#i tried feeding it some sans lines back when i was doing the rp to see if the machine was capable of identifying his speaking style

[carlyraejepsans]

HELPP i found out about character AIs and im losing it over calling deltarune sans "a more manipulative personality" 😭😭 like whatt we've only seen this man like 2 times

sorry im being a hater hgfjdks but you're the sans understander

lmaoo character.ai, look where the fall of ai dungeon got us, smh. thank you for the compliment though!

[ambiguouslyliterate-blog]

Respawn Point Ch. 5: A Desert of Dangerous Dinguses

I thought I’d be used to single player by now, but loooking back at the pillar of smoke rising from the cherry blossoms of the forest, my heart still stung.

Sand whispered under our feet as we paced across the arid expanse, clouds of sand sliding across the ground like a thick fog, our only companions the occasional cactus or dying piece of brush. We'd started walking to get away from the forest, the sounds of the woods feeding our paranoia—any crunching leaf becoming the snap of a bowstring, any rustling grass becoming a wandering member of a mob, ready to signal the others—but before long, we were walking in the middle of a sandy void with the forest only a short green line on the horizon. Though I guess with San and Slenda’s home burned to the ground and the three of us chased out of the server’s walls, we didn’t have anything left to do but wander. But I suppose wandering’s what the three of us were good at.

I looked ahead to San, marching forward through the dunes, hoodie tied around her waist, a penumbra of sweat forming just below her neckline. She’d shout something encouraging to the two of us every so often during her marches, her eyes trained on Slenda’s expression. Occasionally the creeper girl would flash a weary smile, and Slenda would give her back a thumbs-up. A silent conversation that I understood, but never really joined.

The former admin was silent as we walked, the only sound from her being the sand sifting under her feet. Her eyes were fragile behind her broken glasses and sweat trickled in streams around her face, fogging the cracked lenses. I tied my jacket around my waist, imitating San, and put my scarf into my pocket, stashing it away in my inventory. I wondered why Slenda hadn’t done the same, still wearing the baggy sweater from Weebtown. “Hey… Isn’t that hot?” I asked, breaking the short silence between San’s outbursts.

Slenda flashed a pair of frightened eyes towards me, the rhythm of her steps shaken for a few moments before proceeding. “Oh, I um…” She seemed lost in thought, and less than willing to strike up a conversation, mumbling something under her breath that I couldn’t quite make out. I decided to persist.

“Huh?” I asked.

“I said I’m…” It was subtle, but I could see Slenda blush behind the twisted line of her spectacles, “I’m not wearing anything under this sweater…”

I heard San stumble ahead of us in the sand, giggling. Shoving my hands into my pockets, I went back to looking ahead, hoping to not add a death of embarrassment on top of Slenda’s already long list of problems. “I’m sorry, n- never mind, that really sucks.

Slenda’s footsteps quickened, an irritated snort leaving her lips as she shook her head, coming to meet my pace. “Yeah, and you wanna know what else sucks, Cyrus? Everything. Literally EVERYTHING that’s happened to me these past few days.”

I pulled into myself, my mouth pursed in a stunned silence. San turned back towards us, an arm lifted slightly towards her friend, her fingers curling. It felt like she was waiting for the tension to leave, for an easy moment to jump in and spread her quirky positivity, but it didn’t feel like it was coming. I could feel Slenda’s eyes digging into me, each like a purple blade, “My closest friend—someone I’ve known since I spawned—betrayed me, I lost the trust of hundreds of players at once that I’ve been working to gain tirelessly for months, my spawn’s been destroyed and I’ve been chased out of the closest place to home I’ve ever had, and in top of that; on top of EVERYTHING that's happened, we're walking straight into the Thieves' Desert RP server! Before you know it, we'll be surrounded by traps and vagabonds itching to jump us and steal everything we have while they leave us to die in the desert. AND ON TOP OF THAT, I die, it means I have to back to Goldenworks, a where I, I--!”

Heavy, round droplets began to fall from Slenda’s eyes, darkening where they fell in the sand below. San dashed over to wrap the former admin in a close embrace, Slenda squeezing her back just as tightly, if not more. Slenda took off her broken glasses and pushed an arm between her and San to wipe her eyes.

“I’m just… So tired…” She sighed. Looking at her made my heart ache, but I couldn’t help but find a strange comfort in her fear, in her distress. Maybe because it felt like a mirror.

