He didn't have fingers. He couldn't hold a book, couldn't turn a page, couldn't even position himself at the right angle to see the words.
He was a cosmic deity standing—lying—squirming in front of the greatest repository of eldritch knowledge in existence, and he couldn't read any of it.
The psychic scream he let out was felt by every messenger in the Dream, caused the Doll to drop whatever she was carrying, and made three of the books on the nearest shelf fall open of their own accord as the very fabric of the Dream rippled with his frustration.
"ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!" he projected, the thought so loud and so furious that Captain fell off his back. "ARE YOU—A LIBRARY?! A SECRET LIBRARY WITH EVERYTHING I NEED AND I CAN'T—I DON'T HAVE—AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!"
He thrashed. He flailed. He smacked a tentacle against the nearest shelf, which knocked loose a scroll that unrolled across the floor, covered in dense, beautiful, utterly illegible (to a worm) Pthumerian script.
The messengers watched him have his meltdown with the patient, unsurprised expressions of creatures that had been serving cosmic entities for a very long time and had seen worse.
Captain picked itself up, dusted off its tiny hat, and waddled over to the fallen scroll. It picked up one end and held it up toward Derek, tilting its head as if to say: Want me to hold this for you?
Derek stopped thrashing.
He looked at Captain. He looked at the scroll. He looked at the eleven other messengers who were arranged around the room, each watching him with attentive, eager-to-please expressions.
They can hold the books, he realized. They can turn the pages. I just need to figure out how to read Pthumerian, which I definitely cannot do, but I'm also a GREAT ONE now, so maybe—
He focused. Concentrated. Directed his seventeen eyes at the scroll that Captain was holding and looked—not with his physical eyes, but with whatever deeper sense came bundled with being a cosmic entity. The sense that had let him feel the Dream, feel the messengers, feel the Doll.
The symbols on the scroll shifted.
Not physically—they didn't move, didn't rearrange. But his perception of them changed. The angular, alien characters stopped being meaningless shapes and started being—
Words.
He could read them.
Not fluently, not easily—it was like trying to read a language you'd studied in high school twenty years ago, familiar enough to grasp the shape of meaning but too rusty for nuance. But he could read.
The first line of the scroll said:
"On the nature of communion between the kin of the cosmos and the children of blood, being a treatise compiled by Gehrman, First Hunter, in the two hundred and seventh year of his confinement."
Two hundred and seventh year, Derek thought, awed. He was here for CENTURIES. Writing. Studying. Learning.
The second line said:
"In this work I shall endeavor to record what I have learned of the Great Ones, their origins, their desires, and their methods, drawn from my communion with the Moon Presence (unwilling though it was), my observations of the hunters who have passed through the Dream, and my study of the artifacts and texts recovered from the waking world."
And the third line—the line that made Derek's seventeen eyes go wide and his tentacles curl and his hearts beat in a syncopated rhythm of pure, unadulterated excitement—said:
"I do this in the hope that one day, a hunter greater than I will claim the Dream for their own, and will need this knowledge to survive what is to come. For the waking world grows darker, and the Great Ones grow restless, and Yharnam—"
The scroll was damaged here. Torn, or burned, the edges crumbling. But what remained of the final words on the visible section was enough to turn Derek's cosmic blood cold.
"—Yharnam is only the beginning."
Derek stared at the scroll.
Yharnam is only the beginning.
Not "Yharnam is the whole story." Not "Yharnam is the extent of the problem." The beginning.
Which meant there was more. Beyond Yharnam, beyond the Hunt, beyond the blood and the beasts and the nightmares—there was MORE. A larger world, a bigger picture, a canvas of cosmic horror that the game had only ever shown one corner of.
The sequel's worth of content he'd been screaming about.
It was real.
And it was apparently a problem.
Oh, Derek thought, with the calm, crystalline clarity that comes right before true panic sets in. Oh. This isn't just a 'I got isekai'd into a video game' situation. This is a 'I got isekai'd into a video game and the video game is about to get a LOT worse and I'm the only one in a position to do anything about it and I'm a WORM' situation.
