#technically this could work for any sans but I like this idea for more “glitchy” sanses the most

[robots-are-kinda-hot]

error x reader but he’s stuck as a little shimeji on your computer

that’s it. that’s the idea

[fluffynin]

I rolled my eye lights as the three humans bickered. When I had Kris tell them to explain the so-called "strengthening" system of these weapons... Well, all three came up with different answers.

Which, with thinking about Kris and I being technically the same being, but so different... Makes sense as we have confirmed all four of us Legendary Heroes come from different Japans, or worlds to be exact.

So why are they saying the other is lying?

"HEY, HEY! CALM DOWN! WE SHOULDN'T FIGHT!" Sansy floated over with Papy, both brothers pulling at the souls of Ren and Motoyasu to seperate the trio.

"yeah. we are kind of up a shit creek without... oh, wrong saying," Papy flinched as he corrected himself.

Huh? Why was... Oh, yeah. My job as the taxi of the River Maze. I wonder if I can still access that place with our current situation. At least if we can get back to the Void, we can vacate any other Gasters who have ended up in there to this world.

Not a fix, but should be way safer than the constant threat of Anomalies trying to eat whatever code they find. Plus, I rather put my trust in other versions of myself than whatever so-called "help" that lousy excuse of a king was gathering. At least if there are other scientists and doctors like Kris and me, we could look into these Waves of Catastrophe properly instead of the half-assed way these humans been doing with summoning who-knows-what and throwing the poor souls into what sounds an all out slaughter.

Which, oddly, looking at my fellow heroes, they are all so young. Sure, techinically I was once human, but I was at least around Kris's age of about 200 years or so, off a few decades since comparing his now Darkner appearance to what he properly is as a magic skeleton. These three never seen the horrors of war. Hell, with the methods they told me... It almost sounds like they never been in a real...

I clapped my hands together and everyone jumped.

"Huh? What?" I yanked on Kris's sleeve to get his attention to my hands

-I think I figured it out.- I signed and opened up the menus.

Each of the humans said they played a game with similar settings to this world. I, myself, love to play MMORPGs and even got pretty well set up in a guild that got pretty good.

Yet, if I use that as a reference, what if the enhancement methods the trio talked about was not of the games they played... But instead it was the best way of enhancement overall for how the world's operating systems worked.

I noticed glitching and a prompt came up with the question if I wanted to adjust my current and only shield: Small Shield

I confirmed and took in a calming breathe.

I was never really good at this, but I've always done it to myself to keep my LOVe at 1. Plus, I currently have a little EXP to spend from the Anomalies I took out before this mess, so it is worth a shot. All I'll lost is EXP which is a win for me either way.

I touched the gem on my shield and felt myself submerged within the depths of its inner being. A huge web of symbols and lines, almost all dulled out. I went to the one that was dimmly glowed more than the others.

I held out my hand with a spark and pushed into the light. The symbol went ablazed and the flames flickered down the lines to other symbols... And branched into new lines and new symbols. I felt a flood of warmth before my senses returned to reality.

"You okay, Iwatani-san?" Itsuki asked.

Ah, right. I always took much longer than Coordinators. A big reason I never did it to others for payment.

Yet, looking through the menus and manual...

Adjustments and transfering of EXP and LOVe to improve stats and such. As well as new branches that demand... Oh, skulls.

Just what is going on with this weird ass world.

Well, let's focus first on my discovery as Adjustments weren't the only thing added to my menu and manual.

"📖⏺" I let the text boxes float up from my mouth.

"Wha?" Motoyasu voiced the confusion on all three humans' faces. Though, even Kris had a high brow arced.

Seriously? We both speak Wingdings and he never spoke shorthand?

"n says the book records?" Papy translated. "o-kay?" The twin skulls looked at each other with worried looks.

Itsuki and Ren, however, had their eyes widened. Itsuki motioned the air and narrowed his eyes. He nearly fell when something happened on the interface only visible to himself and me.

"Oh! The manual records new stuff as we learn it!" Itsuki grinned. "None of us are wrong, but instead all right!"

"But how?" Ren grimanced at his own menus. "I don't get your methods would work to make our weapons stronger." I motioned to Kris.

"Different operating systems, one unit?" Kris asked with decipering my signs. Oh, good. Was a bit worried as our sign lanuages were a bit different with some words.

However, seemed that got the idea across for Motoyasu and Ren.

"So our weapons act like hardware that can take on various software." Ren said as he gotten a glitchy interface. " Wait... Could this be why we can't work together? Our weapons' original systems conflicts with the others?"

