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The sun beat down overhead as their little group of four all stumbled through the portal and onto the soft white sand of the beach.
“We need to-” Blue huffed, out of breath from all the running their escape had required. “-Find shelter. Like, now, before I pass out from exhaustion.”
Beside him, Cross collapsed, ragdolling onto the ground and landing face-down with his limbs splayed out at odd angles.
“…Case in point.”
Nightmare rolled his eyelights, placing Dream down on the ground from where he’d been held securely against the older guardian’s ribcage while they ran. Cross let out a loud snore and immediately began choking on the sand he’d accidentally inhaled in his sleep.
The negativity guardian sighed, shaking his head. “Alright, fine. Give me a half hour or so and I'll set something up.”
-
An hour later they all sat beneath a canopy of woven palm leaves, watching as Cross scarfed down a whole fish as fast as physically possible, grease dripping down his chin and staining his phalanges. Nightmare grimaced at the sight, slowly turning the stick in his hand that held a second fish over the fire located just outside of their little shelter.
Blue scowled, elbowing Cross in the ribs. “Manners. You're setting a pretty bad example for the kiddo, y'know.”
“Oh, like you're any better,” Cross scoffed around a mouthful of flaky white meat. Blue elbowed him a second time, harder.
“As fascinating as this is,” Nightmare interrupted, passing Dream the smaller fish he'd just finished cooking. “Which, for the record, is ‘not at all’ - where are we, and how long until we can leave?”
Cross stared thoughtfully out at the ocean, wiping oil from his face as he swallowed one last mouthful before tossing the picked-clean fish bones into the fire. After a moment he pulled up a window of Code, his eyelights scanning across the jumbled green text with ease.
“Well,” he finally said. “Turns out, this ‘verse is only made up of one world, so that should make our job easier. There is an issue, though.”
Dream looked up from the fish he was nibbling on, tilting his head at the older skeleton curiously.
“It's made up of roughly ninety-three percent ocean.”
Blue raised a brow. “So? We know how to work a boat.”
At that, Nightmare kicked him sharply in the knee, gesturing pointedly at the tiny deserted island they'd landed on, and, most notably, the distinct lack of any boats or boat-making materials.
“…Oh, right. That.”
“Yeah. That.” Nightmare hissed, massaging the bridge of his nasal cavity as though that would make his rapidly-approaching headache disappear.
“I mean, I guess I could turn us into merfolk,” Cross said with a shrug, as though that was a perfectly normal thing to say.
Blue stared at him. “What.”
“Merpeople?” The monochrome skeleton mused, either oblivious to his companions’ confusion or ignoring it entirely.
“What.”
“Merple,” he decided, nodding his head as though some great secret of the universe had been revealed to him. “Merple sounds good.”
“Yeah, great, good to know, but can we go back to the ‘turn us into fish guys’ bit?” Blue demanded, earning a shrug from Cross and nothing but a pair of deadpan stares from Nightmare and Dream. “Why are we doing that?”
“No boat,” Dream summarised helpfully, a grin on his grease-stained face as he took a large bite of his meal.
Cross shot Blue a look that said ‘of course the child understood that faster than you’, and was promptly tackled out of their makeshift shelter and onto the beach as Blue screeched, grabbing handfuls of sand and trying his hardest to shove the grains into Cross’ eye sockets.
Dream watched, giggling, as the two shouted and wrestled with one another beneath the midday sun, while Nightmare, having long since stopped caring about the duo’s chaos, simply continued to hum to himself as he roasted another fish over the fire.
-
“This is STUPID,” Blue declared, dragging himself and his new set of tentacles towards the ocean with his arms. When the very edges of the waves began to lap against his body, he stopped and turned to glare at Cross. “You did this on purpose, didn’t you.”
Cross, the only one still walking on two legs, snorted. “Don’t blame me for this. You’re the one who insisted on staying where you were instead of going over to the water.”
“He’s not wrong, you know,” Nightmare piped up from the rock he was clinging to, trying his best not to get dragged out to sea by the currents that kept catching on the eel tail now trailing behind him. “You did kind of do this to yourself, Blue.”
From somewhere to the right of the negativity guardian, Dream let out a happy cheer as he leapt in and out of the water like a dolphin, his new shining golden scales catching the sunlight each time he did so.
Blue made an angry grumbling noise, a scowl on his face as he continued to army-crawl his way into deeper waters. Finally, once he’d reached Nightmare and was floating alongside him, he turned back to the beach and called out, “IT’S YOUR TURN TO SUFFER, OREO-MAN! HURRY UP AND GET TO IT, CHOP-CHOP!”
