Beep!

And boy do I have ideas. : D

(Mildly disturbing ones but, well. This is Fallen London we're talking about here.)

(yusssssssss)

give me the goooods

Okay, so: I was thinking a bit about the Masters of the Bazaar in this version, and how we decided Alphys was a doctor.

nods

Thing is, I always liked the universal 'Mr' theme naming for all of them, so I didn't want to switch to gendered titles. So my thought was I'd try to find five different gender-neutral professional titles, one for each of this Bazaar's Masters.

Maybe Mx. gets used for many of them

Or all of them, because a large proportion of London doesn't want to presume gender (it being Victorian London aside)

The ones I've got so far are Doctor Amber, Captain Aquamarine, Minister Violet.

But I'm not sure about the color theme naming, might veer a bit too much towards clue. The other two I'm thinking professor and some kind of religious title, but I'm not sure?

Ooooh I like that idea

Hmm, the master themes are substances that link to trades, so that might be Minister Violets, but is floristry an attendent trade to that person?

It occurs to me that the Cardinal could serve as title and color, but I'm not sure I want to lose the title-trade two name structure- ooh, yes, pastor works. : D

(I picked Amber bc not only yellow, but associated with electricity and a tradeable substance_

ooooh yes

man you know how everyone in FL has titles rather than names

that might tie into Undertale's importance of names

The Fallen Child sounds very easily an FL thing

Ooh, yes.

(Because I'm a dork with a weakness for puns, I keep wanting to make a Fallen London OC called the Reverent Revenant, but I've only got their name, no character ideas...)

(hmm. maybe a priest from the Tomb Colony)

(Could work, yeah... Sorry I kept taking so long to reply, by the way. I keep trying to do two or three things at once, and it makes typing kind of hard. I would have put them off til later, but one of the things was eating dinner and I was hungry.)

(eating is priority!)

So, the way my thoughts are lining up here, I think we're doing more of a wholesale alternate universe, not mixing in the canon masters, too. I was thinking five because five Masters plus the King and Queen adds up to seven, which is numerically significant.

We talked more about Chara earlier, but some of my thoughts on Flowey: there is a reason the Mountain King and the Ruined Queen no longer speak.

He tends a garden, filled with flowers. They grow rich and golden and beautiful all throughout the lush majesty of his throne room, even without the need for sunlight.

Do not visit this garden alone.

Do not visit this garden unwisely.

He will not attempt to drag you into it. He will give you every chance to leave. But if you persist on continuing further, if your curiosity must be satisfied... then he will apologize, and put your remains to good use.

Every body is buried in the garden, taken by his trident. He feels remorseful over them, but such an avid gardener knows: all plants have to feed off something.

And his son is so hungry.

hhhhhhh yes

parents feed their children, and gardeners care for plants, and this is the way of things

I figured in this AU Asgore and Toriel wouldn't really be splitting up because of their kids' deaths, since the Masters revived them... sort of. But Toriel was not happy about what Asgore's deal twisted Asriel into, or what had to be done to sustain his new form, and in their mutual grief it was easier for her to blame him for not dealing well enough.

And for him to shout back that at least their son still had a form of his own, and where had his sibling gone, alive but too far to be reached again?

They said things they can never take back. They've done things that cannot be taken back, since.

Basically things became very strained.

And it may have taken a while for Chara to come back! Given the requisite conditions. They might have thought they'd been swindled. (and they had, just not like that)

The Underground is large, and each of them keeps to their own half of it while the Masters handle what they will.

so when Chara-as-Patience did turn up...

(To be fair, the Masters don't really seem to be trying to make the deals have horrible results, they just really don't get other species...)

(well, the Vake might be enough of a dick)
(but yes, they do seem to fulfil the letter and let the spirit hang)

I think maybe that Chara's first return could have been the point where they reconciled, found a better way... except that they ran ahead from Toriel, didn't go into the garden with her.

oh my god

he killed them

before he even knew

They were too eager to see him again. They didn't stop to introduce themselves, they didn't stop to think of the danger he'd become.

Do not go into the garden alone.

