A/N: Strangest thing–went to sleep after gorging my brain on Yuri on Ice fic and the FFBE game and somehow dreamed of Descendants. So… that’ll teach me to presume wtf is going on in my head.
~
The Glimmering
They’ve known since the beginning that Auradon is not nearly as perfect as it would like to believe.
They could never have guessed just how right they were.
Wow, okay, so that’s a basically useless summary am I right? But the story goes pretty much like this:
Sometime after the first movie, the four Lost Kids are witness to Auradon Prep’s strangest and most horrifying tradition:
Every year, for one month, the school goes through what is only known as “The Glimmering.” In which for that month, there are no teachers, and the students are left to fend for themselves against weird demonic planar creatures.
It was a bit Battle Royale meets HP and the Chamber of Secrets? In that, the creatures don’t kill the students but they do petrify/erase their memories and, over all, it’s quite creepy really. At least on the Isle of the Lost everything was straightforward–here? Not so much.
I don’t know why, but for some reason the Lost Kids weren’t sticking together for it–maybe The Glimmering happens suddenly and they were in different classes on opposite sides of the campus? Or maybe students are expected to fight on assigned teams?
Oh, right, there’s a competition aspect. There’s a lot of different possible achievements (though who or how these judgements are made… maybe the missing teachers monitor the situation somehow?) such as most Glimmers killed individually, most Glimmers killed in a group, most impressive kill, etc. etc. Apparently, there’s one achievement that hasn’t been reached but which everyone kind of knows instinctively and that is to kill the Glimmer Monarch.
Though bewildered and horrified, the Lost Kids are, unsurprisingly, rather good at The Glimmering. Mal has magic, Evie allies with the Science Club mostly comprised of the dwarves’ descendants, Jay has practically trained for this his entire life, and for some reason I had the most visceral inkling that Carlos and Dude survived because they stayed in the ventilation system and sniped Glimmers from ceiling.
In the Auradon adults’ defense, it’s not like they abandoned the students–it’s just that for that month, the plane on which the Glimmers exist is accessible only to kids. I don’t know, dream logic. It was quite cool in my head.
Anyway.
Some things that I remember happening:
- Audrey and the cheerleaders last a scarily long time (though, admittedly, they did use other students as cannon fodder between themselves and The Glimmers).
- The Glimmers have their own nefarious mission to try to get Ben, for an unknown, nefarious purpose.
- Jay and Lonnie pair up–but pair up as in agree to fight together and watch each other’s backs, not pair up as in romance because as it turns out Lonnie is not interested in boys. But they do become friends, which is quite nice. And they’re quite badass, which is also nice.
- Jane can access her magic in this plane–I don’t know what the repercussions of that are, but I’m sure it’s important.
- Via the ventilation system, Carlos ends up in the PA system/Audio-Vis clubroom. For some reason, he also knows that certain sounds can throw off the Glimmers’ ability to perceive properly? And thus is the part in the movie where he blasts some epic song across the campus and the students make their big stand.
- Evie and the remaining survivors of her Science Club minions stumble on an adult. But… like… a suuper aged ~mysterious~ adult who is trapped in the Glimmer plane and bestows wisdom from their years of experience. For some reason, I’m pretty sure it was actually someone who wasn’t that much older than them but who had aged so rapidly in the Glimmer plane that they looked ancient. Someone’s lost older sibling, I think, who had been forgotten by the kids but not by the adults.
- During the big stand, Mal and Ben–because bizarrely my brain said they had to be the main characters again–are in a hedge maze which leads to the Glimmer Monarch’s lair. There’s a quiet moment where Ben possibly reveals that he knows what’s going on? Or at least why the Glimmers are so after him in particular? There’s a big reveal, anyway, which makes Mal–who is internally absolutely horrified by this weird month of inter-planar demon war–even more horrified and outwardly so. At Auradon? At the royal family? I don’t remember.
- Mal does not beat the Glimmer Monarch. Nor does Ben. In fact, none of the students beat the Glimmer Monarch. Mal and Ben have to run away from the Glimmer Monarch (who, of course, gives chase) and they head towards the field where the big stand is happening. There the aged stranger shows up, rapidly de-aging, until they look like a teenager as well. They and the Glimmer Monarch are the ones that fight each other, the stranger wins but dies and with that the Glimmering is over. Forever.
… Now that I type it out, while I don’t think that’s what happened in my dream, I do think that narratively it would make the most sense if the stranger were either 1) Ben’s older sibling, 2) Jane’s older sibling, 3) an unrelated fairy descendant, 4) THE oldest Lost Kid taken from the Isle of the Lost by the royal family as a sort of… sacrifice? Offering? Stabilizer?
… It’s possible there are two strangers in the Glimmer plane, one a Lost Kid, one an Auradon kid. Unsure exactly.
Anyway, it was just a pretty cool dream. Surprisingly coherent for all that I can’t fill in ALL of the details.
JackSGreyson Says 