Brain Spew Just for You

Makes people like it

Makes people act like idiots while under its influence

Plant

(An Undertale fusion with Ranboo taking the role of Frisk)

—

[ranboo pov]

Sometimes waking up is quick. A sudden awareness, a dream fading into the morning light, and there you are, once more an active participant in the world.

That’s the best kind of awakening, in most situations. Makes it easy to get to school on time.

However, the universe quite consistently has it out for you personally, and as such you do not receive the luxury of a quick awakening.

No, waking up today feels like fighting through molasses, clawing your way up from an endless sea of unconsciousness when you want nothing more than to stay drowning in it.

You feel like shit, too. You’ll probably have that gummy stuff in your eyes.

Bringing a hand up to your face to roughly rub yourself into awareness, the first thing you note when you open your eyes is that this is not a place you remember having seen before.

Now, this is normal for you, seeing as your memory is about as effective as your brain, which is not at all, but you’re pretty sure this is a new low, even for you.

Honestly, you should have guessed something was off by how the ground felt before you even opened your eyes.

Sure, you’ve slept in a few fields in your time, but a bed of flowers? You’d always assumed those only existed in manga.

The room you’re in is a massive cave, with only one exit you can spot from a glance. (And a hole in the ceiling, but you’re looking for places you could feasibly have entered from, so something that high up is irrelevant.)

If there’s only the one exit to the cave, you probably wandered in here while trying to escape a rainstorm or something last night, and you must have entered through there.

So, stands to reason that’ll be the way out, right?

With this flawless logic in mind, you get to your feet and make a beeline for it.

Just as you’re about to exit, something flashes in the corner of your eye. You turn your head, but there’s nothing there.

Huh. Must have been your imagination, then.

—

[ghostbur pov]

Something is wrong.

Excluding your missing memories, excluding your apparent ability to see Ranboo’s battle screen despite not being Ranboo and not being involved in the encounter, excluding the fact that his first experience in the underground was someone trying to kill him, even excluding the star.

Ignoring all of that, something here is very wrong.

Why is Technoblade in the Ruins? You’d assumed he’d just been visiting for a picnic, or some such thing, but that note…

You’d lied to Ranboo, about what it said. It wasn’t just an explanation of encounters, though that was a part of it.

No, the full contents of the note are…

Concerning.

“Hey, new human. [censored for spoilers] probably didn’t explain the combat system down here, because he’s cringe like that. So because I’m extremely cool, I decided to explain it to you for him.

But you were taking a while to get here, so I wrote this note instead. That dummy over there is named Steve, you’ll be practicing on him.

Walk up to him and select the MERCY menu. Then hit ‘flee’ and the fight should end immediately.

Every fight down here is like that, so you should be able to apply the same principle for whatever randos attack you, though it might take a couple tries against the faster ones.

Oh, and-

Don’t FIGHT. Ever.

Unless you wanna die, of course, but I’m mostly trying to stay on Eret’s good side, here.

So I’d really rather not need to kill you.

See you soon,

-Technoblade”

—

[ghostbur pov]

“I don’t think that’s normal,” you state.

Ranboo turns toward you, and the screen disappears as he raises his eyebrows. “But falling a completely unreasonable distance and surviving before being attacked by a [censored for spoilers] is?”

Fair enough. You guess he hasn’t really got any standard of normality anymore.

He’ll regain it, of course, if he stays down here long enough, but for now you know exactly how lost and confused he must feel.

“No. This is weird in a way that’s not connected to the underground’s standard oddities.”

He sighs. You can’t help but commiserate.

This situation is already unusual enough, so why does the world need to throw yet more weirdness at you? Isn’t it enough to have you be a ghost when as far as you know, ghosts don’t exist? Isn’t it enough to try and help this kid find a safe place after his first experience down here was an attack?

...Isn’t it enough to leave you dead, alone, and missing memories?

—

[ranboo pov]

With that out of the way, you walk into the next room. It’s not really any more remarkable than any of the other rooms you’ve seen. (And significantly less remarkable than the room where you’d found the save point, which had been absolutely spectacular looking)

Just a generic purple room with some discolored tiles that indicate a path, really. You walk through without paying it much attention.

Just as you’re entering the adjoining hallway, you hear pounding footsteps and someone screams: “DIE, HUMAN!!”

You barely hear Ghostbur’s muttered “Is that Cletus?” Before a short-

You can’t discern anything about this person other than their height, actually. They’re too bundled up for anything else to be visible.

Anyway, they’re barreling towards you extremely quickly, screaming about wanting you to die, and you don’t exactly have a lot of time to figure out the best way to deal with this, ok?

So you just- react.

They get close enough for you to reach them and you just-

Hit them aside.

@purpleflamed says: “I’d love to hear your thoughts, with the updated lore...is a Tommy about to pull a Pandora? While I wouldn’t say his motives are curiosity, there is a constant tension having the prison RIGHT there.”