Patience was buried in the roots to feed the Prince, the Fallen Child got a new grave in the form of the ribbon that was returned, by messenger, to Toriel, and all chance at reconciliation was lost.

I don't know if anyone ever told him.

hhhhhhhhhng

ironically what undid them was impatience

Should have listened to their friend...

yyyyyep

hmm, if Toriel had the ribbon, the next child might have stolen it, and then died with it on their person

and this time, it was probably Bravery that went ahead despite Chara's warnings

I was thinking more Patience died wearing it, Asgore sent it back to her out of a twisted form of thoughtfulness.

But yeah, Bravery probably wasn't great at the 'calm down and think it through' part of things.

nods yeah. and then Toriel had the ribbon, the next child, likely an urchin, stole it, and then elsewhere went on a trip to the river

i'm thinking Chara didn't tell Integrity about Asgore at all (since telling Bravery only spurred them on)

I think maybe the center of the Golden Garden is this giant Omega Flowey-like flower/tree/thing that has Asriel's actual body hidden deep inside it, but he can choose to manifest through anything growing in the garden, and people can be buried anywhere in it to feed him.

I'm also thinking that there are probably a lot of other plants with interesting or usefully weird properties growing in there, too, because of his presence. It'd explain why people keep going into the damn place even though probably most people know by now that it might get you killed by your king.

the Curiously Singular plant from that storylet might have come from that garden

there's probably a ton of roots all across the city by this point, he can pop up nearly anywhere

(Fallen London's 'oh god everything is horrifying' aesthetic doesn't really mesh with Undertale's 'people are capable of doing a lot of damage when they're scared and hurt but no one's all bad deep down' themes, but crossovers aren't perfect.)

(the place probably attracts people with high Shadowy like flies)

(tbf, a lot of FL's 'oh god everything is horrifying' stems from 'people are capable of doing a lot of damage when they're scared and hurt' )

(it's just that a lot is also due to Agenda)

Yeah, that'd make sense. Maybe he can only do little tiny Flowey-type plants with far-away roots, but he gets stronger as you get closer to the center and his real body.

Ooh, what if a lot of the stuff from the Golden Garden (I just like that as a name for it) tends to mutate people's biology/appearance, and so do a lot of the Masters' products, so that's why even the theoretically ordinary city people are 'monsters' in this AU.

oooh i like that idea

and it ties in with newcomers slowly becoming intolerant to sunlight, too

hhh man Flowey waiting for his sibling each time, fully aware he's been responsible for quite a few of deaths

There's the question of how the whole thing with Chara happened if everyone started out human, but maybe something like a relatively small but very prosperous and happy city-state on a mountain's side, whose people had historically been rather poorly treated by their neighboring nations until they retreated to a more remote location to live in peace.

oooh i like that idea

One day, a child from a village just on the boarder of the nearest foreign nation runs away and eventually winds up collapsing half-dead from exhaustion just outside the city walls... well, you probably can guess the rest.

the Masters do seem to like cities that were trade hubs, but they've been tricked before with Egypt

: DDD

Maybe they were, before they retreated? So they're all happy for a while until the kids start dying, the Masters show up and they make a deal, then everybody's living under the mountain and is way less happy about it. And heavily mutated.

i love that idea : D

and if this happened in 201x, splat went London

...Huh, I just had a weird thought. If we're doing this as a wholesale AU, the Bazaar him/her/itself might also be a different character, right?

ooooh go oon

What if the Bazaar-equivalent is the Player?

holy shit i love the way you think

wait would this make the Sun toby

this a metaphor for making AUs

I mean, they're basically a character in their own right depending on how you interpret the game, they're a very incomprehensible entity from very far away and could be considered a higher form of being, everything is ultimately set up to benefit them, and what they want most is stories...

: D holy shit. headcanon accepted

love stories, all kinds of love

On one hand, I like the idea of Judgement!Annoying Dog have some kind of, like... intellectual thing with The Player, where they connect through games and stories and it wants to win its way back with just the right one, so it can convince everyone and get his attention again...

on the other hand, given that Toby Fox is a real person and I try to avoid writing RPF on moral grounds, blurring the lines like this does tread into slightly uncomfortable territory.

hhhh i love that idea

yeah good point

I guess treating the Annoying Dog as a character distinct from Toby (like the Player isn't actually us so to speak) is a solution, but given the dog's an author avatar...

