video/action (forward-dated to 4/20); while collecting the stars, i connected the dots

[skelebro]

[The video wobbles a minute before it steadies, locking onto a grinning skull. It's your friendly neighborhood skeleton, Sans, looking undeniably pleased with himself as he comments to someone just off screen:]

'S lookin' great so far.

[There's a fumbling tapping as the feed gets jostled, and Sans is forced to set the thing onto the ground, face-down. At least the audio filters through, unimpeded if a bit muffled.]

All right. We ready?

[There's a distant sound of affirmation - two, actually, though one sounds a mite more stammered than the first. Kate, it seems, hadn't much wanted to take part in the announcement itself. So when the feed swings up again, there's two distinctively non-human shapes in the periphery - a yellow, lizardlike creature and a small black hedgehog that sharp-eyed cave-dwellers might recognize as Alphys and Shadow, respectively. The video jerks again, blurring the twin blazes of color into smeared linear streaks, and the cave gets a lovely shot of Sans's pink fuzzy slippers in preparation for the finale.

There's a click of fleshless fingers snapping; hundreds of tiny, glowing objects being displaced and then replaced, buried into the rock of the ceiling. Takes a lot out of a skeleton and leaves him a bit stooped from the effort, but it's worth it.

The camera swings up again to pan across the ceiling, now lit with a vast array of blue sparkling stones.]

It ain't Tranquility's illusions, but... [One last whip-pan back to Sans's face, and he winks at the camera, lookin' just a tiny bit more on the edge of exhaustion than usual. Just a hair.] You can consider it a good constellation prize.

[Enjoy the night sky, Hadriel. It'll last for quite a while. Sans, for his part, plans to be stargazing all night. Feel free to find him at the lake, if you're real interested.]

Comments

[drabsolutelynot]

[No. He would cease to exist were he to ever run out of questions to ask.]

Of the people who have been brought here, or at least of the ones that aren't from the Underground, how many, um-

[He pauses, trying to find a polite way to put this]

-have any of them ever reacted badly, per say, to meeting a talking skeleton?

[skelebro]

[Oh boy.

Sans regards Rosen for a moment, neutrally.

Then he starts to laugh. It's a low, rumbling sound, one part humor and two parts self-deprecating irony, 'cause boy is that a question with layers.]

Plenty. There's a whole spectrum to this kinda thing, Doc.

[drabsolutelynot]

[The laughter is not a particularly great sign]

Would you say there is a 'typical' response?

[Certainly Rosen is aware of what he assumes, and hopes, is an extreme case. Though out of professional duty he will refrain from any and all mention of Marian.]

[skelebro]

Shock? Terror? Questions as to whose body I am? "Freak," "undead," "creature of the night" - [He ticks each one off his phalanges before abandoning the effort and rolling his shoulders in a dismissive shrug.]

Y'lose track, after a while.

[drabsolutelynot]

[Lee may look vaguely horrified]

You are saying more often than not the response is negative?

[No, he can't pretend like its a shock. He can't even be sure that under different circumstances, on a day that was less mind-numbingly strange and chaotic that he himself wouldn't have had a worse reaction to Sans.

But from where he is standing now, two months in, Rosen feels a pit in his stomach at the thought]

[skelebro]

[C'mon, he really all that surprised? People see a talking skeleton and panic, no matter how adept he might be at layering their initial shock in a drape of jokes and disarming puns.]

What can I say? Guess I take some real gettin' used to.

[drabsolutelynot]

I'm not naive... and I can't pretend like talking skeletons are normal where I come from

[They don't exist outside of horror films or cartoons]

I guess somehow I've been here so long enough that 'skeleton' is far from the first thing I think when I see you.

[And the way they first met 'bad joke' and 'prank' managed to be the first impressions that got in there before the shock of 'oh my god the skeleton is speaking to me'. Being dazed from the coliseum probably helped as well.]

I'm sorry to tell you this, Sans, but a talking skeleton has nothing on an octopus-shark.

[Its a weak attempt at a joke]

[skelebro]

Ah, gee.

[He shakes his skull in mock dismay.]

How'm I ever supposed to live up to a thing like that, huh? See that, that is properly terrifying, and I'm just some old bag of bones crackin' jokes in the corner.

[Takin' a joke and running with it, as is the Sans way. Anything to keep from discussing a more serious topic at any kinda significant length.]

[drabsolutelynot]

Thats a doozie, Sans

[Lee feigns seriousness, one corner of his mouth pulling downward in pretend puzzlement]

Maybe if you glowed in the dark

[He points at the 'stars' above]

Like one of those.

[skelebro]

Would that make me scarier, or just kinda funny-lookin'?

[He says, as if he isn't capable of igniting one eyesocket in a flameless ball of cyan-gold, flickering between two extremes as gravity contorts in response to the deft twist of one hand.]

[drabsolutelynot]

Can't something be funny and frightening at the same time?

[skelebro]

That's pretty much my shtick.

[Not that he tends to go for frightening by default. Some people just find animate skeletons to be innately terrifying for some reason. Can't imagine why that'd be.]