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It started—as most shitty things do—with denial.
“Man,” Quackity huffed. He was petering out of a full-bellied laugh when the door nudged open, the floppy lid of his beanie appearing first through the threshold, followed by his flushed incredulous face, and a brilliant pearly smile. “What a show. What a night.”
Karl glanced up from the book in his lap with an inquisitive hum. “What’s that, sweetheart? Is there another circus in town?”
Quackity shook his head with another chirping laugh. “No, Sapnap’s just being a riot is all. Throwing a fit, I tell ya. It’s hilarious—watch, here he comes now—”
“Karl!” Sapnap wailed, utterly devastated, as he burst through the door of their shared cottage in Kinoko, bodily slamming Quackity to the side so he could stagger through to Karl’s waiting arms on the couch. “Karl, baby, you gotta help me—!”
Karl barely had time to mark his place in his book with a ribbon before his tear-stained husband was collapsing atop him, shoulders and chest heaving with thick and terrible sobs. He was practically gagging with the force of his hyperventilation, words slurring through hitched gasps and sniffles like a monster’s snarl. “Babe?! What’s wrong?” Karl spluttered, eyes darting between his husbands as Sapnap’s terror and Quackity’s amusement intensified in mirrored measure to one another.
“There’s—I heard p-p-people, I heard them in—in the mines!” Sapnap blubbered. “In the rocks, I heard them, I swear—I swear I did, Karl, you gotta believe me—there’s people in the rocks!”
Quackity snickered and raised his eyebrows, splaying his hands demonstratively. “See?”
The confused line in Karl’s brow deepened. “In the rocks? What rocks?”
Sapnap finally tore his face from where it was buried in Karl’s chest, leaving wet patches on his violet hoodie behind his watery red eyes and wobbling lips. “The—the rocks, y’know?”
Karl shook his head. “I do not know. I’ve seen a lot of rocks in my time. You could be talking about any of them.”
Sapnap made a sniffling sneer and shook his head. “No, not—ugh, fine, I’ll just show you.” he pulled himself up and started stomping to the door without waiting for confirmation, leaving Karl and Quackity to hastily tie up their shoes and jackets before marching after him.
When they finally reached their destination, Karl’s eyes widened with realization, a smile and a sigh escaping his lips. “Ah, you meant these rocks.”
Before them stood a craggy opening to a labyrinth of cave and ravine systems—the first and most initially lucrative of all the SMP’s nearest mining spots to spawn. The entrance’s chapped lips were comprised of creamy grey boulders hardened smooth to support the porous system of earth they safeguarded, their bodies spotted with moss and lichen to blend seamlessly into the lush surrounding grassland.
The caves had long ago been ravished of all their resources, leaving behind only a sprawling relic of mineshafts and grandiose cliffsides where mobs ran amok in the pitch dark, unbroken except by lava pools and the occasional subterranean ocean of glow squids and crackling magma. The area was notorious for its precarious terrain, made almost impossible for inexperienced townsfolk to navigate by the constant foot traffic and mining expeditions that carved through its middle back in the SMP’s earliest days. Once, it would’ve been an interesting place for climbers to explore, with staggering cliffsides melting into tangled ravine deltas and abandoned mineshafts, but by now the entirety of it was widely considered nothing but old news. There were bigger and better things to explore further beyond the reaches of the mainland’s borders, and those had the added benefit of new resources to be harvested.
Karl squinted dubiously into the cave’s opening, not wanting to express his immediate doubt to Sapnap before at least pretending to entertain the idea, since he looked so petrified and stubbornly sure of himself. “Are you sure you heard people down here? It could’ve been a pack of zombies—”
“I’m positive,” Sapnap interrupted, stamping his foot. “I heard talking, and footsteps running, and these crazy—crazy big thumping sounds, like they were moving things all around, and—and mobs don’t do that, right? So I’m not crazy. Right?”
“Sapnap, baby, you know I love you so much—but you’re one of the craziest motherfuckers I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting,” Quackity snorted.
Sapnap let out a betrayed cry and turned to Karl with pleading, red-rimmed eyes, but Karl could only wince and shrug his shoulders helplessly.
“Sorry man, I just don’t see why anybody would be down there right now, especially since…” He trailed off suddenly, spine stiffening, and did a double-take back at the entrance.
Then his eyes bulged wide enough to pop them free of their sockets.
“What? Especially since what?” Quackity crowed, shouldering Karl aside to climb up to the entrance beside him. “What’re you—”
“Shh!” Karl hissed, jabbing a finger over Quackity’s mouth. “Be quiet, I think I heard something…”
Quackity scoffed and rolled his eyes but leaned closer into the darkness, untucking one ear from within the lip of his beanie to listen.
