Undertale - Pet dogs and date a skeleton!

I just woke up from a dream where Sans was summoning Papyrus' head instead of a blaster, and I think the visual confused and alarmed me enough that I started waking up. As I was waking, I segued to a "what if" where Muffet (and spiders) are the ones actively chasing through Hotland. Got me to wake up to thinking of an alternate Underswap where the characters are very much themselves, but fulfilling a different role in the way through.

Sans being the skelebro to offer phone support on our way through the underground, making bad jokes about pretty much everywhere and obscure references to people he knows. The perfect excuse to sit back at home and do nothing. Incredible.

Papyrus working multiple sentry jobs because he thought demonstrating his unfaltering dedication might be the thing to get Undyne to let him join already. Not sure yet whether he'd opt for doing play fights at each station, sincerely try to capture us all the way to the hall, or just show up to hang out multiple times asking the way.

Muffet sending her pets in various missions to delay or capture us, because she'd like to take our soul herself and use that power to free the ruins spiders, but she's not going to just abandon her shop.

I'm not sure how or what to change Undyne and Alphys' stuff, and Mettaton's canonical too hooked into Alphys' for me to decide his thing without hers.

 

Alphys the anxious guard captain, trying to ensure the safety of the underground?

Undyne the very enthusiastic scientist, trying to improve the lives of the people of the Underground while also trying to break the barrier?

ETA: Alphys setting up security cameras everywhere because what if a human gets in and then using them to watch Frisk, while Undyne doesn't even know you're there at first because she's super busy on some project like, I don't know...lighter tougher partially-magic-based materials that could be used in both armour and buildings? Research into high-energy magic (aka "whoops, that exploded too!")

Alphys ordering extra patrols and then later freaking out because oh noooooooo the human is a smol and most of what the Royal Guard has been up to has been like...finding lost kids and other small things, not many criminals in the Underground

 

Instead of Undyne it's multiple separate patrols of guards, and they keep trying to catch you and monster kid because why are you out here, this isn't even where you live??



I gotta had for work in a few, so lemme leave this adorable behind:

Zarla notes that Toby deleted the tweet about which bro is older, so "Sans is the older" can't really be considered for-sure canon.

Mostly I just can't get over how plausible those comments from Papyrus are for him.

 

i like the underswap concept you guys are developing. i want to fit blueberry sans in there somewhere 'cause that character design/concept is cute and i'm a sucker for cute, even though i don't know if it's remotely ic for sans.

that picture is really cute :D

 

all the guards freak out once they realize frisk is human
all of them notice as soon as they go to the battle screen because...red soul, point down.
half of them are like. "WHY IS A HUMAN CHILD HERE CHARA TOLD US THEY THOUGHT THE MOUNTAIN IS CURSED WHO SENT A SMOL TO THE CURSED MOUNTAIN"
and the other half are like "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa human"

 

and blueberry sans...that's just like, sans in a brighter blue, right?

ETA: i am not very familiar with underswap outside of Inverted Fate

 

sans with a battlebody like papyrus and happier and very much playing up how cute his shortness + babyface makes him

and blushing and starry eyes

sans but with CUTENESS INTENSIFIED

the traditional underswap sans

 

Hmmmm. The visual design, of him wearing costume armor, that's easy enough to work. Could be that he also wore a guard costume to the costume party, like the bros coordinated.

Starry-eyed Sans in guard costume, a bubble of joy and shouty optimism. I almost only see him in very seme/uke nsfw stuff, so I'm not a fan of the whole shebang.
eta: I know there's other stuff out there, there's way too much AUs interesting content for there not to be. But, yknow, the biases of what I look at.
eta2: remind me to find that art of younger scientist sans

 

so like
maybe they both wore battle bodies to a costume party and Papyrus used, idunno, some superhydrophobic stuff he got from Undyne to make it really easy to clean
and so now Sans wears nothing but that because he can just clean it by going into the shower and it doesn't even get wet as such?

ETA: and then he also figured out how to make his pupils look like stars and does so because it annoys Papyrus?
also: I headcanon Sans to only actually have one working eye. He's blind in his right eye, if it's even there; either way he uses magic to make the white 'pupil' of that eye (or the fake eye) match up with the real one, unless he wants to annoy Papyrus (or, later, other family) by making his eyes do the goggly thing.
this Sans might've changed the glass-eye spell to make both his eyes have star-shaped pupils (gotta have them match), and then just...forgotten he'd changed it

 

the joy and shouty optimism doesn't feel entirely sansy to me, but i like it anyway 'cause it enhances the cuteness effect.

and yeah, i didn't really see much good blueberry sans stuff on ao3. there's much more exploration of what makes underswap papyrus who he is, why he's different, than of what makes blueberry sans blueberry sans.

i think i vaguely remember that art. very vaguely.