(This was in response to this post I made a while ago about the prison arc and its parallels to greek mythology)

That’s a good question, honestly. I’m definitely Living In Fear (tm), but as far as whether I think it’ll actually happen...

Tommy losing his last life to Dream is probably (hopefully) the end of his tragedies. It’s a painful relapse into his trauma after he’d finally escaped it, but if the analyses are correct and it being a relapse metaphor is intentional, it’ll probably just end up being a quick last big bad thing before Tommy’s healing arc finally starts in earnest. Honestly, I’m expecting he’ll start dropping off from the main plot a bit in order to let his character recover properly before any more big stuff happens with him.

I could be wrong, of course, but that’s my current projection.

However, Tommy is not the only character currently in a position to pull a Pandora, and in fact there are several characters it would make much more sense for.

In order of how much I’m manifesting, my guesses are:

1. Technoblade

2. Badboyhalo

3. Philza

The reason why I’m guessing these characters specifically is because they’re all currently in a position where, A: Sam would likely be willing to hold them in prison, and, B: they’re clearly set up for some kind of big narrative punishment for their actions.

I’d say Techno is the most likely because c!Techno has faced almost no narrative consequences as of yet for the various things he’s done, as well as having motive to free Dream. (The favor)

Here’s how that sequence goes in my head: Tommy rocks up to the prison to kill Dream, and manages to get to his cell due to Sam being distracted by the simultaneous break-in from Techno. Dream is successfully broken out, and Tommy chases him, but Techno ends up trapped somehow, and someone (probably Quackity, let’s be honest) convinces Sam to keep him locked up.

I’d also consider Bad a likely possibility, as his current arc has been Skeppy whump after Skeppy whump, and now that their relationship has finally deteriorated visibly, as well as Bad being in the midst of a moral crisis due to killing Foolish, he’s in the perfect position to do one more really bad thing before starting his redemption arc.

Here’s how I’d write that: Bad, at the end of his rope, alone, hunted, and uncertain, decides to free Dream in order to simultaneously get back the one friend he knows won’t give a fuck about him doing murders, as well as to get one of the most powerful people on the server to owe him a massive favor. So he and Tommy break in at the same time, chaos reigns, and Dream escapes while Sam manages to lock up Bad. Thus isolated from the egg, it’s influence over him slowly fades and he realizes more and more how far he’s fallen, finally culminating in the eggheads breaking him out only for him to turn around and betray them almost immediately.

And as for Philza? Honestly, I just think it’d be awesome if, in an attempt to get his son back, he ended up fucking everything up real bad. I just think that would be an extremely pog amount of angst and would also give Phil more opportunities to develop his character.

Please I desperately need people to accept that he’s not a moral paragon

With the syndicate stuff and all that everyone keeps expecting him to make the most heroic choice in any given situation and I just- please, guys

He can be a good character and a sympathetic one, and that doesn’t require him to be a paragon! He’s flawed, his worldview is extremely black and white, he makes excuses to allow himself to be friends with people who have killed his other friends, and he’s actively helped Dream in his enderwalk, which is canonically not a different personality!

He’s not perfect! He’s not right! He’s not a hero!

And he shouldn’t have to be, he shouldn’t get stuck in this box of either being a hero or a villain, he should get to be just a teenager who makes flawed decisions for flawed reasons without that making him a monster!

In any other story, he’d be written as the hero.

Instead, he’s an amazing character study for what paragons look like in practice, in the real world surrounded by terrible ideas and incomplete information, as opposed to a vacuum where the right choice is obvious to all parties

He’s preachy and egotistical and self centered and entitled without that taking away from him being caring and loyal and intelligent and devoted

He has so many juxtapositions baked into him, y’know?

A loyal traitor, a brave coward, an anarchist in the 1%...

And it’s done really well, too. All of his little idiosyncrasies make perfect sense in context, despite how odd they sound without it.

Eret sits alone on the day L’manburg is reclaimed.

Not that they didn’t help with taking it back- of course they did, right? They have a lot to atone for, and they’d been waiting, waiting, waiting for an opportunity to take back a few of their sins.

So they did help take it back, stood atop a tower firing down at Dream and his allies, watched Schlatt’s infamously poor health come back to bite him in the most final way…

But they don’t stick around long, after that. They don’t stay for the presidential game of hot potato, the founders of the nation passing its ownership back and forth. 

They would have, normally, but.

Eret has worked with Dream, in the past. Everyone loves to remind them of it, and they often do so themselves, but something oft forgotten is that Eret knows Dream, knows the obsession he has with ending L’manburg, knows the methods he’s most fond of, that game of pawns and traitors he excels at so notoriously.

And Eret knows Dream gave Wilbur 11 stacks of TNT.

Now, supposedly it’s all gone. Various people have looked around and none have been able to find a trace of it, but Eret knows Wilbur, knows the message he wants to send, and before the battle, they checked somewhere no one else did.

Not many people know the podium is hollow, so not many people noticed when it stopped echoing if you hit it and started making a dull thud sound instead.

Eret notices a lot of things.