#also their expressions in that first drawing came out way funnier than i intended and now i can't stop laughing at it

[hamsternamedmarinette]

There's just something about watching Gabriel and Nathalie discuss the consequences of their actions that's SO funny to me

[toovirgins]

Le Rêve - Part 6

Summary: After an unproductive studio session, George and Ringo leave in a hurry. John later returns to find his glasses and another unwelcome surprise.

Things were different now.

Not entirely—they still had the band, the songwriting partnership, the united front for the media and press. It’s just that now, the tour was completed with determination and efficiency, becoming just another box to check off. Now, Paul relied much more heavily on George’s suggestions, and in a fit of jealousy or competition (Who could be sure? What was the difference?), John did the same. Now, Lennon-McCartney hardly wrote together and never wrote alone, needing George or Ringo to be in the space as a buffer.

When Paul had come back into the room that night, George knew he’d found John. He entered wordlessly, immediately throwing all of his belongings into his trunk, and George didn’t have the heart to ask where he was going. He and Ringo simply stared, too afraid to test the waters that were more tumultuous than they’d ever seen.

When Paul had finished packing, he’d looked pointedly at Ringo until the man understood. Ringo pushed himself up out of the armchair and followed him out of the room. He’d returned only minutes later with a sad smile in George’s direction that he assumed was meant to be reassuring, but instead was plain unsettling—a visual marker of the notion that something had changed within the group. Ringo had unpacked his things on Paul’s side, and that was that.

They weren’t allowed to talk about what happened. It was this unspoken rule, but a rule nonetheless—which was rather fine with George at first, anyway. But as time dragged on and the air grew no less hostile, George figured that he would rather talk about it for hours if it meant getting the old dynamic back. He was torn between two opposite poles of the spectrum, a futile effort of trying to please both Lennon and McCartney. There was a bitterness flourishing within him at the recognition of his usefulness only when they didn’t need each other. But objectively speaking, he was given more say, more credit, more songs. He couldn’t complain. Or he shouldn’t complain.

Something about the unspoken rule led George and Ringo not to talk about it with each other, either. George knew Ringo was absolutely dying to; at every uncomfortable or unnatural interaction between John and Paul, George knew a concerned glance from Ringo was coming his way. Ringo needed to talk about things, and George felt right guilty in deliberately ignoring the desire. He was just holding out hope that if no one addressed it in any context, the universe would wash away that it even happened, and the band—their livelihoods—would live on.

The quick succession of knuckles against the side of his head jerked him out of his daydream (nightmare?).

“Hello?” Ringo quipped. “Anyone home?”

George scowled and slumped deeper into his seat. “Barely.”

He and Ringo had been dicking about in the studio for the past half-hour. It was just the two of them—Paul hadn’t shown up, and John, already in a sour mood for the day, had cursed the man under his breath and stalked off. That had been about an hour ago, and when John didn’t return, the remaining boys gave up trying to focus. After a brief quarrel over who dropped the ball on bringing the marbles and playing cards, Ringo suggested a friendly competition over who could butcher “She Loves You” on their respective instruments in a funnier fashion. Which, credit where credit was due, was incredibly entertaining; only minutes before now, George had been rolling on the ground in laughter when Ringo had seemingly pulled a bicycle horn from his arse and honked it in place of the famed McCartney-Harrison “Ooh’s”.

However, as many things do when one has an attention span of about two minutes, the game soon grew tired—the song was only so long—and the pair had resorted to quiet, mindless fiddling on their instruments. In turn, the lapse into silence and thought had led George down his aforementioned neuro-rabbithole.

“Are you all right?” Ringo questioned, lifting an eyebrow in his direction. “Y’just seem a bit… off lately, I dunno.” There was an urge there, a pull. Ringo was nearly leaned forward off his chair.

“Off how?” George mused, entertaining the idea a bit. His tone was light, but his expression was stern. It was clear that they were both acknowledging the Unspoken Thing; it was also clear that it would remain as such.

Ringo bit his lip and shrugged back, evidently noting George’s reservations. “Y’know. Quiet-like. At least, more so than usual.”

George scoffed at the referenced nickname. The Quiet Beatle. As if! Give him a question worth answering, and they’d see who the quiet one was then. Certainly not him. “I’ve just got a lot on me mind,” he muttered, lifting a shoulder.

“You’re more in demand than before,” Ringo pointed out bluntly.

A rub of the temples didn’t do much to soothe the stress in his body. The weight of the emotional and mental burdens he’d carried over the last few weeks was beginning to settle on his shoulders with Ringo’s prodding. A sudden exhaustion clouded over him. “I know.”

“Is that bad?”

George looked at his friend with dull eyes. “Should it be?”

He didn’t need an answer, but it still stung a bit not to get one.

After a long beat of silence, Ringo hastily changed the subject. “Maybe we should call it quits for the day,” he suggested with a half-hearted grin, tapping the bass drum lightly and modestly. It was almost a tick at this point, the drummer seemingly wholly unaware of his actions.

George decided to play along with the shift in energy. “I agree, Ritchie. Feels a bit useless without Their Royal Highnesses around to conduct us,” he added with a roll of the eyes and a giggle.

