Undertale - Pet dogs and date a skeleton!

That makes me think of something that's been cleared and stained, like this!

 

[PURIFICATION IN PROGRESS]

 

oh my god undyne and papyrus are so not prepared to be parents

With that beign said! My favorite babybones interpretation comes from askbabybones.tumblr.com
it's adorable
it has sudden!growthspurt for Papyrus and Sans being the older sib which is my headcanon (but might not be yours! I especially like their relatively big age gap i can relate to that)
it assumes they have been growing up without parents for at least long enough that papyrus doesn't remember having parents.

 

So, I was going through every room in the game and calling Papyrus and Undyne (as one does) and... I may have found a glitch.

 

@garden glitch... or intended feature?

 

I like how Undyne yelling at you to STOP THAT seems like she's telling you to stop glitching her up there.

 

HAHA yeah i saw that it made me giggle.

 

@Ipuntya Well, the dimensional boxes work fine. Will have to find out if this same glitch occurs when calling people on other conveyors (though I don't think it does...) Also, I kind of want to find out if the same glitch happens if you haven't befriended Undyne yet and are just calling Papyrus, but I don't know if I'm going to do another pacifist run any time soon...

@swirlingflight Yep that also made me laugh.

 

...Okay so I knew that Papyrus doesn't kill you, that he captures you if your health gets low. But I didn't know that he apparently can stop mid-attack if your health reaches low enough that any more damage would kill you??

But Zarla-s on Tumblr did and now my heart... my heart...

 

I'm avoiding Undertale threads cause I aint played all the way through it yet, but an old acquaintance/RP partner of mine posted something on tumblr I think you guys would appreciate, particularly if any of you are also fans of certain popular mangas.

behold :V

 

I got that glitch too, on my first playthrough! Which was neutral, so I hadn't befriended Undyne, so it does happen if you're only friends with Papyrus.

Just to add to the tiny skeleton theory pile, I have a friend who has a baby-bones headcanon where the parent/parents have to break off a piece of one of their bones, put it in a basket with a meaningful Thing (she had Gaster as the parent, and he used a blanket that had belonged to his late wife), and then bury the basket and wait a few months for the bone to grow into a baby skeleton. I'm not sure how plausible it is but I like the ritualisticness.

[also I saw that zarla-s comic earlier today and it got me RIGHT in the feels, oof. I have Many Emotions about the skelebros and it hit every single one :'D]

 

@adisagestar
Ooh, thanks for the info. That conveyor is the only conveyor this glitch seems to occur on - for all the others, you just stop moving when you open the menu. (I also tried it on the conveyors leading up to and down from Alphys' room... hitting C just does nothing on those.)

Also that is an ADORABLE baby bones headcanon.

 

If I was a skeleton I'd use my cocyx to make a baby. And then I'd torment my offspring with the knowledge that its reason for life is a dick-joke for eternity.

I probably shouldn't be a parent. Maybe not a skeleton either.

 

Spoiler: I've been thinking about the lab.

The true lab, I mean.

I've been thinking about the origins of Flowey.

I think I remember the entries saying that she only injected determination into one of the flowers; the rest were controls. It turned out, by chance, that the one she picked was one that had a kid's dust scattered over it.

So what would have happened with a plant with no dust? A different flower, or a water sausage, or an echo flower, or something?

(I think) In the geno run New Home segment, Flowey tells Chara that he woke up in the flower patch in the castle. Alone and confused and frightened, crying for his parents, but nobody came.

But in her entries about the flower, she doesn't indicate sending the flower back after there were no results. The entry only says, "The flower's gone." And it has the alternative color scheme, so I wonder if it wasn't adjusted.

So did Flowey the Flower, without any memories of Asriel's, wake up in the true lab first? Wake up, become capable of motion, and escape? And only, later, gain Asriel's memories? Or.....?




And all of this is really for the sake of me wondering, so. What would happen if another flower, also dusted with some other monster's remains, were injected with determination?

Because late last night I found myself highly amused by the WHAT IF Flowey decided he wanted to continue the research that Alphys abandoned. Find some way to keep a monster's soul viable outside their body, so he could absorb it and have a soul again. Eventually realizing it isn't working, and fucking around replicating what she did, and making another ex-monster flower.

After all, Flowey's only able to absorb monster souls in the true pacifist ending, after he grabs the six human souls and uses their power. Before that, he doesn't have enough power to make the souls last long enough. The signs in Waterfall say that pnly monster boss souls last a little after death. The others would take "an enormous amount of power."

...I wonder what happened in any of the runs where he killed Toriel or Asgore.