And then, like the rasp of a falling guillotine’s blade, there came an echoed shuffle and slide, followed by the garbled chime of a voice that was distinctly human.
The exact words were indecipherable from the reverberation of the depths, but they warbled human-like nonetheless, and Quackity’s shocked shriek was drowned out almost entirely by the victorious shouts of Sapnap as he leapt down from the opening with his fists pumping in the air.
All the while, the people in the rocks maintained their murmurs.
The widespread response to the three husbands’ claims was about the same as Sapnap’s before them—doubt, followed by exasperation, which eventually led to in-person cave visits to begrudgingly listen for themselves, and then the immediate strike of abject terror upon having those outlandish claims confirmed. Paranoia spread through the SMP settlements like wildfire, eyewitness’ kindling erupting from the embers of rumor faster than naysayers could stamp them out as mere conspiracy.
There were people in the rocks, citizens shrilled throughout the streets for all to hear, doomsday preachers of hidden spy networks plotting an all-out revolutionary war flooding the collective consciousness with nightmare fuel to last lifetimes.
Some still wondered if the noises were truly people at all, but those beliefs were usually toted by even wilder apocalyptic theories, that they were mobs evolved to mimic human intelligence—or the long-lost siren songs of generations fallen previous, whose cross-dimensional portals had finally been opened to unleash ghostly fury upon the populace for robbing them of their resource-rich caverns and lands.
Needless to say, it was clear that something must be done, and Quackity was determined to make that happen sooner rather than later. Taking partial blame for the discovery of the ghastly cliffside creatures, he felt it was his duty to collect a volunteer team of highly skilled and athletic cave explorers to make the perilous expedition through the deeps, where at last they would attempt to uncover the truth.
“We’ll need anyone able-bodied and confident enough not to get lost down there,” Quackity called out from the community house podium on the morning that the search would supposedly take place. All around, a small gathering of townsfolk and SMP citizens watched with bated breath as he scanned each face, the supportive bodies of Sapnap and Karl posted directly in the front row with grim determination set across their steely eyes. “Early members’ participation would be greatly appreciated, seeing as most of us are at least somewhat familiar with these particular mining cliffsides—but we’ll welcome anyone experienced with rock and ravine navigation whatsoever.”
From the back of the group, George raised his hand, looking a bit weary from the past week’s anxiety, but mostly just bored with the current proceedings. “Sorry, but what’s the actual goal here? There’s people in the rocks, so what? Do they owe us money?”
“Great question, Gogy.” Quackity snapped his fingers into finger guns and a wink before turning to address the rest of the crowd. “As of right now, we’re calling it a tentative search-and-rescue. I know we all have our suspicions about them, but it’s my husbands’ and my combined professional opinion that the people in the rocks will mean us no harm. There’s a substantial chance they’re just nomadic villagers that wandered in from one of the hundreds of exits and openings stretching throughout the SMP and didn’t know how to navigate the cliff subsystems well enough to get out. In the event that they’re outwardly hostile, we’ll have our team headed by resident PvP expert, Sapnap. I’ll be in charge of inter-settlement diplomacy, just in case there’s an issue with landsharing or privacy or any number of foreign cultural differences, and Karl’s offered to provide snacks and music.”
Upon mention of his name, Karl lifted his head and nodded out to the swarm of faces pressed against his back and gestured with his phone, which was open to the edit screen of an unfinished Spotify playlist titled i’m in your walls (jk that’d be so fucked up lol). “Submit your aux requests in the next hour or they’re not getting played! Also, cavern acoustics are wack, and we’re not trying to startle anyone into slipping to their deaths so we’re trying to keep it lo-fi chill adjacent if possible.”
Quackity nodded seriously and rubbed his chin. “Don’t worry, the queue is already filtered throughout with Pigstep every six songs to boost morale.”
A soft smattering of appreciative cheers fluttered throughout the audience, causing Quackity to crack a smirk. “Alright, as much as I’d love to keep talking about music, let’s try not to stay too off-topic here. Right now, we’ve only got the three of us in our ranks, but I’m thinking we’ll need a handful more of you fellas to help navigate the treacherous terrain, along with one or two more PvP-ers, and preferably somebody who’s good at getting around without a map. We’re bringing several for each of us, but most of our internal compasses will be total forfeit once we lose light of the sun, so it’ll help to have a guy with a strong enough sense of direction without it to serve as added insurance. How’s that sound? Any takers?”
A few gathered members began stepping forward and Quackity brightened with relief, stepping off to the side to greet his husbands’ encouraging grins—but there was an unfortunate side effect to this relaxed celebration of their success—and it was in the fact that nobody noticed a masked stranger clambering to the stage until he was already at the podium.