Cross simply held up his middle finger in response, already pulling open another window of Code - his own, this time - as he waded out until he was waist-deep in saltwater. Suddenly, he felt very glad that he’d had the foresight to add ‘waterproof’ to his clothes’ Code alongside everyone else’s after that incident with the snake-garden-hose-thing a few months earlier.
With a slight crackling sound and a brief moment of glitching along his legs, Cross found he could no longer support himself enough to keep his head above the waves, and he went under with a splash.
When he emerged, coughing and spluttering as he spat up seawater and a few stray pieces of kelp, it was to the sound of Blue’s hysterical, wheezing laughter and Nightmare’s poorly-hidden chuckling at what had just happened.
He rolled his eyelights at the sound, and began swimming forward until he was close enough to splash them both in the face, receiving an offended screech from Blue as he did so. Cross’ movement through the waves was slow and awkward, as his newly acquired tail was taking some getting used to, but he wasn’t particularly worried, since none of the group was moving particularly fast - with the sole exception of Dream, who had taken to his new gold-and-black koi tail with a speed that was, quite frankly, terrifying.
“So,” Blue prompted after a moment of silence only interrupted by Dream’s delighted shrieking. “What do we do now?”
Cross shrugged. “What we usually do, but underwater, I guess.”
“Run around causing problems, try not to die, fail miserably, and then get chased out by the locals?” Nightmare deadpanned, folding his arms over his chest with a raised brow. “I sure would love to do that for the millionth time.”
“Explore.” Cross corrected, delivering a sharp flick to Nightmare’s forehead. “We’re going to explore, guys.”
“Yeah!” Dream piped up, poking his head out of the waves between the adults of the group, a beaming, skull-splitting smile spread across his face. The little corruption tendril waved - or wiggled, really - to them from where it was wrapped securely around Dream’s shoulders. “‘Splorin’s fun!”
Nightmare reached over to his little brother and placed a hand on the young skeleton’s head, the beginnings of a faint smile visible on his face. “It sure is, kiddo.”
-
Killer wasn’t sure what to think of the strangers currently splashing around at the edge of the reef, but he already knew he didn’t trust them. Their swimming was awkward and screamed of inexperience as they flailed about, struggling to keep their heads above water despite their gills, as waves mercilessly hammered away at their faces.
Really, the only one of them who seemed even slightly capable of navigating the ocean with any sort of skill was the little golden one, whose shining scales and frill-shaped fins bore a striking resemblance to Dream’s own.
Killer scowled up at the silhouettes of the newcomers, baring his fangs towards the surface where their shadowy figures were outlined by the fading sunlight, becoming fainter and fainter as the thick, dark clouds rolled in and the storm approached. Dream hummed thoughtfully from where he lay on his stomach in the sand next to Killer, his fins fluttering gently in the current.
“Should we warn them?” He mused, tilting his head as he eyed the tiny mer darting in and out of the group. “That storm will arrive awfully soon. And we wouldn’t want a little fry like that to get caught out in this weather, now would we?”
Killer huffed, flicking his tail. “I don’t trust it. Besides, the reef is one of the safest places to be during rough tides - no need to worry about them. They’ll be fine.” He paused for a moment, tapping his claws against a nearby rock shelf. “Probably.”
Dream shook his head, laughing in that shimmering, glittery way he did, like a string of pearls clicking gently against a sheet of seaglass in a shipwreck. “No need to be so paranoid, Killer. Not every strange mer we come across is out to get us, you know.”
“Yeah, just most of them,” Killer grumbled, folding his arms across his chest, and Dream got the sense that he would have rolled his eyelights if he had any.
“What about Cross?”
“Cross was an exception and you know it.”
Dream sighed quietly to himself, smiling fondly at Killer’s stubbornness. The two mers lay beside each other in comfortable silence for a long moment after that, watching the shadows of the four newcomers as they paddled awkwardly around the reef above like newly-hatched fry.
The concerned frown that had grown on Dream’s face slowly became more intense as they observed; until, suddenly, the koi let out a frustrated huff and shot off through the water with a sharp flick of his tail, leaving behind a startled Killer as he made a beeline for the group floating at the surface of the water.
-
Blue tilted his head curiously at one of the eight yellow tentacles that had replaced his legs, poking at one of the faint ring-shaped markings lining the skin.
“So, what species is this supposed to be, exactly?” He asked, raising a brow at Cross.
