As the blanket of sleep slowly drifts away and leaves Fundy to his senses, the more Fundy braces for the dreaded sound of his alarm to wake him. On queue, the blaring sounds of the default alarm sound fill the room, forcing Fundy to wake up and get out of bed.
Standing up and quickly stretching, Fundy decides to…
[[look around the room.->look around the area.]]
[[leave the room.]]Opening the door, Fundy enters the corridor and beelines towards the bathroom door.
[[Continue->get ready to go out]]It’s a copy of a textbook on method acting for beginners. Colorful markers and bookmarks stick outside it, lovingly indicating all sorts of notes Fundy’s written throughout the years. Fundy smiles fondly flipping through the pages, he must have had it since high school.
[[Look around the room->look around the area.]] The frame is covered in various puffy stickers ranging from sushi to cartoon dogs. In the frame is a picture of Jack getting doused in water by yours truly. //I think Eret wrote something on the back, Fundy remembers. //
[[Look around the room->look around the area.]] It’s a bottle of some pill with too long of a name for Fundy to memorize to treat his insomnia. The bottle is almost empty, so Fundy makes a mental note to get it refilled soon. Fundy lets out a grunt after realizing he probably needs a restock of his T-Shots too.
[[Look around the room->look around the area.]] He does his morning routine, going to the bathroom and washing his face or whatever, before grabbing a pair of black jeans and an old hoodie from the door handle.
Fundy hastily puts the hoodie on while walking into the kitchen. Once he puts his head through it, he scopes out the kitchen, searching for something to eat. His eyes hone in on an apple in the corner, deciding that it might as well be “breakfast” for the day.
Upon biting into it, Fundy frowns when he realizes it's gone a bit bad, he sighs, making a note to get groceries later today.
He finishes the apple in under a minute flat, aiming (and missing) the core into the trash can as he hastily slips on his shoes and walks out the door.
[[Continue->walk out door]]He was intending to go get some groceries but was quickly interrupted by a poster on the nearby telephone pole. It was a pretty creepy-looking image of a poorly scanned picture of a person sleeping.
[[Read?->read?]]“Having odd dreams or out-of-body experiences?
If so, contact the Sleep Buoyancy Investigation (S.B.I.). We are an independent research group dictated to the research of the subconscious and conscious mind and how it can relate to unworldly powers. For just a small amount of your time, you can further science for generations.”
Well. They sure had balls.
[[Continue->grab contact information]]Fundy grabs the small slip of paper on the bottom of the poster. He’s the only one that’s bothered grabbing a slip.
[[Continue->go back home]]He picks up the basics and picks up a prescription from the pharmacy across the street. He makes his way home, debating on making the trip to the address on the poster.
//It’s a Friday and he's all alone. Why the hell not.
//
[[Continue->arrive at testing center]]
It’s a few hours later, around 10 P.M., and Fundy took the last good bus to this area and he’s greeted by an office building that looks like a hospital more than a “sleep research facility”, or whatever. He enters the building and is greeted with a fluorescent-lit room and that pale shade of hospital green. He sits in one of the chairs against the wall.
[[Look around waiting room->look around waiting room]]
[[Do nothing->continue waiting]]Fundy bounces his leg and decides to…
[[look at the brochures on table->look at brochures]]
[[look at the wall->read posters on the wall]]
[[look at front desk]]
[[Continue waiting->continue waiting]] Fundy continues to wait for a few more minutes until he hears the footsteps of someone clicking on the floor. He straightens his back (gotta show he’s a professional after all), and waits for the door leading to the rest of the building.
Well when that door opened, nothing could have prepared him for who was about to come out of that door.
//What the fuck is Wilbur doing here?
//
[[Continue->get called in by wilbur]]The brochures advertise a course on theoretical quantum physics, something that Fundy does not have the brain power to read right now.
[[Look around the waiting room->look around waiting room]] The posters are of various informational posters about sleep. One of them talks about eating cherries and warm milk to fall asleep faster and how they’re “natural methods”.
[[Look around the waiting room->look around waiting room]] There’s no one at the front desk, but there’s a sign that says “Taking a break, will return soon!”
