Undertale - Pet dogs and date a skeleton!

I didn't know that!

I came up with a rather amusing Chara theory thing, namely: Chara doesn't actually remember most of the monster subspecies/species names. They're coming up with those names on the spot. They are an amnesiac dork who remembers things based on what Frisk does, and they have no idea what the species names are, but Frisk wants to know so they just...make them up on the spot. Same with most stats-they have a general idea of those, but they're usually off by quite a lot because they can't remember how big a stat point is. They also give you the maximum. Which is not usually what the monster has.


That also explains why some of the flavour text isn't useful information but rather like...poetry and puns.

 

Pundertale.

 

Top of the Mornin' to ya ladddies, my name is Jacksepticeye and welcome back to UNDERTALE! Or I should say Pundertale because of my good buddy Sans.

Actual diologue from an intro

 

an excellent pair of comics that sum up the similarities and differences of the skelebro's problems

 

A song that makes me think of Sans:

Spoiler: cut for relevant lyrics with spoilers for genocide route

No one beats him at his game
For very long but just the same
Who cares there's no place safe to hide
Nowhere to run, no time to cry
So celebrate while you still can
'Cause any second it may end.
And when it's all been said and done
Better that you had some fun
Instead of hiding in a shell
Why make your life a living hell?
So have a toast, down the cup
Drink to bones that turn to dust
No one, no one, no one, no one
No one lives forever!

 

Does anybody want to hear my headcanons about how magic works in general?

 

Sure!

 

Okay!

So my headcanon with magic is that magic comes from the Void.
The Void is the place where things that don't exist go; it's the Universe's error handling system and recycle bin. It's where things that don't exist go. Think a mixture of Crowns of the Kingdom's Inpotentia and Chuubo’s Marvellous Wish-Granting Engine's Outside. It's also full of magic.

Souls are kept at least partially in the Void, but in realer parts; they don't exist in the normal universe so into the Void they go. The inventory system is just putting objects inside the soul, but each object requires a DT 'tether' to hold it unchanging.

Things in the Void that aren't held unchanging (or souls) tend to slowly lose their properties and gain new ones, twisting and warping and splitting apart and otherwise interacting in bizarre ways with themselves and each other. 'Objects' in the void include things like "spatial relations", "all the laws of physics", "chronology", and the like, so the Void acts like Rose's room from SU when it tried to simulate the entire town, along with pretty much any wild video game glitch, along with that one non-Euclidian portal map. It's possible, if you go to the Void, for the properties of the Void to begin to include things like "you are travelling" or "you are lost" or "you are terrified".

Inventories vary from person to person-some people can 'stack' identical or close-to-it objects, so they can use only one tether slot for, say, 12 monster candy. Others, like Frisk, have to use one-slot-one-object, although if Frisk put stuff into a container they could inventory the container and its contents and it'd take up 1 slot.

Monster money has spells on it to make it very easy to inventory-even Frisk can stack it, and Frisk's inventory is...really tiny. It's possible, although slightly more difficult, to have things like phones work somewhat from within the inventory-all monster phones have the required hardware to work from an inventory.


Anyway. So magic comes from the Void. There's two types of magic: magic that takes energy or matter from the Void (or puts it back)-fire magic, ice magic, monster food; and magic that takes unreality from the Void/takes reality from the local area and puts in the Void, then uses that unreality to do things (changing the properties of a crystal to 'this is glowing', making something really big fly, adding/removing/shifting gravity). (Magic is also a bit of a substance-it's literally everywhere in the Void and maintains its connection to the Void at all times, but it isn't the Void.)


However, it's also possible to use DT in magic. DT is like metaphysical inertia-it is a stabilizing force. However, there's a lot of power in even a little DT-it can also add reality to things, sometimes in a different direction from what the reality originally was. It can interfere with some spells-monsters, for example, are made partially out of unreality and putting in too much of something that creates reality causes them to become made partially of slime.

If you're careful, however, you can use DT to give magic a stabilizing boost; in addition to the normal magic in the spell, there's DT increasing the reality of the end result, as well as stabilizing the whole spell in general and dragging in more magic from the Void without increasing Cuil level within the soul.
Most spells don't have ontological inertia. Or at least, not much. The Barrier, with 7 human souls of DT, had sufficient inertia to not weaken at all in all the time monsters were underground; but Toriel's fire magic goes out as soon as she dies.

Humans don't generally have the necessary soul-structures to actually channel magic at the right development level to do so. Learning magic, for a human, consists at first of trying to get those structures to develop-once that happens, the soul's stable state is point-up, not point-down.