“Ahem,” the stranger cleared his throat awkwardly, his voice sounding intentionally gravelly, like he was trying to disguise himself as someone else. “There’s— ahem— there is no need to fear! Fellow… Uh—fellow civilians! For I, the Great XD, will assume the burden of… Exploring.”
“What the fuck?!” Quackity squawked, whirling around to scrutinize the Great XD, whose mask was very clearly just a smiley face drawn on a paper plate, with two hole-punched peepholes for eyes and a thick black sharpie to line its wobbly grin.
“I will brave the cliffsides,” XD explained through his stilted, falsely deepened speech. “Alone.”
Quackity made another high-pitched sound of protestation. “Like hell you will!”
“Is that… Dream?” Sapnap chimed in from the front row, leaning in and narrowing his eyes dubiously. “Dream, what the fuck are you doing up there? Knock it off, dude. You’re being cringe.”
George burst out into shrilly jeering giggles. “Why is he making his voice like that?! What’s with the trash on his face? This is literally the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen, Dream. What the hell?”
Dream took a few startled steps back from the podium, clearly thrown off guard by the fact that anyone could’ve seen through his brilliant disguise. “I am not Dream, alright? My name is XD, and this is my real voice. Stop—stop laughing at me, George! It’s not funny!”
Quackity rolled his eyes and folded his arms, stalking up to Dream’s side with an unimpressed tilt of his head. “Right, sure… So then I’m guessing this is your real face, too?” He reached a finger out to flick the flimsy edge of the paper plate.
Dream flinched, then stared at Quackity for a few seconds, processing. “…Yes.”
Hearing that, Sapnap threw his hands up with an exasperated shout. “Aw come on, man! We can clearly see that it's just a paper plate.”
Dream appeared visibly startled by that accusation. “How did you—?! No, no, this is obviously a face, okay? Look, I’ve got eyes and a mouth and everything! There’s no way it’s not my real face!”
Somehow, he managed to keep up the charade of his pretend voice all the way until just then, when George cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “BOOOOOO!”
“George,” Dream whimpered in his normal cadence, clutching his heart through the obnoxious green fabric of his hoodie. “Don’t do this to me… How could you be so cruel?”
George removed his hands from his mouth and instead used them to give Dream double thumbs-down. “Boo! You suck, get off the stage!”
Dream buried his masked face in his hands and started crying.
Finally having enough with the melodrama, Sapnap hefted himself up from the ground and strode over to Dream’s side with a lighter flame glowing by his thumb. When he pressed it to the edge of the paper plate mask, it lit up like flash paper, causing Dream to yelp and leap back in terror.
“What the hell, Sapnap?!”
“Aha! I knew it!” Sapnap roared victoriously, pointing at his exposed face in accusation.
Karl’s eyes bugged out wide. “DREAM?!” he gasped, shell-shocked.
Quackity, along with everyone but Karl himself, side-eyed Karl with a mixture of disbelief and chagrin—then Quackity shook himself free to refocus on Dream with an irritated scowl. “Alright, big guy, what the fuck is going on? You know you don’t have to put on some stupid costume to volunteer—literally just raise your hand and ask like the rest of us. If you really wanna tag along that bad you could’ve just said so.”
Dream looked like he swallowed something sour and sharp, shrinking in on himself as he met Quackity’s imploring glare, until finally his shoulders slumped. He dropped his head and closed his eyes with a big, heavy, relenting sigh. “Okay. I have a confession to make… Remember those traveling circus guys that stopped in Kinoko a little while back?”
Quackity flushed with delight and he laughed, tilting his head back and puffing his chest with a deep, contented inhale. “Oh fuck yeah! I loved those guys! What a show, what a night—”
“And remember how one of the adult ringleaders was a sheep hybrid with curly white hair who was like a maternal figure to the younger ones but she wasn’t married to the avian Dad or the other paternal figure who was a creeper hybrid?” Dream interrupted Quackity’s recollection, his words tumbling from his mumbled mouth in one sheepish breath.
All around, bewildered nods of affirmation followed, so Dream sniffed and continued on, “And remember how the sheep hybrid was actually my mom, Captain Puffy?”
Again, the townsfolk could only nod—except for Karl, who exclaimed, “Wait, really?!” As he was eternally slow on the uptake.
Dream picked up where he left off after just the slightest pause to accommodate for Karl’s outburst, his nervousness growing more and more apparent. “And remember how my mom would sometimes entrust me with babysitting the five little kids of the circus while she and Phil and Sam were busy packing up the tent to leave near the end of their stay?”
“Fucking of course we remember that shit, Dream! What’s your point?” Quackity demanded, folding his arms.
