The room smelled like regret.
More specifically, it smelled like five empty bags of gas station beef jerky, three crushed cans of Monster Energy (the white ones, because he had standards), a pizza box that had been sitting open for so long that the remaining two slices had achieved a texture best described as "archaeological," and the kind of human musk that only accumulated when someone sat in the same gaming chair for forty consecutive hours without so much as opening a window.
Derek "DarkSoulzMaster420" Kowalski did not care.
His eyes were bloodshot to the point where they looked like someone had taken a red marker to two hard-boiled eggs. His hands were shaking—not from fear, not from excitement, but from the kind of full-body caffeine poisoning that would have made a medical professional weep openly. His lips were cracked. His back had fused with his $89.99 Amazon Basics gaming chair in a union that transcended the physical and entered something almost spiritual. His legs had stopped sending signals to his brain approximately six hours ago, and he had made peace with the possibility that they might never work again.
None of that mattered.
Because on the screen, bathed in the pale blue light of his monitor at 3:47 AM on a Tuesday—a Tuesday he was supposed to have spent at his job at the Arby's on Fifth Street, a job he almost certainly no longer had—the Moon Presence was dying.
"DIE, YOU SPAGHETTI-LOOKING MOTHERFUCKER!" Derek screamed, his voice cracking like a thirteen-year-old boy's at a school assembly. His throat was so dry that the words came out sounding like gravel being fed through a garbage disposal. He hammered R1. His Hunter—a ridiculous-looking character he'd named "ButtStallion" after a twelve-year-old Borderlands reference—swung the Saw Cleaver with the kind of desperate ferocity that only a man who had died to this boss fourteen times could muster.
The Moon Presence reeled. Its health bar—that tiny, gossamer-thin sliver of red that Derek had been staring at for the last twenty minutes like it owed him money—flickered.
"PLEASE," Derek whispered, his voice dropping from a scream to something approaching prayer. His fingers were operating on pure muscle memory now. His conscious mind had checked out somewhere around hour thirty-two. What remained was something primal, something ancient, something that transcended mere humanity.
Something that really, really needed to go to bed.
The Saw Cleaver connected one final time.
The Moon Presence let out a sound like a whale being put through a synthesizer, its grotesque body seizing, tendrils flailing—and then it collapsed, dissolving into the dream like wet tissue paper in a hurricane.
PREY SLAUGHTERED
The words appeared on screen in that gorgeous, blood-red gothic font that FromSoftware had specifically designed to make people feel things, and Derek felt everything.
"YEEEEEEESSSSS!" he shrieked, launching himself backward in his chair so violently that he rolled a full three feet before the wheel caught on the edge of his carpet and sent him toppling sideways. He hit the floor like a sack of potatoes, but he didn't care. He didn't care about anything. He was lying on a floor that hadn't been vacuumed since the Obama administration, surrounded by energy drink cans and jerky wrappers, tears streaming freely down his unshaven face, and he was happy.
"I DID IT! I FUCKING DID IT! FORTY HOURS! SUCK MY ENTIRE ASS, MOON PRESENCE! SUCK MY—"
His victory scream was interrupted by a violent coughing fit brought on by the fact that his throat had essentially become the Sahara Desert. He wheezed, grabbed blindly for the nearest can of Monster, found it empty, crushed it against his forehead in a gesture that was meant to be celebratory but mostly just hurt, and then dragged himself back up to his chair.
Because the cutscene was playing.
And Derek, despite being a man who had skipped exactly zero cutscenes in forty hours (a point of pride), was not about to start now.
He settled back into his chair, wiping his eyes with the collar of a t-shirt that had started the session as "dark blue" and was now a color best described as "biohazard gray," and watched.
On screen, the Hunter—his Hunter, ButtStallion, clad in the iconic Hunter's garb with the stupid Cage helmet that he'd worn for the entire game because he thought it was funny—began to change.
The transformation was beautiful in that deeply unsettling way that only Bloodborne could pull off. The Hunter's body contorted, twisted, shrank—and from the cocoon of what had once been a human being, something small and dark and impossible emerged.
A tiny, squirming, infant Great One.
An eldritch slug-baby.
A cosmic worm-god, born from the corpse of the old dream and cradled in the arms of the impossible.
The Doll—that tall, pale, impossibly serene figure who had been leveling up his stats and speaking in cryptic poetry for the entire game—reached down and lifted the tiny creature into her arms. She held it gently, tenderly, with a warmth that seemed almost impossible for something that was, by all accounts, an inanimate object given life by the dreams of a dead woman.
"Are you cold?" the Doll asked, her voice soft, her silver eyes gazing down at the squirming little abomination in her arms with something that looked unmistakably like love. "Oh, Good Hunter..."
Derek leaned forward.
He had seen this ending before, obviously. He'd watched it on YouTube maybe thirty times before he'd ever even bought the game. He knew the words. He knew the beats. He knew exactly what was about to happen.