Ringo hummed in agreement. “Oh, John, oh, Paul, please save us! We can’t even remember what album we’re supposed to be working on!” He cackled at his own joke.

“Help!, isn’t it?” George partly ignored the dramatic flair and turned to flick off the amp. He caught Ringo’s sparkling stare as he reached to unplug his Rickenbacker.

“No, mate. We’ve done that one already. Y’know, the whole ‘film’ bit?”

George blinked. “Right.”

“George Harrison, foremost Beatles expert,” Ringo chided. He glared reproachfully at an imaginary camera. “Don’t do drugs, kids.”

“Piss off!” George tried to glower, overruled by the laughter in his voice. Ringo offered him a hand and pulled him up out of the chair.

“Fancy a smoke?”

George’s lips drew into a wide grin. Based on the context, he knew exactly what kind of smoke he was implying. “Race ya to the car.”

—

“Mind telling me where everyone ran off to?”

Paul lifted an accusatory gaze in John’s direction as the man entered the room, his brow deeply furrowed in concentration.

“How should I know?” John answered, scanning the room fervently. His eyes hadn’t met Paul’s yet, Paul noted with a twinge of annoyance.

“Was there not a session today?” Paul hinted, irked by the idea that John too may have tried to skip out. Sure, Paul had been late, but at least he’d intended on coming.

John paused for a moment, shooting him a critical glare. “You tell me.”

He didn’t feel like trying to defend himself.

After a long moment of staring expectantly, John realized he wasn’t going to get an answer. He huffed and returned to his search, tipping over a chair to peer underneath it.

Paul rolled his eyes and offered the glasses at arm’s length, clearing his throat to draw the attention. John blushed and hurried over to snatch them up. He quickly stuffed them back into his pocket.

In response to the twinge of curiosity in his gaze, Paul only shrugged. “Left ‘em on the settee over there, you did. Just figured you would return for them sooner or later.”

John grunted in response.

Paul raised an eyebrow as the man began to head for the door. “All right, then. Mind at least telling me where you’re running off to?”

“I just came back for me glasses.”

“Came back?”

“You weren’t there,” John muttered, nearly inaudible. “I left.”

Paul stiffened, viciously reprimanding the sentimental twitch his heart gave to John’s response. “’M just late. Got caught up in traffic, is all.”

It was a silly excuse. John quirked an eyebrow at the boldfaced lie, knowing good and well Cavendish was barely a ten-minute walk. Paul watched him chew his lip for a moment before deciding to let it be.

Paul accepted John’s compliance graciously and returned to tuning his bass. His skin prickled as he felt John’s eyes on him, watching him closely. Tensions were still incredibly high between them, on account of the thing-that-happened-but-“never-happened”—and it was taking a lot of getting used to. The feeling was unsettling; time and again Paul would have to physically restrain himself, ignoring the twitching desire in his hand to touch John or biting back a witty comment that only John would understand. The emotional connection they’d had was gone, or at least dormant, and Paul couldn’t for the life of him figure out what was going through that thick head anymore. It even seemed that Ringo and George had a better guess than him.

It was miserable, really, having to pretend that everything was just dandy. There had been a substantial amount of press upon return from the tour, which was more of an irritation than anything else. There, he could slide into his Paul McCharmly persona, the façade already being somewhat of a character. The lie got quite easy to live when one was already acting. But the media circus was relatively quiet now (as it would ever be), and the hardest part was trying to pretend in front of the three people that knew him better than anyone else alive.

He wasn’t even sure who the pretending was for anymore. It certainly did nothing to quiet his mind or soul.

“What are you working on?” It was a half-arsed effort at conversation, but an effort nonetheless.

“Nothing, yet,” Paul answered, frowning in the direction of his instrument. “I’ve got a bit—real simple, for ‘Wait’. Might add some flare to it, might finish it. Might run it through and absolutely hate it and scrap it. Who knows,” he concluded, almost to himself.

“I think we should talk.” John’s voice, quiet, low.

Paul glanced up at him with a start, desperately trying to mask the surprise on his face. John was looking at him with an odd expression on his face, something Paul couldn’t quite put words to. Only then did he realize that it was the first time the two of them had been alone since the incident.

Heart pounding, he tensed. “When?”

“Now.” The answer was definitive.

“About what?” Paul responded sheepishly.

John’s eyes flashed.

Let’s just forget it ever happened.

Paul felt a sudden wave of stubbornness wash over him, feeling hollow at the abrupt activation of the memory. Of course he couldn’t fucking forget it happened. He couldn’t, and he shouldn’t be expected to. None of them should. Paul noticed the sad, wondering gazes from the other bandmates as well. Sweeping it under the rug had been wholly counterproductive to the entire group (though he didn’t entirely want to test the alternative, either). Best case scenario, the whole thing wouldn’t have happened.

But it did. And life was infinitely worse now because of it.

Paul swallowed hard. This was all John’s fault. Paul could have kept the dream a secret for the rest of his life. A few shameful wanking sessions was probably all it would take to get over it, and while he might look at John a bit differently after, at least John wouldn’t be looking at him differently. About a week of awkwardness would likely ensue, and John would make some offhand comment about how Paul was acting queer, and the two would laugh it off, only one of them knowing how much truth the comment carried. It was John’s fault, because Paul could have figured it out on his own.