“There must be some place we can rest here.” I said, hoping to peel away some of the melancholy that had fallen over us, or at the very least give us some direction, Slenda glaring at me through her broken glasses. I’d heard of this desert and the server that occupied most of its land. It was a roleplay, or “RP” server, meaning it was full of people in roles and costumes, taking on fantasies through mask and cape. However, while some enjoyed purely skipping around the desert, delivering quirky lines and experiences to travelers, others reveled in the socially-acceptable chance to become a thief or a marauder, and being able to slip out of the persona at the end of the day without consequence. A game played with life and death. It was a fine place to be for an RPer, someone who was consenting to this whole bizarre system, but to us, it was a death trap.

“It’s a server full of crazy RPers, yeah, but they’re all players, right? They get tired. There’s got to be a rest stop or a neutral zone somewhere…”

San turned to us, arm shooting into the air, waving like an eager student. I stared, baffled for a moment, before pointing to her, her face lighting up. The creeper girl put her extended arm back around Slenda, smiling brightly through the tension that still gripped Slenda and I. I wish I could know how she did it.

“There’s the Sandy Speakeasy!” She grinned, her feat stomping excitedly in the sand, “It’s one of those neutral whatevers and I haven’t been there in ages!! It’d be perfect!”

Slenda couldn’t help but look at San with cloudy doubt, her brows pulled together. I had no idea that San had lived here at one point, but did Slenda not know either? The former admin tried to erase the expression, looking towards the sun. I followed her eyes. The bright square was beginning to fall below the line of the horizon, nightfall more than imminent. We watched with a creeping dread as more and more of its light began to retract, the shadows of the cacti and dunes around us growing long like the night’s hungry claws.

Rolling my shoulders, I tried to straighten my back, standing strong against the dimly lit sand that surrounded us, trying to stay brave or at least put up my best act. I hated seeing people scared, whether they were being threatened by a power-hungry modder or just terrified of the world around them, and I felt it was my job to restore their confidence. With a flick of my wrist and a twist of my fingers, I activated my mod, calling out the last weapon I copied back in Weebtown. “I’m sure we can make it,” I smirked, feeling my power surge into both hands. It felt stranger than the other times. Before I felt a chill, like steel, but my hands felt strangely warm, like my hands were hovering over a fireplace, “After all, we’ve got these, don’t we?”

San and Slenda looked at me wide-eyed, Slenda’s mouth pulling to the side, crooked, San’s grin extending ear to ear as her eyes glowed. Neither were the expression I was expecting. After all, they were just the same swords I’d copied when I fought that swordswoman in Weebtown, I’d fought with them for some while now, it shouldn’t have been a surprise. But San spoke out, her eyes glimmering with the excitement of a fangirl.

“You copied Roxxie’s mod?!”

I stepped back, bringing my hands forward, flames trickling up around the corners of my vision. WHAT THE—I flailed, acting on reflex, my body kicking and flailing to escape the fire that was pouring from the palms of my hands and crawling up my elbows, chasing me to the sand as I crashed to the ground in a beige cloud. I sat up, the fire still warm in my hands, but not hot, nor painful. My eyes went from hand to hand, watching the flames as they trickled up harmlessly around me. I relaxed my body, the flames quickly dying on their own, even the ones that’d found their way onto my clothes. The only thing burnt was the desert floor beneath me, soft brown scorches left in the sand. I looked up at San and Slenda, the former holding back a fresh deluge of laughter, while the latter pressed her palm against her face, her glasses held in her other hand. Her mouth was crinkled, somewhere between nausea and disgust. Some confidence you bring, Cyrus. You could be a superhero.

I didn’t remember copying Roxxie’s mod back in Weebtown, but I did touch it, and I guess that was enough. I hadn’t encountered enough modders to really test it, so unfortunately, I just had to roll with whatever it decided to do. Did it overwrite the swords? I thought, turning my hand, watching the fire crawl through my fingers like an upside-down trickle of water. Come to think of it, I hadn’t called out the drill I copied in a while. I stared, perplexed at the flame. “Do I not have the swords anymore?”

