#Worm for Brains Mavis Werther

[rjalker]

[ID: The “Drake, where’s the door?” Meme. Two screenshots from Drake & Josh, showing them standing in a treehouse with solid wood walls, with a door painted on one wall. Josh has his hands folded in front of him, his back to the fake door. He is labeled, “Mavis”, and Drake is labeled, “Quartz”.

Josh asks, “Quartz, why are we staring at a dead body?”

The camera switches to show Drake, laughing incredulously, edited so he is saying, “Uh, duh, so I’ll know what he looks like in my next life so I can kill him again!”

End ID.]

[rjalker]

Bev and Chez, finding themselves in a horror-movie situation but refusing to abandon their totally-possessed-by-a-demon friend anyways:

[ID: The meme of Lord Farquad standing on a balcony with two knights, editing so he is saying, “We may die, but that is a sacrifice we are willing to make”. End ID.]

[rjalker]

[ID: A digital drawing showing a person with brown skin standing in a doorway, with one hand on the frame, and the other hand lifted to hold the other side, a small, bloody knife clutched in their hand, with a long, segmented gray caterpillar wrapped around their arm that is also covered in blood. They have long, curly dark brown hair that is mostly flat down their back. They are wearing a pink sleevless shirt with yellow stars across it.

In front of them, further down the hallway, is a silhoette of a person wearing a hooded cloak, and a side view of their face is visible off to the side of the image, showing them having pale skin and light blue eyes. A doorway with the sky visible is at the very far end of the hallway.

A puddle of blood is in the foreground, behind the person with the knife, and two orange and yellow webbed tools like bat wings are on the side of the image opposite the hooded figure, with one of them cut off by the edge of the drawing.

End ID.]

Alright new version with the colors fixed since I don’t know what the fuck was going on with my old laptop but it displayed the colors completely wrong to what they actually were...which explains why they always looked different on my phone, but I was assuming the problem was my phone, not the laptop >:/

Anyways here Mavis and Quartz. SKD should be stumbling down the hallway since he already got stabbed once, but I was being lazy and I’m still being lazy.

Mavis is the human, Quartz is the Brain Worm. 

[rjalker]

I can’t find the original post >:(

but at one point I had a dream that as part of the bird-people universe there was a species of giant cuckoo that had evolved to hide eggs in “human” nests (the original dream still called them human even though their evolution diverged so long ago) and all the humans could just really easily tell which eggs were thers and which weren’t, but also, they didn't’ care. They’re all just pretty much universally like, “it’s a free baby” and literally just raise the actual literal baby bird alongside their own kids, and it’s treated like just another member of the family.

it was super cute.

[rjalker]

Mavis: Quartz, why are we staring at this dead body?

Quartz: I wanted to memorize his face.

Mavis: ......why.

Quartz: So I can kill him again in my next life.

[rjalker]

Bev, singlehandedly dragging xel totally-possessed-by-a-demon-right-now friend through the woods: THE UNIVERSE IS TESTING ME TODAY AND I DON’T CARE IF I FAIL

[rjalker]

Mavis: why are we running? Why don’t we just transfor--

Quartz: I have never flown before and I am trying to save our lives, not break our neck crashing into a tree.

[rjalker]

also as an addition to the rules of the magic according to the dream: if you don’t get in the water at all, then you both fucking die and sucks to be you.

[rjalker]

[ID: Ten images, all different versions of the first, with the others cropped, with added text and diagrams to show different parts.

The main image is a simple digital drawing of a body of water that has been separated into sections using rocks, with part in the foreground with darker, deeper water than the ones next to and behind it. All of the water is brown, with the shallowest almost golden in color as the sun rises from the bare trees in the background, rising on brown hills. The edge of the sun is visible as a ball of white coming up behind the trees, and the sky is in a gradient from pink at the bottom, to green, and to blue at the upper edges of the picture.

The trees are casting long shadows onto the water.

The next nine images are cropped versions of the original, showing only the water, and the very bottom trunks of the trees.

The first three have black arrows drawn across the water. The first also has a dotted line drawn across the middle of the pond. The arrow goes towards it, then turns around to go back the way it started, and is marked, “they die”.

The second has the arrow going all the way across to the other side, and is marked, “you die”. 

The third has the arrow go all the way across, then turn around and go back, and is marked, “you both live”.

The next version shows just the cropped image of the pond, without anything extra added. The next shows the pond, with green, yellow, orange, and red highlights added overtop. The outer layer next to the rock dam is marked green. the area further in is marked in yellow, further in than that is marked orange, and the very middle of the pond is marked red, then darker red.

The next three have sections of the lave outlined in black, and filled in with diagonal lines, minus the highlighted colors, but in the same area.

The green part is marked, “You’re fine”.

The yellow and orange part is marked, “turn around now”, with now underlined for emphasis.

The red part is marked, “yeah, you’re dead”.

The last image has a stick figure drawing of a small boat drawn into the middle of the pond, with one stick figure person in the boat, and another in the water. The person in the water is standing, holding up curved paddles shaped like bat wings. The person in the water has their arms lifted to the boat, shouting, “fuck you”.

An arrow points to the person in the boat, and reads, “he’s a peice of shit”.

Large text across the bottom reads in parenthesis, “not to scale, they’re too big but it’s a work in progress”.

End ID.]

The pond from the original Brain Worms dream since I found the original post and suddenly remembered exactly what it looked like!

It was part of a river that went through a forest, and part of it had been sectioned off with rocks to make a dam so that the water was deeper. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, the Serial Killer Dude (SKD) from my dream did that as part of his evil plan to kidnap and murder people.

The water in the deeper part rose to the edges of the rock wall, and went over a little at a time because of the current of the river, but never fast enough to get it back to its normal level.