(...oh fuck, I just realized: if we're going with 'Annoying Dog as avatar of the author' and he's a Judgement... dog star. He's the dog star. Fucking heck.)

(oh my godddd)

(It turned into a pun we have to do it now. There's no choice.)

(It's too late for us.)

But yeah, maybe we can kind of skirt around creepy territory with this idea if we stick to it being the abstract concepts of the original storyteller and the one who loves the story enough to build on it, as represented by the Annoying Dog and the Player.

Stick to what they're pretty much a metaphor of in-game, not get the literal people in question involved too much.

Exactly

It's also probably less weird if we stick to love in the sense of intellectual admiration, which also would be a fun way to tie into the theme we kind of accidentally started here with having Chara and Asriel be the ones the deal was made for: Fallen London is mostly about specifically romantic love, instead we're going with other kinds, too.

After all... sharing a story with someone, reaching out to and communicating with them, and having them send their own story back, building and improving on what you started... in its own way, you could call that a form of love, too.

: DDDDD

exactly so

and potentially the stories are still to try and break the Chain

Could tie in well to Sans being a Judgement, and also the Judge: he's sympathetic enough to people that he'd be fine with you breaking it non-harmfully, but if you're going to cause something with massive horrifying collateral damage Liberation of Night-style then he's going to have to step in.

By the way, I was thinking of the titles for the Master-equivalents, and your idea of Minister Violets for Muffet instead of just 'violet' works even better than I realized at first. I did a quick search to confirm, and it turns out violets are edible, and can be used (among other things) as a fancy pastry topping or made into tea, which fits her perfectly.

ooooooooh : D

these are good concepts

man

would the Liberation of Night kill him?

...You know, after a moment's thought, I kind of like the idea that it wouldn't. After all, the whole point of his punishment was sealing him away into a much lesser form, small and fragile and weak, making him something less than a Judgement for daring to make Judgements out of lesser creatures.

So, unless he were somehow restored/released before it happened, I think it wouldn't effect him more than it does most people.

Plus it works well with how in canon, he potentially outlives damn near everyone else in his species, all these big strong monsters dead and the little skeleton with one HP still hanging around somehow...

He only really dies because he saw the End coming and decided to finally confront you- just letting you end the world would have probably gotten him killed along with everyone else, but he could have at least escaped being personally murdered by you if he'd just kept running.

there's a tiny light in the darkness

a small beacon of Law

(sorry for the gap i accidentally deleted chrome somehow and my bro had to bail me out)

man tho, would the survivors flock to him?

No worries, computer troubles happen.

And he does definitely seem to be very much a stabilizing force in the Underground in all the Neutral endings, always seeming to help the new ruler one way or another, so he'd probably help out here too. In the sense of acting as a Judgement with all the others dead, though...

Well, you know how Judgements enforce their will through their light, defining what Is and Is Not through what they believe? I think Sans deliberately avoids using even the little bit of light he can call up these days, because he knows that most of what he believes isn't very happy.

hhhhhhhh

FL has a lot of themes of prices

Like, some parts of it are probably under conscious control, but I think there's a certain degree to which a Judgement can't really keep themselves from enforcing their honest, genuine beliefs as their Law.

So I think Sans' would be like... on one hand, you've probably got Laws like 'be kind to others' and 'take no lives', but you'd also probably wind up with something like 'there is no point to trying, give up' as a fundamental Law of the local universe, which could be kind of a problem.

hhhhh

good thing it only occurs where his light falls

you can pick and choose by going in the radius

bc what with not having much light to start with and actively suppressing it

man tho would the LiN people still be trying to snuff him?

(I think that might be what the glowing eye thing is in this world- blue and gold starlight. So that's why he won't ever do it unless things are really desperate.)

...Aw man, come on Revolutionaries. Can't you leave the little guy alone? He's been through enough already, he's just trying to get by here.

(Which is to say: possibly yes, depending on whether they thought it was worth it and how the situation turned out.)

