Omake Week 2018, Day 1: For the fifth year in a row, Omake Week somehow makes an appearance! Honestly, this year I half-expected to not manage to pull this off, since for the longest time the only kind of omake I could think up was for Bloodborne. Which makes it the perfect choice to start us off!
~X X X~
"Welcome home, good hunter," the Doll greeted Balyn. She tipped her head to one side in a now-familiar air of curiosity, as if something about him had caught her interest. "Are you all right?"
"Eh?"
"You lack your usual…verve."
Balyn pursed his lips beneath his mask. She did have a point. By nature, he was a demonstrative person, whether launching himself into new activities with enthusiasm, celebrating his victories, lamenting his defeats, or bitterly and loudly complaining about the vagaries of Yharnam life.
"I'm just feeling a little pensive," he said.
The Doll displayed her inherent strength of character by not shouting, "You!?" Even so, the astonishment hung in the air, so Balyn decided to explain.
"I was just in Oedon Chapel right before I came back here, and I saw something unnerving." Which was saying something, given that humans-turned-beasts were prowling Yharnam's streets and horrific manifestations out of literal nightmare worlds were causing intense confusion about the nature of what was and wasn't reality. "Unnerving" by Yharnam standards went a long, long way.
"Oh? What is that?"
"Well, you know how I've been rescuing folks and sending them there, right? Did I ever tell you about that? Well, anyway, there was this one woman, Arianna. She's a prostitute, even though she dresses like she's some fancy noble from Cainhurst or something. She hasn't been feeling good ever since I killed Rom and the sky got all weird, so it seemed even stranger that she'd be missing, since people don't walk around a lot when they're feeling too sick to do anything.
"I got worried about her, so I looked around the place a bit, and I found that she'd actually gone and climbed down to the cellar…and had a baby! Well, given that she wasn't pregnant when she first came to the chapel, it won't surprise you that the baby wasn't human. Actually, it looked a lot like a newborn version of those things that are wriggling around all over the Upper Cathedral Ward, the ones that look like if you gave them a couple of millennia they'd grow up to look like Ebrietas."
He shivered, thinking about it. It sort of made sense that those things were Ebrietas's babies or spawn or fingerlings or whatever larval Great Ones were called. It made a lot less sense that they'd be born from a human woman.
"I don't know," he continued. "It's like that stuff I read in…Byrgenwerth, was it? About the red moon and a womb being blessed with child? And all that stuff about Formless Oedon, and Arianna's blood being kind of like the forbidden blood of Cainhurst…"
"What did you do?" The Doll seemed more interested in the here and now than obscure ruminations on academic topics.
"I turned right around and walked out of there! I mean, that lady's going to have a hard enough time finding a decent babysitter once the night of the hunt is over. And anything I did was probably going to make matters worse."
"History does suggest something of the kind."
"But I've got to say, that Oedon dude is lucky that he's formless, because if he was here I would have some very pointed remarks for him. I don't care if he's a Great One or the chapel janitor; if he wants a child that badly then he can darned well adopt!"