into the deep end - 30k T orufrey fic, focusing on memory trauma, disability, and romance.
the sweet oblivion of the victim, the poisoned freedom of the other.
for one moment - it had felt like two parts returned - the needed reunion of two disparate halves. no more secrets, no more pain.
the moment you get to give back what you never wanted to take. that moment, under the night-blooming flowers, when they had both let out the same single broken sigh of relief.
but they were never whole to begin with, were they?
qifrey swore he wouldn't say 'sorry' to this man any more if he could help it - sorry is cheap now. he didn't want to be in a position ever again where you only have 'sorry' left. so he just looks down into the threads of his blanket, strains his eye until it hurts, feeling his insides - his throat, heart and head - burn with pain. he expects more, but olly says nothing.
olly says nothing.
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woke up at 2 am in a cold sweat from an extremely stressful nightmare that there was a “disease” meter in SOS AWL
i found it out because i noticed a new icon under my health bar that looked exactly like this
from reading a guide (which i had to do while time moved since there was no way to pause) i learned that
you start with a randomly generated number of hidden Disease Points from 0-100
you can also increase/decrease your hidden Disease Meter by doing various things like snuggling sick animals / not washing hands / not sleeping / talking to certain npcs / eating diseased foods
every marriage candidate ALSO has a set amount of Disease Points
marriage candidates might refuse to marry you altogether if your Disease Points are too high, and at a certain point most npcs simply walk/run away from you on sight, and the music becomes all jank like in HMDS at high fatigue
when you get married your disease points are added to theirs, and if it is over 100% your child is born with the Diseased Personality, which overrides all the regular Naughty/Normal/Shy/Chatty personalities and makes any kind of skill development nearly impossible
i was especially distressed because looking at the table of contents rock had his own dedicated section to navigating his disease mechanics since they worked differently than the rest of the candidates
the rest of the dream was me reading the guide whenever i could, i kept trying to find moments when i could read it but for most of the dream it was really vague about rock, just ominously warning that he’s incredibly diseased and going “it’s best to avoid Rock because Well You Know”
so eventually i learned rock had 501 disease points which should be impossible since it’s meant to go from 1-100 (marlin had the second highest, at 70). i was despairing because it seemed impossible to enter chapter 2 with him in these circumstances, and time was moving quickly, but it turned out that you can cause an overflow error since the counter for child disease only counts to 200 before starting over, so if i got the maximum amount of disease points then it would wrap like 501 + 100 = 1 and our child would have the lowest possible disease of any child
so i spent the rest of the dream frantically trying to gain as many disease points as possible by talking to daryl repeatedly, touching as many surfaces without washing hands, eating failed dishes, talking to rock and agreeing with him during his multiple choice questions, but i got to the point where i was literally bedridden and had no options left to increase disease points since i was stuck in bed and no one would come visit / help me, i was just rotting with the Disease music blasting in my ears, awful
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