#chara (UTSE)

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What's the worst reason you had to reset?

"..."

"I HATE HOTLAND."

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Has anyone recognized you yet?

"DOCTOR CHARA KNOWS WHO I AM, OF COURSE!"

"EVERYONE ELSE... DOESN'T RIGHT NOW. I THINK. IT VARIES."

"..."

"...I WISH UNDYNE WOULD RECOGNIZE ME SOON."

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Hey Chara, why'd you revive papyrus?

"I... I felt guilty."

"I know that I was not the one who killed him, but I might as well have been. I needed to fix what happened."

"..."

"...Strangely, I feel as though there may have been another reason, too. Yet I cannot fathom what it was."

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I think it's been long overdue for me to talk about what happened to Sans after I promised I would, so, here we are!

When I said I threw him in the Void, I was not lying dgshshf.

Sans had been somewhat involved with the efforts to revive Papyrus after he died. Chara came to him with the idea, and he was the one who provided them with Papyrus' scarf/cape, which was what a lot of his dust had settled in.

Sans wasn't totally on board with the plan and was skeptical that it would work (since, y'know, people who die aren't supposed to come back from that). But a tiny part of him still wanted to have hope that maybe he would get to see his brother again. Ultimately though, Chara's safety was more of a priority to him. Tori'd kill him if he let her kid get hurt on his watch, after all. So, I'd say that he did make some half-hearted attempt to discourage Chara from trying to revive Papyrus, but also didn't actually do anything to stop them when they insisted on going through with it.

As I've said before, Chara had less Determination available to work with compared to Alphys when she did her experiments. Alphys had extracted all of her samples from the human SOULs that had been collected (as mentioned in canon in the True Lab). Those SOULs disappeared after Frisk's battle against Omega Flowey, though, so Chara wasn't able to do the same. They found and used the leftover Determination that Alphys had previously collected, but it wasn't enough. So, from there they had two options to get more:

They extract some from the Amalgamates (not actually an option; the process could be painful, they refuse to harm a monster, absolutely not, no way are they doing this)

They extract some from their own SOUL.

In Chara's mind, there was only one choice.

So, with Sans' hesitant supervision, they hooked themself up to the DT Extraction machine.

However, as I'll get into some other time, Chara's SOUL is massively Fucked Up. Their Determination is pretty much the only thing holding it together.

Y'know, the very same Determination being extracted from them?

So, because the extraction process is basically killing them, they try to RESET on reflex. However, their ability to RESET also depends on the amount of Determination they have. Which they are currently in the process of losing.

This put the timeline in a weird, unnatural state of an incomplete RESET, causing time, space, and reality as a whole to begin tearing itself apart.

Sans intervened at that point, terminating the extraction process early and saving Chara's life as a result. However, his interference forced him to get very close to the source of the space-time disruptions (and thus where the destruction of reality was at its worst). He, unfortunately, got sucked into that whole mess, causing him to get sent to the Void and erasing him from the minds and memory of every living person in the process.

So! Sans got Gaster-ed lmao rip. Though actually, his erasure wasn't as complete as Gaster's was. Gaster got erased from all of existence entirely, whereas Sans has only been erased from his specific timeline (and all the other timeline iterations that branched off after his erasure). He exists outside of time now, watching over the world that he can no longer interact with. If anyone here happens to be familiar with Chrono Trigger, I'd say Sans' situation is somewhere in between Gaster's and Gaspar's. ...Funny how their names are. Fairly similar actually dgssgf

As for the out-of-universe reason why I threw Sans in the Void, it's the best way to make his role as the "game's" narrator work. Being a monster instead of a human, it doesn't make sense for him to have some sort of "soul connection" or something with Trace that Chara had with Frisk and/or the player.

So, he doesn't! But by existing outside of time, space, and the game itself to some extent, he, similarly to Gaster in Deltarune, is aware of and interacts directly with the player. Trace themself doesn't actually know about Sans' presence for most of their adventure. All of the narration and UI stuff is Sans talking to and interacting directly with the player specifically.