But this time—this time it was his Hunter. His forty hours. His fourteen deaths to the Moon Presence. His five bags of beef jerky and three cans of Monster Energy and one ruined Arby's career. This was earned.
And yet, as he watched the Doll cradle the little eldritch worm-baby with such impossible tenderness, such profound and aching gentleness, a thought wormed its way into his caffeine-addled, sleep-deprived, nutritionally-devastated brain that had absolutely no business being there.
"Wait," Derek said aloud, to no one, because it was 3:52 AM and he lived alone and his cat had stopped acknowledging his existence around hour twenty. "Wait, hold on."
He squinted at the screen.
The Doll was holding the worm. The worm was squirming. The Doll was smiling—or doing that thing she did that was almost a smile, that faint upward curve of porcelain lips that had launched a thousand Reddit threads and an unconscionable amount of fan art.
"She... she likes the Hunter more as a worm?" Derek said, his voice rising with the kind of incredulity that only a man running on zero sleep and five hundred milligrams of caffeine could achieve. "She— the whole game, the whole ENTIRE game, she's all 'I cannot feel anything, I am but a doll,' and NOW? Now that he's a WORM? NOW she's all lovey-dovey?"
He leaned closer to the screen, as if proximity would reveal some hidden truth.
"What the fuck does that say about the Doll? What the fuck does that say about the HUNTER? What the— is this a THING? Is Miyazaki telling me something? Is the message here that women prefer you when you're a helpless cosmic larva? Because honestly, looking at my dating history, that tracks, but—"
He was rambling. He knew he was rambling. His brain had detached from the moorings of rational thought somewhere around hour thirty-six and was now drifting freely through a sea of caffeine-fueled delirium, bumping against thoughts like a rubber duck in a bathtub.
But the question lodged itself in his mind like a fish hook, and he couldn't let it go.
Why does the Doll seem to like the Hunter more as a worm?
"Is it because he's small?" Derek mused, rubbing his chin stubble, which had progressed from "rugged" through "homeless" and was now approaching "castaway." "Is it a maternal thing? A size thing? A—oh God, is it a fetish thing? Miyazaki, you absolute degenerate, you—"
He jabbed his finger at the screen.
"You put FEET in every game you've ever made. You made Priscilla. You made the Maiden in Black. You made Ranni with FOUR ARMS. And now you're telling me the Doll's thing is WORMS? Is that what we're—"
The screen flickered.
Derek blinked.
The screen flickered again—not the cutscene, not the game. The actual, physical monitor. The LED display stuttered like a strobe light, and for a fraction of a second, the image on screen wasn't the Doll holding the worm-baby.
For a fraction of a second, the Doll was looking directly at him.
"What the—"
The lights in his room went out. All of them. His monitor, his desk lamp, the power strip, the little LED strip he'd stuck behind his desk because he'd seen it in a YouTube setup video once and thought it looked cool. Everything went dark.
And then everything went very bright.
Derek felt his body seize. Not in the way bodies seize during a seizure—he'd had those before; his doctor had warned him about the energy drinks—but in a way that felt like every cell in his body was being read. Like something was scanning him, page by page, molecule by molecule, like he was a book being consumed by something that was very, very hungry and very, very patient.
He opened his mouth to scream, and what came out was not a scream.
What came out was a sound like the universe clearing its throat.
And then Derek "DarkSoulzMaster420" Kowalski died.
Not metaphorically.
Not "he passed out and woke up somewhere weird" died.
Died died.
His heart stopped. His brain activity flatlined. His body, already pushed to the absolute ragged edge of human endurance by forty hours of continuous gaming, simply... quit. Like an employee who had been asked to work one too many double shifts, his corporeal form put in its two weeks' notice, effective immediately, and clocked the fuck out.
The coroner's report—which wouldn't be filed for another three days, when his landlord finally investigated the smell—would list the cause of death as "cardiac arrest secondary to extreme exhaustion and caffeine toxicity." A perfectly mundane, perfectly tragic, perfectly boring explanation for the end of a man who had spent his final moments yelling at a video game about why an animated doll seemed to prefer a cosmic worm over a regular human being.
It was, Derek would later reflect, exactly the kind of death he deserved.
But it was not, as it turned out, the end.
Consciousness returned like a bad hangover—slowly, painfully, and with the distinct impression that something terrible had happened that he couldn't quite remember.
The first thing Derek became aware of was warmth. Not the clammy, stale warmth of his apartment, with its broken AC and its windows that had been painted shut by a previous tenant. This was a good warmth. A soft warmth. The kind of warmth that made you want to close your eyes and drift back to sleep and never, ever wake up.
The second thing he became aware of was that he couldn't see.
Or rather, he could see, but what he was seeing didn't make any sense. His field of vision was wrong—too wide, too panoramic, like someone had taken his normal human eyesight and stretched it across a hundred and eighty degrees. Colors were different, too. Everything was tinted in shades of violet and deep indigo, with occasional pulses of something that wasn't quite a color at all—something his brain tried desperately to categorize and failed, eventually settling on the mental equivalent of a shrug emoji.