(oooh I like that idea
when he uses it, he's trying to get you to give up )

(for once that Law works for him)

(It's what produces the karmic effect there: you've gone against several of his Laws and are still going against at least one right now by continuing to fight and therefore continuing to try, so the light is slowly killing you.)

(It becomes a question of whether you can put it- and him- out before it finishes the job.)

( holy fuck yesssss)

(man i wonder if he's fluent in Correspondence)

(Papyrus has probably had accidents with it in the past)

Come to think of it, his Law combined with such an already desperate situation could produce interesting results. Like, in ordinary times it'd just drive people to despair, but here people may have already come to the conclusion that things are hopeless on their own, and are still hanging around anyway. So I think the overall effect might be...

Gentle. And very sad.

hhhh a sort of 'things suck, might as well enjoy as best you can' field

Sort of the same overall emotional feeling as seeing people hold each other during a funeral: there's no hope here, that's been gone for a while now, but there is kindness. They can still care for each other, even though they know by Law that they're just a brief and fragile light in the dark.

yessssss
we do know that after the Liberation, people still live and strive

using the false colours, and clicking, and touch

So I could see maybe he sets up somewhere safe and hidden enough that any surviving Revolutionaries won't show up to kill him, and maybe anyone who's already given up on their own comes to him and lives there, getting to have a safe and peaceful life albeit a quietly mournful one, while the people who want to believe there's still hope travel outside.

(Also, yes, Sans and Papyrus probably can both speak in the Correspondence, although they usually don't because they want to avoid setting people on fire. Papyrus is a little shakier on some of it because he was just a baby when they got sealed into their current forms, but he's still got an instinctive grasp of it.)

( Might explain why their voices sound indefinably strange to people, too. Sans dropping the font could be him letting just a little bit of it ease into his voice, just enough to give people this sense of impending doom without actually making anything happen.)

(oooooh now that i love)

('whoops sorry bout that. spontaneous combustion, hell of a thing')

"burn in hell" (person literally catches fire)

aasdtygkihujh yes

man tho maybe the Fallen decks themself out in protective plaques just so this doesn't happen and it becomes a struggle rather than a oneshot

I mean, if part of Sans punishment was getting sealed in a form that's fragile, even by mortal standards, it could work similar-ish to canon: he has to dodge everything you throw at him, you have to keep him from completely whittling down your health before you finally manage to land a hit.

oooh yus

I do like the idea he wasn't exactly the hottest shit (literally) as a Judgment either, though

going down the chain might have just carried that

Bit of a dwarf star, you mean? : D

But yeah, inasmuch as the Judgements have any kind of hierarchy among themselves, I doubt he was one of the more straight-up powerful ones. Probably did what he does now: got by on being way smarter and sneakier than whoever he was fighting.

: D yeah exactly!

all those metaphors about binary systems are truth in this

oooh yus
dodging the Time Dragons

Also, I realized that Alphys having known Sans before either of them wound up in their current situations makes this kind of hilarious, in that if you peel back all the high dramatic aspects of it...

he's basically her equivalent of that one friend who asks if he can crash on your couch for a few days because he lost his job and got evicted, and then he's still there like three years later and not paying rent.

Also, he shows up with a kid and you didn't even know he was dating anybody.

lol that is quintessential sans

sans is That Guy

Alphys is a good friend

Honestly, I feel like there should be a normal human AU somewhere that has Sans as, like... the nice version of that one guy everyone dated at some point in their lives?

You know: He sort of wandered into your life for a while, it was nice while it lasted but eventually you realized that you wanted something beyond getting stoned and eating pizza at four AM so you broke up with him, which he accepted completely amiably.

You stay casual friends and somehow he winds up still on good enough terms with you that he shows up periodically to raid your fridge and nap on your couch.

If you have any children or young relatives in your life, you he find that he's somehow become their cool but irresponsible uncle figure, and he still sends them horribly tacky but sweet cards more-or-less around their birthdays every year, even though he never once remembered your birthday while you were dating- or, for that matter, his own.

That guy.

That guy

okay but this implies that Sans and Alphys dated

(I mean in this hypothetical normal human AU, not the Fallen London one) And in this AU, one of the running gags is that Sans is just somehow that guy for everyone.