Alphys figured out a way to technologically develop those. The other relatively quick way to trigger development of those involves soulsex. With a monster. Resulting in a malformed human/monster hybrid that can't survive to term being (mis)carried by the human. (If the monster gets pregnant instead, they just get a monster/human hybrid kid, who, as a hybrid, is infertile-like a mule. Magic-using humans with low baseline DT levels can sometimes carry a hybrid kid to term too.)

The longer-term method involves just...living with monsters for a long time, eating lots of monster food, having your soul frequently taken out and interacted with until you can sense magic, then having spells used on your soul and trying to interact with those spells-if someone can sense magic as such then they can also affect magic within the soul but can't channel it externally.

 

I saw a fic with the AU premise of "Frisk has some lung disease thing that means they have difficulty keeping their lungs dry enough, has to leave the Ruins because it's too damp, and gets adopted by Grillby who figured out a spell to help".

it also had a scene partway through discussing monster food-specifically, noting that if monster food is made of magic it's probably digested at least in part by the soul...so Frisk notes that when they eat monster food their soul feels full while their stomach just feels not hungry.

 

More magic headcanons: there's also magic-the-substance, which can be in two general states: interacts with normal physical matter and doesn't interact with normal physical matter.

If it is in state 1, it tends to mimic the physical matter around it-this is how monster food is made 'mostly of magic'. That and just charging the food with magic.
If in state 2, it can sometimes interact with magic in state 1-this is how Papyrus stores his bone attacks, the box is magical. Nearly all monster attacks are state 2 magic, they're hitting Frisk's soul instead of their body.
Ghosts and spirits are made of type 1 magic, with the main difference being that a spirit has a human soul from when they were an alive human. Ghosts, having a monster soul, instinctively know how to alter the outermost layers of their body to be able to interact with physical matter and so pick things up and the like, but they're always able to interact with other type 1 magic.


When magic-the-substance is pulled from the Void via magic-the-action, the details of how it's pulled affect its colour. 'Twist' it one way and you get an orange tint, as well as magic that doesn't interact with things that are moving relative to its spell nexus (or...whatever the terminology is for the point where it enters the world and is also shaped to Do Things-you can shape it to Do Things later if you got gaseous or liquid magic but why). Twist it the other way and you get cyan magic, that doesn't interact with things that aren't moving relative to the spell nexus. Twist it a third way and you get green magic that has relatively low Cuil and can very easily be made to heal.

Yellow and red magic are twists that don't really do anything except colour the naturally-white type 1 magic.

Spoiler: True Pacifist Boss Fight Headcanon Spoiler Thing

And then there's rainbow magic. Rainbow magic is gotten when you pull the magic out of the Void at supersonic speeds. Generally, it's harder to shape, on account of you have to slow it down first. Asriel's giant rainbow cone of Wave Motion Gun? Yeah that was a giant beam of supersonic magic. It got wider when he increased the size of the entry point. That is a dangerous thing by the way it can let things through. Like, apart from magic.

While you can pull basically infinite energy out of the Void, the entry node only stays stable as long as you feed energy to it. You can't just put the energy coming out of it into stabilizing it, it will destabilize into a different spell shape, explode, implode, or grow massively. One of those. Sometimes more.

If you feed way too much power into a spell it sometimes just explodes even if it's like a healing spell or something and the entry node is stable. This does not generally come up much outside of rainbow magic.

 

Spells also have a 'frequency'. The lower the frequency, the worse pushback you get, but the less power you need to do things. On the other hand, the higher the frequency, the more power you can safely feed into your spell before the pushback vibrations become excessive.

Spells on the exact same frequency can interfere with each other if their nexuses get too close. Spells on different frequencies affect each other less. Spells on wildly different frequencies can sometimes overlap totally-a high-power, low-frequency spell masking a high-power high-frequency spell from most detectors, for example (the average detector scans from low frequencies up-less energy expended on scanning all those absurdly high frequencies that only like 3 people can even get to).

 

Yet more headcanons!

The red soul virtue thing is hope, not determination. All the fallen humans had determination, and besides perseverance and determination are too close together.
Before the Barrier, human souls were in all colours excluding black and white. By the time the Barrier had broken, however, they were almost all entirely the colour of one of the soul virtues. No blending or differing shades at all-someone with so much as a slightly darker red would be astonishing.

The reason is related distantly to monster speciation. Before the Barrier, humans could take their souls out, and have soulsex and so human children would inherit soul'genes' from both parents. The Barrier spell, however, stopped that, so every human born after the Barrier was made had their soul come from their genetic mother's soul, in a form of self-fertilization that was almost totally unknown at the time the Barrier was made.