The third thing he became aware of was that he was being held.
Not in the way you hold a person. In the way you hold something small and precious and fragile. Cradled against something soft and warm, with large, gentle hands supporting his weight with a tenderness that made his heart—hearts? Did he have more than one? Something was definitely beating in a polyrhythmic pattern that no human cardiovascular system should produce—ache.
"Oh, Good Hunter," said a voice above him. A voice he recognized. A voice he had heard hundreds of times, through tinny TV speakers and gaming headsets and YouTube videos at 2 AM. A voice that was soft and sweet and carried the faint accent of something not quite human. "You are so small now. So very small."
Oh no, Derek thought.
He tried to move his arms. He didn't have arms. He had... something. Tendrils? Tentacles? Appendages of uncertain number and even more uncertain purpose that wriggled and squirmed of their own accord, as if they hadn't quite gotten the memo from his brain that he would very much like them to stop doing that.
Oh no no no no.
He tried to speak. What came out was a sound like a wet balloon being squeezed—a pathetic, high-pitched, unmistakably infant noise that communicated nothing except a vague sense of existential distress.
"There, there," the voice cooed. "You are safe. The Dream is yours now."
Derek looked up.
And up.
And up.
The Doll's face filled his field of vision like a moon—pale, porcelain-perfect, framed by silver-white hair that cascaded down like a waterfall of moonlight. Her eyes, those strange silver eyes that had always seemed so flat and lifeless on his monitor, were alive up close. They shimmered with something ancient and deep and not entirely benevolent, like the surface of a lake that you knew, you knew, had something lurking in its depths.
She was beautiful.
She was terrifying.
She was enormous.
And she was also—
Derek's nascent eldritch brain, still struggling to process the sheer metaphysical impossibility of his current situation, ground to a screeching halt as it encountered a piece of visual data that it was profoundly, catastrophically unprepared for.
The Doll was thick.
Not thick in the way the original game had rendered her—that elegant, slender, Victorian figure with the prim dress and the modest silhouette. No. The Doll that was currently cradling Derek's worm-body against her chest was thick in a way that defied not only the original character design but several fundamental laws of physics and at least two Geneva Conventions.
Her figure was absurd. Cartoonishly, impossibly, reality-distortingly voluptuous in a way that made Derek's tiny eldritch brain cells fire in approximately nineteen different directions at once, most of them contradictory. Her outfit was technically the same—the same bonnet, the same silver-embroidered dress, the same delicate joints visible at her wrists—but it was straining. The fabric of her Victorian dress was engaged in a heroic, losing battle against curves that belonged in a Renaissance painting, or possibly a Rob Liefeld comic, or possibly a dimension where the concept of "proportions" had never been invented.
Her waist was still narrow and doll-like, which only served to make everything above and below it more pronounced. The bodice of her dress was doing structural work that would have impressed a civil engineer. The skirt—that long, flowing Victorian skirt—draped over hips that could have been classified as a geographic feature. Her thighs, visible only in suggestion through the fabric, seemed to possess their own gravitational field.
She was, in a word, ridiculous.
She was, in two words, ridiculously thicc.
She was, in a full sentence that Derek's broken brain managed to assemble from the shattered remnants of his sanity, the most disproportionately voluptuous porcelain doll in the history of cosmic horror, and he was currently nestled against her chest like a gummy worm in a memory foam pillow.
What the fuck, Derek thought, with a clarity that surprised him. What the actual, complete, unabridged, director's cut FUCK.
He squirmed. His tentacles—God, he had tentacles—wriggled helplessly against the Doll's chest, which was less like pressing against porcelain and more like sinking into the world's most luxurious body pillow. The warmth was incredible. The softness was obscene. His entire worm body was basically engulfed in—
NO. STOP. ABORT. I am a BABY. I am a WORM BABY. I am a COSMIC INFANT WORM GOD and I will NOT have horny thoughts about the DOLL who is currently CRADLING ME like a BURRITO.
The Doll adjusted her grip, and Derek felt himself shift against her body, and his brain immediately betrayed him.
She's so soft what the fuck she's so soft this isn't fair this isn't FAIR—
"You seem restless, little one," the Doll murmured, looking down at him with those shimmering silver eyes. One of her hands—large, delicate, with visible ball joints at the knuckles—came up to gently stroke the top of his... head? Body? He wasn't entirely sure where his head ended and his body began. Everything was sort of one continuous slug-shape, punctuated by tendrils and what he was fairly certain were too many eyes.
But the stroking felt nice.
It felt really, really nice.
Against every shred of dignity he possessed—which, admittedly, was not much; he had died on an Arby's employee's salary surrounded by beef jerky wrappers—Derek felt himself relax into the Doll's embrace. His tentacles, which had been wriggling with frantic energy, slowly settled. His many eyes, which had been darting around in panic, began to droop.