“You know what,” John answered coldly.

John wanted to be cold? Paul could do cold. “I really don’t,” he countered with sickeningly false innocence. “What’s got you all worked up, Johnny?”

“Fuck off, Paul, you know what I’m talking about. Don’t try to fuckin’ skirt around it anymore.”

Paul’s heart was hammering in his throat, the blood rushing in his ears. After weeks of drowning in his own head, hearing the words come out of John’s mouth so… dismissively was blindingly infuriating. He had been driving himself mad trying not to talk about it, to think about it, to feel it. He’d shoved the memory down with so much force he’d thought his soul would pop, only to watch it helplessly bubble back to the surface. There was no forgetting it, and there was no addressing it. And now, John was breaking the number one Unspoken Rule of the Unspoken Thing like he never gave a shit about them in the first place.

“Skirting ar-? I’m not skirting around anything. I’m truly blanking, Johnny.” He paused, throat too constricted to swallow the massive lump in it. “Are you sure it’s not something I was supposed to forget?” The comment didn’t have near the effect Paul had hoped.

“Every conversation’s got to turn into a fuckin’ brawl with you, doesn’t it?” John crossed his arms, looking like nothing more than a pissed-off older sibling.

Paul was beside himself. His voice cracked, the words coming out in a near-shriek, but he was so furious that it hardly mattered. “With me? Every conversation is a brawl with me?”

“D’you need to bloody hear it again?” John looked minorly inconvenienced. If he’d had a watch on, he’d be sure to check it right now lazily. His demeanor was utterly vexatious, awakening feelings Paul didn’t even know he had. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this upset with someone.

“You think you get some type of medal, standing up in front of me and acting like none of this matters?” Paul was on his feet now, openly striding towards him. Startled, John stumbled backward a step before smacking his back against the wall. “You want a bleeding award?” Paul raised his tone an octave and fluttered his eyelashes dramatically, a mockery on all levels: “Oh, John, you’re so stony and brave, I bet nothing ever rattles my big, strong man!”

“Fuck you,” John whispered, his eyes begging the conversation to slow down. But Paul was on a roll now, and he’d be damned if he didn’t let out all of the pent-up pain John and John alone had caused over the last few weeks.

“No, fuck you. Do you know how hard it’s been? News flash, John. Not everything is about how you feel. Hard to believe, I know.” John opened his mouth to speak, but Paul cut him off. He was practically on him now, pushing John against the wall as he helplessly cowered under Paul’s alarming tirade.

“Do you know how hard it’s been for me? Trying to figure out if I’m a goddamn queer because of you? And how about the sleepless nights, eh? You’ve had those too, I know it.” A sick sense of pride effloresced in Paul’s chest as John’s eyes shot wide with recognition. “Lying in bed and wondering if you’re not who you thought you were. Wondering what when wrong along the way to make you this way, and what the hell you can do about it now. It’s maddening. And you took my right to get an answer, John.” Paul’s voice broke a bit at the next part. “Talking to you was my only hope at figuring this out and you took it away from me. And now we can’t talk about anything anymore.”

When John started to speak again, Paul lifted a final triumphant hand in his face. “I’m not done. Because let me tell you, Lennon, I don’t care if you need to bawl it out or never think about it again. But don’t stand here and fucking bullshit me like this. I know you.”

John straightened against the wall, eyes flashing with a hatred that almost made Paul’s knees buckle. “You don’t have a bloody clue what’s bullshit. Your whole foundation is bullshit. You’re not pissed at me because you’re upset that our pretty union wasn’t consummated, and thus I robbed you of a chance to explore this bit of newfound sexuality.” John’s tone was mocking, saturated with pretentiousness and exaggeration. “You’re pissed at me because I was just another shag you didn’t get to fully add to your sexual conquests. Grow the fuck up, Paul. You want to talk about knowing each other? I know you. You’re the one who’s bullshitting yourself, not me.”

Attacking John back felt like a safer bet than trying to defend himself. “Like you were there for some miraculous consummation? Some beautiful, heart-wrenching dénouement to a tragic love story? You’re full of it. Don’t come for me like you had some higher ground to speak from. We’re not special, John. We don’t have some kind of cosmic soulmate connection where we can read each other’s minds and desires. You and I, as anything, aren’t going to live happily ever after. Go buy into some other fuckin’ fantasy.”

“You were a mistake,” John spat.

“Mistakes happened,” Paul concluded. “I didn’t.”

John gaped at him as Paul pushed off. His chest was heaving, tight with unrestrained breaths, looking like a cornered animal. Though it was impossible to explain, Paul watched in real time as something shattered in John’s soul. He didn’t know what it was, and it didn’t seem like John knew, either. Paul turned on his heel before he could give the sight any more thought.

“You told me to forget it. So that’s what I’m doing. For good.” Paul stalked back to where his guitar lay on the ground. He began to gather his belongings and pack up for the day. “This conversation is over.”

“So that’s it? You don’t want to talk about it?” John called out to him, planting himself in the doorway as Paul made for the exit.

“Get out of the way, John.”

He held his ground and spoke honestly for the first time in a long, long time. “You’re not gonna talk about it, yeah? That’s fine. Fuckin’ beautiful. I’ll talk about it. I love you.”