“You don’t know?” Slenda interrogated, her eyes piercing, even through her cracked lenses. I shook my head. “Mods don’t really come with instruction manuals…” I said, churning the heat in my hand, shaping it. It both obeyed me and followed its own path, it was more like herding an animal than a power I had control over, “I think I can only copy one mod at once, but I’m not sure… I haven’t really tried it.”

Roxxie’s fire lit up the sand around us, our shadows stretching long, the circle of light crawling slowly across the desert surface. Something didn't seem right about the way the light's glow. Our shadows seemed too long, and felt like they were moving, but I wrote it off as just a trick of the light. San stood admiring the flame in my palm, her eyes a little too lost in it as Slenda looked everywhere but, her mouth a broken grimace.

"Should I put it out?" I asked Slenda, her eyes turning up for a second before looking back at the ground. She shook her head. "We'll need it. It's starting to get dark out, and it might be useful against the bandits."

She ran her hands along her arms, then placed one on her neck, both hands directionless, chasing a shiver that wouldn't soon go away. "It just… Makes me think about Roxxie… What we’ll do if we run into her out here, or if she runs into us…"

San squeezed the frantic ex-admin tightly, grinning the wide grin I assumed at times was just tattooed onto her face, “Roxxie got banned, and we killed her, which means she got sent back to your guys’ old server. If anything, we should probably worry about getting to the neutral zone right now.”

A silence quickly fell over the three of us, Slenda and I looking at each other. Slenda’s expression was cold, angry, a shade she never seemed to show around San, but the bite quickly faded from her expression. She placed her hand in San’s, nodding reluctantly. “You’re right,” She sighed, San nuzzling her to free the smile that was starting to form, “We should get going. Any place is better than this desert at night.”

“Besides,” San smiled, “You’ve both been avoiding the traps pretty well so far.”

The creeper girl walked on, a pop in her step as she moved across the small dunes.   I looked over to see that the former admin shared my expression of disbelief, her eyes wide-eyed and silent. I could practically hear the “WHAT” echoing inside her head. We looked the creeper girl up and down, trying to find some kind of zipper or seam in her expression, a cue to laugh. But we couldn’t find any. Slenda stepped forward, hands clasped in front of her, squinting at San, "Did, did you just say… Traps...?"

San laughed incredulously, placing a hand on her hip, "You… You can't see the obvious patterns on the ground…?” Slenda gawked in disbelief. "N- No," I interjected, "You're just messing with us, right? One of your pranks? Some morbid creeper humor?"

The creeper girl bent down, her face about half a block off the desert floor. She exhaled, blowing hard across the ground, peeling a layer of sand from the ground and revealing a wooden pressure plate beneath, bits of redstone powder sticking out from its corners. I shined Roxxie’s fire towards it, illuminating what I could tell was a pressure plate trigger for some kind of trap. My heart sank. This was the first I’d noticed… How did San…She looked at us with half-lidded eyes. I felt like I was being scolded.

"Hey, what are you doing!” A voice snapped, me and Slenda straightening to a sudden attention. San turned her head; her back still slumped over the trigger of the apparently unimpressive trap, her eyes flat. Sand crunched from a dune to the side of us and a figure stepped out, their face strained in an irritated look and smeared in red paint. They were clad in heavy steal armor, strapped with leather and spiked in various places, their androgynous face peaking in a mohawk that looked slightly burnt. What in the Nether went on in this server? The road warrior glared at us, their lips pursed to the side like an irritated customer.

“I set up a perfectly good trap in the middle of this wasteland, wait for days for someone to come across it, and you don’t fall into it? And on top of that, you insult it?! The nerve!”

The RPer stuck out their finger at San, prodding the air as they scolded her. San cocked an eyebrow, her expression bare of her usual amusement. She looked more disappointed than anything. San raised her foot, her arms crossed. The leather-clad rebel instantly began stammering, trying to force an apology out as San brought her foot down, stomping the pressure plate into the sandstone below

Arrows shot from hidden dispensers in the sand around us, piercing the rogue from all angles, and quickly reducing them to a bloody heap. They fell to their knees, their expression glossy as San drove her iron sword through their chest. Their body changed into smoke and disappeared into the dry air, their eyes rolling back as they disappeared into the cloud. San regained some of her smirk, her hands on her hips. “Maybe you’ll learn to do some R&D next time, punk! Seriously, pressure plates?”