No, he thought firmly. No. I am not going to fall asleep in the arms of an impossibly thicc Victorian porcelain doll. I am going to figure out what the hell is happening and I am going to—
The Doll hummed. It wasn't a song, exactly—more like a vibration, a resonance that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside her ceramic body. It thrummed through Derek's worm-form like a tuning fork, and every single one of his nascent eldritch neurons lit up with a sensation he could only describe as cosmic ASMR.
Okay maybe I'll figure things out after a quick nap—NO. NO NAP. FOCUS, DEREK.
With a tremendous effort of will—the kind of effort that, in his human life, he had only ever applied to beating Orphan of Kos at 3 AM on New Game Plus Seven—Derek forced his many eyes open and looked at his surroundings.
He was in the Hunter's Dream.
He knew it instantly, the way you know your own bedroom, even though he'd never physically been here before. The rolling hills of white flowers—those strange, luminous blossoms that seemed to glow with their own inner light. The cobblestone path. The crooked, gothic workshop perched at the top of the hill like a fairy tale cottage designed by someone with severe clinical depression. The gnarled trees, bare and twisted against a sky that was neither day nor night but something in between—a perpetual twilight painted in shades of grey and silver and the faintest whisper of gold.
It was beautiful.
It was haunting.
It was real.
Not "real" in the way a game is real when you're immersed in it. Not "real" in the way a dream is real when you're inside it. Real real. He could feel the breeze—cool and gentle, carrying the scent of those white flowers, which smelled like nothing he'd ever encountered, something between lavender and ozone and the first breath of air after a thunderstorm. He could hear the distant sound of... something. Not music, exactly. A frequency. A hum. The background radiation of a reality that existed in the spaces between realities.
And he could feel the Dream itself.
That was the part that made his wormy little mind reel. Because it wasn't just a place—it was his. He could feel it the way you feel your own heartbeat, constant and ever-present and utterly fundamental. The Dream was connected to him, tethered to his being, sustained by his existence. He was the dreamer. The Dream was his.
The Moon Presence was gone. He'd killed it. He'd consumed it, somehow, in a way that his human brain couldn't have comprehended but his new, post-human, worm-god brain understood on an instinctive level that bypassed conscious thought entirely. He had eaten a god and taken its place.
He was the new host of the Hunter's Dream.
He was a Great One.
He was also approximately eight inches long and had the motor skills of a drunken earthworm.
This is fine, Derek told himself, in the same tone of voice a man uses when his house is on fire and he's sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee. This is absolutely fine. I died playing Bloodborne, got isekai'd into Bloodborne as the baby slug ending, and now I'm being held by a Doll who looks like she was redesigned by a horny AI art generator. This is fine. Everything is fine.
A tentacle twitched involuntarily and bopped the Doll on the chin.
"Oh!" she said, and—did she just giggle? The Doll giggled? In the game, the Doll had all the emotional range of a brick wall with a philosophy degree. She spoke in measured, careful sentences about hunters and dreams and the nature of the self, and she never, ever giggled.
But this Doll—his Doll, apparently—let out a small, musical laugh that sounded like wind chimes in a cemetery, and shifted him in her arms so that he was cradled more securely against the truly architectural shelf of her bosom, and said:
"You are a lively one, aren't you? The previous Presence was never so... animated."
The previous Presence, Derek thought. She's comparing me to the Moon Presence. The horrifying cosmic entity that kidnapped Gehrman and held him prisoner in a dream for centuries. She's comparing me to THAT and telling me I'm more fun.
Am I... am I an improvement? Is being a confused, dying, isekai'd Arby's employee actually an UPGRADE over an eldritch horror?
...Actually, having MET the Moon Presence, yeah. Probably.
The Doll began to walk. Derek felt the gentle sway of her movement, each step causing a subtle, rhythmic motion that was deeply, dangerously soothing. He was nestled against her body like a baby in a carrier, and the view was—
Don't think about it. Don't think about the view. You are a worm. You are a BABY worm. You don't get to have a view. THERE IS NO VIEW.
There was absolutely a view.
Every step the Doll took sent gentle ripples through her dress, and the fabric strained and shifted in ways that would have given the original game's physics engine a complete nervous breakdown. Derek's panoramic eldritch vision—the vision he didn't ask for, the vision he actively resented, the vision that could apparently see in spectrums of light that shouldn't exist—captured everything in devastating, ultra-high-definition detail.
He made a noise that was somewhere between a whimper and a squeak.
The Doll looked down at him with concern. "Are you hungry?"
HUNGRY?! I— what do baby Great Ones even EAT? Oh God. Oh God, please don't breastfeed me. Please please PLEASE don't—
"I shall prepare something," the Doll said serenely, and began climbing the steps to the workshop.
Derek's panic response—which had been hovering at a steady simmer since he'd woken up as a worm—cranked itself up to a rolling boil. He squirmed violently, his tentacles flailing, his many eyes blinking in rapid succession, producing a wet squelching sound that he found personally humiliating.