[[Look around the waiting room->look around waiting room]] Wilbur clearly must have not noticed him because he was still looking at a clipboard when he walked into the waiting room, scribbling on some sort of form but when he glanced up the way his face fell was almost instant.
Fundy tried opening his mouth to say something but Wilbur beat him to it, “Well, uh. You’ve come here because of weird dreams, yeah?”
Fundy nodded in response, “Yeah, yeah. I’m here because of the…dreams.”
“Great! Just uh, follow me and I’ll lead you to the study room.”
[[Ask Wilbur why he's working here->ask why wilbur is working here]]
[[Don't acknowledge Wilbur->take deep breaths and ignore it]]
“Will…I uh, didn’t know you worked in a place like this!”
“Well, I didn’t know you had weird dreams either.”
“Uh, yeah. Didn’t tell you because it’s my shit to deal with—may I ask why you work here?”
Wilbur didn’t answer, “I don’t mean it as rude or anything! Just…didn’t expect you to work here.”
Wilbur sighed, “They had an internship I took up back in college, and I guess I did a good enough job that they hired me full time when I was desperate.”
“Oh.”
They walked in silence until the end of the hallway.
[[Continue->wilbur continues/explains]]Fundy swallowed his beath and followed Wilbur into the end of the hallway in silence and anxiety. He did not have the energy to question Wilbur right now.
[[Continue->wilbur continues/explains]] Opening the door to the familiar brown carpet way, Fundy turns the corner to the stairway and makes his way down to the street.
He makes his way to the lobby, checks his mailbox, and makes his way outside.
[[Continue->see sign post with sbi form]] Wilbur ushers Fundy into one of the rooms.
Upon walking into the room, Fundy is greeted with a minimally decorated room with nothing much, just some comfy chairs, a table, and potted plants. Wilbur sits down in one of the chairs and motions Fundy to sit down with him after he fills something out on his clipboard.
“So,” Wilbur said while removing a pen lid with his teeth and spitting it across the room, “what sort of dreams have you been experiencing?”
“First of all, ew, gross, Will,” Wilbur scoffed in response but slowly got up to pick the pen cap off the floor, “I guess, I’ve sorta had a track record for weird dreams?”
“Mhm, continue?”
“Yeah, uh, I promise I’m not crazy or anything but—I think I can tell the future?”
Wilbur’s eyes widened, “Oh?”
“I KNOW, I know, I promise I’m not making it up—”
“No, no! I uh, I believe you, Fundy. Just tell me a bit more, yeah?”
“Oh. Okay, right. But, yeah. Sometimes when I’m really tired, like //really// fucking tired I sometimes go on these, blank thoughts? Like, I can’t focus on anything else but my breathing and shit because I’m just that tired. And uh, then, I have these weird dreams that don’t really make any sense but make sense with stuff that happens in the future?”
“Mmm,” Wilbur hummed while jotting down notes, “do you fall asleep when that happens?”
“No, not really. It’s sorta like, my body feels like it’s sleeping but I’m not sleeping. I tried telling a doctor about it and she just gave me some sleep medication and said it was probably sleep paralysis or something.”
“But it doesn’t feel like sleep paralysis?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh.”
Wilbur continued to scribble more notes before escorting Fundy into another room across the hallway.
“Well what you’ve told me is really interesting, so uh, I’m gonna run a test on you, not anything bad, just listening to some meditation. Is that alright?”
“Oh. Sure? You better not do anything bad, Will!”
Wilbur let out a small laugh and promised Fundy that “He wouldn’t hurt him if he could.”
And with a click from the door, Fundy was alone.
The room was pretty sparely decorated as well, it was a dimly lit room with one painting of flowers and a bed.
[[Continue->lay down on the bed]]“Alright, I’m going to play the meditation now,” Wilbur’s grainy voice said over the intercom, “I’ll be monitoring it, but just listen to the meditation and follow through it.”
Fundy gave a thumbs up, and after a “Yeah!” from Wilbur, he laid down on the bed.
It was an alright bed, a bit hard but…bearable.
[[Listen to the meditation->listen to the meditation]]The intercom started playing meditation through the room, a calming melody of wind chimes being the backing music.
Fundy followed the meditation’s instructions, breathing in and out, unhinging his jaw, releasing any tense muscles he might have had.