He turned to Captain.
Get me everything, he thought. Every scroll, every book, every scrap of paper in this library. I need to read ALL of it.
Captain saluted—an absurd, endearing gesture, given that the messenger didn't have proper arms so much as elongated forelimbs—and chirped a series of commands to the other messengers.
They sprang into action with a fervor that bordered on manic. Messengers swarmed the shelves like pale, fleshy ants, pulling down books and scrolls and tablets, arranging them in neat piles around Derek, holding pages open with their tiny hands, rotating texts so he could read them from his position on the floor.
It was the most adorable research team in the history of academia, and Derek loved every single one of them.
Alright, he thought, settling in for what was clearly going to be a very long study session. Let's find out what the hell is going on in Yharnam.
What was going on in Yharnam was, to use a technical term, a complete and total shitshow.
Derek learned this over the next several hours, as the messengers brought him text after text and he slowly, painstakingly decoded Gehrman's notes.
The picture that emerged was... not great.
He already knew the basics, of course. Yharnam was a city plagued by the scourge of beasts—a transformation that occurred when humans consumed too much old blood, the blood of the Great Ones, which the Healing Church had distributed as a miracle cure for all ailments. The blood healed everything—disease, injury, madness—but it also, given enough time and enough dosage, turned people into monsters.
What Derek didn't know—what the game had never explicitly stated—was the scale of the problem.
Yharnam, it turned out, was not unique.
The Healing Church had not limited its blood ministration to a single city. Over the decades (centuries?), the Church's influence had spread. Emissaries had been sent to neighboring cities, to distant kingdoms, to far-flung settlements across a continent that the game had never shown and never named. The old blood had been exported, traded, sold, evangelized. The Healing Church was not a local organization—it was an empire, and its primary export was the substance that turned people into beasts.
The game had shown Derek one city on one night of one hunt.
Beyond Yharnam's walls, there were dozens more.
Some were fine—or as fine as a city could be when its primary healthcare system was based on drinking cosmic monster blood. The scourge hadn't hit everywhere equally. Some populations were more resistant than others. Some had their own traditions, their own methods of coping. Some had simply not been using the blood long enough for the effects to manifest.
But others...
Gehrman's notes on the city of Loran made Derek's tentacles curl.
Loran had been a thriving civilization—one of the first to discover the old blood, predating even the Pthumerians in some accounts. It had been a center of learning, of culture, of art. It had used the blood wisely, carefully, with rituals and restrictions designed to prevent overuse.
And then something had gone wrong.
The Darkbeast. That was what the notes called it—the thing that had emerged when Loran's relationship with the blood had finally, catastrophically, tipped over the edge. Not a single beast, but a concept—a living embodiment of the scourge at its most extreme, a creature of lightning and madness and hunger that had consumed the city from the inside out.
Loran was gone. Not ruins—the Chalice Dungeons preserved its ruins—but the living city, the people, the culture. Gone. Devoured by its own blood.
And Gehrman's notes suggested that Yharnam was heading down the same path.
"The signs are unmistakable," one entry read, dated to what Derek estimated was roughly a decade before the events of the game. "The Church grows desperate. The blood grows thin. The hunters grow fewer. Each night of the hunt is longer than the last, and the beasts more numerous. I have spoken with the Presence—it does not care. It feeds on the hunt. It WANTS the cycle to continue. But the cycle is a spiral, and spirals only go down."
Derek read this passage three times, then stared at the ceiling of the library and contemplated the fact that he was now responsible for a Dream that was connected to a world that was apparently collapsing.
Cool, he thought. Great. Awesome. I'm a worm in charge of a failing universe. This is EXACTLY what I wanted when I sat down to play Bloodborne forty hours ago. I wanted COSMIC RESPONSIBILITY and EXISTENTIAL DREAD, not just a cool ending cinematic and a sense of accomplishment.
"Hey, Captain?" he projected.
