Undertale - Pet dogs and date a skeleton!

the art is so pretty but I have yet to see anyone make it work in terms of plot
aka YES, DO IT.

 

i am interested!!!

 

Okay so I didn't actually originally mean "the story of undertale but in space" i meant "undertale postgame or something, space" but.

Okay.

So, instead of sealing the monsters underground in Mt Ebott, maybe the magicians decided to cast them from the world into space-having climbed mountains or heard from flying monsters of how the air gets cold and thin up above, they decided to cast the monsters into the frigid sky. Frigid is really hard to spell by the way.

The spell, however, was designed to imprison the monsters, not kill them, so it found a place where the monsters could live: a huge cave in a planetoid. It brought air with them, and some plants, and the magicians sent across some (rather poor-quality) livestock and the like. The punishment was for them to live in eternal thin-aired cold, unable to return to easy breathing and thick air, not to starve to death.

So the monsters go into some iron-cored planetoid. In their caves close to the core, there's sufficient gravity and the air stays put. It's also pitch black so they have to light it up with magic. They survive. It's a struggle-water and air are at a premium, monsters who have sufficient magical reach to bring light from the surface to the depths are rare, but they have gravity and air and so on. They can't leave, due to both the fact that, space, and also because of a Barrier stopping them. The Barrier doesn't do anything to time or anything it just stops anything without a human soul from leaving.

Unlike in canon!Undertale, humans keep their magic. It becomes rarer, though. Instead of permanent landfills, these humans tend to just send rubbish "to wherever monsters went", so the monsters get occasional huge piles of trash.

Eventually humanity looks to the stars. Starships aren't a thing, but eventually someone discovers how to get a ship into orbit using magic. As such, mages start being used to power ships.

Chara would've been a mage on an illegal ship, who took the ship and themself away one day to That One Planetoid That Got Used As A Trash Bin For A Thousand Years. To their surprise, there's life, and it's pleasant.
When Chara dies, Asriel takes their soul and uses magic to copy the functionality of a ship-something only possible to a being of incredible power. He's shot at by humans, who see this horrifying organic-ship monster flying at them with a dead human, and so has to come back.

Other mages also head to Ebott Planetoid every so often, after that, until Frisk arrives, crashlanding with a relatively intact ship, and the last soul needed to break the barrier.

 

i wanna hear about that too!

and that's some good worldbuilding!

 

Anyway so, the monsters would have ridic magitech. They've spent centuries relying on the stuff.

 

Okay so Undertale postgame space thing.

Basic premise of that, for me, is that the Undertale canon barrier separates the Underground in time as well as space. Time passes differently there. It was a few years for the monsters between being sealed and Chara falling, but a few centuries for the humans. Then it flipped-so it was centuries for the monsters but it's still somewhen in the 201Xs for the humans, not 21XX or whenever.

So the monsters come out of the Underground, and they've got like, telekinesis, lights that don't need electricity, ways to farm things underground, magic-powered fridges, really good recycling, the ability to fix water damage on electronics, and phones with sufficient hammerspace to store 20 huge steaks and a jetpack. At least one monster can teleport.

And they're really interested in space, after hearing about it, because they've spent centuries underground and now they're hearing that there's a place where all around you is the night sky.

The reason why we haven't gotten like, moon colonies and asteroid mining, is that space launches are absurdly expensive-the lowest current actual cost (not counting the heavily subsidized Russian Shtil-3a) is something like $4,300/kilogram. If it were merely something like several hundred dollars per kilo, space-based solar power, space colonization, asteroid mining and the like would all be feasible.

So the monsters, seeing that, might start working on something to help launch rockets-even adding a little bit of the early velocity by nonrocket means shaves off a huge amount of cost, for example.

So then they'd go looking for ways to integrate useful spells into a rocket. Maybe they'd go the telekinetic route, starting with Sans or Papyrus or other telekinetic monsters helping boost a rocket up, or a magitech thing doing the same. Maybe they'd have a spell that heats the air to reduce fuel costs. Something like that.

Posting because this is getting laggy and I have so much to write-it may have to be spread across several hours though I have classes.

 

Anyway so the monsters do magitech things to reduce launch costs, so suddenly space exploration is viable.
And they keep researching, as power becomes cheaper and cheaper due to huge solar panels in space, as asteroid mining becomes A Thing, as plans are made and approved to put lots of humans in space-taking some of the pressure off of Earth. Especially since the monsters do have experience in maintaining an ecology in a smallish space, and a lot of really weird high-yield low-light crops. (I headcanon that those include some really weird things like edible pine leaves.)