But since he just so happened to currently be in a research facility, the meditation got…weird. After his body was relaxed it walked him through various ways to improve his focus and “try to see outside the room”, whatever that meant. It moved onto what Fundy can only describe as trying to astral project into another realm of reality, which, Fundy tried very hard not to laugh at, but went along with it anyway.
And //holyshitwhatthefuckitworked//.
Fundy was having those weird dreams again. Nothing really happened besides feeling as if he was looking at the front lobby and feeling a strange sense of other…things alongside him but to say he was freaking the fuck out would be an understatement.
The meditation ended while he wasn't noticing because he came back to, reality he guesses, after Wilbur poked him on the arm.
Fundy shot back up and after some deep breaths, started answering questions for Wilbur.
“Did the meditation help you relax?” Head nod.
“Did you experience out-of-body experiences?” Head nod.
“Did they feel real and not dreamlike?” Head nod.
Wilbur’s eyes glowed at every single response, excitedly ticking off every box on the form before practically skipping his way into another room for more experiments.
[[Continue->get led into another room]] Both of them enter the other room, again, equally decorated as the rest of the rooms. Fundy was thinking maybe they didn't actually have enough furniture and just went, “Oh shit. Gotta work with what we got, I guess!”
Anyway, Wilbur sat him down at a table and started setting up…something.
Wilbur finished setting a cardboard box up, having only a small opening in the back to place his hands in. He took something out of his pocket, placed it inside the box, and shook it around for a bit.
“Alright. Fundy, there is a die in the box, could you try to tell me the number it landed on?”
“Uh. Sure?”
“Just…try to recreate the feeling the meditation made you feel, okay?”
Fundy nodded in response and tried to rest his body and really focus on the box. Letting his body loose and shutting his eyes, he could slowly start to see something inside the box.
It was a piece of dice (or //die// as Wilbur always called it) that had a 6 facing upwards.
“It’s a six, I think?” Fundy said while still focusing on the dice.
Wilbur, making a humming sound, shook the dice again before asking what it landed on again.
Fundy answered again, “It’s a 2,” then again, “5”, and again around 6 more times until Wilbur told him to stop.
“Fundy, you got all of them right.”
“Wait really?”
“Well, yeah! You got all of them right and like, a one in a trillion chance—”
“So wait, I wasn’t just…hallucinating or something?”
Shaking his head, Wilbur started to go on a long-winded lecture about quantum physics, or something. Fundy had a mild headache and interrupted Wilbur about it anyway. Wilbur didn’t seem to shaken up by the fact and just handed him a painkiller that Fundy dry swallowed.
Fundy was led back into the meditation room and given instructions, again, to lie down on the floor and focus on the meditation when he was ready.
Wilbur closed the door behind him and the moment the door clicked, Fundy sank onto the floor and started to ask himself how the fuck he got here.
[[Continue->get asked to lie on the floor with meidtation playing]] Fundy prepared to get out of the room, but when he opened the door to the hallways and proceeded to walk through it.
Now, that should have been fine and dandy, right? Until he started looking through the doors only for all of them to be filled with nothing but sand.
He stopped in his tracks and just, stood still just to make sure it wasn’t his brain playing any tricks on him. A few seconds of staring into the door later, he walked through the door.
The place he arrived at was weird. Nothing in sight except for a vast desert and a single building in the distance. Going to investigate, Fundy arrived at the building relatively quickly and opened the worn-out door to go inside.
The inside of the building was very poorly lit, even more so than the nighttime sky outside which how the fuck you do that almost impressed Fundy.
He walked down the stairs into the basement where he was greeted with a desk that’s definitely seen better days and a book. He picked it up and started reading through it.
Slowly though, as he started to read through the pages the world started to (text-style:"buoy")[melt].
Before Fundy could even comprehend half of what was happening, he felt as if he was being ''//watched//'', hundreds of eyes looking at him all at once, all feeling as if they were waiting for him to breathe the wrong way, make a move, or do ''//anything//'' that would make them all grab him all at once. All of a sudden he felt as if his entire being was on fire, burning as something scratched within him, //clawing// its way out to escape.