I can only assume that SKD fucking with it like this is the reason that swimming in this area without already being bonded is now dangerous, but the dream didn’t elaborate.

The first set of rules - swimming to the middle and turning around, swimming across and getting out, and swimming across and then swimming back, are the normal rules for the magic, they didn’t change. Those apply after you’ve started to bond with a Brain Worm, when you’re in Stage 3™.

If you swim halfway out and then turn around, the Brain Worm’s mind will die, but you get to keep their body and your mind. So you can now leave your body whenever you want to go around as a Brain Worm, which would mostly be helpful for swimming. Your body will magically be kept alive while you’re not in it, so you wouldn’t have to worry about it drowning. When your body eventually dies of old age (assuming you’re actively using it), you can either go back to the pond and live with the rest of the Brain Worms, or you can find another host and hope they’re not going to kill you when they swim into the water. You could also just discard your body whenever you wanted, it’s not like you have to keep it. You are now pretty much immortal unless you’re killed, since Brain Worms don’t die of old age, they’ll just eventually lose their colors.

If you swim across the whole thing, and climb out on the other side, your mind will die, but the Brain Worm and your body will live, and they’ll get to keep your body if they want it, or they can just go back under water again. Same rules apply as above, they can keep or discard your body as they please, find a new host whenever they feel like it, ect.

If you swim across all the way, and then swim all the way back, you both get to live. Your mind is stored in their body until they die, so you can both leave your body and wander around as a Brain Worm, and you’ll both share control over both bodies, though when you’re not in your body it still goes into a magical coma/stasis. When your body eventually dies you can both leave to go back to the pond or find another host or do whatever, and if you do decide to find a new host, it’ll be the three of you instead of two sharing the two bodies, and on and on with however many hosts you take. There is no limit to how many people can be bonded at once, though if nothing goes wrong it takes forever, since most people are bonded for a normal human lifespan before their body dies and they decide to find someone else.

If you don’t get in the water at all, you both die. Sucks to be you.

The danger zones don’t exist normally, it’s only because SKD’s been fucking with the natural geography(?) of the pond. The river is meant to be flowing normally over top of the entrance to the under water cave so that they can get oxygen and nutrients and fish and stuff, but since he built a dam, he’s fucking up all kinds of shit in the water, and attacking them whenever they come to the surface to try and negotiate, so now they’ve started attacking whenever anyone or anything goes in there, since they’re being constantly attacked and their sources of food sabotaged. They’re pretty much under siege.

If the river were running normally, it would be perfectly safe to go swimming in their area, but while the dam is there, you’re more likely to get murdered in revenge since they can’t tell the difference between you and SKD. They aren’t able to just break the dam themselves because it’s reinforced with magic, so even if they all worked together, they couldn’t push any of the rocks out of place. And they could technically just leave through the cave, but if they can’t bring any supplies with them, they can’t survive the (very, very long) trip to the next city.

SKD is kidnapping humans, and chucking them into the middle of the lake so that the Brain Worms come to the surface to try to fight, and then he catches everyone in a magical net. This stopped being effective after the first time he did it, since the Brain Worms aren’t idiots and they aren’t going to swim into a trap twice. But he keeps doing stuff to piss them off, so the more hot-headed and inexperience's ones will be tempted to come after him anyways.

Quartz along with many other people got captured the first time he did his trick, and She Whose Name I Did Not Learn got captured much more recently, which she did on purpose so that she could find out what was happening to the ones he’d already taken and try to rescue them.

[rjalker]

List of characters that have shown up so far, and their pronouns. It’ll update whenever new characters show up.

feel free to use/edit the neopronouns if you like them

it’s also where I’m keeping track of how much I’ve written each day for NaNoWriMo.

[rjalker]

well if I’m going to officially give the bird-people familiars it’s kinda now or never lol...................................................

one one hand yes.

on the other they weren’t in the dream so I’d have no clue what the fuck they’d be doing in the set scenes

[rjalker]

Besides getting a Best Friend For Life, the ability to breathe underwater, and also getting to be Pretty Much Immortal (you won’t die from old age) what kind of benefits should you get from being bonded with a Brain Worm....

Because someone just tackled Mavis and Quartz to the ground from excitement so I have to figure out if they get any defensive abilities that are about to activate lol.

Mavis, your sibling needs a name...

[rjalker]

Here’s a MS Paint comparison for future reference. The bird people weren’t house sparrows, but I’m too lazy to find a picture of a different species.  (Italian, Cape, and Spanish sparrows more closely match what they looked like, since they also had patterns on their chest)

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/100252904 sparrow

https://www.pexels.com/photo/selective-focus-photography-of-orange-tabby-cat-1170986/ cat 

[ID: A picture of an orange cat sitting on a table, looking in the direction of the camera, with a picture of a house sparrow cut out and pasted in as though it is sitting beside the cat. The sparrow has been resized so that it is around the same size as the cat. End ID.]

[rjalker]

Anyways I’ve decided that you can, in fact, use them as headlamps because I think it’d be funny. You just have to carry around a spray bottle with water in it.

This does however mean that if you’re trying to sneak while it’s raining, you’d have to try and keep your head dry, so that could pose some problems.

[ID: A digital drawing showing a human character with brown skin and long curly brown hair, drawn from the shoulders up against a dark background, wearing a pink tank-top with yellow stars on it, and a grey pandemic mask. There is an opening in their forehead, and something is glowing bright blue from inside it, while they look off to the side with their eyebrows slightly raised. End ID.]

[rjalker]

Mavis: I’m fine, ien, really!

Chez and Bev: Mavis, you have a giant gaping hole in your skull and your brain is gone. You are not by any definition of the word ‘fine’.

[rjalker]

Mavis: my brain feels foggy--

Mavis: hey wait a fucking minute