thisavrou_ooc | tdm 14

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*tdm

tdm 14

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Survival is the exception
"living is an act of courage."

THROUGH THE INGRESS

The Ingress has pulled you in. Your body experiences several sensations at once: being pushed forward as if a hand is resting on your back, momentary and startling blindness, a gentle ringing in your head. You have difficulty discerning whether it is hot or cold, but where you have been prodded is noticeably warmer than the rest of you. Some may suffer from dizziness while others are perfectly fine. Once equilibrium has been reestablished, you will notice you are standing on a rocky planet.

Former crew of the Moira are there to greet you, and it’s a grim message they have to share. The Moira has crashed and is beyond repair, but there’s good news... the destination the crew has been heading towards for over a year? You’re standing on it. But before you get into exploration and survival, it’s best to deal with the effects of coming through a broken Ingress.

☄ slip and trip
find your footing fast
Coming through the Ingress has left your character with one of three changes - an age slip, a form of body horror, or an extreme weakness. The first, the age slip, will mean that the character is either older or younger and this change can’t be rectified during their first month in game. The second, body horror, comes in the form of an alteration to the character's body due to whatever they were carrying at the time they came through. If they were wearing a watch, it’s now fused to their wrist, clothes are permanent, knifes replace fingers, and many other alterations (anything goes) and it lasts the first month as well. The third, extreme weakness, can be a mental or physical decrease - weaker arms, legs, or the weaker ability to talk or do math.

ooc: the choice of change is up to each player and this prompt can be game canon.

☄ introductions aren’t awkward
as long as you don’t shake their hand too long
A new planet. Physical and mental changes. Talk of a ship that crashed and a Hub that is home to the ‘creators’ of a technology you’ve never heard of. A lot is happening and the best way to sort through it is by getting to know the Moira’s crew. They’ll help you settle in and get you any care you might need, all the while informing you that the group is on its way to the center of the hub. Something that might seem mundane is an absolute necessity for survival. Ask a seasoned space traveling veteran for answers and guidance.

ooc: this prompt can be game canon.

☄ dealer's choice
just make the right one
Characters have the option of coming through an Ingress that is any possible location on this planet. It can be inside a cave, at the top of a rock formation, etc. This means you can have your character have to climb or slide down, have them yelling for help, and have other characters see them and come to their aid. Your character's arrival is completely up to you, and since this is a unique situation that hasn't happened before, go nuts with it!

ooc: this prompt can be game canon.

OUT OF CHARACTER INFO

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For mature or graphic content, please label. For questions, please direct them to the FAQ. As always, be kind and have fun!

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He -

Intends to touch them. He intends to hold them down like the vicious little abomination they are, doesn't he? He surges at them with a ferocity they haven't come to associate with him, and that bubble of laughter swells up in their throat and bursts like bit of rotting fruit.

He's proven everything correct after all. They're too distasteful and terrible and wrong to be reasoned with. Look at what they've done! They've made him angry, far angrier than is typical for him!

They are not fast enough to avoid the way his arms curl around them, and their smile snaps into something of a rictus, their nonchalant air abruptly dissipating.

They have no weapons. No plan. They are a variable uncontrolled and uncontained, unpredictable. They do the only thing that is available to them in this moment, and they duck down to rip one of their floral growths from their arm, holding it between their teeth.

It is an old, remembered impulse.

Chew, grimace, and swallow.

At first, it doesn't sink in what they're doing. They're crazier than he is, and he can't say he wouldn't expect them to consume a part of themselves. But it's not a part of themselves is it? The golden flowers...

Golden flowers?

Or buttercups?

Mettaton freezes, still holding them in place...for a brief moment, he remembers something. Months ago, Toriel had mentioned both Asriel and Frisk becoming very sick. From a pie filled with buttercups. He had messaged Frisk, of course, to make sure that they were alright. Buttercups were poison, to humans and monsters. That he knew. And of what else he knew, what he'd seen and heard through the Moira's windows playing scenes through the timeslip, well.

I'll go get the flowers.

Angrily, he shifts his grip, one hand reaching up with cruel intent. The intention to cut off Chara's breathing. To exert his will enough that they might have second thoughts.

"Don't. Don't do this."

What about...everyone who cared?! The people who wanted them there, the children who had gone through such pain and upset when Chara had disappeared. Why couldn't they care?!