The hatted messenger looked up from the book it was holding.
What do you know about Yharnam right now? Like, current status? Is the hunt still happening?
Captain tilted its head, then made a series of gestures—part sign language, part charades, part something alien and instinctive—that Derek's Great One senses translated into a rough understanding:
The hunt was over. The night had ended. The Blood Moon had set. Yharnam was... quiet.
But not the good kind of quiet.
The kind of quiet that comes after a storm, when you're not sure if it's really over or if you're just in the eye of it.
Derek closed his eyes—all seventeen of them, which took a moment—and tried to reach out with his consciousness. To extend his awareness beyond the Dream, through the barrier between the dreamscape and the waking world, to touch Yharnam itself.
It was like reaching through water. Thick, resistant, murky. His awareness pushed against the boundary of the Dream and the Dream pushed back, not maliciously but protectively, like a mother holding a child back from a cliff edge. He was too young, too weak, too new. He couldn't see the waking world directly.
But he could feel it.
And what he felt made his worm-body shudder.
Yharnam was sick. Not just "people are turning into beasts" sick—fundamentally sick. The city itself, the land, the reality of it was infected. The blood was everywhere—in the water, in the soil, in the stones. Decades of blood ministration had saturated the very earth with the essence of the Great Ones, and it was festering. Growing. Mutating. Becoming something that was neither human nor beast nor Great One but something new and terrible and hungry.
And beyond Yharnam, in the wider world that the game had never shown—
Derek pulled his consciousness back. Slammed the mental door. Curled his tentacles around himself and trembled.
Because beyond Yharnam, he had felt something else. Something vast and dark and patient, moving in the spaces between realities like a shark beneath the surface of a calm ocean. Something that made the Moon Presence look like a goldfish.
Something that was waking up.
What the hell was that? Derek thought, his hearts hammering in polyrhythmic panic.
He didn't know. Gehrman's notes didn't cover it. The game didn't cover it. No lore video, no Reddit post, no fan theory he'd ever encountered had even hinted at something that enormous, that powerful, that fundamentally wrong lurking at the edges of the Bloodborne universe.
Because FromSoftware never made a sequel.
Because they made Elden Ring instead.
Because they decided the world needed another open-world game with reused bosses and a map that was too big and a story that required a literal university professor to decode, rather than giving Bloodborne the continuation it deserved.
And now Derek—a dead Arby's employee, a worm, a baby god with no arms and no legs and seventeen eyes and a library he could barely read—was the only person in any universe who knew that something was coming.
And he was completely unprepared.
I hate FromSoftware, Derek thought bitterly. I love them. I hate them. I love them. I—okay, I mostly love them, but RIGHT NOW, at this SPECIFIC moment, I hate them so much.
Miyazaki, if you can hear me across the dimensional divide: MAKE. THE. SEQUEL. I am LIVING in the sequel. I am the unwilling PROTAGONIST of the sequel. And I don't have a STRATEGY GUIDE.
The Doll found him in the library.
Derek heard her coming before he saw her—the soft click of her shoes on the stone stairs, the gentle rustle of fabric, the faint creak of the steps as they accommodated her passage. He braced himself for the entrance, which he was learning to do because every time the Doll appeared in a new space, his traitorous eldritch eyes insisted on giving him a complete panoramic survey of her proportions as they interacted with the environment, and the staircase was narrow.
She emerged from the stairwell and Derek very firmly did not notice the way she had to turn slightly sideways to fit through the doorframe, or the way the dim library lighting played across the curves of her figure like a Renaissance painter who had just discovered the concept of "more," or the way her dress—
STOP.
READING. I AM READING. I AM A SCHOLAR. I AM PURSUING KNOWLEDGE. THERE IS NOTHING IN THIS ROOM EXCEPT BOOKS AND LEARNING AND—
"You found Gehrman's library," the Doll said, and her voice held a note of surprise. Genuine surprise—the first time Derek had heard her sound anything less than perfectly composed. She looked around the room with wide eyes, taking in the shelves, the scrolls, the messengers arranged around Derek like the world's most disturbing study group. "I did not know this was here."