Dream swallowed. He lifted one hand to itch at the back of his neck, flashing the audience a brief and somewhat abashed smile, but then his gaze flattened at his feet. At last, he sucked in a sharp gasping breath and blurted out, “Yeah, so—I killed the kids.”
For the smallest fraction of a second, it was silent enough to hear a pin drop.
And then the outrage erupted.
“WAIT WHAT THE FUCK?!”
“WHAT?! WHAT?!”
“You KILLED them?! You killed a bunch of kids?!”
“Yeah, on ACCIDENT!” Dream retorted in a wavering voice, collapsing to his knees and burying his face in his elbows as he attempted to comfort himself with a hug around his own shoulders. “It was the last day before they were supposed to leave and we were playing hide-and-seek, but then they ran too close to the cliffs and fell straight off the edge of a ravine, and I tried to reach them but it was too late—when I looked over the edge they were dead on the rocks! And when my mom came to check on them I told her they were just having too much fun to talk because I didn’t have the heart to tell her, and she said ‘Well, since you take such great care of them, maybe they can stay in Kinoko for a little while.’ Because she and the other two adults needed to go on a rare supplies expedition before their next tour and were afraid the kids would get in the way! So whenever she stops in for a visit I just tell her the same thing, that they’re having too much fun to talk right now, because it’s already been so long since I killed the kids and the lie’s gone on for far too long to back out and it would be sooo awkward to bring it up now. Besides, the last time she visited, she said they were gonna be gone for a pretty long time before their next check-in, and that was like months ago so I just kinda… Forgot about it.”
“How the fuck do you ‘just kinda forget about’ five dead kids?!” Sapnap screamed.
“Stop yelling at me, I’m traumatized!” Dream shrilled back, clamping his hands over his ears and squeezing his eyes shut. “I thought I could forget about everything and go on to live a long, happy life, but now their ghosts are probably haunting the cliffs where they died and they’re gonna crawl up one day an exact their revenge on me and tell everyone I’m a murderer and that’s why I was gonna go check the place out by myself! So nobody would ever have to know! And nobody can say I’m doing a bad thing because I have trauma that justifies it, okay?!”
“Trauma can help explain bad behavior.” Like an eldritch beast, the voice of a dark and broody isolated citizen of the SMP emerged from the depths of the crowd, his gold-armored visage parting a path through the people leading to the stage like fingertips splitting soft bread. “But it’s never an excuse.”
The Warden was rarely spotted outside the impenetrable campus of the SMP Prison, his identity a complete mystery to most, if not all, who resided near enough to know of his existence. His voice was known by very few, but rumored by most, and it was considered an omen of destruction to see the Warden away from his obsidian station, which only occurred in the SMP’s direst times of widespread need.
If the Warden was here to speak, people knew to listen to him. If the Warden was here to speak to Dream, he knew better than to resist.
“Dream. You’re coming with me.”
“Oh God oh fuck,” Dream wheezed, his face going pale as it was slowly eclipsed by the approaching Warden’s shadow, which loomed over the stage’s steps before him.
Karl’s hands flew to his mouth with a gasp. “Uhh—wait, are you taking him to prison?”
The Warden just looked at him, head tilted.
“Oh fuck, right—because he killed a bunch of kids!”
“On accident!” Dream retorted through tears, but still hung his head low in shame and allowed himself to be dragged to his feet by the Warden, who pivoted on his heel with his hand still clamped around Dream’s forearm and started marching off in the prison’s direction.
Most of the crowd dispersed by that point, retreating to their homes to avoid the sickness of mining fatigue that would sweep the Warden’s party of followers, but the three husbands and George tagged along to watch their friend, the child murderer, be locked away for life.
“Christ,” Quackity muttered as he and Karl squeezed Sapnap's hands.
Dream started to tremble with poorly-contained sobs as the black outline of the prison came into view on the horizon, and George snickered at the sound, fishing his phone from his pocket with a delighted grin.
“Wait, I just got an idea for a TikTok. How do you spell ‘ wambulance?’”
Dream wept bitterly at the sight, which only served to further incense George’s giddiness as he overlayed a vast number of obnoxious sounds and video filters. He crouched down to get a close-up of Dream’s pathetic wailing face for the final shot just as the group came to a stop inside the first security room.
Karl blinked around at their sparse surroundings, finding the floors tiled in a black and red terracotta that led to the broad obsidian body of a vwooping violet portal. The walls were a stark white, lined with thick quartz to refract the yellow light of a glowstone array nestled atop the ceiling’s decorative obsidian and blackstone.
The lack of furniture and decor wasn’t the strangest part, however. Instead, it was the glassy film of the portal. When he squinted at it closely, Karl found it was merely that—a thin sheet of stained glass, split down the middle by a thread-thin black seam.