Even still, as they feel the bitterness slide down their throat, they will not stop smiling, nor will they look away or blink or otherwise break eye contact. They want him to see it, every inch of what he's done, the same way they have. He will see his consequences. He will see every second of them. Their gag reflex pulses sickening in their throat, their stomach, but it won't be long, they know. The sores must surely already be forming down their esophagus and all along their digestive tract.

How convenient, that this Ingress must have known how intently they desired this. It had known it enough to supply them with their very own poison.

They can do nothing but tear out another mouthful of flowers and chew them, baring their teeth at him in a smile stained with flecks of red and green and yellow, until he reaches up to - what? Choke them? Strangle them?

Everyone learns, soon enough, what it is they want. And they either resist it or allow it. In this case, mercifully (ha ha), it seems to be the latter.

"You'll blink before I do," they whisper, the words shivering out of them in an uneven hiss.

The breath rasps agonizingly in their throat, and they continue to smile. Wait for the digestion to process properly. Wait for the side effects to settle in.

If not, then perhaps they'll be heading off a bit sooner!

They are right. In a manner, of course. Mettaton knows what he's doing, knows what it'll mean if he keeps that stranglehold. Honestly, he doesn't want to let go. Because if he killed Chara here, then Frisk wouldn't know. Frisk, Asriel, Toriel...they could all be SPARED.

No one had to know.

Except it would come out. Just like with Sans, it would come out. And Mettaton couldn't bring himself to gain another EXP, especially from someone he knew. Someone he didn't like, but someone from home.

So his grip loosens enough that the human can breathe--it had only been an empty threat anyway, but he doesn't intend to let them stay this way.

"If this is what you want, then so be it. I'm still bringing your corpse to your family, so that they can at least know you were here. I will not let your death fall on my conscience."

A lie. Of course he would. The look on his face betrays him--he's helpless to the circumstances, as he had been before. Mettaton stands, bringing Chara up with him. He expects them to struggle as he shifts his grip to carry their body over his shoulder like no more than a sack of potatoes. Not that they should struggle.

They're going to die...because he doesn't know how to make them stop without inflicting violence upon them and every time he thought he had it in him to do it, all he could remember was that frightened look on Asriel's face as he lost himself, repeatedly electrocuting the spider creature attacking them both.

Funny, Mettaton had always thought himself the center of attention. But watching events play out only reminded him that he was never important. He couldn't influence much after all, could he?

His uncertainty and agony is written all over his face, a truly open book. He releases them, if incrementally, and they can breathe again. An optimal development, surely - death by flower is ever so significantly more drawn-out and painful compared to that by strangulation, and the former is the sort of thing they know they have always had waiting for them.

He expects them to struggle and struggle they do. There is still a degree of intent and control over their every movement, even as the burning starts to settle into their veins, curdling in their organs, blistering and scarring every inch of them that has not been already converted into a warzone of blood sores and floral poison.

He lifts them up, and that allows them a window. They jerk abruptly in his grip, arms linking around his neck in a ruthless parody of the grasp he held over them just before. Their grip tightens like the jaws of a steel trap, a cold vice as they use it to bring their smile inches from one side of his head, an apposition of lips and whatever passes for a robotic ear.

There's an air of triumph to the words as they hiss them, soaked in madder:

"You're lying."

Ah.

At first, he didn't mind their struggling. Why wouldn't they struggle, they had struggled against his sympathy, his attempts to make them see reason, they had struggled against his anger...everything. All that Mettaton had tried to do, they seemed to find a problem with.

Trying to choke a robot was stupid of course, so he knew there was no real attempt there, and even if there had been, they would have to work harder than that. This form was but a puppet to the ghost inside. He wasn't even properly corporeal. Because he had died, and there was no way for him to fuse with the body permanently unless he felt a very strong positive emotion.

But the whisper in his ear, like Chara's telling him a filthy secret, it makes him stiffen, and his grip tightens around them, and he jerks on their legs, trying to shake them out of their position.

"Why are you doing this? You don't even have the right to judge me. What do you know of my conscience, you awful little human?!"

Awful little human, aren't they? A terrible, disgusting little thing. They'd just love to get their hands on him, wouldn't they? T-O-O B-A-D!

The pupils of their eyes dilate abruptly until there might as well be twin pits of blackness stamped onto their face, great dark voids drooling a rotting liquid bilaterally from the places where their eyes once were.

