#i know everything is kinda... horrible forever but we all gotta persevere okay? lets do our best to find joy in the little things.

[snowflop]

Happy new year from me and my beastie 🎉

[kaesaaurelia]

from your fic "never a lovely so real" - what did you think about when you wrote the first sans fight?

This got LONG AS FUCK, so it’s behind a cut.  For reference, this is in response to the DVD commentary meme:

Sans’ countdown: 5, 4, pi, e, 2, square root of 2, 1, 0.

I had this in my head for like months, to the point where I would be out doing an errand for work grinning like a maniac, and trying to figure out if I should come up with a constant between five and four.  I also kept trying to fit i in because Euler’s identity is neat, but that just isn’t how countdowns work.

Belmont takes his barrier down and Asgore throws his trident.  It whizzes right past the personal barrier Corcoran has thrown up.

“You missed,” says Corcoran, sounding baffled and a little disappointed.

“Oh, no,” says Asgore.  "I jammed the door behind you.“  He conjures another trident, and throws it at the door towards the rest of the building.  "Now no one can leave.”

I really really wanted something to echo Asgore’s shattering of the Mercy button, since that’s such an oh shit moment in his fight, and it’s also pretty important that Asgore was Sans’ original boss and there’s a hell of a lot Toriel doesn’t know about any of this.

I think this is as good a time as any to stop for a couple stories about Papyrus, don’t you?  I mean, what kind of wacko wants to hear all about all this depressing violent bullshit I’ve been talking about?

Don’t give me that look, buddy.

So!  Let’s talk about my brother.

When I first wrote this bit, I was genuinely not sure what kind of reception this would get, given that by now a lot of people were really really looking forward to seeing Sans kick some ass.  But Sans-as-narrator has motivations that don’t always jive with my motivations as someone who just wants to tell a story, and this is a part of the story that he’d want to stall for as long as possible, partly because he’s horrified by his abilities, and partly because he’s ashamed of what he’s done with them.  I’ll skip doing commentary on the Papyrus backstory stuff here, unless someone else wants me to do that, but suffice to say Sans always seems more comfortable talking about Papyrus than himself.

So, where was I?

Oh, right, this asshole.  I blip to stand on the ceiling as soon as everything goes topsy-turvy.  There’s a brutal snap as Noyes makes contact with the ceiling headfirst, and he lies there at the top of the room in a limp pile.  It’s too bad, because that means no more Noyes puns.  Noyes will be silent forever.

I have so. many. notes. on who was killed when and how and by whom, in which scene, for this whole jailbreak plot arc, so by this scene I was really happy to be working with only two students and Corcoran.  Having some cannon fodder was really important, though, because I had long since reasoned that for a fight scene with Sans’ powers to be interesting and not just impressive, to really show them off, you either have to have a character who can reset – not an option in this case – or a fairly worthy opponent.  So I erred on the side of making Corcoran’s barrier magic more powerful, but I also really wanted to make sure Sans had a couple of other people to pick off first, to represent those first few times someone tries to fight Sans and gets instantly killed.

“He shot at everyone who tried to leave!” says Fullerton.  He struggles and gets up, but I think I see him grab something first.  Nice try, but no dice.

“Yeah, I guess you got a good point, kid,” I say.  "C'mere and get your hall pass and you can go back to school, no harm done.  We’ll shake on it.“  I walk over, real casual, and hold out my hand.  But when he draws Corcoran’s gun, I’m ready.  As six long bones pierce his stomach and chest, his body jerks backwards and he staggers and falls.

And obviously this is the part where Sans offers fake-mercy.

“How are you doing this?” he demands.  He jumps, experimentally, and falls back to the wall.  "This is the wall.  If I broke through the wall would I fall to the ground, or –“

Partly this is just an excuse for the barrage of horrible gravity puns Sans unleashes but I’m gonna be honest, if someone was breaking the laws of physics while they killed me I’d be damn curious how they were doing it.

the old stories call ‘em “grotesques,” but Dr. Gaster and me always called ‘em blasters

I think in canonverse Undertale fic, Gaster is usually the originator of Gaster blasters, but since I wanted Papyrus to have a blaster (per canon hints) and since Papyrus is neither related to Sans or Gaster, nor was he involved in the mad science/time travel shenanigans, it kind of had to be a general skeleton thing.  I’m still kind of figuring out my backstory for the blasters/grotesques, but I’m kind of thinking of them as something that most skeletons are capable of, in varying degrees, but they rarely bother to learn to do it.

He’s got his barrier up before it hits, and when I call the blaster off, he looks relieved – until his barrier goes a sickly purple color and starts to flicker.  He’s looking as tired as I’m starting to feel; he’s breathing heavy, and his hair’s plastered to his skull with sweat.  I kinda suspect his barriers ain’t up to the usual abuse.

I mean, Corcoran being the purple soul and all, I had to work Karmic Retribution into it somehow, it being one of two purple mechanics.  (The other one, Muffet’s webs, are kiiind of referenced in Corcoran getting tangled up in wires, although I don’t remember if I actually meant to do that?  Let’s pretend I meant to do that.)

