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This is a primer for those unfamiliar with Dead by Daylight or new to Cade Conner.
IF you wish to avoid graphic scenes please skip all text in between FADE TO BLACK and BACK FROM BLACK.
IF you want to skip directly to the action Skip to START
Dead by Daylight is an Asymmetrical horror game. Gameplay consists of a team of four Survivors whose objective is to repair generators to power an exit gate and escape. The Killer is sent to stop them from escaping by any means necessary. The in-universe reason for these games is that an Eldritch creature known only as the ‘Entity’ has gathered from across the multiverse Survivors and Killers to compete in these games for its own satisfaction.
Outside of the game survivors can be found relaxing with each other around a campfire and Killers can be found haunting their unique realms.
The Cade Conner take on the multiverse is slightly different. This game features unique cosmetic collections for Survivors and Killers as well as charms that rarely hold any gameplay value. My take is that every unique combination of cosmetics and charms is an entirely different Survivor or Killer, while all these characters share the same name, body, and often powers as their counterparts they are completely different iterations with different backstories, attitudes, beliefs. For example there is a significant difference between the default Trapper and the one with Frosty eyes. This also explains legendary survivor skins that completely change the character’s backstory. Take Meg whose default story is of a girl abandoned by her father and raised by a fierce tiger mom and runs from her problems, but put her in sundress and blonde hair and you have a southern tomboy who ran through her gentry family's fields chasing rabbits.
START
Ace threw the empty bottle against the wooden chest from which he grabbed it. Ace gave the chest a kick and its lid slammed shut. “Wish, this thing had tobacco.” Ace said, sitting up to open the lid on the chest. His empty bottle had been replaced with a new murky liquor. “Oh well!” Ace popped the cork and slumped back down inside the back of his Clipper, cargo plane.
There was still some charge left in the magic mirror that the Entity tasked him with viewing. Ace subconsciously fiddled with it as he did with dollar coins. Not every Ace had the skill to perform magic tricks with cards and coin, but it seemed most of the Aces could easily learn.
Ace was halfway through the bottle before a rapping knock sounded on the door next to him.
“Enter!” Ace yelled
Haddie entered. This Haddie was called Future Haddie, on account of her futuristic bodysuit. Her pants had neon lights that connected to her tight fitting half top. It was half a top because a diagonal line ran from the middle of her chest, exposing neon pinkish fishnets that hugged the body suit. She had a streak of pink in her hair, instead of the white or blue most Haddie’s wore.
Ace always thought she was a bit softer than the other Haddies. Of course, He wasn’t the stereotypical Ace hanging out at the card table or makeshift dance club. The typical Haddie though, they were tough, always looking for an excuse to fight back, inside and out of a trial.
Haddie set herself back against the same wall as Ace and closed the door. “Is that your first bottle or second tonight?”
“Third.” Ace answered frankly.
“Rough trial?”
“Nah she was a baby plague, didn’t even vomit once.”
“Oh, okay.” Haddie looked over at him but his face was emotionless. She let silence fill the cargo hold as she started to stretch out for a nap. (If he want’s to talk he’ll talk) she thought.
“Don’t you think it hurts more reminding yourself of the past?” Ace swished his liquor in the bottle, already down to a third.
“You know I don’t. I wouldn’t have begged for you to share your space if I did.” Haddie knew that he wasn’t really asking about her. She had been sleeping in his cargo plane for over a year, when she wasn’t in trial or hiking back to Ace’s cargo plane. “I wouldn’t have walked the past two days if these steel walls didn’t provide me the comfort of the ship I grew up on.” She ran her hand against the cold steel beam. “I know she is my safety blanket, though she is your plane.”
“Well It’s not like I’m trying to forget the past. It’s just that after so many years of being stuck here. I didn’t expect to remember something that I had forgotten.” Ace took another sip to stop himself from explaining more.
“Was it a good memory?”
“Bittersweet.”
Haddie laughed softly, it was a kind laugh. Ace felt her laughter grow within him and he chuckled as well. “Thanks.” Ace said after the laughter faded. He found himself smiling into his empty bottle. “So are you… uh… in the mood?”
“Not tonight, Captain. Let a lady sleep.”
Ace was deciding what to do next, as the Entity’s fog seeped in through the seams of the plane and surrounded him.