Really? Derek projected, surprised. You've been in the Dream for how long and you never found a secret basement?
"The Dream kept secrets from me," the Doll said, trailing her fingers along the spine of a book. "It was not mine to explore. I was made to serve the hunters and to maintain the workshop. What lay beyond those boundaries was... hidden."
She pulled a book from the shelf—a thick, heavy tome bound in dark leather—and opened it with a reverence that suggested she understood exactly what she was holding. Her eyes moved across the pages, reading the Pthumerian script with an ease that told Derek she'd been able to read it all along.
"He wrote all of this," she murmured. "All those years... I thought he simply suffered. I did not realize he was also working."
There was something in her voice that Derek's eldritch senses picked up on immediately—a complex knot of emotions tangled together like a ball of yarn. Admiration. Sorrow. Regret. Guilt. The Doll had stood beside Gehrman for centuries, watching him waste away in his wheelchair, and she had never known about the hidden life he'd been living beneath her feet.
It was sad. It was really, genuinely, heartbreakingly sad, and Derek felt his seventeen eyes sting for what felt like the hundredth time today.
He left it for me, Derek projected softly. He said so, in the first scroll. He wrote it all down so that whoever came after him would know what they were getting into.
The Doll closed the book gently. She set it back on the shelf with careful hands. Then she turned to Derek, and her expression was the most complex thing he'd ever seen on a face—human, doll, or otherwise.
"Then we must honor his work," she said. "We must learn. And we must prepare."
Prepare for what?
The Doll looked at him, and her golden—no, silver—no, golden—her eyes were shifting again, fluctuating between colors like a mood ring attached to the soul of a cosmic entity. When she spoke, her voice was low and certain and carried the weight of something very old and very wise.
"For whatever comes next."
The laundry happened at the worst possible time.
Derek was in the middle of a breakthrough. He'd been reading for hours—the messengers holding texts, turning pages, rotating scrolls with tireless efficiency—and he'd just gotten to a section of Gehrman's notes that discussed the physiology of Great Ones. Specifically, the section on growth.
"The infant Great One, upon birth, enters a period of rapid development determined by three factors," the text read. "First: sustenance, which feeds the body. Second: knowledge, which feeds the mind. Third: connection, which feeds the soul. A Great One deprived of any of these three will wither. A Great One that receives all three in abundance will grow quickly—perhaps dangerously so."
Derek was vibrating with excitement. This was EXACTLY what he needed. A manual. An instruction set. A guide to leveling up his worm body and becoming something capable of actually DOING things—
"Excuse me, little one," the Doll's voice came from behind him. "I need to do the washing."
Derek barely registered the words. Yeah, sure, whatever, washing, fine, now back to the—
"I will need to undress."
Every single one of Derek's seventeen eyes snapped to attention with a speed that violated several laws of optics.
WHAT?
He spun—rotated, really, his worm body corkscrewing on the library floor with the grace of a startled croissant—and found the Doll standing at the base of the stairs with an armful of fabric. Sheets, it looked like. Bed linens from the workshop. Perfectly innocent. Perfectly mundane.
But she had said the word "undress," and Derek's brain—his cosmic, eldritch, supposedly-transcendent brain—had done exactly what his human brain would have done with that word, which was to immediately imagine the worst (best?) possible scenario and then panic about it.
"The Dream's sustenance has left residue on my garments," the Doll explained calmly, gesturing with one hand at a faint, silvery stain on the front of her dress—the remnants of Derek's feeding earlier, when some of the liquid had apparently dribbled. "I should clean them."
That is— that is reasonable, Derek thought, willing his tentacles to stop trembling. That is a perfectly logical and reasonable thing to do. Laundry. People do laundry. Dolls do laundry. This is NORMAL.
"There is a basin in the workshop," the Doll continued, already turning toward the stairs. "I will be brief."