Spoiler: And I've been thinking about that what-if, thinking that I kinda want to expand it into a fanfic.

So I was thinking about Flowey's speech how he met everyone and befriended everyone and killed everyone, read every book and burned every book. I have to assume that includes the stuff in the true lab.

I mean, from what I can tell, Flowey's the one in the true pacifist ending to push Papyrus to push Undyne to write that letter and set Alphys off to the lab. He already knew about it, he calls you at the end of it and takes over that elevator and covers the door with vines so you can't go back. He must have learned what happened down there at some point or another.

So I figured, okay, explore that. What if he's exploring the world and chances upon meeting Alphys down in the lab, freaking her out because she recognizes him... but he doesn't recognize her, and maybe that calms her down enough for part of an explanation. Or maybe it freaks her out worse, and he just resets to "meet" her all over, this time pretending he has vague memories of it all and wants to know where he came from.

He might spend a few runs buttering (ha) Alphys up with his interest and curiosity in his origins... and her research. Learning, bit by bit, about the science that made him this way. Trying to learn enough about it to continue it, because Asgore just refuses to give him the souls, but maybe this has some possibilities after all. The fact that she freaked out and gave up when she hit one minor catastrophe means nothing to a flowerkid who's murdered a bunch of family and friends by now. Especially since he can undo mistakes with a wave of a reset.

So he learns about the science of determination, rewinding sometimes to stay in her good graces. Eventually concluding that just passively listening to her won't work out, and tries a new path: to convince Alphys to officially continue her experiments, coercing her to contact Asgore to return the souls to the lab.

Asgore doesn't, of course. We already know that Asgore doesn't bring out the souls again. Maybe he refuses Alphys because the missing people are still missing, and she needs more than just Flowey's support to find the confidence to reveal the truth.

So Flowey throws a tantrum, spends a few frustrated runs killing everyone. Eventually calms down, and eventually realizes what I did last night: the human souls are no longer the only supply of DTE. Yes, Alphys originally got the DTE by extracting it from the human souls. Sure, the souls were then sent back to the castle and hidden again before Flowey ever woke up, and Asgore refuses to show them to Flowey by any means... so there's a finite amount of DTE available anymore. But the amalgates were all injected with a ton of DTE, enough that their bodies couldn't handle it and they all melted. So if someone were to use the extractor to get the DTE out of them (probably dusting them in the process, unfortunately...) it might be possible.

So he traps Alphys out of the lab, continues the research on his own, extracting the DTE and trying different things in different runs. Eventually has the idea to recreate his own origins, and see what he can learn about it.




I thought through all of this because I had the horribly amusing idea of having one of the monsters we know and befriend waking up as a soulless flower. Of exploring the similarities with Flowey, and the differences.

I want an excuse to make a flower!Papyrus AU and explore what that could mean for him. I wouldn't mind exploring how some of the others might respond to that happening to them, too, but Papyrus is the one where I got very interested in it; Papyrus is the one who will not kill you, no matter what.

Because, like, Asriel is very wilting in the flashbacks, a very idealistic kid who cares a lot what his friend Chara thinks. Papyrus is, as Undyne calls him, very self-absorbed. He cares about people, pushes them to be what he believes they can be, but he's more of a guy to jump into the spotlight than to hold it up for someone else.

And I wonder what the differences would be. Would the reduced shock make it easier for Papyrus? Because it would be a lesser shock.

Flowey woke up confused and disoriented and alone, a scared child who'd killed his best friend on their request, who felt betrayed by them when they broke their promise and tried to kill people, who died without freeing his people... and who woke up emotionally numb, without the ability to love his own dad. Who ran away, sought his mom, realized even she couldn't help him, and tried to kill himself.

Contrast that to Papyrus whose friends are alive, whose brother is still alive. Who does know of Flowey, and trusts him, but they aren't longterm best friends who he counts on for validation. And especially if Papyrus (or whoever else is flowered) doesn't have greater determination than Flowey, and so never gains the power to reset. Because Flowey tried to kill himself, but discovered that somehow, out of the combination of magic and determination, that because he didn't really want to die he literally couldn't; that he would reset the very timeline to when he first woke up in the flowerbed. And even then, Flowey spent an unknown number of resets going through the motions of being kind and helpful to everyone before he became frustrated and bored and started murdering and torturing.

So really, I wonder, would the lesser shock that Papyrus (or really anyone but Asriel) experiences make it easier to pretend to themselves that they hasn't changed? To try to continue treating people as they wanted to treat them, to encourage their friends and family to be happy and well? And how long would everything last before the numbness hits them?