The Warden said nothing in a way of explanation, merely dragging Dream to a button on the side of the portal, and forcing the others to trail tentatively after. When the button was pressed, there came a soft and pleasant ding!
And then the portal’s elevator doors slid open.
- Several Months Earlier -
Five children are seated on the floor of a ravine, giggling and kicking their feet and rocking back and forth from the sheer enormity of their excitement.
Tommy, Tubbo, Ranboo, Technoblade, and Wilbur are so fucking stoked to do drugs.
Wilbur, the mastermind behind their operation, stands before his team with his fists dug into his hips and his mouth split wide into a barely-contained smiling shriek. “Okay! Showtime, boys! Techno, did you gather enough blood?”
Hearing his cue, Techno reaches into a hidden nook behind his back and draws out a gushy plastic garbage bag filled with dark liquid, slamming it against the ground before Wilbur with a squelching plop. “About seven and a half gallons of it, yep.”
The boys ooh and aah at Techno’s proud presentation, and Ranboo pipes up from beside him, “Where’d you get it all from?”
“Mostly GameStop,” Techno replies, shrugging. “And Burger King. And a little from Claire’s.”
“Pog,” hums Tommy with closed eyes in reverence and a sage nod of his head.
Wilbur nods his agreement with the appraisal before refocusing his attention with a quiet clap. “Ranboo, you planted the note? Also Tommy, you’re both warmed up?”
“Sir, yes sir!” Tommy and Ranboo report in perfect synchronicity, saluting sharply as though connected together by string.
“Very good,” Wilbur chirps. “Tubbo, how are the detonators? Do they have the desired effect?”
Tubbo shoots him a wicked, cold-eyed smirk. “Oh, you know they do, Mr. President. The mallets are slimed to perfection. Their sounds are violent and sickening—it’s truly an abomination to behold.”
Wilbur’s grin darkens to match that of Tubbo’s sadistic one. “Excellent. Good work, men.”
He extends his hand to the center of their huddle, prompting each of the four remaining children to stack theirs up along with it, until Wilbur at last tops the pile off with his other hand. He leans in close in preparation for his speech, and the children hold their breaths in vivid anticipation.
“Let’s scam a bitch for drugs.”
Later that day, they enact their grand plan.
They’ve cajoled the Green Bitch into playing a game of hide-and-seek in the forest surrounding their home base—a system of abandoned caves and mines whose wide opening looks out almost immediately to one of the steepest ravine drops they could find. Its floor is almost entirely inaccessible on foot, the sheer drop down is crumbly and slick with glossy shards of rock like volcanic glass, and it's just close enough to the day’s bright opening to still clearly be able to make out shapes and contours in the deepest ripples of cliff darkness.
In short, it’s the perfect playground for a band of troublemaking acrobat children.
They're hidden in a thatch of ivy right next to the cave’s opening when they hear Dream stomp around a bend in the forest, and Wilbur raises his hand in a countdown from five.
He gets all the way down to one exactly at the same time Dream’s hoodie appears beyond a distant tree, and his eyes latch onto the kids just as they leap from their hiding place and start booking it for the cavern’s mouth, shrieking and giggling all the while.
“RUN!” Ranboo shrills, pretending to flee from Dream’s rapidly approaching footfalls.
“Aha! I’ve got you now!” Dream cries after them.
They make chase all the way to the ravine’s edge, where Tommy gives Ranboo a subtle signal—flipping the bird—and they tear off ahead of the others just in time to ‘accidentally’ stagger and flail at the precipice.
Dream’s taunting jeers have melted into panicked shouts, warning them of the cliff, begging them to stop, but they don’t listen.
Using their skills as the top two acrobats in the circus, Tommy and Ranboo fall clean off the edge and catch themselves on two pre-installed trapeze pulleys, hidden from Dream’s view.
The pressure pulleys trigger a camouflaged stone trapdoor to open up beneath Techno, Wilbur, and Tubbo, who make a grand show of tumbling over the edge after their brothers. In reality, they’re being swept down a smooth and swirly slide built into the rock, which deposits the three at the ravine’s bottom just as Tommy and Ranboo’s trapezes lower them safely beside them.
Techno slashes a hole in the garbage bag of blood waiting for them at the bottom and it gushes out to cover the floor surrounding their bodies, sprawled out in cartoonish poses with their tongues stuck out as though dead.
Tubbo presses the button to detonate a series of five pistons attached to heavy mallets, which slam into blocks of slime atop echoey hollowed stone slabs, effectively mimicking the pulpy sound of bones and flesh splitting against stone. It echoes up over the topmost edge of the ravine just as Dream finally catches up to them, the small blonde dot of his head poking out with a horrified wail.