"It would explain why we defaulted to different set ups." Motoyasu crossed his arms. "So to make up for not able to work together, we can share our enhancement methods with each other to increase our strength."

I snapped my fingers and did jazz hands with a grin.

"But, what's your method?" I felt the ice in the trio's glares at me.

"We shared ours, yet you haven't said... Oh, right..." They flinched at my double birdie.

"My method is called Adjustment." Kris translated. "It's a bit hard to explain, so it would be easier if you let me do it. I'm not that good, but it should allow the better users of this the means to do it."

"Wait, this isn't a video game mechanic?" Itsuki asked with a raised brow.

"AH! THAT!" Sansy jumped. "YOU REALLY SURE YOU WANNA TRY ADJUSTING THEIR WEAPONS? THEY AREN'T-"

I tapped my shield's gem and signed.

"They are similar enough. I got it to work." Kris crossed his arms. "But what is this Adjustment thing, dear brother." Kris gave me the "Dad Eyes." I felt my throat tightened into a gulp.

-Explain later. Just think of it as the simple version of what turned you from skeleton to human.- Kris's grimance deepened. -I just never thought I could go in reverse. Usually can get the advance method to work with turning human souls into monster kind.-

"I see. So it enhances the soul aspects of the weapons and users." Kris caught the hint and let it go. "It's magic, so it is a little hard to express it in... Human language?" Kris let out a sigh. "At least from our world, magic is usually more expressive than logically explained. Our kind... Our race of humans are the few able to express magic much like other magical races."

"So... You're mages." Ren said with a nod. "Like how VR is common in my world. In a way, it makes since considering Shields were bad in the game I played."

"Wait, the same for you, too?" Motoyasu asked in shock.

"My game also did Shields badly," Itsuki flinched. "Which makes it worse seeing you in a wheelchair, Iwatani-san. It's like you got no straw at all instead of the short straw."

What? I just raised an eyebrow with confusion.

How was being in a wheelchair bad? Hell, these were the best wheels I had in my life! Custom-made and foldable, perfect for someone like me who uses wheels for ease of life.

"ah, right. humans aren't used to n's type." Papy rolled his eyelight.

"I don't get it." Kris huffed. "Doesn't a wheelchair help increase my brother's abilities?"

"Ah, but we will be in combat." Motoyasu gave me a loot of pity. "How can a crippled person-"

Both twins burst into laughter while Kris glared daggers at the three humans. Ah, right, monster kind is used to having to adapt all sorts of ways to help each other living Underground... Especially after the pollution turned the River into the maze twisted with time and space itself.

"What... Oh," Ren went wide eyed. "Right, a mage. When I think how magic is used in the game... Of course a Legendary Hero specializing in magic would focus on defense."

"Huh?" Motoyasu cocked his head.

"Oh, yeah! Pure mages were always weak to close combat. So, instead of having a staff, you have a means of defense as you lob spells at the enemies."

"Wha? Don't cha mean bullets?" Kris snorted. "Spells are a human thing that lack any expression. Bullets are far faster and effect in combat than chanting stupid phrases." Kris snapped his fingers for a bone bullet to appear and he balanced it on the tip of one.

"B-Bullet?" All three asked before they went pale. "Like in... a bullet hell game?"

I guess one could call my magic akin to a magic bullet hell. I sure know the Eighth Fallen probably saw our fights as such.

"Bullet hell?" The skull twins and once skeleton asked with confused dazes.

Me?

I just gave a devish smile.

"👍"

-----------

Trying to get out of the worldbuilding trap with writing linked short fics. This one came from the sketch above and just snowballed into this. Hope it is enjoyable as it was for me to write this.

PS - Correcting some mistakes.

[bigyack-com]