Slenda and I stood stunned, San’s composure, her knowledge of traps, everything coming out of the blue and hitting us like a thousand pounds. Just as the smoke cleared from the marauder’s corpse however, we heard the sand move again, and I pointed my arm towards the darkness like a torch. Another thief, dressed as a pirate, leapt up from behind the sand mound just beyond the road warrior’s, a wild-eyed grin on his face. Why are they all so close together?! This is a booby-trapped desert, not a street market!

"YAHARG! I KNEW THAT FOOL MADHAX79 WOUDLN'T BE ABLE TO CAPTURE YOU!! I’VE COME TO REAP THEIR SPOILS, BEWARE THE WRATH OF CAPTAIN EUAAHHGHH--!"

I flicked my arm in the swash-buckler’s direction, a ball of flame smashing into him like a cannonball, both the captain and the flames that engulfed him falling quickly behind the mound of sand. “Yeah, yeah,” I sighed, watching the black smoke fade and the grey smoke of his despawn rise over the sandy barrier, “We’re trying to get somewhere, do ya mind?”

As the smoke cleared, I saw the darkened horizon more clearly, including the shapes beginning to rise from the sand. Hostile mobs… I sighed, Just what we needed. Slenda took out a stone shovel, clutching it close to her chest, a contorted expression of fear on her face. San rose to her feet and placed a hand on her shoulder, Slenda shaking at her touch. I moved closer, hoping to offer something to calm Slenda down. San’s blue eyes shined at me but the other pair slid to me like cold amethysts, a glare silently cursing my next three generations. Needless to say, I stepped back, changing direction. As I turned, I saw shapes moving on the horizon, hostile mobs crawling from the darkness.

My feet moved mindlessly as I started walking where San had been pointing us, creating a ball of flame in my hand to guide us as we went, "Great, well, let's get going. I just want to--" A hand burst from the ground, clamping my ankle and tripping me. My mind barely registered it, my body falling forward like a ragdoll into the sand. I tried to pull away, only to pull the hand's owner further out of the sand, a face with one wild eye and a mane of crimson hair gazing hungrily through me. She lifted her other arm, a dagger whipping into her palm, "GIMME ALL YOUR RUBIES!!"

WHAT IN THE NETHER?! I tried to wriggle free, the eye-patched thief managing to drive the blade into my leg before I could blast her with Roxxie's fire. Pained and terrified, my body toppled into the sand, my hands clutching my leg. San and Slenda tried to run towards me but were each held back, San tripping over a husk as it emerged from the earth and Slenda activating a pressure plate, her body disappearing into the sound amidst the sound of pistons. Shadows around us began to move, eyes glinting from behind cactuses and rising from mounds of sandy camouflage. I felt a body try to grab me, hands working up under my arms. Instinctively, I tried slipping out, only to see San above me, a crooked smirk on her face. She almost looked like she was having fun. "Come on Cyrus! Fun time is over, we gotta get going!”

I wasn’t aware fun time had started.

San dragged me to my feet and started picking up speed, pulling me along with my wrist held tightly in her hand. Slenda struggled to pull herself out of the pit she'd fallen into, carving the side of the hole with her shovel, which she then used to beat off a skeleton that was crawling from the ground beside her. She let out a grunt, kicking out from the edge of the artificial crater, her eyes frantically searching the world around her, every side filled with danger. All around us the ground was shaking; arms, heads, and swords were pushing up from the sand, everyone desperate to test their mettle against the powerful travelers. After all, they assumed we were in on it, that we were willful participants in this bizarre game of death. Slenda ran to catch up with us, narrowly avoiding another pit and the grasping hands of an angry ninja to arrive by our side, batting off any adversaries that came close with her shovel. San ran at the front, carving our way forward with her sword while I ran at their side, taking out whoever and whatever I could with Roxxie’s fire. But it felt like the entire desert was alive, the very ground itself sending antibodies to devour us, and I didn’t think that a few fireballs (and terribly inaccurate ones at that) were going to protect us.

San pushed onward, crying out with a passion that seemed fueled by the chaos, unlike ours, "Come on guys, it's just over that hill! Probably!"

"PROBABLY?! YOU MEAN YOU’RE NOT SURE?!" I cried, tossing a fireball at a skeleton, knocking it back only for its arrow to firmly plant itself in my shoulder.