He begins to sob and shake, crying to himself, “Oh God, oh fuck—oh fuck! What am I gonna do?! Oh fuck, what the fuck—”
“Blehhh,” Tommy whispers at Tubbo, who fights to keep himself still amidst a giggle. “Look at me, I’m dead, blehh— pfft!”
Wilbur smacks them both on the arm before snatching his hand back to sprawl sickeningly by his head. He may not have the same contortionist’s flexibility as Tommy and Ranboo, but his deathly stillness earned from years atop the tightrope allows him to appear completely corpselike, even in awkward or uncomfortable positions.
Techno and Tubbo, meanwhile, have no extra skill for playing dead as a lion tamer and part-time clown, part-time pyrotechnics expert, respectively, but they’ve positioned themselves close enough to the gush of blood to cover their tracks. Anything amiss about their performances will be quickly smothered by gore.
On the surface, Dream continues to descend deeper into his panic until he seemingly trails off at something aboveground and beyond the kids’ sights.
“Oh fuck, fucking hell, oh my—fuck—fucking… George? George! Ahem— uh… H-hi. How—how are you? I like your face—fuck I mean eyes— FUCK I mean glasses. You look good. THEY LOOK GOOD. NOT IN A WEIRD WAY OR ANYTHING—”
“Sorry, what was your name again?”
“…What? George, we—we’ve known one another for like twenty years. I’m your best friend. What do you mean you don’t know my—”
“Umm, I think you’re mistaking me for someone else.”
The thundering sounds of Dream’s violent descent into heartbroken hysteria cover up the noises of the five children as they make their hasty getaway, leaving the gruesome bloodstain behind as the only reminder of what has occurred on this day. The finishing touch is the way they take turns dragging each other away and into the shadows to give the appearance of their remains being scavenged away by monsters.
- Present Day -
After filing through the portal elevator doors, the Warden and his puzzled followers made their descent deep into the earth.
When the doors again slid open, they were greeted by the cozy sight of an underground home, furnished in smooth tiled stone and honeyed wood. A spacious kitchen was lined up beside a crammed array of couches and beanbag chairs surrounding a quaint coffee table, with five cooling mugs and a tray of fruit pastries set up for afternoon tea. To the elevator’s right, a fat-bellied village bell of buttery gold was posted into a wall, connected to a frayed rope that the Warden clasped in his gauntlet armored hand and clanged out in a sharp ringing clamor.
“Alright boys, give it up! Show yourselves!” the Warden barked in a fierce yet subtly amused shout, startlingly different from his previous silent disposition.
Pattering footfalls staggered out from around one corner, the door to an adjacent bedroom flying open with the disgruntled faces of five children who were supposed to be long dead.
“What do you want, Sam? We were in the middle of somethi—HOLY SHIT IT’S THE GREEN BITCH!” Wilbur shrilled, pointing and gasping at Dream’s captive form behind the Warden’s arm. “Everyone, scatter! Get in position!”
Quick as a flash, Techno snatched an axe out of thin air and slammed it into a nearby wooden barrel acting as a side table to a pathetic little flower pot, and a steady stream of scarlet blood began spurting out from the crevice created.
Tommy wrenched a decorative sword free from its hooks on the wall and clamped it against his torso with the arm facing away from Dream, screaming and falling into the puddle of blood on the floor as though stabbed through the stomach.
Tubbo’s body jerked back in a series of invisible blows as though he was being shot at multiple times in slow motion, before he, too, fell to the ground by Tommy’s side with an exaggerated BLEHHH.
Ranboo clutched at his throat and pretended he was being strangled.
Wilbur’s eyes rolled to the back of his head and he screamed as though possessed.
Techno tied a hasty knot in his hair to affix the axe against his skull, so it almost looked like he’d been struck in the head, except for the fact that his smooth rosy locks were too slippery to hold it in place when he fell down with the others, and the axe clattered uselessly to the tile on his right.
In a matter of seconds, the scene went still, save for the growing pool of bubbling barrel blood, and Tubbo’s exaggerated choking gurgles.
The five children stared out empty-eyed into empty space—dead.
Suffice to say, the aboveground SMP citizens were astonished. Amazed. Flabbergasted.
The Warden’s palms lifted into a slow, patronizing clap, and he rolled his eyes behind his spooky mask. “Excellent performance, boys. Good job. You did it. You gaslit Dream into thinking he was a baby murderer. Now get up and apologize for it.”
Techno bolted upright with an incredulous sneer. “Heh?! We weren’t trying to gaslight Dream, why would we give a shit about that guy?”
“Yeah, he’s fucking ugly and that shade of green is wack!” Tommy piped in loudly. “Disgusting!”