And they discover that teleportation is FTL, but it needs a stabilizer...

So they do research into stabilizers. Meanwhile Alphys is doing research into painless ways to extract DT or magic, and figures out how to do it-a spellstructure that someone can hook into and feed it magic and/or DT, except the spell is powered via voidtap and the magic fed to it is just liquefied and dumped into a tank. Same for the DT.

Alphys figures out how to get teleporting into a magitech circuit thing-DT is the perfect stabilizer.

Suddenly, FTL. And the moon colony isn't even finished.

 

The earliest uses of teleportation in this thing would actually be to make launches cheaper. A levitating launch platform and rocket could be teleported up to several kilometers up, where the air resistance is much less and so you get much more velocity for the same amount of thrust. Further teleportation could be used to put the rocket further and further up, until nearly all the thrust is used to produce horizontal velocity.

Later uses of teleportation could involve rapid transit between planets. It would likely take decades before a manned expedition went out on FTL-focus would probably be on unmanned scouting trips and colonization of the solar system.

 

Plus depending on how hard it is to teleport stuff into a moving target and how that affects the math, you might be able to send rockets without supplies up and then send everything else, once you don't have to fight gravity for everything.

 

As a result of that, it would make sense for humanity to relatively rapidly spread out across the Solar System, suddenly reducing Earth's human population with nobody dying.

It would be plausible for humanity to be visiting other star systems within Frisk's lifetime. In fact, Frisk may well be present when first contact is made!

Also, monsters may be able to figure out a magitech solution to the Lunar Gravity Problem. That'd be helpful. It'd be nearly certain if Sans and Papyrus's thing was definitely gravity manipulation, and that wouldn't affect the things needing telekinesis.

 

the galaxy: pacifist run

 

@KarrinBlue that too!
Also, thinking of uses for levitating platforms, it'd be relatively easy to build a giant mass driver thing, like the tunnel used for those levitating trains, and use levitating platforms+levitation spells on it to support it as it goes up until it opens at the edge of space.

Such a giant mass driver thing could allow for a no-air-resistance acceleration run right from the surface up to the edge of space.

 

Incidentally a rocket sled launch track of 55 degrees to vertical up a mountain of at least 3km could enable a single-stage-to-orbit, fully-reusable vehicle with today's technology if it accelerated the payload to Mach 2-without a vacuum tunnel.

Also, the Space Shuttle used more than a third of its fuel just to reach 1,600km/h which is a little over Mach One. Accelerating the spaceships to Mach Two via nonrocket means (say, the magically-enhanced giant mass driver thing) would more than half fuel consumption.

 

Weird thing: monsters might use a lot of fungus in their materials. Like, you know that tumblr post with the ridiculously tough materials made from mycelium? Monsters might use something like that.

 

Oh yeah-something I forgot to post yesterday-it seems from the jetpack thing that it's possible to fit a fuel tank in a dimensional box and have it still deliver fuel properly.

If you can get a really big dimensional box, presumably you could put all the fuel for a space shuttle or whatever in the Box-and it'll still be able to be delivered to the engines, while being effectively not there as far as weight and aerodynamics goes.

 

how does frisk not have monsters stealing shit out of their dimensional boxes, in a watsonian sense? are monsters just too nice? is stealing unnecessary in the underground?

they don't seem to be locked and frisk wasn't the one to originally put the tough glove in the first box.

 

Maybe there's several box networks, that can all be accessed from the boxes, and nobody touches that one because all it has is a glove?

Maybe the networks are keyed to individuals and Frisk found the first box after that box networked unkeyed itself because whoever it was keyed to died?

Maybe it was keyed to Chara, if Chara was haunting the other fallen humans too?

Stealing is probably unnecessary in the Underground, too.

ETA: by "all it has is a glove" I mean that it's been empty except for one glove for so long that nobody even checks it anymore obviously it'll just be the same glove (and then it's frisk's stuff instead)

 

Not just fuel - you could keep food there, all kinds of stuff that's necessary but takes up weight.

 

Hah, yup! But not in the same box, you don't want fuel in your food.

Fuel, though, is the major thing-generally spaceships end up being something like 97% fuel because of, you have to have enough fuel to lift the ship, but then you need more fuel to lift that fuel, and more fuel to lift that fuel, and so on, until you get a ship with external fuel tanks bigger than itself.

 

imagine frisk pranking monsters by putting really weird things in the public box network