We're Still Here - Application
Nov. 18th, 2020 03:17 amPLAYER INFO.
NAME: Swirl
PREFERRED PRONOUNS: They/them
ARE YOU OVER 18? Yep
CONTACT: PM this journal or![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
swirlingflight - and if there's a game server I'll join it, w/ permission for members to DM me
CURRENT CHARACTERS: n/a
CHARACTER INFO.
NAME: Papyrus "Knochenmus"
CANON: Undertale
CANON POINT: Neutral ending, exiled queen Toriel / empress Undyne, where Papyrus joins his brother Sans in befriending and frequently visiting the exiled queen
AGE: Unspecified in canon. I estimate he's in his early-mid 20s. Employed, still figuring out what he's doing with his life, young enough that family and acquaintances tend to shelter him, old enough to have some eclectic skills and be voted king.
GENDER: Cool Dude (he/him, presumably male)
HISTORY: Wiki entry here, with the neutral ending we're using here. I think it's missing some things, so I have an outline here - but it is not short.
APPEARANCE: Human!fanart here. Previously a skeleton monster prone to spine-revealing short clothing, Papyrus is now a human with dark curly hair (typically styled), about 6' tall, prone to wearing jackets and scarves. Skin and other fleshy bits get cold easily, and he's not a fan of the sensation.
ABILITIES:
Quick with theatrical commentary, he boasts about how he practices speeches for various conversational needs.
Despite the flanderization that Papyrus hates puns, he makes more wordplay - and more puns per word through the game than Sans does. But where his brother makes knock-knock jokes and obvious skeleton puns while posing like a stand-up comedian, Papyrus favors plays on words, from the painfully obvious (a "shocking" electrical maze experience), to the relatively subtle (complaining he's losing a "pupularity" contest against the dogs), to the downright ridiculous (using cardboard and pasta screws to build a terrible sentry station made of "cardboardhydrates"). Bone- and skeleton-related puns aggravate him, probably because he's heard them his entire life, and we only see him make any in retaliation against his brother.
Vacuuming, tidying, and other skills of keeping a clean and orderly house.
Builds mechanical / electrical / magic puzzles in frozen ground, redesigns his kitchen sink to lift it several feet for a doorway underneath.
Paints a long thin stone bridge to appear to be made of wood, builds a snow skeleton (with top-heavy human musculature but a thin spine), and arranges the pieces of one puzzle to resemble his face.
Perfectly befitting the era of gelatin experimentation, Papyrus defaults to more of an aesthetic approach to cooking than one focused on edibility. His spaghetti might look ordinary, but with things like seasoning pasta in an oaken cask for an indefinite period of time, it makes for an "indescribable" taste. This has likely improved somewhat with lessons from Toriel - the exiled queen teaching him to be a mom - but only so much.
Patrols a section of road to look for intruding humans, reporting any sightings (or lack thereof) to his boss in daily meetings.
Follows discussions of proposed changes to laws - though the Underground's somewhat incoherent infrastructure is probably less convoluted than Santa Rosita's legal system - and seemingly handles the household taxes.
Rarely uses his bed, snoozes only on occasion, always picks up his phone within two rings, and expresses outrage at the thought of eight hours sleep. If it weren't for how strange many characters in Undertale are, I would attribute his sleeplessness to being an explanation for how strange he can be. But no, he's just like that.
Avoids unwanted criticism with obstinate positivity, passive aggression, and feigning ignorance of anything and everything.
Sincerely believes that "anybody can be a better person if they try," and that they can do so more easily with support, though he knows some refuse to try.
Undertale monsters are made mostly of magic and dust, with little truly physical matter composing them, though most are solid while they're alive. As a skeleton monster, Papyrus looks, sounds, and smells like bones. He claims to be cuddly and soft, but he also claims to smell like the moon.
Between their mostly immaterial bodies and relatively fragile souls, monsters are as vulnerable to the intent behind a blow as the force of it, if not more so. A sufficiently murderous child wielding a notebook might slay a monster in a single blow, while a child less aggressive might not in multiple blows with a frying pan.
Projectiles of various shapes used as primary resort in combat, an aid to day to day life, and a form of expression. Fire magic is used in lighting fireplaces and cooking, lightning magic is used in powering electronics, and so on. Monsters devise attack patterns to play and show off for each other, and their 'bullets' can block each others' attacks and cancel out for a harmless show of force. Sometimes they fade immediately after use, sometimes they persist as long as the creator lives.
Mostly bone-shaped projectiles, where white bones hit as you'd expect a levitating bone to, while the blue bones only damage creatures actively moving - automatic movement like breathing is fine.
Stops his magical attacks at just the point necessary to knock an opponent out without killing them, a skill almost no monsters in Undertale demonstrate. He also varies the sizes of the bones, arranges them to spell out words, and spams an entire field's worth of bones before letting the human levitate over them.
Following his claims of wanting to capture the human fairly, Papyrus heals Frisk just prior to their battle. If he successfully knocks them out and captures them, he heals their injuries again - they wake in the shed at full health. If they win, they're left to heal themselves.