“Blue-ringed octopus,” Cross responded, staring curiously at his new fur-lined sea lion tail as he twisted through the water. “I removed the neurotoxin venom, though. You’re enough of a menace as it is.”
Nightmare coughed as seawater splashed up against his face, a large amount getting in his mouth as he tried his best to float in place, resisting the urge to return to the safety of his rock. “And how long have you been able to turn us into fish, exactly?” Dream leapt out of the water beside him, giggling, and he spluttered violently as the resulting wave swept over his skull.
“The whole time, technically. I just never had a reason to.”
Nightmare and Blue both turned to stare at him, and he shrugged.
“So you’re telling me,” Blue said with narrowed eye sockets as he slowly paddled towards Cross. “That you could have done this the ENTIRE time our groups were fighting back home? And just NEVER used it!?” He stopped, forehead-to-forehead with the monochrome skeleton as he glared at him.
Cross reached up and flicked him in between his eye sockets, making him yelp.
“No, stupid. It came from that power-boost Error gave me before we left. You were there when he explained what it could do. Numbskull.”
With a scowl, Blue reached out, ready to punch his friend in the shoulder as hard as possible. But before he could, a head popped out of the water beside the group, earning a shriek from Nightmare, an ‘Oooooh’ from Dream, and twin dead stares from Cross and Blue.
“Excuse me,” This reality’s Dream said politely as he rose from the water. “You wouldn’t happen to be lost, would you?” He smiled as he spoke, but there was a look in his eyes that said he was analysing their every move as he scanned the group.
“Maybe?”
“Depends on your definition of lost.”
“What kind of name is Lost, I’ve literally never met anyone named Lost, I don’t know what you’re talking about-”
“Very much so.”
Came the chorus of responses from the group, and Dream blinked in surprise, both at the answers he received and the familiar voices saying them. He squinted, leaning towards them with an expression on his face that the group knew all too well.
“…Cross? …Nightmare-?” He began to ask, but was interrupted by another mer erupting out of the water behind him.
Killer shook himself as he emerged, showering them all with droplets, and turned to Dream with a scowl on his face. “Seriously? You couldn’t wait for another few seconds before swimming off-”
“Killer.” Dream said, deadly serious. “Hush.”
Killer shut his mouth and turned to look at where Dream was pointing. As soon as he saw them, his sockets widened dramatically and he looked around wildly, trying to figure out what was happening.
“Who are you?” Dream demanded, his eyelights beginning to glow a furious, blazing gold. “And why, may I ask, do you look like our podmates.”
“We’re their evil twins.” Nightmare deadpanned, receiving a sharp look from Blue. He grumbled to himself, rolling his eyelights. “Okay, fine, I’ll shut up.”
“Explain.” Dream hissed, turning to Cross, who already seemed thoroughly done with this entire encounter. “Now.”
“Nooooo-no-no-no-no-no-no,” Cross shook his head in furious denial. “It is NOT my turn to deal with this. Blue?”
“Why ME?”
“Because I did it last time! And also you promised that if Dream was the one asking then you’d deal with him.”
Blue groaned, letting himself sink underwater as he did so, his grumblings becoming nothing but muffled blubs.
-
“None of that made any sense,” Killer huffed as Dream led the way to the pod’s cave home, weaving expertly between coral and sharp rocks while the newcomer floundered in the water behind him.
“Cope.” Blue snapped, narrowly dodging an oncoming fish. “I’m not going over it again.”
Nightmare rolled his eyelights at their bickering, keeping a tight hold on his little brother’s sleeping form as he carried him through the ocean. All the swimming had taken a toll on the kid, and he was currently snoring safely in Nightmare’s arms, held protectively against his ribcage.
Cross yelped as he swam face-first into yet another boulder, failing to steer himself away in time. “Ow…”
“Almost there,” Mer-Dream announced, as they approached a large ravine in the ocean floor, and he began to swim down into the shadowy depths, making a beeline for a spot about halfway down the rocky cliffside.
“Well, this is going to suck,” Cross sighed, pausing at the edge of the ravine and taking a moment to stare up at the sky, far above the distant waves overhead.
Nightmare snorted from beside him, bumping Cross’ tail with his own in a half-hearted attempt to be comforting. “Don’t I know it. These introductions are always so awkward.”
“I swear to the Angel, Killer, if you don’t stop asking stupid questions I am going to eat your spine,” Blue scowled, swimming over the lip of the ravine without a moment’s hesitation.
And, with a silent shared look of resignation, Nightmare and Cross followed behind him.