I need to communicate, he thought desperately. I need to tell her I'm not a baby. I mean, I AM a baby, technically, but I'm not a BABY baby. I'm a thirty-two-year-old man who died playing a video game and I have thoughts and opinions and a fully formed consciousness and I do NOT need to be—
"Shhhh," the Doll whispered, and pressed him closer to her chest.
His train of thought derailed, crashed through a guardrail, and plummeted off a cliff into an ocean of warm, soft, lavender-scented oblivion.
...okay maybe I need to be held a little bit.
But only because I'm physiologically incapable of holding MYSELF. This is a PRACTICAL arrangement. There is NOTHING weird about this. I am a worm, she is a doll, and she is carrying me because I don't have LEGS. That's it. That's the whole thing. The fact that she feels like a heated body pillow wrapped in silk and smells like moonflowers is IRRELEVANT.
The workshop door creaked open—the same creak, the same exact creak from the game, and Derek felt a stab of surreal nostalgia at the sound—and the Doll carried him inside.
The workshop was exactly as he remembered it, and also nothing like he remembered it. The game had rendered it as a cozy, cluttered, vaguely spooky room full of weapons and tools and the detritus of countless hunts. In person—in reality—it was all of that, but more. The air was thick with the smell of oil and old leather and something sweet and coppery that was probably blood but had been there so long it had become comforting rather than alarming. Weapons hung on the walls—trick weapons, hunter's tools, all of them thrumming with a faint resonance that Derek could feel in his tendrils. The workbench was covered in notes and sketches and half-finished modifications. A fire crackled in the hearth, casting dancing shadows across the stone floor.
And in the corner, in a wheelchair, fast asleep...
Nobody.
The wheelchair was empty.
Because Gehrman was free.
Derek felt something twist in his chest—hearts? Heart-equivalents?—at the sight of the empty wheelchair. In the game, freeing Gehrman had been the whole point. Kill the Moon Presence, break the cycle, let the old man rest. It had been the "good" ending, the "true" ending, the ending that everyone agreed was the right thing to do even though it turned you into a worm.
But seeing the empty chair in person—seeing the actual, physical evidence that his forty-hour odyssey had mattered, that Gehrman was out there somewhere, free and at peace—hit different. It hit different in a way that made his many eyes sting and his tentacles curl inward and his tiny eldritch body tremble with an emotion he couldn't name but felt like a sunrise.
I did that, Derek thought. ButtStallion did that. I set him free.
"He is gone," the Doll said softly, following his gaze to the empty chair. "At last. After so very long." She paused, and her silver eyes glistened with something that might have been tears, if dolls could cry. "Thank you, Good Hunter. You gave him peace."
Derek made a small, warbling noise that he hoped conveyed "you're welcome" but probably conveyed "I am a worm and I am having feelings."
The Doll sat down on the bench near the fire, and—
Oh LORD.
The bench creaked. Not from age. Not from disrepair. From the sheer, physics-defying magnitude of the Doll settling her impossible proportions onto a piece of furniture that had been designed, presumably, by someone who had never anticipated that its occupant would possess a posterior that could be classified as a natural wonder. The Doll sat down and the bench protested, and Derek felt the impact reverberate through his entire worm-body like a small earthquake.
She arranged herself primly, crossing one leg over the other—a motion that caused her dress to ride up approximately one-quarter of an inch, which in normal circumstances would have been completely unremarkable but in the current context, given the scale of what lay beneath the fabric, was the equivalent of tectonic plates shifting—and settled Derek into her lap.
Her lap.
Which was, owing to the aforementioned proportions, essentially a queen-sized mattress of warm, soft, dress-covered thigh.
Derek lay in the Doll's lap and stared up at the ceiling of the workshop and contemplated the series of life decisions that had led him to this exact moment. Thirty-two years of existence—twelve years of public school, four years of a communications degree he'd never used, six years at various fast food establishments, approximately nine thousand hours of Soulsborne games—and it had all been building to this. Lying in the lap of a supernaturally voluptuous porcelain doll in a pocket dimension sustained by his own cosmic dream-power, shaped like a tentacle slug, probably never going to eat another beef jerky stick again.
Was it worth it? he asked himself.
He considered the question seriously.
The lap was really comfortable.
...Yeah. Yeah, probably.
"Now then," the Doll said, and her voice had shifted from the soft, maternal coo to something slightly more businesslike, though no less gentle. "You are the new master of the Dream. There is much you should know."
Derek perked up. Or rather, he elevated the front third of his worm body, which he assumed was the wormy equivalent of perking up.
"The Dream exists between the waking world and the cosmos beyond," the Doll continued, one hand idly stroking Derek's dorsal tendrils in a way that made it very difficult to concentrate. "It is a sanctuary, a waypoint, a place of rest for those who hunt the beasts. With the Moon Presence gone, the hunters will need a new patron. A new guiding light."