(Both of these instances are offscreen, and the former is very easily missed, since most people heal and save before boss fights. Given that we do see Toriel heal from a distance, the simplest explanation is Papyrus can also heal.)
It also makes an interesting contrast with his brother: while Sans can seemingly poison a murderous enemy with the 'Karmic Retribution' lingering damage, Papyrus can seemingly heal.
A gravity / momentum manipulation that can fling people around in the air, or weight them down to force them into a platformer-style jumping puzzle. Papyrus seems to use this on himself for a few gravity-defying stunts, like sliding around without walking, double-jumping in the air, and leaping unnaturally far from standing
This is extrapolated, as Papyrus never demonstrates using this attack, but the skeleton brothers largely have the same magic abilities. If Papyrus survives a particularly murderous human, he admits while hanging out that he could have "blasted" them to end the fight quickly, and in any other fight he spends it giving a speech and possibly applying beauty products.
Given that the "blasted" comment was added to Undertale in a revision, I see it as a very intentional clarification from the game's creator.
It's pretty well known that Sans Undertale can teleport, as he blatantly demonstrates a few times through the game, including here. When he teleports, the world goes blank black to obscure what he's doing from any onlookers, and a sound effect happens as the world comes back into sight. In an easily missed easter egg, Papyrus does the same thing, albeit more slowly.
I'm taking this to mean that both brothers know how to change their location in space, and Sans does so frequently to save himself the trouble of walking around, while Papyrus only uses it to get into places he normally couldn't reach - the room depicted here, Sans's room, is ordinarily locked.
It's also feasible that Sans is responsible for teleporting him into the room, as part of another collaborative prank.
Papyrus and Sans both demonstrate odd powers of perception and interacting with the 4th wall. Where Sans has uncanny insights into how much the human has killed, how many times they've fought, and the ability to attack in the menu itself, Papyrus watches the human slide by underground or through a phone call. He gives no explanation for how he does this, despite so awkwardly drawing attention to it then changing the subject.
I am not stretching this so far as to theorize that the brothers' banter in the Kickstarter and other trailers, where they seem to be aware of their world as a game, is canon. I do think they have some kind of meta knowledge about the workings of their world, even if it's the magic equivalent of quantum physics. They're not alone in this - Asgore interacts with the menu long enough to break part of it, while Flowey restricts the human to only one option, making an entirely different style of battle.
SUITABILITY:
Papyrus is a skeleton monster from the Kingdom of Monsters, a kingdom that's been sealed within a mountain for untold centuries - with mostly kindly people who've become desperate enough for freedom that their king murders any human that comes their way. Papyrus is briefly tempted to capture the human for fame and fortune, but opts for entertaining and befriending the human through threats and terrible puzzles. He spends his fight monologuing about that indecision and hope, rather than genuinely strive to capture them, and goes on to shelter them from his boss's murderous intentions... while skirting the line between outright betraying either of them.
Prior to the game's beginning, he befriended another time traveling stranger, a soulless flower that visits him with compliments, advice, and predictions. Through the game Papyrus has uncanny knowledge of some things, including the human's cellphone number and how best to befriend a few of the other monsters, likely thanks to the flower's guidance. And in the best possible ending, Papyrus admits that the little yellow flower had advised him on how to get them all there. If faced with another character who pushes him to believe in their advice over his own ideas, and encourages him to seek their approval, he would likely fall into the same pattern of credulity and playing along.
The game also has various 'neutral' endings, with neither the best nor worst outcomes, in which the different major characters take leadership in the wake of the king's death. In some, the captain of the royal guard takes the throne – by force if necessary – and she dedicates them to a renewed war preparation. In those, Papyrus either gets shunted to a position of meaningless importance, or quietly rebels by all but moving in with the queen who would avoid war at all costs. In another, the star celebrity takes ownership and reshapes the kingdom to one celebrating his glory constantly, and disappears anyone who speaks out too openly against him. Papyrus adapts to this by joining his brother in working for the celebrity as one of his agents, with a forced smile and resignation that terrible things just happen sometimes.
In the worst of the timelines, the human outright hunts down every single monster they can fight, in a mission that could lead to some kind of end of the world. They storm through Papyrus' entertaining threats and puzzles to his exasperation and increasing concern, and eventually he confronts them not with any illusion of trying to capture them, but to lecture them into changing their lifepath. He complains about the dust (the remnants of dead monsters) on their hands, encourages them to believe they can change for the better with his help, and stands waiting with his arm open for a hug. He's not one to hunt down a murderer to strike them down without warning, at least not without some drastic changes to his personality, but he can confront one to demand they change their ways.
Between a life of relative confinement and cultural desperation for freedom, the manipulations by a flower, life in a glitter-filled dystopia or a war-driven kingdom, and the examples of his own death, there's plenty to work with for how he might cope in Santa Rosita.
PERSONALITY.
In short, Papyrus will likely see the risk as worth it. Ordinarily he only has the power to make the best of his present circumstances, which he does with a gusto, but he's never really satisfied with his circumstances. In the best ending, he complains about how the human messed it up. In multiple other timelines, he encourages the human to do the seemingly impossible, whether it's coming back to visit him despite the danger they'd be in by returning, or finding some way to bring back his missing or deceased friends - a request that would require something like time travel. The idea of undoing a mistake, even with the risks of how things would change, is one he's pondered before.