:D:D:D

 

Googlyeye contacts.... jeez XD

(Leaving for real now)

 

Incidentally that one-eyed Sans headcanon came from an offhanded comment of a friend, while we were talking about the Undertal cast having a Paper Towel Roll War: Sans had a Nerf gun and his aim with it wasn't very good, and Frisk had a Nerf gun as well and their aim was atrocious.
Friend: "Frisk's aim is worse than that of the guy with one eye."

 

i'm now imagining sans saying the most depressing things ever with stars in his eyes

"just give up, i did"

(art found on google image search and used for illustrative purposes)

 

hah
at the end of the game someone comments on the stars and he's like
wait
i'm still wearing that cosmetic spell

 

When you put it that way, I'm impressed by how good Undyne's aim with the spears is. And no wonder she has that green attack for pinning people down.

 

remember it now, far less vaguely!

Spoiler: the art in question

It's meant as preceding canon, time looping retcons (and possibly G***** retcons, depending on when/who G***** was) by a fair amount of time. And it has a paired piece of art based what looks like several years later to go by the change in Papyrus' height and face and the changes in Sans' energy and optimism.

Spoiler: that art in question

Still liking this. I had a couple more thoughts at work:

Undyne for enthusiastic explosive scientist is absolutely my favorite for underswap Undyne. It's canon for what she does in two of the family endings, assisting Alphys with explosive science. And it's what my favorite depiction of Underswap Undyne does.

Spoiler: the most relevant comic in question

I also love the idea of scientist!Undyne working to create lighter, tougher magical armor because imagine: actual magical girl transformations. If we keep Alphys as the original weeb, and Undyne learning about it from her, then Undyne could be wanting to create something for Alphys.

Spoiler: Thoughts re true lab spoilers

Consider: Alphys setting up all those cameras because she knows what unfilmed human children get up to, with no record of it. Like, canonically she likes to know stuff, with walkthroughs to the puzzles littering her desk, memorizing her favorite games/shows and recounting scenes and story arcs, and panicking when she loses place with what she's supposed to be doing. And Undyne's not as secretive as Alphys is, doesn't seek approval or guilt spiral into avoidance; her problems are more about pushing solutions to problems WAYYYY harder than need be, alienating people with her aggressive loudness. If scientist!Undyne found those tapes... I can see her showing them to Alphys, one night when they're both freaking out about it.

And the amalgamates coming to existence under a Royal Scientist Undyne: where Alphys got stressed about people calling for results and rushed her work to, Undyne would start out with way too much determination from the start, overenthusiastic about adding LOTS in the same way she approaches cooking. Undyne starts from the view that LOTS and LOUD are GOOD. This take on underswapped Undyne and Alphys, that I saw and reblogged a long time back, figured it'd be another thing of her feeling like she's great at wrecking things, but man, building things is tough.
(making the magical girl armor for alphys that much cuter an idea, since, well, maybe undyne sucks at creating things, but SHE'S GONNA MAKE IT HAPPEN ANYWAY! BECAUSE IT MATTERS!)
(and also alphys matters to her)
(cute undyne looking away all :3 face)

I don't wanna just use that version as the basis of anything, because standard underswap does lots of things I don't care for.

(You know, it occurs to me: the old Home in the Ruins and what little we see of New Home look a lot alike besides the color scheme, so much alike that I'm think the cave system looks like that by default. With all the IceCaps and Snowdrakes and such, Snowdin's snow is a magically-created developed over the years since monsters left the Ruins, and wasn't there when they started out. Hotland wasn't as hot, but has become moreso as they expanded the cave downward and opened up to the lava level. That Waterfall has a couple natural rivers carrying garbage from the surface, sure, but most of the water in there is just due to the condescension and rain from Snowdin's cold and Hotland's heat hitting each other.)

 

@swirlingflight yep, that's exactly the art! :D:D:D

 

The history books mentioned that the monsters went through scorching heat and lots of wet and then lots of cold to get to the end of the caverns where they built Home.

Also, yeah, taking into account the missing eye, Undyne's aim is amazing.
Now I'm imagining her bobbing her head from side to side trying to get depth perception that way.

Other things scientist Undyne could do: various research into Determination, including that one incident where she had like 1 microgram of it to test its effects on monsters and went on a three day DT bender that resulted in the palace getting a hologram sky...based off of a sci-fi movie, as well as a bunch of explosions, dimensional boxes, and probably terrifying the entire Underground with attempts at railgunning the Barrier apart (LOUD); trying to work out magical weapons that could allow for maybe possibly not losing horribly if they got out and immediately had war declared on them; a transportation network because sometimes you need to get all the way from the Ruins door to the lab with a tree okay things happen

that sort of thing

 

what do we do with Toriel and Asgore?

 

or, er, actually: @swirlingflight @unknownanonymous what should we do with toriel and asgore? do we swap them?