“I have a mental map!” San chimed, shrugging, “But those are statistically the worst kind of map, so--!” The pain throbbed in my wounds, my arm and leg both shrieking at me as I ran, San’s shape ahead of me like a beacon. She seemed to glow, her body dark but the sky around her illuminated like a halo, the horizon beaming at her. I rubbed my eyes on my shirt, trying to get out the sweat, sand, or whatever it was messing with my vision, only for the glow to persist. It wasn’t San’s light though, it was the light of torches.

San dashed towards the light of the neutral zone, her body disappearing over the horizon, Slenda and I hustling behind, struggling to catch up. I looked back to see thieves among the masses throw down their weapons, cursing the night sky as we neared safety. Others fought against the mobs that had changed targets, the mob of dangers convulsing, attacking itself. Distance between us began to grow and for a moment, the world finally growing as the sand rose up around us.

Except the sand wasn’t rising; we were falling.

The sand below us dropped out into a low basin where a town was dug out, the ground coming up at me like a swift kick. My body battered as I rolled down the sand, every inch of the slope finding a part of my body to smash into before I finally came to rest on the cold sandstone tiles below. Slenda had already fallen in a heap by my side, San towering over the two of us. Of course, she knew the drop was coming.

"Come on guys! Don’t die now, we’re practically in the speakeasy!"

Her face beamed, her body covered in sweat, dripping down her shoulders and into the front collar of her tank top. Sore, I lifted my head, my eyes tracing the fragile outline of the neutral zone. Under the wall of the sand, the sandstone buildings wavered on their foundations, the decimated structures like the rising dead. Slenda began to push herself up, digging her shovel into the ground and using it to bring herself to her knees. She surveyed the broken buildings of the town before us, a familiar look of dismay in her eyes.

“What… Happened to the town…?” She gulped, shakily rising to her feet, she trudged up to the ruins, searching for a flash of movement, anything that we could consider a sign of life. There were only enough torches to create a dull glow, and a few testificates wandering in the distant streets. They were a docile non-player race that squatted in destroyed towns, but they weren’t the hospitality I was expecting. Slenda's hands tightened on the shovel in her arms, wringing it, “Were we too late…?”

San tilted her head.　

"Nah, I don't think he'd be closed yet." She responded simply.

Slenda looked back at her, a worried look in her eyes. "I'm sorry, San. I don't know when this happened but... Maybe we can rest in these ruins...”

San chuckled and shook herself free of Slenda's gaze, tapping up the cracked sandstone staircase of a nearby building. Slenda and I followed suit, stepping into the ruined room. Slenda looked at me uneasily. The creeper girl smirked, pressing against a broken wall with her elbow. The floor beside her slid open, pulled by an unseen piston. From within there was the warm glow of torchlight, the hole below the sandstone lined with wood planks.

"It’s a speakeasy, guys. Of course it has a hidden entrance.” San smirked at us, “You guys can sleep out on the sandstone and broken glass all you want, but I’m going inside and getting a drink.”

San slipped naturally into the warm glow of the hole below, the piston stamping the floor back into place behind her. We heard the soft thumping of boots on wood as she slid down the ladder, zipping away. Slenda and I stood in a temporary silence; the special kind of silence that filled a room once San left; the emptiness left by the absence of her energy. Slenda broke the silence with a giggle, her hand quickly cupping her mouth. She tried to hide the shy smile that had broken across her face. “Notch, is that two times today that we’ve been scolded by San?”

A sudden burst of laughter cracked the flat expression my face had settled into, Slenda looking at me with eyes that flickered in dull purple embers. Her eyes were still red and swollen from crying, but now they were pushed up by an endearing grin. She was just as tired as I was, but she was more than happy. I guess San just tended to do that to her.

“I guess you’re right.” I admitted in amused disbelief. Slenda sighed, shaking her head as she tapped the button and stepped down into the entryway. She put her foot on the first rung, then the next, descending slowly.  Her eyes looked forward longingly as she fell out of view, “She sure is something, huh.”

“San?” I asked, starting my own descent. I couldn’t help but let out a chuckle. Sounds began to trickle up from below us. The sounds of banter, laughter, the clinking of glass. The dull roar of hospitality beckoning us. The piston shut back into place behind us, the sky disappearing, and with it the hostile, arid breath of the desert. “Yeah. She’s definitely something.”