Canyon Application

[ribticklers]

PLAYER INFORMATION

✘ Name: Mel
✘ Age: 32
✘ Contact: maiiau
✘ Character(s) currently in game: N/A
✘ Favorite horror tropes/events: psychological corruption, horror surgeries, dream/memory sharing and twisting, playing games that end terribly, putting characters in situations where every option they have is terrible, cosmic horror, isolation, space/ultra deep water horror
✘ Limits/Triggers: eyeball damage, particularly piercing damage (eye socket damage is fine, which is good since I plan on giving Sans just so many eye sockets); rape/noncon; animal abuse/neglect
✘ Invited by: Naya

CHARACTER INFORMATION

✘ Name: Sans
✘ Canon: Undertale
✘ Canon Point: post-death Genocide run

✘ Age: 30 (no canon age but definitely an adult)
✘ History: Wiki link; Genocide route
✘ Personality:

You're assigned a group project. What role do you end up taking?
sounds like a hassle. how about i don't instead? first of all i'm pretty old for a group project. second a nap sounds like more fun. maybe hit up my bro instead. papyrus is great at group projects. maybe too great, actually. his ideas are definitely... unconventional. some people don't appreciate that kinda thing. but he'll definitely be encouraging. me? nah.

[Which is to say that Sans is not really great at working in a group. His first inclination and preference is to do things on his own. He actually does more work than you'd think, when he feels like it's actually important, but he tries not to get other people involved. And he's right, it would be a hassle for him--if he considered the whole project frivolous, he'd be very likely not to bother at all. He'd absolutely be that guy who does nothing and never shows up to meetings. He might be the guy who then shows up with a fully completed project on the day it's due, but there's no way to predict that, and therefore he should not be trusted in a group project setting. None of this is a lie, but Sans is prone to exaggerating his faults when he doesn't want to be involved in something (and sometimes just in general, because his self-esteem is not always the greatest).]

You have the chance to anonymously send a letter to someone who's wronged you in the past. What does it say?
look, i already said everything there was to say face-to-face with 'em, and i bet i already repeated myself plenty from their perspective. if it wasn't good enough then, i'm not wasting more effort.

[Sans is talking about the anomaly, of course--the thing wearing human skin that killed him and everyone else in the Underground. The last thing Sans remembers is dying in his fight with the anomaly. Sans knows they can reset and reload time like a video game, and he spent a lot of his fight talking on and on about how he knew what they were doing and hated them for it. He told them they were a terrible person over and over. He tried friendship, he tried guilt, he tried anger, he tried just boring them into submission, and none of it worked. At this point, writing a letter to them about how they killed everyone and should feel bad about it is just pathetic, and he won't take part in something like that. He thinks anything with powers like the anomaly had--power to control the timeline at whim--should use it responsibly and should be patient with anyone who is stuck in linear time because consequences are very different when you can just redo anything bad that happens. But, again, he told them this already. He'd be happy if he never saw the anomaly ever again at this point.

(Anyway, anything Sans said couldn't possibly remain anonymous. He knows too much in too pointed a way; the anomaly would know it was him immediately.)]

Someone you admire very much has just done something you find reprehensible. How do you deal with the situation?
i figure he probably had a good reason for it. i might talk to him about it, but if i thought it was bad, he'd definitely think so too, so that might just stir things up. might just get him a milkshake and hang out with him.

[Sans is referring to his younger brother Papyrus here. It's difficult for Sans to even imagine Papyrus doing something that Sans would count as reprehensible, but Sans's trust in Papyrus is great enough that he'll assume the best of Papyrus, even if there's nobody else he would ever cut this much slack. Anyway, when it comes to comparing himself to Papyrus (which Sans often does, judging himself wanting), Sans knows he's done plenty of things Papyrus would really dislike. Even if Sans doesn't remember it, he knows he's killed the anomaly over 12 times while Papyrus died offering them mercy. He lies to Papyrus all the time. He never tells Papyrus about them being stuck in a time loop, even before Papyrus goes to his death. While Sans can, at a stretch, imagine Papyrus doing something terrible, he can't imagine it being worse than what Sans has done. So of course he'll forgive his brother, even if he never actually talks about it with him.

They should probably talk about things together more.]


If you could achieve all your goals right now, what would your life look like?
heh. kind of late for that.