[drundertalescum]

Hey for the mini fic thing, how about Underswap pap been unable to sleep for some reason so he sits on his bed, smoking because why not and thinks about something, like a really bad joke thing that his tired mind thinks is hella hilarious so he bursts out laughing and almost drop his cigarette onto his bed, maybe?

This went somewhere else entirely. Blame it on me being tired and my sleepy mind thinking it was funny. It’s probably not. I am very sorry.

Warnings for some vague potential emetophobia triggers and rated D for Drugs. Also extraordinarily bad decision making.

(Also this ended up WAY longer than I wanted it to be because i had sleep-deprived ideas and I couldn’t resist my USPapyrus-is-the-biggest-dork-of-all headcanons.)

——-

It was 3am again, and Papyrus could not sleep a wink.

That wasn’t unusual. He’d always had trouble sleeping, and once upon a time, he’d accepted that completely. Night had always been working time, where he’d take himself to the shed and build prototypes and personal projects and things to impress his bosses… but those days were long gone.

Plus, Sans had really been after him lately about sleeping more, eating better, making healthy choices, etc etc etc. So, Papyrus figured he should at least try to sleep for once.

Healthy choices. Healthy, healthy choices. For his health. Which was important.

…

Papyrus was gonna do drugs.

Yeah.  Yeah, he was going to take a drugs now. Or… uh… okay, he didn’t know the “lingo” for doing illicit substances, but he was going to do it.

See, there was this guy in town, Doggo, who ran the Inn. Super nice guy, never once laughed at him, and sometimes they smoked together. Papyrus was hesitant to use the “F word” and risk making it weird, but they had become pretty good acquaintances over the years they’d known each other. They would talk sometimes in Muffet’s, or Doggo would let him stay in the Inn for free sometimes when he was ducking responsibilities he couldn’t quite face right then and there.

Doggo and him would usually just share cigarettes together, but on occasion, the innkeeper would pull out something else to smoke: a dog treat. He’d offered him a try, said they were great for relaxing, unwinding, great for the “bad days” and Papyrus… well, he’d been very tempted. He did have a lot of bad days, though he didn’t like to admit it, but he’d declined at the time for fear of embarrassing himself. What if it was like the first time he smoked, coughing and choking and looking decidedly uncool?

No thanks.

But he’d been intrigued, and a few days ago, he nervously went into the Dogi’s shop to grab a few things, but really just the one thing (the others were distractions, a clever ruse!): Dog treats. He didn’t know which ones were the good kind, so he just bought the cheap ones, trying not to draw attention to himself and his illicit items (which were sold over the counter? In broad daylight?? The whole town had to be in on it… a drug conspiracy right under the Queen’s snout! And now he was a part of it! He felt dangerous! And cool! And a part of something! It was awesome.) He did a good job. C+ for effort, he thought. Maybe flinging himself out of the window to leave quickly and stealthily was not the best option, in the end. He’d thought it was open? It wasn’t. So he’d had to stumble back in and sheepishly offer to pay for a new one. They hadn’t been too mad about it, though. He guessed they were used to it.

He had intended to smoke one that very night, but he’d chickened out. And again the next night, and again, and again.

But now, well, they helped with bad days, right? Well, while the day had been fine, the night had been miserable, and he really could use something to unwind.

So tonight was the night. Papyrus was going to do drugs. Illegally.

Wow… he really had fallen, hadn’t he? No. No, no, nevermind, that didn’t, he wasn’t going to think about that. He was going to think about how cool he would look when Doggo offered him a treat and he accepted. He was going to think about how much sleep he was going to get once he finally unwound. Sleep champion. Sleep master. Master of the sleep. And the illicit substances.

Sans was hoping to be so disappointed if he ever found out… No! No no no! Not thinking about that! No! Stop! Bad thoughts! Begone!

Shoo!

Okay. Okay, this proved it. He needed it. He couldn’t turn his mind off no matter how much he wanted to sometimes, and this was probably what he needed.

Forcing himself to move quickly before he lost his nerve again, Papyrus pulled out his lighter and lit up the treat. This part came with practiced ease, though the lighting part took quite a bit longer than lighting up dry leaves and paper. This thing was kinda thick and slightly oily (and the thought of that made him feel sick, but he wouldn’t think about it. He just wouldn’t think about it.) which made his task a bit harder, but it didn’t last long enough to let the doubts back in.

Those waited until after he took his first drag, and it was exactly as awful as he’d imagined it might be– and then some.

Bleh!!

But… he forced himself not to think about it as he took a second, longer, slower drag, trying to savor the intense flavors. And… it… was…

…still awful, but maybe an acquired taste? And maybe he could acquire it. The texture wasn’t quite as bad on second try, and he was feeling… maybe a little more relaxed? Just a bit. But these things took a bit to kick in (probably. At least they did on TV.) and if it helped, then…

Yeah, actually, yeah. He felt calmer. Lighter, now. Suddenly the stress about this all wasn’t so bad, and he wasn’t as nervous, and that was a very great result to have.

Papyrus leaned back on his bed, thinking pleasantly about very little besides just how nice this was, to not have to worry about every little thing, if only for a little while. How long did these last, anyway? He didn’t know, and maybe that should have scared him, but it didn’t. He could accept waiting a little while, being a little more mellow for a bit, instead of just pretending to be all the time.