Okay. Sure. She's going to go upstairs and do laundry and I'm going to stay down here and read and everything is going to be FINE and—
"Would you like to come upstairs? You have been reading for quite some time. A change of scenery might—"
NO. NO CHANGE OF SCENERY. SCENERY IS FINE. THIS SCENERY. THE LIBRARY SCENERY. BOOKS. VERY INTERESTING BOOKS THAT REQUIRE MY COMPLETE AND TOTAL—
"—do you good," the Doll finished, and before Derek could project another panicked thought, Captain and three other messengers had already scooped him up and begun carrying him toward the stairs.
TRAITORS, Derek screamed internally. YOU ARE ALL TRAITORS AND I WILL REMEMBER THIS.
Captain adjusted its hat and chirped happily.
The workshop was warm. The fire was crackling. The basin—a large, stone affair that Derek absolutely did not remember from the game—was filled with steaming water that the Doll had apparently heated using a method he couldn't identify and didn't want to think about.
Derek was placed on the workbench. His usual spot. His safe spot. His spot where he could focus on Important Cosmic Matters and absolutely not on—
The Doll reached behind her neck and began unfastening the buttons of her dress.
OH COME ON.
Derek squeezed his eyes shut. All seventeen of them. It took effort—some of his eyes apparently didn't WANT to close, the treacherous little orbs—but he managed it. Darkness. Beautiful, safe, non-visual darkness.
He could still hear, though.
The soft rustle of fabric being loosened. The whisper of cloth sliding against skin—porcelain? What was the Doll's surface, exactly? It looked like porcelain but felt like skin but she was clearly artificial but also clearly alive and this line of inquiry was NOT HELPING.
A heavier sound—the dress being set aside, folded, placed on the bench beside him. He could feel the residual warmth of it. Could smell the faint scent of moonflowers and something sweeter, something that was uniquely her.
"You may open your eyes, little one," the Doll said. "I am decent."
Define "decent," Derek thought, but he opened his eyes—cautiously, one at a time, like a man peeking through his fingers during a horror movie.
The Doll was standing by the basin, her back to him, wearing—
A shift. A simple, white, linen-like undergarment that covered her from shoulders to knees. It was, by any reasonable standard, modest. Conservative, even. The kind of garment that a Victorian-era doll would wear beneath her dress, designed for functionality rather than aesthetics.
The problem was that the Doll wearing it had proportions that turned "modest" into a theoretical concept.
The shift was trying. God, it was trying so hard. The poor, innocent piece of fabric was engaged in a Herculean struggle to maintain its structural integrity across a landscape of curves that should not have been physically possible. It clung, it stretched, it strained, it pulled. It was simultaneously too tight in some areas and too loose in others, creating a topography of fabric tension that was frankly architectural.
And she was bending over the basin.
Bending. Over. The basin.
Derek's higher consciousness—the part of him that was a god, a scholar, a seeker of cosmic truth—retreated to a small, quiet corner of his mind and began reciting the Periodic Table of Elements.
His lower consciousness—the part of him that was still, inescapably, irrevocably, a thirty-two-year-old man who had bookmarked fan art—stared.
The Doll's hands moved through the water with practiced efficiency, scrubbing the silver stains from her dress with a bar of soap that smelled like something not quite of this world. Her movements were graceful, rhythmic, almost hypnotic. Each scrubbing motion caused corresponding motions elsewhere, and the shift responded to those motions with a dedication to physics that Derek both admired and cursed.
Hydrogen. Helium. Lithium. Beryllium. Boron. Carbon. Nitrogen—
She wrung out the dress. The wringing required both hands and a twisting motion that—
—Oxygen Fluorine Neon Sodium Magnesium—
She bent lower to rinse.
—ALUMINUM SILICON PHOSPHORUS SULFUR CHLORINE—
She straightened up and turned to check on him, and the shift, subjected to the sudden change in direction, swayed with a momentum that was approximately 0.7 seconds behind the rest of her body.