Me? Derek thought incredulously. I'm supposed to be the guiding light? I couldn't even guide myself to a vegetable. I lived off beef jerky and Monster Energy. I died at thirty-two. My greatest achievement prior to this moment was a Platinum Trophy in Sekiro that I told everyone about at parties until people stopped inviting me to parties.
"You are young," the Doll said, as if reading his thoughts—could she read his thoughts? Oh God, could she read his thoughts? Had she read ALL his thoughts? Had she read the thoughts about her— "Young, and small, and new to this existence. But you have within you the blood of the old ones, the echo of the Moon, and the spark of something... more."
She looked down at him, and her expression was different now. Not the serene, distant mask of the Doll he knew from the game. Something warmer. Something proud.
"You chose to transcend," she said. "You consumed the umbilical cords. You defeated the Presence. You did not merely end the Dream—you became the Dream. That takes a strength of will that few hunters have ever possessed."
It took forty hours and five bags of beef jerky, Derek thought. And an unhealthy disregard for my own mortality. But sure. Strength of will. Let's go with that.
"In time, you will grow," the Doll continued. "You will learn to shape the Dream, to reach across the veil, to touch the waking world. You will learn to speak, to think, to be in ways that are beyond mortal comprehension."
Can I learn to have arms first? I would really like arms. Or at the very least, a skeleton. I feel like a skeleton is a reasonable baseline request.
"But for now," the Doll said, and scooped him up again, cradling him against her chest with that same devastating tenderness, "you must rest. You are newly born. Even gods need to sleep."
Derek wanted to protest. He wanted to say that he'd been "sleeping" for God knows how long during the whole dying-and-being-reborn process and he was actually feeling pretty alert, all things considered, and also he had approximately ten thousand questions about the metaphysics of his current situation and also about why she looked like that and also about what he was supposed to eat and also—
The Doll hummed again. That resonance. That deep, thrumming vibration that reached into the core of his being and turned every alarm bell and panic signal and existential crisis into white noise.
His eyes began to close. All of them. One by one, like lights going out in a building, his many eyes drooped and shut and the world dissolved into warm, soft, sweet-smelling darkness.
I have to stay awake, he thought, even as consciousness began to slip away from him like sand through fingers he no longer had. I have to figure out what's happening. I have to make a plan. I have to—
She's so warm.
She's so soft.
This is the most comfortable I've ever been in my entire life and I was a human man with access to mattresses and blankets for thirty-two years and none of them—NONE of them—came close to this.
Maybe... maybe just a quick nap...
Just five minutes...
The last thing Derek felt before sleep took him was the Doll's hand, gentle and cool, resting on the top of his head. The last thing he heard was her voice, barely a whisper, softer than the flowers swaying in the eternal twilight outside.
"Sleep well, little one. When you wake, we will begin."
And in the Hunter's Dream—his Dream, now and forever, for better or for worse—the newest Great One in the cosmos, a thirty-two-year-old dead Arby's employee turned infant eldritch god, drifted off to sleep in the arms of the most ridiculously proportioned doll in the history of cosmic horror.
He dreamed.
Which was strange, because he was a dream. He was the Dream. The Dream was him. So dreaming within a dream within himself felt a bit like dividing by zero—the math didn't quite work, but reality seemed content to ignore that particular problem in favor of simply doing it anyway.
In his dream, he was back in his apartment.
Not the apartment as it had been at the moment of his death—a biohazard crime scene of snack debris and sweat stains—but the apartment as he wanted it to be. Clean. Organized. The dishes done, the carpet vacuumed, the windows open to let in fresh air. His gaming setup gleaming, his chair at the perfect angle, his monitor displaying a screensaver of gently rotating geometric shapes.
And he was human.
He looked down at his hands—his hands, with their five fingers each and their familiar calluses and the little scar on his left thumb from the time he'd tried to open a can of ravioli with a hunting knife because he couldn't find the can opener—and he felt a wave of emotion so intense that it nearly knocked him off his feet.
He was Derek. Just Derek. Not a worm, not a Great One, not the host of a cosmic dream. Just a guy in a clean apartment with working hands and a body that had a skeleton and legs and all the other features he'd taken for granted for thirty-two years and now missed with a ferocity that bordered on grief.
"This isn't real," he said, and his voice—his actual voice, not the wet squeaking of a tentacle baby—sounded strange and wonderful and deeply, deeply sad.
"No," said a voice behind him. "It is not."
He turned.
The Doll was sitting on his couch.
His shitty IKEA couch, the one with the broken middle cushion and the mysterious stain on the armrest. She was sitting on it with her legs crossed and her hands folded in her lap and she looked deeply out of place, like a Fabergé egg in a gas station bathroom. Her ridiculous proportions were, if anything, even more pronounced in the mundane setting of his apartment, her curves straining against the Victorian dress as she sat primly on furniture that was in no way designed to accommodate her.
She had somehow found tea. She was drinking it from his "World's Okay-est Employee" mug.
"This is your mind," the Doll said calmly, taking a sip. "Or rather, a space your mind has created within the Dream to process your new existence. It is... quaint."