"I think I have every right to judge you." If he wishes to truly carry them like some discarded thing, like the sack of garbage they are, then he will have to tolerate this every. Step. Of the way.

"You throw away a Mystery Key to pursue your dreams," says the child, their tone conversational, offhand. "You abandon your family in their time of need. I'm not sure why anyone would expect anything approaching loyalty from you."

When Asriel's statue was an afterthought, something to be thrown out into Waterfall like yesterday's trash, so that something new and shiny could be put up in its place.

Loyalty, it seems, is not Mettaton's specialty.

See. Now it's getting personal. very personal, in fact, and Mettaton's grip becomes, perhaps a little oppressive on one of Chara's legs as he continues to walk. There's a quiet, metallic sound unrelated to the movement of his articulated leg joints. The sound was not unlike the scraping of flint against rock, if only a bit sharper.

He's grinding his teeth, trying not to lose his temper further.

"My family wanted for nothing when I left. Everything was fine. Do not talk to me about things you do not understand, much less what you have no right to judge me on--you don't. Because look at you--you don't even want to see your family, you're running from it and directly into death."

Little fucking shit, he wanted to say, but he bit his tongue on that.

Even still, Chara had found the weakness they claimed to have been searching for. One of many, though it's fortunate that they didn't seem to have knowledge of anything that had happened on the Moira. Not even the reason why Mettaton was wearing that tattered red scarf like it was his.

Fingers like vices over their legs, like something toothed, fanged, like something that reaches up holds them down like hands over a neck, a pillow over their mouth and nose because that's what LOVE is like, that's what love is for little beasts like you.

They're still laughing, even as their fingernails scrape across his metallic exterior, the equivalent of fingers being dug into unresisting flesh. They cough, and something dark and crimson chokes its way out of their throat, smelling of blood and poison and rot. Something truly despicable, truly disgusting, as befits the shell from which it is generated.

"I'm sure they wanted for nothing," they say softly, the words burning a searing trail down their throat - or perhaps that is simply the poison, settling in. Either way. "They wanted for nothing so badly that they cried into the ground, alone and abandoned. They cried and cried for help."

Pathetic, they hissed in another time, in a snowy backdrop with a monster pressing its belly to the slushy dirt, utterly defeated. No one will ever love you the way you are.

But perhaps someone can LOVE you instead.

"Nobody came for them, of course," says the child, dismissively. "Nobody ever comes."

That's the first lesson you learn.

Nobody comes, and nobody ever will come.

"I came back for them. And they forgave me, because they understood, and I told them I was sorry. That's what normal people do, rather than..."

What, agonize over it? Like he's still doing? God, he really is a hypocrite, isn't he? But they don't know what he's thinking, they can't.

Oh, but of course they can. He knows who they are. He knows what they are, if only because he had watched and seen the world he loved unraveled before him, reduced to little more than numbers and values which he couldn't understand.

"..Why are you doing this?" he finally asks, not even bothering to finish his sentence. "What have I done to you to warrant such...vileness?!"

"Perhaps I am doing it because I enjoy it."

They'd choke the life out of him if they could. They'd strangle him into emptiness, watch their LOVE tick upwards consequently, and they might lack a weapon but they don't require a Knife to hurt, to dig into those still-ripe wounds.

He is having trouble categorizing them. They are not normal people, surely. They are something else, something lesser.

"Or perhaps," they say, their smile widening so that the whites of their teeth are clearly visible, streaked with yellow and red and black, "I am doing it simply because I can."

"Just because you can, does not mean you should."

But the words remind him of something else. God, everything was a stark reminder to something, and he hated it so much, it was all still fresh in his mind, and why wouldn't it be? He'd been driven mad by it already, perhaps more as a side-effect of traveling by manipulating time, but there was still damage.

He still knew more than he should.

He still knew...that because they can...they have to.

"The point is...you don't have to remind me what I have done incorrectly. I remind myself of that every single day. But if you insist...I cannot stop you."

Mettaton can't shut them up, and he's not going to drop them. But he knows they are right, and as soon as that thought settles in, well. He doesn't want to argue. Maybe in another time, he would have wanted to defend himself. But after one token attempt, what's the point?

He is a terrible person. Hell, he could tell Chara how awful he is if they got him started.

A quiet sigh escapes him. Maybe that was how he could get back at them. Make them listen.