Then, out of the corner of my eyesocket, I notice – oh hell.  Sellers is creeping up, holding Noyes’ pipe wrench, and before I can tell him to stop he throws it at Corcoran’s head.  Of course it bounces right off his barrier, hard, and goes flying into the air.  Fortunately I duck before it knocks me out.  "Nope!“ I say, pulling him back with magic.  Corcoran rewards his incredibly stupid ingenuity by trying to fry us both, and it’s all I can do to blip out of the way of that flame.  "Go find something to hide behind, kid, you’re a danger to yourself and others,” I snap.

“I had to do something!” says Sellers.  "Everyone else is doing something!“

“Everyone else is a goddamn moron.  Go!” I say, waving at him.

OKAY SO THIS PART.  I remember writing this in the Yulechat IRC and consulting my notes and being like “wait, what is Sellers doing?”  While Marty Szczepanski is not like, Mr. Self-Sacrificing, as written, I figured he’d be feeling kind of inadequate with all these weird magic things going on – even the useless-seeming Belmont has magic, and is working together with always-anxious Alphys, and he’s just not doing anything.  So I decided that it’d be totally justified to have Sellers sit this one out but I just didn’t see him sitting it out.

The other thing you might notice, if you read it as soon as I posted it – I changed the dialogue, and I still kind of wince at this.  The dialogue was originally Everyone else is a schmuck – schmuck, in the circles I’m in now, is a casual mild insult for a useless dumbass.

But see, then I sat down to watch one of the Presidential Debates with my grandmother, and she called one of the, uh, esteemed candidates a schmuck, and she pretty much spat the word, and then she apologized to me for using such language.  And I remembered that in Yiddish it technically means “penis” but more accurately means “dick, but not just any dick, the most festering puss-filled godawful worthless dick you can think of, what a fucking asshole, I wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire, that’s the kind of dick he is.”

Sans would probably not have known this at my age – his mother was vaguely Jewish in a secular way – but after years working in Vaudeville BOY HOWDY WOULD HE KNOW IT, probably because using That Word onstage probably got him banned from somewhere.  (Also, Alphys’ family is actualfax Jewish and probably so are the Blooks.  I hemmed and hawed about including this in the fic, but y’know what, fuck it.)

Corcoran’s not standing anymore.  He’s on his knees, still breathing, but clearly having a hard time of it.  His white coat is now blackened and charred.  His skin also blackened in places; in others it’s a livid red.  "I – I’ve changed my mind, I can, I can help you, I, I, stop, please!“  He throws his hands up wildly, and manages to stand and stagger backwards a few steps.  "Patience!  Please!  You can’t – you can’t let him –”

I actually initially had Corcoran give in to death, but that seemed wrong, and then I remembered he’s the fucking soul of Perseverance and will continue at all costs.  I honestly feel bad for Corcoran for reasons that probably aren’t clear from the fic just yet, but suffice to say he hasn’t had any enjoyment of life in a long, long time.  And yet.

“I could be useful!” says Corcoran.

“Can you believe this guy?” I ask Asgore.

Asgore doesn’t say anything, but he looks very doubtful.

“Well, I don’t,” I say.

I was a bit anxious about writing Asgore in this scene, I guess – I hope I conveyed both that in Toriel’s absence, Sans kind of considers him to be in charge (until Sans has a better idea), but also that Asgore really does not want to be making decisions to kill people anymore and would rather Sans made up his own mind.

All that’s survived untouched are his ankles and feet, which is just disconcerting enough that I briefly consider wasting magic to fix that.

[…]

“Well, I guess that’s gotta be good enough, we can’t exactly wait around for the coroner, huh?”

OKAY IS IT JUST ME, or is that part at the beginning of the Wizard of Oz, with the Wicked Witch of the East’s feet sticking out from under the house just really disconcerting?  Also how cool would it be to have a singing Munchkin coroner around to declare people officially dead when they get houses dropped on them?  Like, not cool if you personally had a house dropped on you but tbh if I had a house dropped on me I’d be too dead to mind the singing, so I’d have no objections.

…….So, anyway.  This image is probably a combination of too many Wizard of Oz viewings and my having only recently read waaaay too many Search And Rescue Woods stories on r/nosleep, wherein the author is fond of saying “and we only ever found half an inch of his kneecap and his left ring finger!”

“Um.  Can we.  Can we cut his head off and stuff his mouth with garlic?  I just want to be sure.”

I would like to remind you that they never got a chance to do this.

“My mom woulda been so pissed off if she ever knew,” I said.  "Conforming to speciesist stereotypes and all that.“

She snorts, to my surprise.  "I think my parents would have a few things to say about my career choice as well.”

There is… backstory here, for both of them.  In Sans’ case, his mother was pretty concerned that Sans did not present himself seriously enough and that no one would take him seriously in the real world.  Never in her life would she have expected him to become a mob hitman, but in the present/future of this ‘verse, there are still a lot of really negative stereotypes about monsters, and skeletons in particular, and she has had to face a ton of them in her own job – she works in tech – so she tried very hard to make sure Sans didn’t give people the wrong impression.  They didn’t have the easiest relationship.

In Patience’s case, she came of age in the ’60s, and so she had to work very hard to convince her parents to send her to college in the first place.  She was very smart, and very ambitious, and very, very idealistic, and extremely naive, and they worried a lot about her – a girl! alone! in the city! – getting mugged or falling in with the “wrong crowd,” although by that they were probably thinking, like, hippies, not organized crime.