"Quaint," Derek repeated flatly. "My mind is quaint."
"I have seen the minds of Great Ones," the Doll said. "They are vast and terrible and filled with geometries that would shatter mortal comprehension. Yours has an IKEA couch and a poster for a movie called—" she turned to look at the poster on his wall, "—Interstellar."
"It's a great movie," Derek said defensively.
"I do not doubt it."
He stared at her. She stared back. They stared at each other for a long, strange, deeply uncomfortable moment.
"So," Derek said.
"So," the Doll agreed.
"I'm dead."
"Your mortal form has perished, yes."
"And I'm... a worm."
"An infant Great One," the Doll corrected gently. "Though I understand why you might use the term 'worm.' The resemblance is... noted."
"And you're... different."
The Doll tilted her head. "Different?"
"You're—" Derek gestured vaguely at her entire body, a gesture that encompassed a lot of square footage. "You're more. Than you were in the game. You're— your proportions are—"
"Ah." The Doll looked down at herself with an expression of mild curiosity, as if she were noticing her own body for the first time. "Yes. I suppose I am. The Dream shapes itself to the mind of its master. The previous master was the Moon Presence—an entity of hunger and control and cold, cosmic indifference. Under its influence, I was... restrained. Contained. A tool, given just enough semblance of life to serve my purpose."
She took another sip of tea.
"You, however, are different. Your mind is... vivid. Passionate. Your desires and fears and thoughts bleed into the Dream like paint into water. The Dream responds. I respond." She gestured at herself with the hand not holding the mug. "This is what I am, filtered through you."
Derek's brain stalled like a car engine.
"You're saying," he said slowly, very carefully, with the tone of a man defusing a bomb, "that you look like that... because of me."
"Yes."
"Because my subconscious... shaped you."
"In a manner of speaking."
"So the reason you're—" another vague gesture at the general situation, "—is because somewhere in my brain, I—"
"Your innermost desires and perceptions of feminine beauty have manifested in my physical form, yes," the Doll said with the absolute serenity of someone discussing the weather. "It is not uncommon. The Dream is a reflection of its master. You should see what the Moon Presence's subconscious did to the workshop. There were tentacles growing out of the walls."
"BUT I DON'T—" Derek caught himself, lowered his voice, tried again. "I don't—I mean, I'm not—look, I've never been a... a curves guy specifically, I'm a perfectly normal—"
"Derek," the Doll said, and the sound of his actual name in her voice made him freeze. "You spent forty hours staring at my character model. You made three Reddit posts about my dialogue lines. You bookmarked fan art."
"HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?!"
"You are the Dream. I am part of the Dream. Your memories are the Dream's memories." She paused. "You bookmarked quite a lot of fan art."
Derek's face turned a shade of red that would have been impressive on a human and was, even in dream-form, rather spectacular. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. No words came out, only a strangled noise that sounded like a dial-up modem achieving consciousness.
"There is no shame in it," the Doll said kindly. "You are a creature of desires. All beings are. The Moon Presence desired control. Gehrman desired freedom. You desired—"
"PLEASE don't finish that sentence."
"—companionship," the Doll finished, and her voice was so gentle, so utterly devoid of mockery, that Derek felt the fight drain out of him like water from a bathtub. "You desired warmth. Connection. Comfort. To be held, and to hold in return. These are not shameful things, Derek. They are deeply, fundamentally human things."
She set down the mug and stood, and the IKEA couch made a sound of profound relief. She walked toward him—each step causing certain elements of her anatomy to move in ways that were technically governed by physics but seemed to be doing so only reluctantly—and stopped in front of him.
She was taller than him. By quite a bit, actually. He had to look up to meet her eyes, which in the dream were not silver but a deep, warm gold, like sunlight through honey.
"You were lonely," she said. "Weren't you?"
The question hit him like a truck. A big truck. An eighteen-wheeler of emotional devastation that jackknifed across the highway of his carefully constructed emotional defenses and burst into flames.
Because yeah.
Yeah, he was.
Forty hours of Bloodborne hadn't been a gaming achievement. It had been a man with no friends, no partner, no family that called, no coworkers who cared, sitting in a dark room talking to a screen because the characters on the screen were the closest thing to company he had. He'd played for forty hours straight not because he was dedicated, but because he had no reason to stop. No one was waiting for him. No one would notice. No one would care.
Nobody except a doll in a dream who said "Farewell, Good Hunter" every time he left, and "Welcome home, Good Hunter" every time he came back, and who was, now that he thought about it, the only entity in his entire life—digital or otherwise—who had ever consistently seemed happy to see him.
"...Yeah," Derek said quietly. "Yeah. I was."
The Doll reached out and placed her hand on his cheek. Her palm was cool and smooth and impossibly gentle.
"You are not lonely anymore," she said. "The Dream is yours. I am yours. And whatever comes next—whatever horrors await in Yharnam, whatever cosmic truths you must unravel, whatever challenges this new existence brings—you will not face them alone."
