VividxMemace

Make it because you love it, because that's enough.

It's not like they haven't done research on humans since coming to the surface, right? They know about a lot of weird little health quirks human bodies have, like how your hair will get greasy over time if not washed, or how you have to clip your nails or they'll just keep growing, or even the way your smell can changed based on the day or your diet.

Strange to them, but mostly normal. Mostly fine. So you all hit the beach one weekend, and they know the shape of a sunburn. Papyrus packs extra tubes of sunscreen, probably five different SPF ratings, a few creams, a few sprays, and Sans will lazily smear some on your nose and call it a day while actually rubbing it into your back so you don't end up burned. You end up burned anyways. Because guess who forgot to reapply. It wasn't like you meant to forget! You'd all just had such a good time it just sorta...slipped your mind. Which is how you end up with a sunburn, shoulders and forehead taking the worst of it. Sans and Papyrus are absolutely guilt stricken about it, the few days of your skin being too tender to touch making them absolutely more miserable than you are. Papyrus applies aloe gel to you like you're gonna shatter, and Sans is throwing his hoodies at you like you're meant to live in them now, and the sun, once their favorite thing to enjoy during summer time, has now become their personal enemy for hurting you. A week passes, your skin heals, and all is fine. The skelebros are relieved, and the crisis is averted. And then the peeling starts. You're in the bathroom, shirt off, and pulling at the edges of a really, REALLY satisfying strip of dead skin, feeling itchy and relieved all at once. It's the good kind of peeling, where it comes away in fat strips and makes a satisfying noise every time. You're about to shower and scrub yourself down anyways, so you may as well enjoy it while you can. Sans, in all his unknowing innocence, opens the door to come in, because personal space does not exist in this household and it never will. "Sans, I'm about to shower," You give him a half hearted protest, looking at him with a playful glare over your half peeled shoulder, still holding a fat strip of skin in your fingers that's still connected at the curve of your arm. Sans's sockets have gone completely dark. He's stood rigid in the doorway, skull locked onto your shoulder. Then he turns to look at the other one. And then your forehead, which is slightly raw from where you'd already done that first. "Love," He chokes out, his voice wrecked. "Love, what the fuck." You blink, looking at him in confusion, "What? I'm just peeling, Sans," and then back down to your shoulder, and just start continuing to pull the dead skin off it, the strip growing longer in your hands with that satisfying noise— Sans's gloved hand snaps around your wrist as he shortcuts right next to you, his eyelights back as thin, shaking pinpricks in his sockets in what you can only think looks like complete and total horror on his face. "Paps. PAPS. PAPYRUS." "Brother? What in all the stars are you up here shouting about—" Papyrus comes around the corner while you're protesting over Sans's grip on your wrist, mourning how the strip broke early, and also confused as to what the hell Sans is freaking out about. Papyrus is frozen in the doorway, sockets flicking between your shoulders, Sans's face, your face, your PEELING FLESH— "Oh my Asgore."

Absolute pandemonium breaks out between the two brothers while you're suddenly being dragged to sit down on the toilet and handled like you're a bomb about to go off. "PAPS GET THE KIT—" "I HAVE THE KIT! I HAVE ALL THREE KITS! CALL THE 911 NUMBERS—" "DON'T TOUCH 'EM OH MY GOD—" "IT'S COMING OFF IT'S ALL COMING OFF—" "I KNOW IT'S COMIN' OFF BRO I CAN SEE IT—" "GUYS!" You shout over their panic and screaming, trying your best not to laugh, because they're very genuinely terrified for you, but god is it hard to keep a straight face. "It's fine. This is normal." They both look at you like you'd told them spaghetti was a fruit. "Kid," Sans's voice is completely strained. "I'm no doctor, but I'm pretty damn sure skin's supposed to stay on humans, not come off." "I CAN SEE IT COMING OFF YOU!" Papyrus practically wails, clutching his skull and doing tight little circles in the bathroom. "RIGHT NOW! IT'S JUST HANGING THERE! MENACINGLY!"

You really should get a reward for choosing, in that moment, not to laugh in their faces. You're a good partner. You do not laugh. Your voice is not that steady though, so points deducted for that one. "It's called peeling, and it happens after a human gets a sunburn," You explain as calmly as you can to them both. "It's actually a really, really good thing." The looks they give you mean they absolutely do not believe you for a single damn second. "Look," You sigh, pulling out your phone, tapping into the search bar, and pulling up the first article you can find that explains the process, turning it to them both. "Too much UV damages the skin. That's what the sunburn was. SO, in order to make sure my cells don't turn into cancer, my body kills of the skin, it turns into this little peeling layer, and it sheds itself off. Kinda like a snake. It's a built in defense mechanism to keep me healthy after a sunburn." Papyrus snatches the phone from your hands while Sans is basically vibrating in place, eyelights locked onto your shoulders while his brother frantically scrolls through the article. "So...this is...healthy?" Papyrus asks slowly, still sounding unsure. "And all humans do this...'peeling'?"

I'm so fucking healthy and I'm so mad about it

The entire point of writing what I love, no matter how shitty, is feeling the words come out through my typing and appearing on the page and flowing with the story as I write. I can literally see it in my brain happening like a movie of my own, and now I get to share that insane movie with other internet people.

How tf does anyone get gratification from AI? How lifeless does it feel to get five seconds of gratification for something shitty and just repeat that over and over? The things I've read that are clearly AI just feel so fucking dead and lifeless. It feels like reading a dictionary built by a robot.

It never feels alive, you know what I mean? Half my process is googling new words, expanding my vocab (yes also looking for twenty bajillion synonyms to said and growled) and spending a few hours just deep diving into topics I wanna know more about.

For Skeletons and the Overseer, I once spent 2 days learning about how nuclear physics and nuclear reactors work. Two days. Researching and reading and watching youtube videos on what the hell a nuclear reactor even did (tldr its a giant steam engine yall thats really cool) along with the three different types of radiation, all so I could create my own realistic magic system where magic was a tangible source of new radiation that could be measured and studied because it felt COOL AS FUCK. MAGIC AS RADIATION!! I CALLED IT DELTA RADIATION!!

But Ai just...pops ur shit out on a page and is like 'heres ten paragraphs of lifeless descriptions and metaphors lmao fuck u'

Where is the whimsy??? Where are the late nights doing deep dives into cool things you love??? Where is the frustration of sitting with an idea and not knowing how to put it to a page?? Where is the love for when you finally hit that scene you've been building in your head and you finally writing it and you're kicking and giggling your feet at 2am???

I have SOBBED over my own writing before because my OCs are extensions of myself, and I channel my own personhood into them. I have written scenes that I have to take a breather from because the feeling I POURED into those people have hit me so deep in the soul that it feels like an open wound, and I've never been more proud in those moments because my writing IS me. I am it. I am the one pouring out who and what I am into that page with characters I love.

Writing is art. Writing is a vice. Writing is an expression that makes you feel things and make your heart pound along with the characters or makes you sob for them or laugh or grin like an idiot at your own screen when you write something funny and can't help but smile like an idiot about it.