Yeah, that was a really nice thought. Wowie, all his thoughts he’d had since he started smoking this had been really nice! He got the appeal now, even more than he already had.

It still tasted awful of course. His expression with every drag was likely rather uncool, so trying this alone had been a smart move (at least a smart move for his cool, casual reputation. He wasn’t far gone enough to not realize that this decision was in most other ways not a smart move.), but he was becoming more used to it, and his winces were getting easier and easier to hide.

Maybe the next time he did this, he would look really cool, really practiced and great, and everyone would think he was a seasoned veteran of drugs. King of the drugs. Or was that technically treasonous to say? At the very least, it wasn’t very nice, the real king being missing and all. Duke of the drugs? He didn’t think there was a duke anywhere that he would be insulting by taking on that title, so that was probably a better fit.

Duke Papyrus, Duke of the Drugs. Drug Duke.

Drug Duke Papyrus!

He giggled to himself. He didn’t know why it was so funny, but it was. It was so, so funny.

The giggles escalated into chuckles, then full-on laughter, and it only got worse, until he clamped his hands over his jaws to stop the sound from getting loud enough to wake up Sans, and for some reason that made it even funnier still, because how the heck was he going to explain this one? That he was cracking up laughing at a dumb name he just came up with because the letters both started with D. Was that even why he was laughing?

Nyeh heh heh!!! He didn’t know but it was funny! It was funny that it was so funny and it was funny that being so funny was just so funny to him because it normally wouldn’t be funny if it wasn’t for all the hardcore drugs, and “drugs” just made him think it the words once again, and thus the cycle repeated until he was crying, fully aware in the back of his mind that this was dumb, this was ridiculous, this was just stupid and incredibly uncool no matter how many drugs were involved, but the rest of his mind (the drugged part? Probably) refused to let reason in on this moment, because it was a good, nice moment, free of self-consciousness and anxiety and restlessness and self-conscious anxiety about restlessness.

So he ignored that voice for a while and laughed. He nearly lost the treat through the giggles, catching it only at the last second and falling off the bed in the process with a clatter of bone on wood.

And normally, that would be the part where he thought about how stupid he must look, how ridiculous and uncool. But instead, he thought about how stupid he must look, how ridiculous and uncool, and he laughed. Because it was funny. He was being silly, and it was actually funny.

A knock came at the door, jerking him out of his laughter but not quite out of hit nice mood.

“…Papyrus? You okay in there…??”

“YES I AM PAPYRUS I AM FINE!!!”

“… Did you fall off the bed?”

“YES BUT IT– I’m fine! I just… um. Well I guess I just fell. Huh.”

“Did you… did you have a nightmare again?”

“Nah, just… I swear, I’m fine, brother. Bro. I’m totally fine.”

“… alright, well, just make sure you get some sleep, okay? Healthy choices, like we talked about?”

Papyrus glanced down at the treat in his hand, feeling the joy roll over in his soul into something more akin to guilt, mixed with nausea, elevated mood crashing down into something murky and awful.

“YEAH bro. I was JUST laying BACK down. GOOD NIGHT, SANS!”

He thought he heard a sigh from the other side of the door. Was he really that obvious? “…Night, Papyrus”

He heard the slippered footsteps padding down the hall and let out a sign of his own. What the hell was he doing? Sitting around in his room, doing this stuff? This was dumb. And now he felt sick. And he didn’t really feel quite so goofy and giddy and light anymore. Just tired and guilty and sick.

Really sick, actually.

He shoved down a feeling that threatened to come up. Oh no. What if he was going to die?

Oh no. He was going to die.

He quickly weighed the options in his head, and again, and again, before finally deciding to swallow his pride. He pulled out his cell phone. It was, marginally, better to be alive and uncool than dead and (perhaps) somewhat cool.

Marginally.

He called up Doggo. If anyone would know what to do, he would.

It felt like it rung forever, but finally the answer came, and he immediately attempted to explain the entire thing, from misguided start to his imminent death, blathering on incoherently and with no real direction, but talking faster than he ever had outside of the laboratory.

He cursed the drugs for making him sound so inarticulate. Normally, he was articulate as heck when he needed to be. Sort of. He was better than this, at least!

(…God, he was better than this. He was so much better than this.)

“Whoa, whoa, pup, slow down. Take it easy. Breathe with me. C’mon. Deep breaths, okay?” Doggo demonstrated and Papyrus nodded, only to feel a flush of what was either embarrassment or illness when he realized Doggo couldn’t see him through the phone. That wasn’t a normal thing. At least he couldn’t see his blushing. “Good, good. Alright. Now, you said you took something?”

“D-DOG TREAT,” he replied, not even trying to suppress his natural tone, only quieting his volume enough to ensure that Sans wouldn’t hear, even if he hadn’t gotten back to sleep. The walls weren’t very thick.

“ Okay, okay good, I see why you called me, then. You made a good decision, okay? I can help you through this,” Doggo’s mostly-soothing voice broke into an inaudible mumble for a moment, and Papyrus could just barely read out the words “bad trip” from out all. Oh no. He was having a bad trip. That couldn’t be good. He didn’t know what that meant but it couldn’t be good at all. “Where’d you get it?”