Like, he's just somehow everybody's collective cheerfully harmless dirtbag ex. At one point Mettaton runs down the list and realizes that about the only two people from their hometown in their age group he can think of that didn't fall into this category at some point are Papyrus (siblings) and Undyne (just that much of a lesbian).

asdfghjkl

that makes too much sense i love it

sans is everywhere

someone tells a story and offhand mention is always 'sans was there'

This is what Sans being all over the place dating everyone would actually look like. It's not fanon 'suave and seductive' it's 'I dunno, he was kind of cute and funny enough to try it for two weeks and he's always been really nice about leaving money to replace stuff he finishes so I guess I don't mind how he keeps showing up to eat my frozen pizza rolls?'

'Sort of wish he'd at least unfreeze them first, though'

(In his defense, he was very stoned. All of those times.)

(Too stoned for microwaves.)

(all those buttons are too much)

(And they, like... beep at you. It gets freaky.)

(what if he's pushing mettaton's face)

(I'm pretty sure that Mettaton isn't a robot in this AU, but I don't doubt he's still done that at least once.)

oh my god

residual canon memory

It only comes out when he's stoned (or at least that's the only time he ever talks about it) so nobody ever thinks it's anything important. Like "awww i'm so glad undyne's back this time, it suuuucked when she melted." "Dude, you have got to stop showing up to class this high."

oh nmmy god

hey alph alph
you feeling okay you've lost scales

He does not, in fact, stop showing up to class high. He's a physics major, so no one notices.

asdgtyhyjk'

Honestly, half the time his grades are better than everyone else's anyway. He claims that stoned Sans got his PhD already.

well he's not wrong

man cribbing off his past self sounds exactly like a thing he'd do

It's a good thing, too. Stoned Sans is kind of terrified of Professor Gaster, so it'd make going to office hours kind of a challenge.

(Professor Gaster's office hours are always a challenge. They change constantly, half the time the website where they're posted is down, and no one can ever find him in the halls. It's like he just doesn't exist the second you walk out of class.)

hhhhhha

someone attach a tracker to his lab coat

(There's rumors someone met with him in this tiny gray office off the main hallway and they got an A for the semester, but nobody's sure exactly who that was and they can't find any doors there.)

(that freshman kid who has the most deadpan face you can imagine)

(Not the freshman kid who smiles all the time, they look a lot alike but this one's definitely a different person.)

( definitely
people who make the mistake sure find out)

(Boy do they.)

god I love college AU

Toriel a lecturer

I feel like she moved to a different school for a while when she and Asgore divorced because Reasons, then finally transferred back to teaching here this year because the kids are going to college and she's not leaving them alone with That Man.

(She walks in and it's like "oh, hey tori, how's it going?" "Oh, Sans, lovely to see you again. Feel free to stop by for lunch anytime." "You two know each other?" "eh, we dated for a while." "GODDAMMIT NOT ANOTHER ONE.")

(Everbody's dirtbag ex.)

hahahaah omg

I find it funny that Alphys is probs the one who's changed the least

also is Papyrus learning architecture?

That would not have been my first guess for him, but it works. : D

...plurk decapitated my smiley.

D :

heheheh

i mean it's mainly based on the puzzle thing

and the sentry stand

'royal guard' isn't really a thing one studies at uni

Yeah, that makes sense, I could see it.

I guess the equivalent of royal guard would be, like, law enforcement/criminal justice major, but I like your idea.

it's hard bc his interest in the royal guard is out of a desire for prestige and so is his interest in puzzles, since they tie into the same thing - catching a human

there's his interest in cars, maybe

To be fair, you can theoretically find prestige in most fields, if you do well enough.

that's definitely true
i suppose it's which one seems the most likely/comes to him first

maybe he's studying medicine

Given that this is for fun, I think the answer is 'whichever you'd enjoy writing most'. Also, I just yawned so hard I nearly fell off a chair, so I think it's time to get ready for bed. Sorry this somehow turned into a completely different AU than the one we were planning to talk about.

pfft i was predicting that would happen

it's the natural flow of conversation

have a good sleep, ecks : D