#discorb

last part has incidental deathloop suicide. also, not actual but technically semi pseudo-incest?

The dream started out with me scrolling on tumblr and seeing a bunch of gifsets and interview quotes from something called ‘this house is a happy place’, with the premise that it was a prequel for amazing digital circus as in all the characters were in this scenario as a preselection for the vessels that ended up the main cast of tadc, at first it included pomni & jax; the setup was a sitcom house and originally it had other goofy crossover elements. I know something with futurama and gravity falls was involved. as the dream went on it started shedding extraneous details. “I” also started taking the place of pomni in becoming a participant in the dream and the cast became “real” people rather than cartoon characters, but it would fluctuate. Basically it was a large blended family style cast, like full house, where there were a lot of “brothers” and “sisters” and at first there was designated “parents” but they stopped being relevant at some point. There was one storyline where “dad” stole a boat in the middle of the night instead of figuring out plans for a vacation and crashed it on something so it sank Titanic-style, and another one where he was trying to build something for the family, or for an anniversary, something. When we started gaining self-awareness about the premise of being essentially trapped in a sitcom, time and reality started unraveling—at one point the house was shrunken down but certain set-pieces were the same size, which some of the cast handled better than others. I remember petting one of the four cats that was now chest-height and saying I liked this part; one of the other “kids” was in denial and was trying to rationalize stuff while another was pointing outside where there was cooked shrimp the size of a car and made some quip about how jumbo shrimp was bigger than she remembered.

There were at least two older "brothers", one older "sister", two younger "brothers", and two younger "sisters" though the cast would fluctuate. I remember a younger “sister” saying she’s glad she came home for break so she could be with us for this, and maybe she’d have to catch a flight to California some other time (we were in a mansion on a small island). “I” remember trying to team up with one of the big “sisters”, and one of the mechanics of this world was that sometimes people retained memories of realizing the setup of the world and sometimes they reverted to their characters/role. Here I remember that it was less “me” more “pomni” but I was still taking pomni’s perspective, she was talking about the different personae/expertise she used to get closer to the “sister” (who now looked like a porcelain doll half-dressed in victorian clothes) and was basically asking which one she liked better, and the doll was saying “It’s not about liking one better than the other, they were all you” and “pomni” joked something about how the doll “probably was more biased towards chef pomni than the others, considering the food” and the doll conceded the point. We were also talking about which “brothers” and “sisters” seemed more or less stable in the situation, I think I needed her help with assessing and understanding and maneuvering the rest of the “family” because I was completely disassociated from my role and knew them as strangers, whereas she was immersed and could advise me on when to approach who and how to do it (she was the one who ran after “dad” when he tried to steal the mini cruise ship. Mini titanic replica?). so I’d go through these “loops” with the doll but I’d switch up my specialties instead of doing the same thing every time just for some variety. But there’d always come a point where things got too overwhelming for her and her memories would be wiped as like a defense mechanism. It was less about the situation itself, more about what was happening to other people.

We were having this conversation because one little “sister” realized we were being trapped in sitcom purgatory and was walking up to the second floor, throwing herself out the window, hitting the ground with a sickening crunch, and then dragging herself up to do it again and again. I think “I” mistimed the reveal and accidentally let her overhear, which triggered her memories of other loops/details/knowledge, which broke her a little. At first the doll was in shock and unresponsive because of that, but “I” took her inside and waited for her to be able to have a conversation so “I” could get something from her, but also, I liked her and I didn’t want her last memory of this loop to be watching her little “sister” try to die. The other mechanic of the setup was that the more we pushed the world out of genre, there’d come a point where everything snapped back into place and “reset” to a different scenario, and I could tell that it was about to happen soon; suicide couldn’t exist in the sitcom world. So “I” told the doll that everything would be alright soon, and that she wouldn’t remember a thing, and that our little “sister” wouldn’t remember a thing, and she was ambivalent about it. Kind of a bittersweet feeling. I got the impression that as I carefully integrated more “family” into awareness, the doll would have to be the last one. There was one last crunch and I woke up.

In hindsight it was definitely a mix of a bunch of stuff, like this house has people in it, too many cooks, stanley parable, that purgatory game I was vaguely watching my sister play before she went to sleep, also there’s definitely elements from sister’s deathloop fic, like having to use someone not in the loop as a hint system

I think the most absurd thing was I woke up with my heart pounding with stress BUT the only thought I had was ‘damn that yuri would go pretty hard’

in the middle of writing everything up while the details were still fresh, a pal messaged me and I was telling her about it