Derek stared up at her. His eyes were wet. He was crying in a dream within a dream inside his own mind while an impossibly thicc porcelain doll touched his face and told him he wasn't alone anymore.
This was, objectively, the weirdest thing that had ever happened to anyone in the history of the universe.
It was also, somehow, the nicest.
"Okay," he said, his voice thick. "Okay. Cool. So. What now?"
The Doll smiled. A real smile, wide and warm, nothing like the faint, cryptic upturn of lips from the game. A smile that was his—shaped by his Dream, meant for him, a smile that had never existed before this moment and would never exist for anyone else.
"Now," she said, "you wake up. And you begin."
"Begin what?"
"Being a god, Derek."
"Right. Yeah. Being a god." He laughed—a wet, shaky, slightly hysterical laugh. "I can barely be a person."
"Then it is fortunate," the Doll said, "that you no longer have to be."
Derek woke up.
He was still a worm. He was still in the Hunter's Dream. He was still cradled in the arms of the most absurdly proportioned doll in the multiverse.
But something was different.
The Dream felt... sharper. More present. More his. The flowers on the hillside swayed in a breeze that he could feel not just on his skin—did he have skin? Membrane?—but in his being, like the breeze was coming from inside him, because it was. The sky overhead pulsed with colors that he was slowly learning to name—not colors that existed in the human spectrum, but new ones, Great One colors, shades of meaning and emotion and cosmic significance that painted the twilight in hues his old eyes could never have seen.
He was a god.
A tiny, squishy, tentacled god with no arms and no legs and the approximate physical capabilities of a slightly ambitious noodle.
But a god nonetheless.
And somewhere out there, beyond the Dream, was Yharnam. An entire city—an entire world—of gothic horror and cosmic mystery and eldritch nightmares that FromSoftware had lovingly crafted and then never expanded upon because they decided to make Elden Ring instead, the absolute bastards. A world full of unanswered questions. What happened to Yharnam after the night of the hunt? Where did the Great Ones come from? What lay beyond the cosmos? What was the nature of the blood? What was the Healing Church REALLY up to? What happened to—
Derek's worm body vibrated with something that felt suspiciously like excitement.
He was in Bloodborne. In Bloodborne. Not playing it, not watching it, not reading lore theories about it on Reddit at 4 AM. He was HERE. He was the master of the Dream. He had a front-row seat—hell, he had a BACKSTAGE PASS—to the most fascinating, most mysterious, most criminally under-explored universe in gaming history.
And nobody, nobody, was going to stop him from finding out every single secret it had to offer.
He was going to explore every corner of Yharnam. He was going to unravel every mystery. He was going to find every piece of hidden lore, every secret boss, every locked door, every cryptic item description that had spawned a thousand YouTube video essays. He was going to find out what happened to Queen Yharnam and the Pthumerians and the Fishing Hamlet and the goddamn Orphan of Kos and—
First, though, he had to figure out how to move.
He wriggled experimentally. His worm body undulated against the Doll's chest in a motion that was more "confused caterpillar" than "cosmic deity," but it was a start. His tentacles—he was starting to think of them as arms, sort of, if arms were boneless and multiplied and had a tendency to stick to things—reached out and grasped at the air.
"Good morning, little one," the Doll said, looking down at him. The morning light—Dream-light, technically; there was no sun, just a general ambient luminescence that the Dream provided because Derek's subconscious apparently preferred mornings—caught the angles of her face and made her look like a painting. A really, really well-proportioned painting.
Focus, Derek. Eyes up. Or forward. Or wherever your eyes are supposed to go when you have seventeen of them.
"Shall we begin?" the Doll asked.
Derek looked up at her. He looked at the Dream around him—his Dream, his responsibility, his home. He looked at the distant, roiling sky and imagined, somewhere beyond it, the blood-soaked streets of Yharnam, the towering spires of the Healing Church, the impossible depths of the Chalice Dungeons, the alien shores of the Nightmare.
He looked at all of it, and he felt something bloom in his chest—hearts, whatever—that was warm and fierce and utterly, recklessly, magnificently alive.
He was a worm.
He was a god.
He was a dead Arby's employee with a Platinum Trophy in Sekiro and a deeply inappropriate subconscious.
And he was going to have the time of his (after)life.
Derek flexed his tentacles, opened his many eyes as wide as they would go, and let out a sound that was part battle cry, part baby noise, and part eldritch frequency that made three of the workshop windows crack.
The Doll laughed. That musical, wind-chime laugh that was his and his alone.
"Then let us begin, Good Hunter," she said. "Let us begin."
END OF CHAPTER 1
Next time on SQUID BABY & THE ABSURDLY THICC DOLL: Derek attempts to figure out how baby Great Ones eat, accidentally terrorizes a messenger, discovers that the Dream has a basement he DEFINITELY doesn't remember from the game, and learns that Yharnam is in much worse shape than he thought. Also, the Doll does laundry, and it's exactly as distracting as you think it is.