I also asked myself, so, what, would Flowey do this before Frisk fell in and accidentally stole the reset power? After? Would flowered!Anybody remember things between the resets like Flowey does, or does that memory only clearly last for those who had the power before?

 

So. I want to remake a small scene or portion of Undertale as a sort of Visual Novel style thing, just to get the ropes on how my new engine works! Please gimme suggestions for what scene!

 

I feel like the Alphys Date would be a perfect choice for such a thing, especially if you decide to go as obnoxiously anime with it as possible? Alternately, the meeting with Asgore.

 

ooh the meeting with asgore would be... so dramatic

that would be very fun

 

I personally feel like the Hotel Scene with Sans would be cool, but i'm obnoxiously suggesting to make everything about my skeleton husband so

 

Returning the chat to quiche for a sec: A few days ago I was thinking about mushrooms and fried onions and whether you could hypothetically fill an entire pie with them (I was very hungry), and then I realized that they'd make the PERFECT base for a Toriel-inspired "snail" pie. Actual escargot are way too small and pricy to serve as anything but a garnish, but you could add chopped up oysters for a bit of mollusk-y flavor, and cook all the ingredients in the same herb and garlic flavored butter they use for escargot. The ingredients are all pretty "wet" and non-cohesive on their own, so it might be a good idea to use a quiche-style filling to hold everything together, but I think it'd taste great either way.

 

Spoiler: So that AU idea I mentioned last post.

It's taken over my brain and my spare time.

As in, I've got like 7 doodles for scene ideas. And I actually pulled out my scanner to get the drivers to USE it on this computer, instead of my fun with trying to take camera pictures. And I've written about 4000 words of notes on it so far. Welllllp.

The short version is,

Spoiler

I wanted an excuse to make a flower!Papyrus AU, where [shenanigans] happen and I could compare the degredation of his personality compared to how Asriel somehow eventually became Flowey. Partly for the sake of picking at both of their personalities for similarities and differences, and partly because it gave me excuses to play with the rest of the world.

I concluded that it could happen, if Flowey spent enough rounds on learning about Alphys' experiments and trying to continue them. He complains in one of the runs that nothing he did or said got Asgore to relinquish the souls, so if I'm keeping the timelines of this AU consistent with the true endings, then no souls. But the amalgamates were injected with determination, and it would probably be possible to use the DTE Extractor to extract it, and a Flowey who's already started murdering for funsies wouldn't have any issues doing that. Just reset, find a time when Alphys isn't in the lab, lock her out, and start doing mad science.

And since Papyrus is so eagerly willing to befriend Flowey, I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult for Flowey to meet Papyrus, claim to be Dr. Alphys' assistant, and convince Papyrus to come help his ~friend~ with an experiment. Maybe torture Alphys into confirming the request online. And for Flowey to first try injecting Papyrus with determination to see if he forms an amalgamate. And to eventually test the accident that made Flowey, and dust Papyrus, and see if a flower!Papyrus forms.

Flowey tells the player that he spent a lot of runs trying to befriend everyone and fix all their problems and make everyone happy, even though he didn't care about them anymore. That he just sorta acted out the motions of friendship, before the boredom and frustration opened him to the possibility of happy murder funtimes like Chara wanted to do back then.

So flower!Papyrus would, reasonably, try to act out the motions of friendship and caring about people, even if he didn't anymore. And if Flowey told him, afterwards, what being soulless meant, Papyrus would probably stubbornly insist that Flowey just hadn't tried hard enough, and act out the motions even harder because if you try hard enough and long enough anything will come true!!!!

...That would probably piss Flowey off. And Flowey has the ability to RESET back to when he first woke up in the flower patch, but he also has the SAVE and LOAD. So suppose he saved right after leaving Papyrus alone in the lab as a flower. And every now and then, when Papyrus has done his explanations to his brother and boss and anyone else, and is trying to go through things, Flowey decides to fuck with his equilibrium and reload him back at the start. Enough times of everything resetting, and even a guy like Papyrus will become a Flowey, right? If Asriel did.

So I want to explore this a bit, and I might make a fanfic of it. If I actually go through with it, I'd appreciate any insight from people here on, like, beta-ing the fic for characterization. Seeing if their emotional reactions make sense, seeing if peoples' motives make sense based on the changes I've made.

Because, uh. Any of us who hang out in the Complaints Department Circular File have seen fic where the characterization is very fucking skewed. And I know a lot of my writing, at least in first drafts, reads a lot like that guy's. And I want to do this idea justice.