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What sort of runs have you done in the past?

I feel like Papyrus' (and Flowey's) RESETs can't really be categorized into "runs" like a player's playthroughs can. While their world might feel like a game to them (particularly Flowey), it still isn't one. There isn't a set "beginning" or "end" to a "run" for them like there is for us (...though I suppose a comparable beginning could be the first moment they woke up after being revived, but I don't think either of them would necessarily start from that point all the time. Papyrus especially would want to start at least a little bit after that point). They just RESET the timeline whenever they get bored/can't get anything useful out of the current one and want to try something new.

As a result, their "runs" are a lot more fragmented than what we as players would consider to be a run.

That said, Papyrus does typically lean more on the Neutral/Pacifist side of things. He's not opposed to murder, though---he can just undo it later, after all, so it's not like it really matters. If a situation "required" it, in his eyes, then yeah, he'll kill someone. But it's not his default course of action (though it wasn't Flowey's either, aside from Frisk anyway). While he hasn't done a "murder everyone" run himself, he's not bothered by it if Trace/the player attempts one and will help you/them out with it. It's something new, and hey, maybe this is actually what he needs to do in order to get the answers he seeks.

Which, actually, is another key difference between Scraps and Flowey! Flowey's actions are fueled by boredom, curiosity, and a desperate desire to fill that void in his SOUL somehow. Everything he does is for his own entertainment, just to see what happens when he does this or that. Papyrus, meanwhile, is on a specific mission, and his actions and RESETs are driven by his attempts to reach that goal.

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Do you have any regrets?

"NOPE!!!! EVERYTHING IS GREAT! BECAUSE I AM GREAT!!! AND SO IS EVERYTHING I DO!!"

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On a scale of 1-10 how DETERMINED are you?

Gonna answer this one ooc so I can go into more detail!

So, I'll rank Frisk (though they aren't relevant anymore) and Trace at a 10! They're the red-SOULed humans and the player-controlled characters. And logically, when they were a kid living with the Dreemurrs, Chara probably would have been here too? But maybe they didn't actually know they had RESET powers?

The Amalgamates I'll maybe put at a 5? They feel like a good marker for a midpoint. I guess realistically they probably would have more than that, but regardless, they don't get control over the timeline (maybe they don't have the focus required to perform a RESET? Or maybe each individual Amalgamate's level of Determination is too similar to those of the others that they all cancel each other out. Either way, if the Amalgamates are the most Determined beings in the Underground, then time just proceeds as normal). Do they remember RESETs? If so, I don't think anyone around them would notice. ...That could be interesting though, actually, so I'm gonna say Yes. ...Maybe. I think it would be neat if they could react to the player's/Trace's past actions (e.g. act fearful around you if you killed a lot of monsters on a past run, even if your current playthrough has been entirely Pacifist), but I haven't given much thought to how that would impact Papyrus since I'm only just considering the idea now dgshshf.

Undyne, then, would be at 4, as the monster with the most Determination in the Underground (not counting the Amalgamates), and probably at or very close to the limit a monster can have before their body starts to break down.

Flowey was somewhere around a 9? Far more than anyone else in the Underground, but not enough to rival a red-SOULed human without getting extra Determination from absorbing other human SOULs.

Papyrus, as Scraps, is somewhere around a 7 or 8! As I've mentioned in the tags of a past art post, he does have less Determination than Flowey did! Mainly because more of it was available when Flowey was created. But, since Flowey was killed by Frisk before they left, Paps still has enough Determination to control the timeline, at least until Trace falls into the Underground. As a skeleton monster, he had... Maybe slightly above average amounts of Determination for a monster? Somewhere around a 2 or 3?

By the start of Scattered Extension's "game", Chara's Determination level is... Around a 6? Maybe a 7? They do remember reset timelines perfectly, but they don't have any control over it anymore. Prior to Papyrus being revived, though, their Determination was higher—at least a 7, but maybe not quite an 8?