With ‘Upload,’ Greg Daniels Takes a Leap Into the Great Unknown

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — The new Amazon series “Upload” was in its final week of shooting last May, and Greg Daniels was chewing on everything he could get his hands on, including his hands. Time was waning, and the set — a convincing facsimile of a claustrophobic Queens apartment — was tricky to navigate. Daniels, the series’s creator, watched a monitor as the crew worked the tight spaces and the director shouted commands.He chewed his gum. Cut! — another take, please. He chewed his fingers. Cut! — let’s try again. He leapt from his chair, consulted the crew and came back chewing his thumb. Cut! — one more time for safety.“At least I get to sit back and let her direct,” Daniels said, nodding to the episode’s director, Daina Reid, which was maybe half-true. He had complete faith in his directors, he emphasized, but this was a passion project three decades in the making. There wasn’t much actual sitting back.“It’s hard not to micromanage,” he admitted.Perhaps more than “Parks and Recreation,” which Daniels cocreated, and more than the American version of “The Office,” which Daniels developed and oversaw, “Upload” is his baby, based on an idea he conceived as a writer for “Saturday Night Live” in the late 1980s.A sci-fi dramatic comedy set in 2033, in which the souls of the dying are uploaded to a virtual afterlife, “Upload” is also Daniels’s first major creation since “Parks” ended in 2015. And when it debuts, on May 1, it will do so in the wake of several other notable series focused on similar themes and issues. The pressure was palpable.“It’s been three and a half months of go, go, go,” Daniels sighed. “It’s been a little bit crazy.”As much as anyone in television, Daniels is responsible for a successful brand of TV comedy that feels as familiar now as it felt groundbreaking when “The Office” debuted 15 years ago. His half-hour, single-camera sitcoms, with their deep ensemble casts and tonal blend of cringey awkwardness and heart, offered viewers the easy reliability of the best multicamera comedies but without the one-liners and studio audiences.“Upload,” however, is new territory for Daniels. Gone is the hand-held, mockumentary aesthetic he is best known for. He took a more cinematic approach to “Upload,” which Amazon encouraged him to write as a single contained story. It is his first creation for a streaming service (his second, the astro-political satire “Space Force,” lands next month on Netflix). The plot — told over 10 mostly half-hour episodes that will drop all at once — is tight and binge-ready. The special effects are complex.It also has action. And a murder mystery. And cursing and nudity. And competition.“There are so many good shows,” Daniels said during a car ride between sets. Audience attention is strained, he said, so he packed as many of the things he likes into “Upload” as possible.“Part of the impulse here is to kind of do a genre mash-up — to have satire but also to have romance and the mystery,” he said. “There’s a lot to look at and a lot to think about.”

Heaven, for a price

People love the characters Daniels creates and writes — as in, actually love. The way viewers talk about Michael Scott and Leslie Knope, they might as well be real people. Pam and Jim could be a real couple. Put “Ron Swanson” on an election ballot, and he’d probably do OK.Along the way, the list of actors his series have turned into stars is impressive. Aziz Ansari, Mindy Kaling, John Krasinski, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Pratt: All were relative newcomers before appearing in Daniels’s sitcoms. Fans of “The Daily Show” knew Steve Carell as a correspondent, but it was his role on “The Office” that catapulted his career.“Upload” has a sharper edge than Daniels’s earlier shows (including the animated “King of the Hill,” which he created with Mike Judge), but the cast has familiar qualities: charismatic, diverse, good-looking but approachable, and led by actors who have the glow of indwelling stardom but aren’t widely known.“I think that’s really exciting from a casting standpoint, is to find somebody and see how you’re going to break them,” Daniels said. “And I think there’s a pleasure for the audience in going into a show and being like, ‘I don’t know any of these people.’”One of them is Andy Allo, who plays Nora, a customer service representative at Horizen, a company that manages the virtual afterlife and its digitized human souls, known as uploads. (The reps function as the angels of this digital heaven.)In the series, Nora’s father, a religious man, is dying, and he hopes to join Nora’s deceased mother in the celestial afterlife, not some digital one.“It does bring in so many questions of your existence after death,” Allo said between takes. “Heaven, on this spiritual level, is what my dad believes in, but I work for this company that has created heaven.”Like today’s wireless companies (note the name), Horizen offers different data plans based on what families can afford. If customers exceed their limits, things get glitchy.“How darkly funny it is that you end up almost in a similar way and place that you were in real life?” Allo said. “It’s like pay-by-month” on the bottom tier, she added — heaven when you can afford it. “You get two gigs a month, and once you run out, you freeze.”Although Nora has dozens of other clients, she grows close with Nathan (Robbie Amell), a handsome young upload who took his charmed life for granted before he was critically injured in a self-driving car crash. Ambiguity surrounds the circumstances of his eventual death, drawing Nora and Nathan deep into a dangerous mystery.Meanwhile, Nathan is even more beholden to his rich and controlling girlfriend (Allegra Edwards) than he was before he died, because her family is financing his digital existence.“Being uploaded and essentially being owned as a human being, or as intellectual property, by my girlfriend throws a huge wrench in my life,” Amell said. “So although I get to continue living, it’s definitely not on my own terms.”To create the show’s complex mesh of realities, Daniels relied on multiple directors with prestigious, wide-ranging résumés. (Reid got an Emmy nomination for “The Handmaid’s Tale”; Jeffrey Blitz directed the Oscar-nominated documentary “Spellbound.”)Daniels was among them, directing two episodes including the 45-minute pilot. It is a rare role for him — “I am probably the worst director of the bunch that I have hired,” he said laughing — and “Upload” presents its own technical challenges. Dogs talk. Heads explode. Characters and objects (and useful body parts) appear and disappear.On an outdoor set, an actor whacked a nonexistent golf ball toward a green screen, then traded barbs with a patch of grass. In the finished version, the empty space became a hologram of another actor playing Arnold Palmer, who died in 2016.“The game just keeps getting harder,” Daniels said. “I shot the pilot, and then ‘Ready Player One’ came out. Spielberg is master of special effects, and he had, like, a 20-minute opening shot with no cuts in it, zooming through this world, going in and out of VR and the real world.”Thirty years ago, Daniels likely wouldn’t have measured himself against Steven Spielberg. But in the era of streaming and prestige TV, the competition had evolved.“I was like, ‘Oh God,’” Daniels said. “‘His one shot is like 20 times the budget of my entire pilot.’”

