#im hoh and have been trying to learn asl so i got excited when they mentioned it in an unrelated doc about monks i was watching dor class

[bjornkram]

Thank you for correcting me, I learned it from a documentary and made the mistake of only doing a gloss over of the google results when I was fact checking and should have clicked through more before posting this. I'm very sorry about posting misinformation, I did not mean any harm and will do better in the future.

Was anyone going to tell me sign language was invented by medieval Benedictine monks or did I have to find that out myself

[buttercupart]

Frisk’s Backstory that i forgot 2 post im so sorry

Frisk was born with moderate hearing loss. Their birth mother wasn’t in a place to properly care for them at the time they were born, so Frisk spent their early years in the foster care system, finding it hard to connect with others. They didn’t verbally communicate, and weren’t taught any alternative communication methods (like sign language), which made making their wants and needs known to be exceptionally difficult. When Frisk was 5, they were sent to live with a young couple in the surrounding area of Mt. Ebott. They were equipped with hearing aids, and began to learn the basics of ASL at home to allow them a form of proper communication for the first time in their life. Frisk was enrolled in a school for Deaf children a few towns away, where they started speech therapy and began to verbally speak to those they felt comfortable around. They came out of their shell and revealed themself to be a very kind and sociable child, and even though they still struggled from time to time, they were much different and much happier than they were when they were first taken in. It was around this time they were given the nickname “Frisk”, based on the way they tended to mispronounce their full name when they got excited. In that home, with that foster family, they finally felt truly loved and cared for.

But it didn’t last. Frisk only spent 3 years there, before they were sent to live farther away in the region with another family, who fostered other children alongside their own. Frisk didn’t take well to being removed from the first and only place they had ever felt safe, nor to being pulled out of the school for Deaf and HOH children, and struggled in their new school. Their social + speech progress began backsliding, and it didn’t help that their foster parents would often get into screaming matches until the early hours of the morning, or that the children already living there had an established sort-of hierarchy, and would take out their problems on Frisk when the adults weren’t around. Frisk completely stopped speaking at this point, and the other children took this as an opportunity to amp up their tormenting because, hey, it wasn’t like Frisk could tell anyone!

A lot of the exact details were never told to anyone even after the fact, but much like Chara, certain things could be pieced together by their reactions to others. They didn’t like anyone touching their hair, ever, they didn’t like anyone touching them or their possessions without permission, they didn’t like loud noises and would start bawling if anyone yelled around them, and so on. To put it lightly, Frisk was not happy at home due to what was going on and their mental health as well as view of the world took a nosedive. 

The straw that finally broke the camel’s back was one evening when the neighborhood kids were all outside playing manhunt, and Frisk was dragged along with their foster siblings. Frisk hid a ways away from the neighborhood proper, in a secluded wooded area, with only a large stick they had snapped off a tree as a potential tool to ward off whoever was “it”. Frisk’s eyesight had been declining for a while, and as such they couldn’t see their surroundings well, and didn’t notice one of their foster siblings, who was “it”, sneak up on them out of the corner of their eye until it was too late. Their foster sib took this opportunity to needlessly pummel them under the guise of “catching” them, and the others who had already been found, and were helping look for those who hadn’t, simply stood by and laughed as it happened.

That was Frisk’s breaking point, and they grasped the stick still in their hand as tight as they could and rolled over, swinging it at their sibling as hard as they possibly could to get them off, and hitting, and hitting, and hitting like their life depended on it. No amount of gasps or panicked screams to stop from the others could calm them down, and by the time they finally came around, they saw only their foster sib, laying still on the grass and trickling blood from their mouth.

Frisk thought they killed them. In a panic, they took off back to the house with what little remained of the stick in their hand, hurriedly bandaged up their injuries and left the house too fast to remember their hearing aids, lest they get caught, and made their way to the town center to catch the last bus that night back to Ebott. 

Their plan was originally to try and find their former foster family and hide out with them, but considering that they really truly believed they had killed their foster sibling, they figured there was no way those people would harbor a murderer in their home. By the time they got to Ebott proper, they decided that instead, they would climb to the top of the mountain, the one where those who venture up it were said to never come back, and they would die there rather than have to face what they’d done.

After almost four days, with only the determination to atone for the wrong they committed pushing them forward, Frisk stumbled across the opening to the mountain in the early hours of the morning. They sprinted towards it with stick in hand and bandage ends flowing in the breeze, ready to take it as their exit.

But instead, Frisk awoke, laying on their back on a bed of golden flowers that had broken their fall, next to a ghostly child that was muttering every swear word in existence.