[Sans's reticence here is very deliberate. He's dead, in the worst timeline, and has every reason to believe this is the end--the point in the timelines where everything ends permanently. A question like that? Absolutely an insult. But he's also not lying about his perspective. There is no way, at this point, for Sans to achieve all of his goals. His goal was just for the anomaly to go away and to have life move forward outside of time loops and resets. Instead, the anomaly tore a murderous path across the entire Underground, systematically murdering anything that didn't evacuate to Alphys's lab. His brother, the person he cares about most in the world, was murdered. The one person in the Undergound who could take the anomaly on in a fair fight, Undyne, was murdered, because the anomaly cheats. Even a fellow cheater, Sans himself, couldn't ultimately defeat the determination of this anomaly. The Underground is empty. Everything is over.

Would it look like going back in time? Like making none of this ever happen? Maybe. But you'll forgive Sans if, after all that, he can't trust going back in time at all. He'd certainly never believe he'd be in control of it.

What Sans wants is for his brother to be alive and happy. If we're getting really ideal, he'd be alive and happy on the surface with lots of friends and a really cool car. Nobody would be dead. It's way too late for all that.]

Someone tells you all your flaws. What did they tell you, and are they right or wrong?
what, like how i'm lazy and messy and love grease? nothing i haven't heard before. nothing wrong with taking as many union-mandated breaks as possible, either. but hey, nothing wrong with someone calling you out on your bullshit, either, as long as they do it right. my bro does it all the time.

[Water off a duck's back, generally. Now, it's water off a duck's back because in many ways Sans's self-esteem is low and it just doesn't matter to him. He deliberately cultivates the idea of being lazy, though, so someone pointing that out to him is just telling him he's doing well at giving off the impression he wants. Sans doesn't think he's actually as lazy as other people think, though--he does a lot of behind the scenes work tracking the anomaly at home, even if he doesn't tell anyone about it. Sans is definitely laid-back and doesn't want to put in more effort than things deserve, but that doesn't actually mean he won't put effort into anything. He means it when he says he appreciates being called out, too, at least when it's Papyrus. Papyrus calls him out because Papyrus knows Sans can behave better and also believes in his ability to behave better. Papyrus cares about him, which is important to Sans.

Really, though, the laziness and messiness point to his real issue of depression. Sans knows he's trapped in a time loop even if he only gets deja vu memories of other timelines. He has all the scientific readouts and razor-sharp observational skills to let him identify the source of the problem. He also can't do a single thing to stop it. Knowledge of his situation just drops him into a hopeless void, living moment-to-moment because he doesn't believe in a future at all. In the genocide route Sans is at his most emotional, and what we see is a more vicious edge to his casual jokiness. He's certainly furious about Papyrus being dead, but he doesn't even try to stop the anomaly from killing Papyrus, because Sans thinks everything he does is pointless. (But he still acts in the end, even if he fails and dies. He still tries to do something. He'll never acknowledge that there's still something left in him that wants to fight back and live without a lot of things changing, but it's there.)]

✘ Type: Spiritual
✘ Powers:

Power 1: Teleportation - ability to teleport intangibly and invisibly from one point to another. Has to know where he's going--having been there is ideal, but it's possible to teleport to somewhere he hasn't been if he can see an image of it or if someone describes it really well, provided he knows where it is in space. Cannot teleport through magical barriers (or NPC equivalents).
Power 2: Emotion transfer - ability to transfer strong emotions to others. Has to be able to properly imagine the emotion in his mind in order to transfer it; Sans finds it easier to pass on negative emotions. Easier to do with someone he has a strong connection with (can use memories of emotions felt with that specific person to transfer them better). Has to have physical contact with someone to transfer emotions.
Power 3: Emotion synchronization - ability to synchronize his emotions to someone else, or to a generalized mood if it's strong enough. Can be done intentionally but also may happen unintentionally when placed under stress or presented with very powerful emotions. Long periods of synchronization with powerful emotions is exhausting--the stronger the feelings, the faster the exhaustion (Sans is not great at dealing with feelings).

✘ Inventory:
-outfit (blue hoodie, t-shirt with knife slash in it, basketball shorts, socks, sneakers)
-dusty red cape
-cell phone (dimensional box inaccessible)
-small amount of gold (monster currency)
-small whoopee cushion
✘ Sample:
one
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