For the next three hours Ace had trial, after trial. During one where the killer, the popstar that Ace hated, spent the trial staring at a wall, Ace got the chance to ask a Vittorio about the mirror. Vittorio didn’t know much but he knew that if the Entity or the Observers wanted him to have it there was a reason. Vittorio told him he would come visit in between trials to have a better look. Ace used the opportunity of the AFK killer to recharge the mirror. Jane and Jack used the opportunity to relieve some stress.
After being torn apart by chainsaws, having no less than three ghostfaces slit his throat, and a murderous doll knock his teeth out, Ace was finally awake and sitting in his flight chair. After being murdered it was always as though you awakened from a dream, whereas if you escape the fog envelops you and dissipates leaving you standing wherever the Entity sees fit.
Ace opened his cockpit door and stepped outside to finish his cigarello out of courtesy to the sleeping Haddie in the back. Three flashlights appeared at the tree line as he finished his last drag. The Vittorio from the earlier in white, one in plain leather, and one in black leather with red inside, approached. One of them yelled “Hail!”
Ace quickly stepped to the treeline to shush them. “Shh, Tech Haddie isn’t sleeping.”
Two of them killed their flashlights and the third pointed his at the ground. “Should we head over back to the nearest campfire.” The nearest campfire was a half hour's walk. “That’s up to you. Have a look first.” Ace handed the Vittorio in white the glowing mirror.
“So how did you say it works?” He asked.
“Well so long as the mirror is charged like a cell phone, I was able to look past my reflection and see through the eyes of one of the Entity’s crows. I don’t know how it knows what to show you.”
Vittorio held up the mirror and its glow instantly faded. “Hm.”
Ace grabbed the mirror back frustrated he would need to recharge it, but it lit back up instantly. Ace looked into the mirror past his reflection and saw, that plague in red chasing a Meg around a T wall. “I guess it only works for me.”
The Vittorios gave grunts to each other in acknowledgement. The one in white stroked his beard and asked. “Are you able to choose what you see?”
“I don’t know. Let me try, give me something or someone to look for.”
The Vittorio in black answered “Look for something you know isn’t in this realm. Something, not someone. Don’t give the Entity any ideas.”
Ace thought of his old fighter plane and stared into the mirror past his reflection. Soon it showed him as a younger man approaching his old bird on a bright afternoon. From perched on top of the hangar where the birds were worked on. He remembered clearly that day, it was the day he scored high marks and won an award for his squadron in drills.
“Alright, I’m seeing a memory from before the fog. It’s from one of the crows' eyes clearly perched on top of a hangar. This happened long before I was taken to the fog. But it’s not showing me where my old plane is right now, which would probably be a decom yard.”
The Vittorios sighed in unison.
“What? What does that mean?" Ace asked
Both the one in white and black answered over each other. “It’s useless.” “It’s the Entity.”
The one in plain leather explained. “It can only show you things that the Entity has seen. Which means we won’t be getting any new information or allow us to escape this realm. Our magics are bound by whatever rules the Entity feels like having at the time. We were hoping that through the mirror we could break through to the Observers but that appears not to be the case.”
“Well I’d invite you guys over for a bottle but Haddie is sleeping. It takes her a few days to make it back from where the fog drops her off and she needs to sleep.”
“The Entity doesn’t bring her directly back here or the campfire?” Vittorio in black asked, confused.
“No, I almost always wake up in my chair. She said it drops her off in that strange alien forest.”
“You haven’t moved her chest over here?” Vittorio in white asks, stroking the tip of his beard.
“No, she just uses mine for food and supplies.”
“Well that’s why she is appearing so far away. Have her move her chest next time.”
“Wait what?”
“It’s common sense, you appear near your chest after trials.”
“I’ve been here almost a decade. How would I have known that’s common sense?”
"Well, we thought you knew.”
“You assholes need to start a school. I bet there are a dozen Fengs who would rather appear inside of the abandoned homes or near the hospital beds, then the middle of the fucking woods.”
Despite the cold and darkness the Vittorios were glowing with shame and embarrassment.
Ace continued “Go on now, tell the others, not everyone has a fucking clue what’s happening. New versions appear every day and are sleeping on the ground in the woods.”