“D-DOGI.”

“…you what?”

The guilt was too much. “I KNOW, I KNOW. I PURCHASED ILLICIT SUBSTANCES IN BROAD, OPEN DAYLIGHT FROM THE LOCAL GENERAL STORE. I’VE GONE ROGUE; I’M SORRY! IF I SURVIVE I WILL NEVER TAKE A DRUG AGAIN.”

“… The Dogi don’t deal, Papyrus.”

“WHAT? OF COURSE THEY DEAL? THEY DEALED! RIGHT THERE IN THE OPEN! IN FRONT OF THE COUNTER! AT EYE LEVEL WITH CHILDREN! DRUGS! THEY DEALED ME RIGHT THERE, AND THE DEAL WAS TOO MUCH FOR ME, DOGGO. THE DEAL WAS TOO MUCH! I AM DYING. I AM HIGH AND I AM DYING.”

“What was the name on the label?”

He paused to think. Why did that matter? “…CHEWY-CHEWY GOODBOYS.”

Doggo rolled his eyes at the name, a look of disgust on his face. Oh no. He didn’t pick the cool drugs. Doggo thought he wasn’t cool.

“Those ain’t drugged. They aren’t even good.” He mumbled, “they take the name of the Good Boy in vain,” too, but Papyrus didn’t hear it, caught up on processing the first part of that.

“… What exactly do you mean, they aren’t drugged? They're… they’re dog treats?”

“Papyrus… my ‘treats’ aren’t actually… they aren't… they’re special. I buy them out of town from some crazy guy in Waterfall.” Papyrus wondered for a split second before he cut off the train of thought. He wasn’t going to even consider that possibility. There were probably plenty of crazy guys who lived in Waterfall. Besides he was dying, so that was something he needed to focus on right now. “It’s good stuff, but they aren’t actual dog treats. They just look like it so I can keep em hidden. I don’t actually smoke dog treats; they’re dog treats.”

“Then why do… WHAT… uh… WHY ARE THE dog treats SO popular, thEn? If THEY AREN'T…?”

“Because we’re dogs, Papyrus. We like treats.”

Papyrus blinked. “Uncool” did not come close to how he was feeling right now. It was all so obvious. “…S-SO… THE REAL DRUGS WERE INSIDE OF ME ALL ALONG?”

Doggo laughed, then, strong and loud, but Papyrus got the impression, at least, that he was laughing at his words and not directly at him. “I guess you could say that! Something like that!”

“I AM AN IDIOT.”

“Nah, trust me, I been there. You just made some mistakes. Listen, you good to walk down here to the Inn?”

“Uh… WHY?”

“You said you were sick, right? And they may not have had drugs in them but you still smoked everything else that was in that crap. You might have imagined the high but you probably didn’t imagine the sickness, and you probably don’t wanna explain this one too that brother of yours, do ya?”

“N-NO. No, I really don’t. I’LL UH… I’ll pack an overnight bag and head over. I’ll be there in a little under 12 minutes.”

“Alright, I’ll keep the back unlocked for you.”

Papyrus smiled weakly, feeling the roiling in his core again. “Thanks, Doggo. You’re a really good dog!”

“Heh, hey no problem, Papyrus. That’s what friends are for, right? See ya in 12.”

“S-SEEYA!!!”

The call ended.

Papyrus smiled again, a little stronger, this time. The F word hadn’t made it weird at all! It had already been too weird to make weirder! A success story!

He didn’t really have much time to enjoy that, though, because he was definitely very much about to be sick.

…maybe he would look into this “healthy choices” thing a little closer after the mess that was tonight.

[thewadapan]

Are You Happy: one year later

Today marks the first anniversary of Are You Happy, a dumb web series I made in a terrible bit of animation software. In celebration, I’m... un-unlisting the series and writing a post to pat myself on the back. Huh.

Normally I wouldn’t bother with this kind of thing, but I think my own general appraisal of this series has shifted somewhat since I put it out into the world. I’ve yet to receive any feedback of any kind from the internet at large, but a few friends of mine have ended up watching it at various points - the last of whom suggested that I should “totally” make the videos public. Well, fine, now I totally have.

I’ve rewatched the series a handful of times since its release and have come to the conclusion that it’s a pretty mixed bag. I’ve come to like many of the individual episodes a lot more, but as a whole the series doesn’t come together for me. In this post, I’m gonna build on what I wrote in the original commentary by briefly shooting through the episodes one by one.

As the first episode of the series, “I Hate You” is pretty much just me getting to grips with the program. I like the way Chris storms out, gets as far as the elevator before he starts feeling bad, and comes back - only to find that, naturally, Samir also left. Back towards the tail end of secondary school, my friends and I got in the habit of just hanging around in classrooms outside of classes - the teachers weren’t technically supposed to let us do that, I think, but they did. I figure that’s what Chris and Samir are doing here - just standing about in a quiet spot. Chris does something annoying, Samir slaps him... business as usual for these two.

Anyway, I showed that first episode to one of my friends, and he helped me out with “The Meaning of Life” by offering a Genghis Khan quote and sitting around as I made it. Plotagon has relatively few options for direct interaction between characters, and I immediately pegged the “slap” action as the funniest of these. It’s even funnier when combined with a sharp cut and a scare chord.