The Seven Mages nearly doomed their own species to extinction.

The reason why it's relevant to monster speciation is that most of the genes involved are nearly identical to various monster genes. There's a few extra sections, one section that's near-identical in all monster species isn't there, and a small cluster of genes don't match up with any of the monster versions of those. But it is entirely possible to take a sample of human soul and turn it into a viable monster gamete of any of half of the different species of monster, including boss monsters.

That cluster of genes is unusual in that it's the main gene set involved in monster speciation. Mutations in there generally result in the monster being unable to reproduce with most of the subspecies in its species, and it doesn't take many mutation there to get a monster of a new species-even if nothing else in the genome was changed at all. If you took, say, a cell from Bratty and changed just the genes in that cluster into duplicates of the ones Catty has, you could get a cat monster who was genetically identical to Bratty except for three genes, yet unable to have children with reptilian monsters except via genetic engineering.

As a result, the monster genus consists of many species with the reproductive barriers coming from one of two clusters of genes. (One of the sets human souls don't have is the other cluster.)


The result of the Barrier interfering with human reproduction, by the way, resulted in humans sometimes being totally unable to do any magic at all no matter what. Those that could learn to do magic generally have very poor power, a low frequency band, low endurance, and low parallel-spellcasting ability; only being able to cast one spell at once is common. Souls awakening their own magic potential are so rare as to be basically unheard of, even after the Barrier broke. If someone's magic potential exists and isn't horrible, it tends to be amazing at exactly one thing, and terrible at everything else. Sometimes two things.

Also pre-Barrier human souls tended to be glossy but that might just be the lack of magical food.

For monsters, the appearance of the souls in the game is stylized; in Undertale reality they'd be glossy, sometimes with faint tints or iridescence, smooth, and 3d.
Frisk's soul would be exactly as pixelly as it appears, and near-2d too, as they'd only had a day or so of eating monster food and not sustaining their soul off of inherently weak voidtap and nonmagical food.

 

@unknownanoymous i can't tell if you just read really fast or if i somehow lost a few minutes or if you liked it before finishing reading it or what.

 

i read really fast.

 

Okay! I read really fast too. One time when I had a reading test I had to retake it because the teacher thought I'd cheated. (I hadn't.)

 

i'm glad you understand. i got worried when you noticed how fast i read, since i was worried that it would seem unbelievable - it was, like, only a few seconds between you posting it and me liking it and i can see how that would've seemed implausible, and i wasn't thinking about how fast i was reading it till you brought it up.

your headcanons are really cool and well-thought out. :D

 

Thanks! I don't actually get notifs for likes, so I only noticed when I refreshed the page to make sure no alerts were hiding (usually I get alerts more often than I've been the past three days or so). And I have no idea how long that was.

Do you have any comments or anything?

 

this has got me thinking about how i make headcanons and what my headcanons are. like, how i like worldbuilding and internally consistent worlds and stuff, but sometimes i find that a well-made headcanon doesn't feel right to me 'cause of either how it interacts with my ships, 'cause it restricts an aspect of the universe that i want be malleable and play-with-able, or 'cause i have silly feelings about it (eg. i want to protect all the monster (sub)species from their theoretical extinction).

and that headcanons are often cool to me even if they don't feel Perfect.

 

Hah, that last one? Is actually part of what inspired the headcanon about monster soul species differences! That and the Creatures game series, where there's two types of species-the engine-recognized one where you just change the Species gene a bit, and the unofficial one where some fanmade breed can't interbreed with other breeds due to differences in organ count, location of vital genes (usually pose/gait), or brain lobe number.

So for example, you could have an Ettin that was genetically identical to a Jungle Grendel except for the Species gene. But you could also have a norn that, if bred with a vanilla norn, produced paralyzed babies. In the second game, you could even have creatures that, due to differences in brain architecture, couldn't be crossbreed with some other unusual creature species because the babies would crash the game.

ETA: So, say there was a griffon monster subspecies. This hypothetical griffon monster has species gene set 1 type A set 2 type B, and its other genetics are similar to a subspecies in species gene set 1 type C set 2 type B, and also to a subspecies in species gene set 1 type A set 2 type D.

So long as any one of those subspecies existed, if you knew the relevant species gene set type sequences, you could revive the other two from total extinction.

 

omfg

i'm imagining someone giving birth and the world just ending when the kid comes out. which would be one way to do the anti-christ, that's for sure.