"That is the sort of person I am." Certain people know their type. Certain people have made themselves perfectly clear. They are the consequences everyone is intent on ignoring. They are the echo of a shriveled-up dead thing, a memory of a dead child who should never have existed at all, whose name was easily scratched away and replaced with another.

Six letters. That is all they are. Six letters. Easy to change, isn't it?

"Because I can, I 'have' to."

There is a certain poetic nature to it, a certain maudlin appeal. A good thing, then, that they are not a sentimental creature by nature.

"Well, Mettaton?" the child whispers, their smile glinting in the cave's half-light. "Are you feeling your sins weighing on your neck?"

...Even having planned to talk about his problems as a form of revenge--or maybe he just wanted confirmation that he was an awful person--Mettaton can't help but feel unsettled by the way Chara speaks. And they didn't say back. The turn of phrase, wasn't it "sins weighing on your back?"

Then...he recalls the scarf he's wearing. He grits his teeth. No, they can't be talking about that. Papyrus wasn't tied into his sin, he wasn't...he...

He was. It was Mettaton's fault, wasn't it? He had wasted his opportunity again. Of course. Selfish Mettaton.

But as it is a painful subject, he simply jostles Chara for now.

"I'm sure you, the omnipotent one, probably know what sins I bear," he mutters. It's the simplest bluff, of course. So transparent.

They couldn't know. This was beyond the confines of their world.

He shakes them like one might jerk a dog's leash. That is what they are, isn't it? An animal. Best control them, teach them their place, Mettaton. If children misbehave, they deserve to be punished. They are asking for it, after all.

Go on. Exert your control. They have never had control, and even in those moments when they do - it is always, always stolen away from under them.

"You may find yourself surprised," Chara says amiably.

That is the only warning he gets before they detonate.

They contort wildly in his grasp, an adrenalized burst of energy lending strength to their struggles as they seek to tear themself away, rip out from his grasp, from the fingers that burn and will reach up and hold them down and hold them down and hold them down while it all comes to a head in an inflorescence of bruises and scars from "the cat" and "the stairs" and "the door" - and he won't hold them any longer.

He will not touch them again.

What the ACTUAL hell was going on?!

Mettaton fumbles the child momentarily, but before they can struggle completely free, he takes better hold of them. Unfortunately, passing through one of the Ingresses had stolen much of his strength, and although Chara is only a kid, he can't keep hold of them forever.

When a flailing limb--he doesn't even see which--clocks him across the hidden side of his face, his arms release entirely and he puts a hand to his eye. If Chara struck too close to the socket, they would probably have come away with a few cuts from the shattered edges of the incomplete eye, where a stray bullet had passed cleanly through his head and he'd simply never had the time to get it repaired.

"What are you--stop it, you...!!!"

He can't think of a way to finish the sentence that isn't derogatory, but he at least keeps from saying little hellion out loud.

Flesh against metal is not what one would call a particularly pleasant sensation, but they've endured worse, and they will continue to. He can try to hold to them, if he wishes, but they do not go gently, and they do not go quietly.

They do not go out. They never go out.

Some sharpened edge of the metal scratches their hands. Inconsequential. Easily overlooked. They might not have their 92 HP - trapped with 20, just as their vessel had been - but this is easily remedied.

He might not have finished his sentence, but he doesn't need to. It is simple enough to fill in the blanks for him. Demon. Abomination. Creature. Thing.

They take advantage of his lapsing grip, of his alarm, to rip themself free, if clumsily - they land heavily on the ground and roll until they are partially on their knees, but they still manage to jerk their head up to stare at him and smile.

"Do you call all children such awful names?"

"Do not put words into my mouth!" Mettaton snaps, despite himself. He's unusually shaken--something about Chara filling in the blanks for him makes him edgy. Maybe they do know something...!

Mettaton reaches a hand up, to rub at his neck and remind himself that he knows what's going on, what the situation really is

(that he isn't being controlled)

and realizes with no shortage of alarm that Papyrus' scarf had tumbled to the ground. That fucking human...they must have entangled themselves in it and now it was on the ground, getting filthy and he never wanted that, never wanted to have to wash it but now he can see it's dirty and dusty. He stoops to pick it up, glaring at Chara because all of this was their fault, he'd just happened across them on a walk, dammit!

A scarf upon the ground. They'd picked up on that little detail rather quickly, though what he would need with a thing like that - some sort of warped, perverted sentimentality, perhaps. People often do cling to what is gone. To the point of absurdity, oftentimes.

