#Karl and Sapnap will bond over their past guilty actions and attempt to keep each other sane

[pomellon]

Mmm yes good this dead space au is tasty. I'm curious though, what IS Dream doing during all this? 👀 And maybe if you have thoughts on the other trio what's goin' on over with them too?

I was playing around with two ideas for Dream, either that he was already off the ship or that he’s still on it and simply don’t know his boyfriends are on it too until the last couple of hours of the event (I imagine the time frame of Sapnap and George getting on the ship and eventually managing to escape it is no longer than 10-12 hours, there’s just things constantly happening within those hours). I eventually decided to go with the latter since it would be more interesting for Dream’s character and make more sense to the story.

So Dream has been on the ship since the beginning, since before the Marker was brought on board and witnessed everything unfold on the planet colony and then eventually on the Ishimura. He was protesting bringing the Mark onboard from the very start, having seen the effects it had on some of the civilians from the colony that they brought up to study. But of course the religious fanatics thought it more important to retrieve their holy relic than to protect the lives of their crew. 

In hopes of learning more about the Marker and how it affects people Dream studied it pretty closely and he knows it's the artifact that is causing everything. It makes people have delusions, it causes them to die at the hands of each other or themselves, and it then mutates the DNA of the corpses, creating Infectors that spread the necromorph mutation, creating more dead bodies to infect.

Dream is also having delusions, but he’s more aware of them. He actually keeps seeing Sapnap and George even before they arrive on the ship. At first he ignores them, not falling for the Marker’s tricks, but the worse things get the more he starts to turn to his hallucinations for comfort. He knows that they’re not really there, but he starts talking to them to soothe himself.

This ended up making him believe Sapnap and George are just his normal hallucinations when he does get in contact with them, and he kind of acts like they’ve been on the ship the whole time. Sapnap easily goes along with it because he’s “seen” Dream too so it makes sense to him. Meanwhile George is trying to figure out what the fuck is going on and start question his own sanity with the way his boyfriends are acting. Maybe he’s the one going insane?

As for the other three, they don’t get added to the story until after the Ishimura events!

Karl is a scientist sent with a team to gather Marker shards on Aegis VII, or what’s left of the planet (spoiler, dnn manage to return the Marker to the planet where it, and part of the planet, is crushed when the Ishimura’s gravity tethers fail, releasing the planet chunk it was holding and sending it crashing back down miles below.). He is heavily influenced by just the shard they find and bring back to the ship, managing to decode part of the Marker’s purpose and architectural design to potentially build a new one. But he also ends up testing his knowledge which triggers another necromorph outbreak on this other ship. 

He survives but is taken in by EarthGov, the main governmental body of this setting, that wants to sweep all these Marker events under the rug. They torture him for his knowledge and then lock him in a cryo chamber for potential future use. The same has happened to dnn after they managed to escape the Ishimura.

Three years later we find Punz and Foolish on the Sprawl, a civilian space station built on the remains of Saturn's moon, Titan, which was broken into pieces in a planet cracking operation. Punz is a security and repair officer on the station while Foolish is a technician. They’re often paired up to fix things and are really close friends, maybe even a little bit more than that already. 

They’re doing their normal routine of getting called out to repair jobs around the station when they notice a lot of the issues they come across seem to have been deliberately sabotaged and tampered with. It's while they’re musing over this that they are notified of an outbreak on the station, and I’m sure you can guess what that means!

As it so happens, the cryo chambers the other four have been stored in are also on the Sprawl and Foolish, an agent of Unitology, is tasked to let them out amidst the outbreak. All six of them will end up getting separated and paired up to survive yet another necromorph outbreak.