Work Text:
It starts with a simple conservation. A simple conservation between two friends/rivals who were just catching up. Dream and Technoblade were relaxing catching up and talking about anything they could, talking about the latest that they were doing, about what had annoyed them, about their friends turned family, and so on.
“You know, I feel like there isn’t any challenge anymore.” The piglin hybrid stated.
“What do you mean?” the masked companion asked.
“Like, hear me out. There comes a point where there is no challenge anymore. You can get OP items and gear even to the point where the Enderdragon can be easily killed or you can spawn several withers and those are even easy to defeat. Sure there is PVP, but sometimes that comes with its own issues. There just isn’t a challenge sometimes.”
That was the conservation that started it. As the good friend that Dream was he started to work. Manipulating and editing code to make the perfect gift for his friend, something to give him a challenge, something that doesn’t have the same problems as PVP. A new mob.
He spent months pouring over this, trying to perfect it making it perfect. Having big attacks that are capable of decimating a person in full enchanted netherite, having specific areas that players need to attack to do large damage and the subtle color shifts on the mob’s skin that hint at the weak points. Just like the ender dragon he put in a mechanism to heal it and a second form that the mob shifts to once it reaches a certain hit point, like the wither.
He slaved over it, spending days trying to figure out the perfect colors for the skin, making sure that the movement flowed from fighting to moving and back again. Tweaking the AI so it can look at a situation and find a way to kill whatever player is nearby. Fiddling with the mob’s behavior from the way it spawns to the way it walks. Dream craved out how it interacts with the world and how the world interacts with it, the corruption that can spread. He even created a spawning mechanism for it, something that can lay in wait until the right moment for it to come.
Dream will be the first to admit that he lost track of time. But in his defense, he wasn’t the only one. Techno was currently hyper focusing on farming potatoes, to become the number one potato farmer. George, Sapnap, Bad and Antfrost were busy doing “super-secret things that you don’t need to worry about”, aka: practicing for the next manhunt. There was no one to keep track of him, no one to tell him to stop. Will Nightmare bring his namesake? Yes, probably. Is he overpowered and almost impossible to kill? Again, yes. Will Dream end up nerfing him a little so that Techno has a chance of beating him? Maybe, it depends on how much he likes him at the time.
Dream suddenly had an idea. Before he had hyper fixated, Dream was talking to another friend, Wilbur Soot. Wilbur had been giving him advice on acting and making an impact for another project that he had pushed off. Dream reached in front of himself, swiping his hand to the side. See-through screens appeared and started to flash by, code and script flying by on these screens at an immense speed. His hand landed on one of the screens and he moved it over, so it was in front of him. There was the code he poured over, he had spent months making it, and he knew it by heart. It was easy, implementing a simple command. A command that would spawn it. An ingredient that needed to be “fed” to it, a single drop. With swipe of his hand down, the screens disappeared, the code implemented.
He snorted to himself, was he being a bit dramatic? Probably, but he didn’t care. Wilbur told him to embrace his inner theater kid. Not to mention, this whole thing can really be blamed on them, on Techno for giving him the idea, Wilbur, who told him to let his imagination go wild, his friends for not keeping an eye on him, honestly have they learned nothing from the manhunts? You don’t give him time to plan.
So there Dream stood, looking up at his masterpiece, his greatest gem, his child. Behind his mask he had a carefree smile, it was done! He couldn’t wait to show Techno. But the question was, when? Techno was currently busy, his birthday wasn’t coming up anytime soon, nor was any major holidays where gifts were exchanged. Maybe Nightmare wouldn’t come out anytime soon. Oh well, he is there until the time comes. Maybe Dream should make a whole environment for Nightmare. A place where his stasis container could rest and sit, until the time for Dream to hatch him, and unleash onto his rival.
Again Dream will state, he can’t be blamed for this. It is entirely his friends’ faults, he was in fact left unsupervised. With another code, he teleported himself and Nightmare below ground, in a cave close to spawn, he would later make a path to it. For the moment Dream stood admiring a complete work, months of code and constant tweaks, it was done, and it felt good. To stand in front of something he was working on for months, and it was done.
Dream was suddenly hit with something. Months he worked on this, what would he do now? He pulled out his communicator and started to look at past conversations, looking for something to do now. He stopped swiping at his communicator when he saw something. Another old conservation, between him and Sapnap, making a server for acting, with a rough story line and improve, with all their friends. Dream mulled the idea over and over in his head, already reached a decision, but who to invite.