They lever themself upright slowly with the fluid press of a palm to the ground. The poison is still setting int their system, scratching the inside of their stomach. Possibly they have not ingested enough. Entirely probable, in fact. It had taken several trips. Several requests for "cups of water" that were not 'cups of water at all.

They've got plenty of poison to supplement the toxins coursing through their system. The Ingress has kindly ensured that.

"Oh, I'm sorry," says Chara in a tone that implies they are not very sorry at all, folding their hands behind their back. "Did I assume there? That would have been horribly irresponsible of me, would it not? Please." They open a hand, the one scarred with its blossoming growths, in a condescending supination. "Continue. Do not let me interrupt you."

Mettaton practically ignores Chara for the sake of the scarf, gently dusting it off. They weren't important right now. Call it "perverted sentimentality" then, but he is very attached to the scarf. Just as he had been very attached to its owner.

Only once he has carefully wound it around his neck again does he pay Chara any mind. That's what they wanted, right, for him to fulfill that self-hatred of theirs.

"If you didn't want to interrupt me, you'd not have struggled," he says coldly. "Little hellion."

So much for not insulting them. He can't help it, they're really getting under his skin, and Mettaton is very weary of feeling vulnerable.

"So are you insistent on staying out here then? I'm not picking you up again, though I rather expect you find that to be an acceptable state of affairs."

The smile simply widens.

Little hellion.

Yes. That should do nicely. Should be an adequate moniker from his perspective. A pity "hellion" isn't six letters, but hey. We can't have everything.

They ignore the question. Press [x]. Skip dialogue. They've heard it before, or something near enough to it to steer on past it without fearing missing anything important. They cock their head to one side almost coyly, a mocking lift to their eyebrows.

"Perhaps," the child says, "I simply found it interesting that your first instinct was to strangle the strange preteen you found in a cave."

"Tch. That was hardly my first instinct. You started this with your self-harm. I only wanted to stop you, but when you escalated, what was I to do?! Watch you commit suicide by poison?! What is wrong with you?!"

There's no way he's taking the full blame for strangling them, even though, at the back of his mind, he knows he did it because it would satisfy him, and that prickling sensation to execute violence for the sake of it, because he didn't care.

He couldn't bring himself to care, because who was so important that he couldn't hurt or kill them if he had to?

It is at that point that they begin to laugh. Golly, what is wrong with them? They're acting so strange and horrible! It's almost as if they aren't really human at all.

They were called, and so they came. That is what the rule is.

What was he to do, though, upon watching a child break themself into pieces like that, so callously? What kind of person would he be if he simply let it happen?

One far more common than he might think, for one.

It really is incredible, how no one thought to look for a child as they scaled a mountain. How they only elected to care when their body was settled upon a patch of golden flowers. How idly they all stood by while they committed that child, twice over, to the dirt.

And so they laugh.

"You are very much in the minority there, I assure you."

Though not, funnily enough, when it comes to inflicting violence upon the child that was vexing him so. No, that seems to be quite a familiar thread.

One might say they even have that in common.

"In what, not wanting you to kill yourself? Because I'm pretty sure that's not a minority thought."

He rolls his eye, annoyed at the conversation entirely. All he wanted was for them to come with him, why was this such a difficult concept to grasp. They weren't stupid. There was no reason for them to die, no more than there was a reason for Asriel to die.

"Can we just get this over with? You're being an idiot, just come see your family."

It would be easier for him, and he's definitely tiring of the back and forth, the semantics and parts of conversation he didn't understand.

Hellion. Idiot. Golly, could they score a child-friendly insult bingo? They could win something if they get five in a row! Maybe a lovely bouquet to go with the flowers coiling out from the skin of their wrist and along their arms in golden crests.

"You would be surprised," they say, clearly amused. Perhaps that is why it was so easy for him to crave the surface's manifold promises, the alleged greener pastures. He never had to encounter humanity firsthand.

How terribly lucky for him.

"I am afraid that little family is already quite complete." They would turn on their heel to make a point, but they do not turn their back. This is one of their rules, and particularly now - they have a good reason for it. "Your concern has been noted."

It will be taken under consideration and processed accordingly before it will be filed, nice and neat.

(It will be filed in the trash, where it belongs.)

tdm 14

cw suicide ideation/attempt???????

incredible

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1/?? stay tuned

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dONE

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