—ARGON POTASSIUM CALCIUM SCANDIUM TITANIUM VANADIUM—
"Are you alright?" the Doll asked, tilting her head at him. "Your coloring has changed. You are... more purple than usual."
I'M FINE, Derek projected, with a psychic intensity that made three messengers fall over. JUST FINE. DOING GREAT. LOVE LAUNDRY. LAUNDRY IS MY FAVORITE. WHO DOESN'T LOVE WATCHING SOMEONE DO LAUNDRY. THIS IS A COMPLETELY NORMAL THING TO ENJOY WATCHING. I AM NOT HAVING ANY THOUGHTS THAT WOULD BE INAPPROPRIATE FOR A COSMIC DEITY. NONE. ZERO. VANADIUM.
The Doll studied him for a moment with those silver-gold eyes that saw entirely too much. Then she smiled—a small, knowing smile that made Derek's hearts skip three beats simultaneously—and turned back to the basin.
"You are a strange little god," she murmured, wringing out the dress one final time and hanging it on a line she'd strung near the fire to dry.
She then proceeded to wash the sheets.
The sheet-washing was, if anything, worse, because it involved more bending and more wringing and at one point she had to reach up to hang a sheet on the line, which required her to stretch her entire body upward, rising onto the tips of her toes, arms extended overhead, and the shift rode up by approximately four inches, revealing porcelain-smooth calves and the beginnings of thighs that—
Derek made a noise.
Not a worm noise. Not a Great One noise. A noise. A strangled, choked, deeply human noise of profound and total defeat.
The messengers looked at him with concern.
Captain patted his tentacle consolingly.
I need to grow up, Derek thought miserably. Literally. I need to grow into a form that can leave this room under my own power so I can maintain a safe distance from the Doll when she does domestic tasks. Because if I have to watch her cook, or sweep, or God forbid GARDEN, I am going to discorporate.
The Doll finished the laundry, retrieved a second dress from a wardrobe that Derek was POSITIVE had not existed in the workshop five minutes ago (the Dream responding to her needs, presumably, which meant the Dream was basically her magical walk-in closet and wasn't THAT a thought), and stepped behind a folding screen to change.
Derek stared at the folding screen.
He stared at the ceiling.
He stared at Captain, who stared back with an expression of total, infuriating innocence.
I need to read more, Derek thought firmly. I need to read Gehrman's entire library from top to bottom. I need to learn how to grow, how to shape-shift, how to project my consciousness, how to do ANYTHING other than lie here and be a useless horny worm.
Because there's something out there. Something big and dark and terrible. Something that's waking up. And when it gets here—when it arrives at the doorstep of this Dream that I am responsible for—I need to be ready.
I need to be MORE than a worm.
I need to be a god.
A real god. A powerful god. A god that can protect this Dream and the Doll and the messengers and Yharnam and whatever else is out there in this universe that FromSoftware built and then abandoned like a parent dropping off a kid at college and NEVER CALLING.
The Doll emerged from behind the screen in a fresh dress—identical to the first, same silver embroidery, same Victorian cut, same desperate structural battle against the forces of her figure—and she was radiant. Clean and pressed and proper and ridiculously, devastatingly, catastrophically beautiful in a way that made Derek's seventeen eyes ache.
"Shall we return to the library?" she asked, and her voice was warm, and her eyes were kind, and her smile was his.
Yeah, Derek thought. Yeah. Let's go.
He had a universe to save.
But first, he had a library to read, a Dream to master, a body to grow, and approximately ten thousand years of cosmic horror history to catch up on.
And he was going to do it all while being carried by messengers and trying not to stare at the Doll.
Easy.
Totally easy.
He was so fucked.
END OF CHAPTER 2
Next time on SQUID BABY & THE ABSURDLY THICC DOLL: Derek makes his first attempt at Dream-shaping and accidentally creates something that should not exist. The Doll introduces him to the concept of "echoes" and he learns why the messengers have been hoarding trinkets. A new hunter enters the Dream, and Derek has to pretend to be a competent deity. Also, he grows his first arm. It's in the wrong place.