With another swipe of his hand his menu came up and his finger hovered over the disconnect button, the button that would bring him back to a mass server with a Hub where he could use his admin abilities to create a new world for this acting server, when he stopped. He turned his head to look back at his creation, Nightmare, when an idea hit him. Techno was his rival, yes he was, he had faith in his fight prowess, but he also knew Nightmare’s. Maybe an entire server fighting together. A press of a button got rid of his menu, and his hand instead reached for his communicator. A tap and it was ringing.
“Hey Sapnap. Yeah, yeah, yeah, listen you and the others can practice on how to take me down in a manhunt another time. … Yes I know that’s what you’re doing…. Anyway! Listen, you remember that conservation we had, to make a roleplay server with our friends? Yeah, well are you still up for it? I found the perfect server…”
Dream left the cave where Nightmare was. Maybe it would serve for some important lore thing during this roleplay, but it wasn’t important currently. So Dream left, talking and planning with his friends, Sapnap had put his communicator on speaker so the others could hear.
He left the blood red egg behind him, the egg that would only hatch when a drop of his blood would touch the egg.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Okay, so how was he supposed to know that Tommy would try and hit the egg with an axe? Even more, how was he supposed to know that Tommy somehow, with his raccoon tendencies, had taken Quackity’s axe? Furthermore, how was he supposed to know that Quackity never cleaned the axe, that when doing a prison scene had accidentally cut him (but it was fine, Quackity freaked out and called a pause), before Tommy got his grubby hands on it? Finally, how was he supposed to know that the dried blood on the axe would count as enough to start spawning Nightmare?
Dream watched from spectator mode, as he usually did just to make sure everything was okay, as through chat everyone on the server got a new achievement. Chat was full of “________ has earned the achievement: A New Nightmare.”
Maybe he should stop everything? Just to inform everyone. He had already pulled up his admin screen, happy for the codes he put in, the codes to control Nightmare in case if it went too far. But he quickly was distracted and he watched as his masterpiece emerged. He watched as the egg started to shake and crack (has he mentioned how proud he is of that animation). A red haze filled the underground cavern, and the egg started to fall apart.
With a loud roar Nightmare was revealed, standing tall, his health bar and name appeared in everyone’s vision, signaling him as a boss, and Dream felt pride. Pride in the animation and coding. Pride in the shocked and stunned looks on his friends’, his family’s, faces. He felt pride as that look turned into terrified as Sapnap, who had a bow draw at the Eggpire making sure that they would move, fired the arrow at Nightmare and it did virtually no damage. What damage was done was healed as the vines around them pulsated and glowed.
Nightmare started his attack pattern, darting fast between everyone, making them lose sight of him only for him to appear behind Sapnap. Nightmare had his arm raised up, sharp talons elongated ready to bring down, when a voice cried out.
“PAUSE!!!”
In an instant Dream activated a code. A code that would freeze any mob, put any player that was falling into spectator mode, and deactivate any active Redstone, or TNT, or anything like that. Another activated code and Dream was out of spectator mode and in front of Bad, who called the pause. Pulling him down to the ground to sit and checking him over.
“Bad. Are you okay? Does this pause need to change into a cut? What do you need?”
Everyone stared at Dream sitting in front of Bad. Dream had reached into code and had already brought out blankets and some water bottles, Bad’s preferred way to destress or comfort when a pause or cut was call. Dream made sure to memorize what everyone had written down for their preferred way to destress.
“What…” Bad breathed out.
“What? ‘What’ what? What do you need? I need you to talk to me Bad.”
Bad lifted his hand up, moving to point in Sapnap’s direction. “What the muffin is that!!!!???”
Dream followed his hand. Looking at Sapnap, who at this point had taken several steps away from the frozen Nightmare, who was still poised to attack. “Do you mean Nightmare?”
“DREAM YOU MUFFINHEAD!!! YOU WILL EXPLAIN WHAT IS GOING ON NOW BEFORE I USE YOU AS TARGET PRACTICE FOR MY THROWING KNIVES!!!!”
As Dream started to run from an angry BadBoyHalo, several other people started to come out of their shock. Most of them started to address their Chat, apologizing and saying that they would be cutting stream here, and wouldn’t stream until they knew what was going on. The ones that hadn’t been streaming had join Bad in trying to pin Dream down and get an explanation. The stream that was cut last, Foolish’s, caught one last thing before the stream cut. It was Dream saying “This is Nightmare I spend months making him, he is my child and you can’t blame me for the inspiration! You left me unsupervised!!”