Back in school, we had these two acronyms: WALT and WILF. These stood for “What Are (We) Learning Today” and “What I’m Looking For” and were used by our teachers to lay out the objectives for each class. I guess it seemed funny to me to go completely in the opposite direction for “What are we Learning Today?” - it’s the student who has to try and poke the teacher into giving the class any kind of information whatsoever - but the execution’s poor. This episode is funnier if you imagine the five preceding minutes of silence, during which Mr. Hernandez is having a completely undetectable internal meltdown.

I knew that the stuff I was making would be quote-unquote “in continuity” - but I wasn’t particularly expecting it to “have continuity”. That changed with “Why Nobody Likes You”, which establishes that Lizzie and Chris are friends of a sort. I like to imagine that Lizzie is one of just two people Chris ever talks to (the other being Samir), and that the only reason they interact at all is because they happen to be the only people catching their particular bus. They really have nothing in common, and struggle to hold an actual conversation - although I figure that’s mostly Chris’s fault.

A fair bit of time has probably passed in-universe between the first and second times Mr. Hernandez and Santa meet on-screen. In “A Bad Teacher”, Santa seems a little more chill - rather than sitting at a distance on the bench, he’s standing. Perhaps Mr. Hernandez just treated him to a coffee, or something, and they’ve just exited the shop. Whatever. I’ve suffered my fair share of bad teachers, and one of the things they all have in common is that they’re completely oblivious to the fact that they’re bad. It’s like... bad students exist, but if (as a teacher) you honestly think your entire class consists of bad students, that’s the point where you should realise that you’re the problem. I think that tendency to place the blame on the students is the kind of thing that leads to whole-class detentions, which are a hallmark of bad teachers.

I’d originally pegged “White-Hat Hacking” as my least-favourite episode - for reasons outside of my control, it’s the first to break the one-minute mark - but upon subsequent rewatches I’ve come to feel more positively about it. Jessica’s line about V for Vendetta and zip bombs always takes me off guard, and I like the way Detective Raymond describes himself as “the smartest and most controversial detective”. It’s also funny to me going back to the source file and seeing a ton of lines marked “JESSICA (flirty)” and a single line marked “JESSICA (surprised)”.

My opinion on “The Faculty Bathroom” hasn’t really changed. As far as self-contained concepts in this series go, “insecure teacher talks to himself while on a smoke break, then dies in a fire” is easily the strongest.

Of all the episodes, I think “Nobody to Talk To” is probably the most forgettable. It opens with Chris, who’s lamenting the destruction of the school (mostly because it means he's even more bored than usual). There’s a medal hanging above his bedside table - I like to think that he bought it himself, only to find that he couldn’t think of something to get inscribed on it. Maybe it just says “CHRIS”. Anyway, the rest of the episode is a soliloquy from Lizzie - I’m not sure how exactly the idea of her being a well-connected anarchist came about, and the way that aspect of her character is introduced here feels a little jarring in retrospect. Still, I guess this episode does slightly redeem itself with a surprise appearance from Detective Raymond.

I’m gonna have to take a few paragraphs to talk about “Ever Get Tired of Movies?” - there’s a lot that I failed to cover in the original commentary. In terms of sound design, it’s probably one of the most ambitious episodes - all the sound effects come from the TV, so there’s nothing in the way of ambient music - but I’m not convinced that having the movie drown out the dialogue at the beginning was a good choice. I still love that Katia and Philippe’s colour schemes each match those of their sides of the room; I didn’t design the characters that way!

In the last commentary, I mistakenly said that I’d forgotten to use Ms. Green - when in fact, I’d used her as the reporter in this episode. I repurposed Plotagon’s “convention booth” scene as the newsroom, which works surprisingly well - combined with Ms. Green’s dialogue, which was intended to sound entirely unlike that of an actual reporter, the overall effect is one of a really incompetent production team on the show. This is entirely accurate: the production team consists of me.

Katia and Philippe have an odd role in the narrative - they’re basically an atomic unit from a completely different story. Of the teens in the series, Philippe is the only one who’s happy with where his life is; Katia is suffering from existential boredom. I think, in showing a failure in communication between these two, the episode fails to properly communicate what’s going on to the audience: Philippe is usually content just to do the same stuff over and over - watching movies, as it may be - but that doesn’t mean that he dislikes new things, only that he’s not the sort to actively seek them out. So the conflict is that Katia is doing the same stuff because she wants Philippe to be happy, while Philippe is fully expecting Katia to be pushing for new things - which she finally does here, when she suggests breaking Lizzie out of jail. Another aspect of this dynamic which I think is unclear is the fact that Philippe’s happy to do pretty much anything - including literal crime - but draws the line at taking off his sunglasses. Katia’s presumably been trying to get him to do so for months; her narrativist instincts are telling her that he must be hiding something. I figure he’s not - he just really likes his sunglasses.

