A Visitor In Their Dreams
is an OMORI fanfic written by Bluetenit, published on Archive of Our Own.
It's been ten years since Mari passed away that fateful day. And now she gets to visit each of her friends through their dreams and see how they're doing now. Who knows what surprises may be in store?
A series of fics named after the first fic was created, following Sunny and his friends years after the original game's good ending, set before and after the first fic. You can view it here. So far, there is:
- A New Family, set about two years before Visitor, which has Aubrey and Sunny getting ready to start a family.
- Little Mari's Story, starting a bit after A New Family, which follows Little Mari as she grows up.
Examples
- Absurdly Youthful Mother: Aubrey and Sunny are both around 22 years old in the first fic, and they both have a young daughter while expecting another child.
- Anachronic Order: Visitor is the first fic in the series, but chronologically takes place after Family and Chapters 1-4 of Story.
- Childhood Friend Romance: Sunny and Aubrey got together sometime after Sunny returned to Faraway to buy back his childhood home. By the time Mari visits them, they're happily married with a daughter and are expecting another child.
- Continuity Nod: Little Mari's plushies are based on the Headspace versions of the characters, such as Berly and Mewo.
- Dead Guy Junior: About a year before Mari visited them, Sunny and Aubrey had a daughter they named after her.
- Family Theme Naming: Angel's older sister is named Angelica, as established in Family.
- Fan-Created Offspring: Little Mari, Sunny and Aubrey's firstborn daughter, who was named after her late aunt. Mari visits her in chapter 6 of Visitor, A New Family focuses on the events prior to her birth, and she is a main character in Story.
- Flash Forward Fic: Visitor is set six years after the good ending. Family is set 4 years after.
- Former Teen Rebel: Aubrey has settled down quite a bit since high school, and now helps run a restaurant with the Hooligans and is married to Sunny. As a homage to her rebellious years, Aubrey dresses up as a delinquent for Halloween, even bringing her old bat.
- Generation Xerox: Following Solana's birth, there have been two pairs of siblings with one named Mari and the other named after the sun.
- Halloween Episode: Week 9 of Family is set during Halloween. Sunny dresses up as Snake, Aubrey goes as a delinquent, Basil is a zombie and Polly is a sunflower. Kel and Hero's baby sister Sally dresses as Sweetheart, while they dress up as horse for her to ride on.
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming:
- Each chapter of Visitor is named after a character Mari visits, with the exception of chapter 7, which is named after her. This is because multiple characters get to spend time with her, such as Kim, Cris, and even her father.
- The chapters in Family are called "Weeks", as each follow the weeks after Aubrey learns that she's pregnant.
- I Never Said It Was Poison: Polly figures out that Aubrey is pregnant when she asks why Aubrey is not feeling well, and Sunny gives an excuse as to her nausea… when Polly had never mentioned Aubrey being nauseous.“... Why is Aubrey not feeling well?”
Sunny looks back out the window. “... Well I think the nausea is from something we ate at the restaurant. I don’t think it was cooked fully.”
Polly simply smiles. She got the answer she needed. “Sunny. Did you happen to notice that I asked why she wasn’t feeling well, instead of asking why she’s tired?”
... Sunny looks forward, trying to process what she said. “W-What?”
Polly looks at him through the front window. “I wasn’t even aware that she was feeling nauseous.”
... It was then that Sunny realized that he revealed something he wasn’t supposed to. “Uhh....”
She looks back out to the road. “She’s pregnant, isn’t she?” - Kid Fic: Little Mari's Story features Sunny and Aubrey raising their family.
- One Drink Will Kill the Baby: In A New Family, Aubrey is hesitant to drink a can of beer with the Hooligans on Angel's birthday, due to already being about 11 weeks pregnant by then. This forces her to reveal her pregnancy to them earlier than she wanted to.
- One-Steve Limit: Averted, as there are two Maris in this fic, who are Sunny's older sister and daughter respectively. Sunny's daughter is called "Little Mari" in order to differentiate the two.
- Protagonist Title: Mari is the titular visitor in her friends' dreams.
- Script Fic: The first version of Visitor has the dialogue rendered this way, as did a lot of Bluetenit's early fics. Later fics in the series drop this, as does the rewritten version of Visitor.
- Shout-Out:
- In Basil’s dream, the narration describing the battle against the Hooligans says that Sunny “simply stood there... menacingly, Mari might add”.
- On Halloween, Basil and Polly dress up as a zombie and sunflower respectively. Sunny then muses that it reminds him of "that one game". A comment by the author also says that Aubrey's costume is modeled after Ryuji Sakamoto.
- Chapter 12 of A New Family has the line “A wild Hector attacks!”
- Squee: Mari is noticeably excited when she learns that Aubrey's pregnant and Sunny is the father. The fic even uses the game's "X became HAPPY/ECSTATIC" when this happens.
- Strong Family Resemblance: As some fanart has shown, Little Mari greatly resembles her namesake. This is acknowledged in Chapter 5 of Little Mari's Story, where Mari assures her niece that she isn't her future self after Little Mari expresses some confusion at their similar appearance and name.
- Tears of Joy: Aubrey sheds some after seeing Mari for the first time in ten years, and Mari sheds some of her own after she learns that Sunny and Aubrey named their daughter after her.