A convincing future

TV has become highly interested in post-mortem journeys of self-discovery, in shows like Amazon’s “Forever,” TBS’s “Miracle Workers” and Netflix’s “Russian Doll.” Daniels is aware of the micro-trend but doesn’t consider “Upload” to be following an increasingly well-trod metaphysical path.Ask about “Black Mirror,” and he is quick to tell you he devised and sold the idea for “Upload” well before the debut of “San Junipero” — an episode that won two Emmys in 2017 for its story set in a digital hereafter.Ask about “The Good Place,” however, and he is thoughtful to the point of appearing vulnerable. “The Good Place” wasn’t TV’s only comedy about the afterlife, as he noted. But it was the only one put out by his “Parks and Recreation” co-creator, Michael Schur.“I couldn’t believe that Mike had the idea for ‘The Good Place’ while I was doing this,” Daniels said. “I don’t watch ‘The Good Place’ because of the similarities. I don’t want to watch it.”Given the creators’ shared history, comparisons between the shows will be inevitable. Each is a high-concept comedy set in an afterworld with design flaws and equally flawed but charming staff. But “Upload” has a detailed and believable universe all its own.Perhaps its greatest distinguishing feature is the focus on technology and class. The tone is sometimes dark, not just darkly funny, and even frightening.Daniels said he’d wanted realism, a version of the near-future that was convincing and recognizable. A Tinder-like app lets people rate their hookups. Unemployment might keep you out of heaven.“For the pitch, I was referencing Kafka and Charlie Chaplin in ‘Modern Times,’” he said. “That’s, to me, why to do it, because it feels like it says something about income inequality and capitalism.”Traditional notions of heaven are about “both living past your body’s death but also, supposedly, some sort of fairness or ultimate reward for the good and the meek,” he added. “In this version, that’s not happening — it’s just the rich and capitalistic getting it.”That pitch had traveled its own Kafkaesque journey, metamorphosing as it went. Daniels conceived an early version while brainstorming “S.N.L.” sketches but ultimately decided to table the idea, and then later tried to turn it into a short story. During the writers’ strike of 2007-8, he took a stab at making it a novel. He didn’t pitch it as a TV show until several years later, selling it to HBO in 2015.HBO spent some time developing the concept, but then the executive who bought it left. Daniels resold it in 2016 to Amazon.“There have been other shows that dealt with the afterlife, but I think the way that Greg has designed the show is truly and fully unique,” said Ryan Andolina, the head of comedy at Amazon Studios. Andolina also bought Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s “Fleabag,” a favorite of Daniels’s, and he viewed “Upload” as another kind of auteur comedy. “Greg is very meticulous and specific, and had a very clear idea of what the show was.”It would’ve been easy for Daniels to make another network mockumentary, but he seems determined to push himself. “Space Force” will reunite him with Carell, who pitched him the show in July 2018, not long after President Trump announced his desire to create a new military branch of the same name.The Netflix series is not quite science fiction, though there are spaceships, and the cast and cinematic production signal a significant budget. Another thing it isn’t: a network mockumentary.“Mockumentary is terrific — it’s a really fun style,” he said. “But after nine years of ‘The Office’ and seven years of ‘Parks and Recreation,’ I don’t know, I felt like I wanted to do something else.”He paused, then laughed. “After dealing with this many green screens, I could see going back to mockumentary.” Read the full article