Fundy couldn’t remember anything much past that besides fire and screaming. Whether it was his own screams or someone else’s he couldn’t remember. Sometime between all of that, Fundy felt like something was extinguished and all he could see were the ashy remains of a building.
With no one around but himself, Fundy screamed as loud as he could.
And then, he woke up.
[[Continue->get asked to tell the future]]Fundy screamed awake, prompting Wilbur to quickly rush into the room, probably hearing him from across the building.
Fundy was breathing heavily at this point, but pinching himself and realizing that he was no longer dreaming calmed him down and, at the very least, helped him ground himself.
Wilbur was standing near him now, “Are you okay Fundy?”
Catching his breath, Fundy responded with “Uh, I think I just need a minute.”
“Okay. Do you need me to leave the room…?”
“No, you can just stay here.”
“Okay.”
The two went silent for a bit, with Fundy getting up after realizing he passed out on the floor and going onto the bed, his back was killing him.
The two broke the silence with Fundy asking Wilbur if the painkillers were drugged, which Wilbur violently denied. He showed Fundy the bottle where he gave the medication and Fundy shot down the discussion pretty quickly.
More awkward silence later and Wilbur started to ask Fundy questions about the dream. Fundy gave a weary sigh and started to explain what happened in the dream. The fire, the screams, the feeling of being ''watched''. Wilbur nodded his head and slowly started to explain what he thinks happened.
He explained that Fundy fell asleep, probably because it was pretty late and the experiments took a toll on him. Wilbur played the other meditation despite it being less and ideal circumstances and guesses that he probably worked.
Fundy nodded and that was the queue that gave Wilbur the okay to go on.
Wilbur explained stuff about quantum physics and some theories and compared them the Fundy’s situation. He slowly started to connect all of the pieces of the dream and gave plausible explanations. He apologized profusely and insisted he didn’t know that would happen and asked Fundy if he could do anything to pay back.
Fundy shrugged it off, insisting that lunch would be plenty.
[[Continue->afterwards fundy shakes hands with wilbur and agrees to sign a contract]]“So you’ve probably figured out that we study quantum physics here.”
“Yeah, the brochures at the front were a dead giveaway.”
Snorting, Wilbur said, “Well this is probably a good time to ask but are you interested in joining in as a test subject? I’ll try to give you fewer nightmares.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“Lunch every Tuesday?”
“Restaurant food, right?”
“Fundy you’ve seen how horrendous my cooking is, I wouldn’t use it as a bargaining chip.”
“Hmmm, sure.”
And with a contract signed, Fundy was an official test subject. And drainer of Wilbur’s money every Tuesday.
[[Continue->somewhere out there,]](A few weeks later, Fundy is at his apartment eating a bowl of cereal on the couch as he turns on the T.V..
The news turns on and it reports on a government building catching on fire with hundreds of news reporters reporting on it. As they started to show the building before it was burned, Fundy couldn’t help but notice that it looked almost identical to the building that burned down in his dream.
//Huh//.)
[[Author's Notes]]Looking around his room, Fundy spots an old book, a photo frame, and a prescription bottle on the small wooden table beside his bed.
[[Pick up the old book]]
[[Look at the photo frame]]
[[Look at the presciption bottle]]
[[Leave the room->leave the room.]] **crashes down from roof**
LETS GOOOO IM FINALLY DONE
but !!! i am very happy how this came out! although it isnt as polished as i wish i could have made it, i think it was a really fun thing to work on as a change of pace from my regular fics! theres a lot more i would have wanted to add (fun fact one of the first ideas i had for this were 2 endings where you can either ignore the post and walk home or you'd go on an epic adventure through a lab and try to solve a mystery) but this fic is already shortened and 3x longer than i expected. oops
anyways as you read from the summary this is actually partly inspired by an irl thing the cia did in the 80's??? its pretty wild tbh and i think about it. a lot. but the thing about the dreams and remote viewing are inspired by the actual things they noticed while studying there/fundy's general dsmp lore (the dreams and weird boat astral projection thing) and thought it fit this case + i got to use an old youtube script i wrote in like...2021 lmao
anyways i hope you enjoyed!!! this is very fun to work on !!! anyways i think im gonna lay down and relax for a bit now, speedrunning this took a lot out of me </3