#i've got a couple suggestions in my inbox i'll put em up for consideration later~!

[nighttimepixels]

ok but fell!maddie owning a bunch of goats as pets? sounds kinda passive-aggressive towards the former royal family of... goat-looking individuals... (or is it just me???) also wanted 2 say im, as always, in lov with your designs and backstories. i wonder what the worst of both maddies has been? the experiments leading to their soul/weapon obssession have been kinda vague and it's like. please elaborate more on them--? all your characters are super great, my heart be calm. ty for your time!

✧∠( ᐛ 」∠)＿

It absolutely is a minor flipping off towards the former royal family, heh. Fell!Maddy just also happened to really love those tiny goats in the end though, unironically, so she’d also completely murder anyone who threatened them. Then again, they are curiously strong and capably pygmy goats so - really, even trying to mess with them behind her back might be a bit of a death sentence before she even catches you >v>;;;

Also, oh man, bless you anon, I’m so happy to hear that ;v; I’ll post Fell!Maddy art soon, I think you might like the twists with her design, heheh.

As for the worst of both Maddys- ooo, that definitely depends on whether we’re talking pre- or post-surface. I did leave the experimentation things a little vague, it’s true, didn’t want to wax on gayly if no one was interested-

To begin to broach it, well, let’s just say both Maddy’s have a higher LV. Maddy’s is higher than most Underground with the exception of the Queen, a wizened turtle crone in Waterfall, and her old fiery bartender friend, but Fell!Maddy’s is astronomical.

More below the cut! :D

Maddy had to make some hard decisions and fast. EXP is a tricky thing to measure sometimes - while gaining it via murder’s obvious, there’s philosophical debate amongst monsters as to whether letting someone die in front of you by negligence counts. So she was already a bit hazy... but after the accident where Alph died and she was only able to save the perseverance soul, a lot happened... fast.

With all but one of the souls gone, monsters began to Fall in droves. They’d held out so long, and yet now, the thing that was so close - well, they’d effectively lost nearly all their progress, and it took a harsh, sudden toll. Maddy, already overexposed to human soul magic, already snapped over the edge...

She made some decisions.

Whereas Alphys in UT tried to experiment to save monsters that would’ve died otherwise regardless and then turned recluse when it all went to hell, Maddy - with concentrated perseverance strapped to her back - didn’t do that. But that didn’t mean her first experiments went well... Or prettily.

She still sees the dust on her hands. It’s part of why she doesn’t take off her gloves any more - the grit of it between her phalanges... the screams, the melting of monsters she had known for years, the haunting whispers that echoed in her maddened skull...

Hundreds of monsters went through her lab before she at last was... successful. To a decent degree... not even entirely. She didn’t stop, and it was a blessing and a curse - for years, no one wanted to venture close to her new lab in Snowdin for fear of being forced to hear the screams that had been so common in the beginning...

There’s more detail to be had there, of course, but it was at that point that she started to expand her work, to restore and improve power and eventually literally construct a mini sun to power and light the Underground and turn it into a technological paradise. By that point, though, she truly earned the mad part of Mad Scientist - while chaotic good in alignment, there’s true chaos there. She’d do anything for the betterment - had done horrors for the betterment, the survival of monsterkind. There’s so much unsaid there but... as a taste... well, when someone’s done that much just to cure what was effective a plague of Falling, what else might they do...?

As for Fell!Maddy, well, she already lived in a kill or be killed world. It wasn’t about snapping and throwing away her morals - though, by all means, she did have them... just in a way that suited her world. She was loyal to her sister and their bond was unbreakable, and to those few that earned a decent measure of her trust she repaid in kind. She’s got her own fiery bartender that acted as partner in crime, and is now that and business partner as well. A few scattered allies - friends was pushing it, but you do what you can. She was always good to kids, or at least gave them the proper chance to get out of the trouble she’d find them in by running away with a kick to the butt and a gruff shout-

But after the accident, well...

See, the only soul Fell!Maddy saved was Kindness. Not perseverance.

To a monster in a Fell!verse, especially to someone like Fell!Maddy who’d always craved that unattainable, compassionate connection with someone, something just for her and soft in comparison to all her world’s hard edges...

Nothing could be more covetable.

Fell!Maddy guards the soul she saved fiercely. No one else can touch it, and since then literally no one has seen her without that soul near her.

With the souls lost, rather than a plague of Falling monsters, her underground faced a sudden civil war. Riots were everywhere, any semblance of tenuous ‘peace’ lost as no one agreed on what to be done. Her experiments began quickly - taking monsters on the brink of death or Fallen, and experimenting. Seeing what power monster souls could have, and what exposure to a human soul might do- what tech she could develop, how she could test the limits of space-time with even just that extra boost... For a long time her lab was more secret and impossible to find, but there was a part of Snowdin even the most grizzled of monsters didn’t dare venture to for the sheer horror of the screams and the darkness of the atmosphere under the exponential EXP increase.

In the end, Maddy was able to develop tech, weapons, means of manipulating space-time that allowed her sister to throw a coup from within the ranks of the Guard, toppling the monarchy and wresting control for herself. The civil war was put to a bloody and tense end, but in it’s wake she purposefully allowed a black market/underground to rise - secret fights and games of strategy played, dust spread in back alleys - in a world like theirs, malcontent was inevitable, so her sister used it to focus on the lower echelons and the harsher proclivities rather than turning up to the overarching leadership.

Fell!Maddy, of course, took up her own position as people learned they could turn to her for all manner of things done... for a price.

Her lab and home in Snowdin is connected by a terrible warping of space-time to her sister in the Capital; such a broad instantaneous reach keeps Fell!Maddy’s sister’s grip on the Underground ironclad and even begrudgingly respected. Meanwhile, Maddy’s lab is more visible, with a ‘lobby’ of sorts for business fronts with her fiery bartender friend.

No one wants to visit the depths of her lab- not lightly.

Her technology is magitech, and unlike anything the Underground had ever seen - and she develops some of it at the cost of soul power itself... of course, not her own, and not at the expense of her precious, protected soul. No, making a deal with her is far more intense than a blood debt. You’ll get what you ask for, and the impact of her work is all over the Underground - the place is practically cyberpunk now.

But people, when they’re not calling her the Mad Scientist of Snowdin, have a tendency to call her the Reaper in her position as mob boss. After all... she’ll come collecting, should you fail to pay the life debt you owe her.

~~~~~

And of course, that’s just underground ;D both of them get up to more and even wilder experimentation above ground once their respective barriers are broken - but I’ve rambled enough for now, so feel free to send more asks if you want more info on either of these mad skeletal scientist ladies  _(┐「ε:)_♡