Dream made a whimpering sound and his shoulders slumped with his frown. “Wow, okay. Not a good day for the Dream community…”
“C’mon, Sam, use your brain,” Wilbur drawled sarcastically. “We were trying to gaslight Mushroom Boy into giving us psychedelics. We left a note and everything! If he doesn’t hand over his shrooms, we’ll fake our deaths and frame his precious boyfriend for murder!”
George raised an eyebrow. “Who?”
Dream started crying. Again.
“…Anyways,” George huffed. “I have absolutely no idea what you idiots are talking about. I never received any such blackmail note.”
“Wh—! What?!” Ranboo spluttered. “I left it in your mailbox! I watched you pick it up and read it! What do you mean?!”
Something seemed to dawn on George then, as he raised his eyebrows and fished around in his mushroom cloak pocket until he withdrew a crumpled old note written in Wilbur’s childishly elegant scrawl. “Ohh, you mean this old thing? Sorry, I’m colourblind. I can’t read it.”
“AGH! The agony!” Wilbur spat, clutching his head in his hands. “What pathetic oversight! How could I have missed that?!”
Dream managed to compose himself enough to sniffle and ask George, “Wait, but—but you can still read when you’re colourblind, right? It’s written in black and white…”
George leveled him with a chilly glare. “Um, I think I know more about American Girl Dolls than you do, genius.”
“Babe, what the fuck does that mean?” Dream sobbed. “Also—you were just gonna let them put me away for a murder I didn’t commit?! How could you?!”
George rolled his eyes and glanced away with a disgusted curl in his lip. “I literally don’t even know you. I don’t care if some freak I’ve never met goes to baby jail or whatever. That’s your problem, not mine.”
Dream sunk to his knees and clutched uselessly to the hem of George’s shirt, blubbering and wailing. “George, please! It’s me, Dream, your best friend and roommate—we literally live together! How could you not care about me?!”
“Ew, what the fuck?!” George snapped, jerking away and slapping Dream’s hands back. “I live alone! You’re literally obsessed with me, it’s actually so pathetic.”
Before Dream’s lamentations could turn into an even louder scene, there came a rush of water, and one side of the cavern opened like a garage door to the grandiose spectacle of Captain Puffy and Philza Minecraft aboard an elegant pirate ship. They were sailing in through an open cove to the docked shore built outside the house, and when Puffy saw the bloodstained children, her eyes went twinkly with maternal happiness.
“Hey, kiddos! Guess who brought explosives—! OH!! Dream! What’re you doing here?!” Her warm greeting melted into something panicked, and she quickly shoved a box of extremely radioactive weaponry materials behind her back and out of sight.
Dream’s jaw dropped to his chest. “MOM?! You knew where they were the whole time?!”
Puffy’s brow beaded with sweat and she grimaced a nervous smile. “Wha—?! Uhh—I have no idea what you’re talking about! What’s all this blood? And oh my God, are those my kids?! Dream, how could you do such a thing—?!”
Phil ceased her rambling with a hand on her shoulder, his face drawn into a resigned sigh. “It’s alright, Captain. Time to drop the act. Techno already texted me about it, they figured us out.”
He held up his phone to show a video from Techno’s perspective of Dream, standing by the elevator and saying, “Wait, when did you start recording me? I never said—WAIT—HOW—WHAT—?!”
Dream furrowed his brow in confusion at the sound. “Wait, when did you start recording me? I never said—WAIT—HOW—WHAT—?!”
“So Gogy, you’re saying you won’t give us your psychedelic mushrooms?” Tommy interrupted, voice pleading and eyes watering with pouty sadness.
“Um, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t have any drugs.” George replied matter-of-factly with an apologetic shrug.
“What?! But I heard Sapnap call you a fungi!” Tubbo whined in protest.
George nodded, pleased, and patted Sapnap’s head in approval. “Hmm, I guess I am pretty fun.”
Just then, Karl stepped to the front of the group with his mouth pursed in a contemplative frown. “And, actually, the mushrooms on the SMP are available to anyone. There’s even a stall that collects them in bulk at the farmer’s market, if you want. They’re literally free.”
Phil straightened. “Oh fr?” His breath fell out of him in a wheezy laugh, and he shook his head. “Oh my God, sorry everyone. If I'd known that at the start we could’ve dropped the act a long time ago. My bad.”
“We’re gonna use them in our next tour special!” Ranboo chirped enthusiastically. “We’ll spike a couple batches of our optional enhancing popcorn so our audience thinks they’ve entered an alternate dimension when the show starts!”
“That’s actually tight as fuck, dude,” Sapnap applauded with a low whistle. “Like, to be honest, it was a little freaky at first when we thought there were creatures living in the mines, but I think the whole situation was worth it if it was all in the name of putting on a good show.”