Anyway, enough of that. “The Easy Way” is another fairly-forgettable plot-centric episode - but I like the way it handles the third and final appearance of Santa, who at first glance seems to have no reason to be at the office. The reveal that the whole thing’s been a distraction for the breakout is probably the closest the series comes to ever having a plot twist - I think it sits very well in the series as a whole, which (for technical reasons) never shows the big, important moments on-screen. I’m pretty proud of Santa’s monologue, which I wrote myself as a bookend to his opening quote, and the little glimpses of his history given within. I also like the moment towards the middle of the episode, where Detective Raymond - having been left to his own devices - wonders aloud “how can one man be so based”, right after threatening a teenager with torture and right before getting duped by a homeless man in a Santa suit.

Getting four characters into a single scene was a real challenge, let me tell ya, but I think “The Agenda (Part 1)” pulls it off decently enough. It offers some decent closure for the minor characters: Katia and Philippe get their adventure; Jessica’s mad hacks keep the cops off their backs. I think Lizzie’s “true power of love” realisation is a sincere one, but she won’t get her closure until a little later. Her expression upon seeing Chris again strikes me as similarly sincere. By this point, I’m banking on the audience having forgotten about Samir - so Lizzie’s actual goal here should come as something of a surprise.

In “The Agenda (Part 2)”, the penultimate episode, the series comes full circle. There isn’t really much to say about this one; the way Chris and Samir make up is pretty much the same as the way they fell out in the first place. Lizzie is just a facilitator here - she’s still planning to leave, but this time has decided that she doesn’t want to leave Chris entirely on his own.

Finally, in “The Agenda (Part III)”, we end up back at the bus stop, where Lizzie talks to Literally The Devil - who turns out to be a much better conversational partner than Chris ever was. This episode tries to strike a balance between jokes and introspection, but I don’t really think that it properly achieves either. Still, Lizzie’s shift to optimistic nihilism here feels like a good conclusion to her arc within the series.

It’s obvious that I was writing Are You Happy by the seat of my pants. While this lead to a pretty unpredictable plot, it lead to fairly poor economy of narrative. Although many of the characters get rudimentary arcs of their own, there isn’t a clear throughline which connects them all - I didn’t know what I wanted to say with this series, and so it ended up saying pretty much nothing.

On the other hand, this is just fifteen minutes of content - and I think it packs a lot of individually-quite-good snippets into that runtime. Usually, when I’m writing something, I hit a point where it starts to be a chore; that wasn’t really the case with Are You Happy, thanks to the fast turnaround provided by Plotagon and - perhaps more importantly - the fact that I didn’t need to worry about writing full descriptive prose.

Plotagon provided a huge amount of great background music - seeing as I didn’t go into detail in the last commentary, here’s a breakdown of which pieces I used:

“cruising rap battle” is something of a leitmotif for Chris, appearing during “I Hate You”, “The Agenda (Part 2)” and his scene in “Nobody to Talk To”

Lizzie, meanwhile, has “hideout”, which appears during “Why Nobody Likes You”, her scene in “Nobody to Talk To”, and the final scene in “The Agenda (Part 1)”

Santa naturally has “jingle bells” for all three of his appearances

I guess you could say that “happy music (care free)” from “What are we Learning Today?” is technically a Mr. Hernandez song, but I’d consider this to be more true of “sentimental” which plays throughout “The Faculty Bathroom”

Detective Raymond’s theme is “Detective Noir background”, which appears during the endings of “White-Hat Hacking” and “Nobody to Talk To”

Jessica gets two songs - “pirate ditty” and “suspenseful”, appearing in “White-Hat Hacking” and “The Easy Way” respectively

Katia and Philippe technically get “zombie theme” and “news intro” in “Ever Get Tired of Movies?”, but that’s just the stuff that plays from the TV - it’s not until “The Agenda (Part 1)” that they get “anticipating”, which I consider to be theirs

Fitting neatly with the vague stabs at liminality present in “The Agenda (Part III)”, Literally The Devil gets “muzak”: elevator music

Other bits of music include “lounge” in the actual elevator in “I Hate You” and “french bistro” for the cafe in “The Meaning of Life”

Upon booting up Plotagon, I was greeted with the disconcerting news that it’s being discontinued on desktop at the end of next month - ostensibly so the developers can focus on mobile platforms, although I can’t help but notice that this announcement was shortly followed by a flash sale on their “Plotagon Studio” subscription service for desktop: just $49.99 monthly, or $499.99 annually! Yeah, uhh, I’m good. This is pretty disappointing, but not entirely surprising - I’ve always kinda felt like the software was about to disappear in a poof of smoke, and now it kinda has.

However, I was also greeted with some good news: apparently, it turns out that I’d previously revisited the program all the way back on the 21st of September last year, to start work on a sequel to Are You Happy. Although I knew that I’d made vague plans to do so, I’d completely forgotten that I’d actually gone ahead and produced any new material! The sequel will likely share a portion of its cast with the original series, but based on what I’ve currently got it’ll probably end up dealing with pretty different themes.

With any luck, the application will continue to work offline past that date - but just in case it doesn’t, I’m going to try and accelerate production on the sequel. Don’t get your hopes up. If I can’t finish it, or I’m not happy with it, I’ll still try and put it out - but it’ll be more as a “bonus feature” than as a fully-fledged instalment in the continuity. More importantly, as is the case with everything made in Plotagon, I can’t promise it’ll be good - I can only promise that I’ll have fun making it.