“Hard agree over here,” Karl gushed, giggling.
Quackity hummed and nodded his vigorous enthusiasm. “You gotta get us front row tickets to your first show in Kinoko.”
Puffy gave them a cheeky grin and tipped her tricorn hat. “Of course! Anything for my duckling and his friends.”
Dream’s cheeks went pink and he glanced away, a tiny bashful smile curling his lips. “Mommm, I thought I told you not to call me that in front of everyone… It’s embarrassing…”
Puffy’s smile flattened. “What the fuck? I literally wasn’t talking to you.”
Dream’s mouth opened and closed with shock.
Quackity sneered and turned his nose up at Dream, spinning on his heel to put his back to him. “Yeah, shut the fuck up, man. My name’s literally Quackity—like a duck. I think it’s pretty fucking obvious she was talking about me, asshole.”
Dream blinked back tears and glanced up at the Captain, trembling. “Huh? Wh—Mom…?”
Puffy tilted her head back at him inquisitively. “Sorry, who are you again? I don’t believe we’ve met. Remind me of your name?”
You’ll never guess what happened next.
Dream started crying.
Again.
George whipped out his phone and resumed his shot on Dream’s face, snickering. “L.”
As though noticing Dream’s presence for the very first time, Karl bent down to get a better look at his features, at which point he snorted out a curious giggle. “Hey, doesn’t this guy kinda look like the paper plate mask dude from earlier?”
“Oh my God, he totally does!” Sapnap pointed and roared with laughter.
“THAT WAS ME!” Dream wailed, utterly inconsolable.
“No the fuck it wasn’t?” Quackity spluttered, face twisting in disbelief at the pure horseshit falling from Dream’s mouth. “In fact I’m pretty sure he explicitly stated that he wasn’t you, like at least a thousand times. Guy barely talked about anything else.”
Sapnap gasped with a remembered realization and patted Karl’s shoulder excitedly. “Wait, remember when he said he like, killed five kids from the traveling circus or something? Dude, that was so funny.”
Karl erupted into giddy peals of laughter and clutched his stomach with delight. “YEAH! Christ on a croissant, that guy was hilarious. I wonder what he’s up to these days?”
“What the fuck is going on?” Dream whimpered, only to be shushed immediately by George.
“RELAX!”
Sapnap’s laughter finally petered off and he wiped a tear from one corner of his eye, shaking his head. “Sorry Dream, you had to be there.”
“I WAS THERE!” Dream insisted. “I was the one with the mask! I’m the one that killed the kids!”
Just as it was the first time he confessed, for the smallest fraction of a second, it was silent enough to hear a pin drop.
“Oh my God…” Karl whispered, breaking the silence with a gasp.
“Dream what the fuck,” Quackity hissed between his teeth.
George examined his nails and said, “That’s seriously messed up.”
Sapnap just shook his head in disgust.
Then the Warden’s hands were on Dream’s arms again, clasping them in handcuffs behind his back. “Dream, you are under arrest for the murder of those five children,” he gruffed out, pointing to the bloodied bodies in the living room, all of which were sitting up and waving at Dream as he was carted away and into the elevator again.
“What?! NO! Stop, they’re not dead, they’re literally fine! THEY WERE GONNA FRAME ME!! They’re right there! STOP!”
“Mmhm,” Quackity tutted and shook his head. “Sure they were. So then how do you explain all this blood, hmm?”
“Were you even paying attention to the last ten minutes of conversation?!” Dream bellowed, wrestling against the Warden’s restraints. “It was all an act! GEORGE! Show them the note!!”
George recoiled, eyes glossing with tears. “Guys the horrible murderer is yelling at me, I’m scared…”
“Aw, shh… It’s alright, duckling,” Puffy cooed, disembarking from the ship to gather George in her warm and comforting arms. “I’ve got you, don’t be scared.”
The last words Dream managed to get out before the elevator doors closed behind him were, “JUST LOOK AT THE NOTE FOR THE LOVE OF—!”
And then he was gone.
Morbidly intrigued, Sapnap plucked the note from George’s hands and skimmed over the writing.
Turn around
:)
He did as he was told, dragging Quackity’s and then Karl’s attention along with him.
When they at last saw the face of the person waiting behind them, it was covered by a paper plate smiley face mask.
XD gave an awkward sitcom wave.
“YOOOOO!!”
“AYEE!! THAT WAS SO GOOD, MAN!”
“ROUND OF APPLAUSE!!”
The enraptured cheers of the audience echoed throughout the cliffside burrow, chasing after the enraged shrieks of a convicted murderer who confessed twice and still somehow thought he would get away with it. Ridiculous.
“Man,” Quackity sighed contentedly to himself amidst the din. “What a show. What a night.”