If we include the fanon about disappeared Royal Scientist Wingdings Gaster - a character only mentioned in chance conversations or easter egg phone calls, hinted at in data-mining, and assumed to be a skeleton based on the font name and black and white sprite known as 'Mystery Man' - this question gets more direct and poignant. One common theory, thanks to some of Toby's original brainstorming for Papyrus, is that Gaster was the skeleton brothers' father, redacted and largely forgotten by the world after pushing an experiment too far. It gives a context to Papyrus's anxiety about being forgotten, as well as Sans's reluctance to put effort into anything. Sans does have an unexplained past in theoretical science, demonstrated in his familiarity with the idea of time looping and everyone forgetting things, as well as the mysterious broken machine and blueprints kept in the locked room. If Sans had been trying to rescue Gaster from whatever experiment he "fell into," and gave up when the task seemed impossible, Papyrus's scolding about laziness and not sleeping all night may have started with encouragements to keep trying different ways to get him back.
Even without that fanon, Papyrus is open to the praise and encouragements and advice of a secretive flower, and follows recommendations for the sake of longer term gain. He pushes toward positions of importance and potential responsibility, starting with his bossing his brother around (mostly unsuccessfully), to getting close to the leadership of the underground in most endings he lives to see. He doesn't gain effective power, being anything from a figurehead and motivational king while his brother runs the kingdom, to a "Royal Guard" whose main job is gardening, to a "great mom" under the tutelage of an exiled queen, to ambassador of monsterkind to humanity.
Temporarily losing things like fear, or doubt, or grief, Papyrus would almost certain try out. How can he become the best version of the Great Papyrus if he doesn't experiment with who he is and how he goes about things, or learn about ways he's accidentally holding himself back? Going through phases of interests and ways of making himself relevant to others is part of how he functions.
Permanently, though, is a different kind of commitment. It's hard to know which hardships or challenges are fundamental in shaping one's strengths, in shaping one towards who they want to be. Papyrus puts a lot of stock into people's power to choose to be better people and do better things, whether the threshold is as low as not murdering anyone, or as middling as cleaning up one's living space and getting a job to spend time out of house or bar. And a person can't choose to not be something that they can't conceive of being. Cutting out the negative emotions that make success challenging, also cuts out the power to choose to be better than those negative emotions.
There's also the question of, how could they possibly not know it was taken from them? Even if Papyrus no longer remembered his fears specifically, he would remember his past actions and notice the differences in them. If the loss was so extensive as to lose his memories tied to fear too, Even, others who have met him would remember his past behaviors, and could tell him about it. Unless - as with time travel or the fanonical redacted memories - it was removed from everyone simultaneously, the question just doesn't make sense. Permanently maiming himself without an inkling of understanding how it works, preferably with a test temporary period, he would not opt for.
Yes, to the point that I had difficulty extending this answer into 200+ words. Papyrus doesn't focus on whether one is a "good person," or even on the terrible things they have done, as much as whether they act on the ability to be a better person than they were. He is canonically the sort of person who would, as a dying decapitated head, continue to encourage his murderer that they can change their ways, that they can do better. While he and his brother have a bantering scolding dynamic where he exaggeratedly chastises Sans over many small infractions, Papyrus's usual emphasis is on learning from mistakes and the possibility to change for the better, no matter what.
The more challenging question is in whether he would believe he had done something terribly, truly wrong in the first place. Most of his bragging about his incredible aptitudes and accomplishments are exaggerated, somewhere between sarcasm and saying it for the sake of speaking it into reality. He tends to blame problems on others (like his brother) or rapidly dismiss them from his mind, refusing to dwell for long on fears or regrets except to use as a fuel and motivation for doing better going forward.
It seems likely that his attitude stems from feeling inadequate and forgettable - or perhaps has done something in his unspoken past so wrong that he can't handle acknowledging it for long - and now he deflects negativity even in his own self doubts, in order to avoid the sort of depressive slumps his brother goes through. (The skeletons share the power to make people blue, after all.)
If something happened to change his nature so he couldn't deflect anymore, that could damage his ability to believe the best of himself and others. In a mind control event where an obvious external compulsion made him act, he could blame anything on the compulsion and mostly shove it out of mind. But something more subtle, that skews his sense of morality further towards things he might consider in the right circumstances, that might haunt him. And something that damages his ability to believe in doing better, that could break him.
Papyrus has varied standards on secrets, privacy, and betrayal. When it comes to his own secrets and privacy, Papyrus keeps many of them pinned up in a way that most people don't know there's secrets being kept. He comes across as a loud and over-the-top personality, very open about a great many of absurdities, with practiced speeches about various topics ranging from complaints about his brother, "insights" about his hometown, to his hopes for advancement and friendship. When people chance upon or pry into things he doesn't want to talk about, he either passive aggressively shames them for the intrusion, or deflects with his bizarreness, sometimes pretending he didn't hear what they said, sometimes outright changing the subject to something he hopes will distract them. It seems to be a long-established habit - Sans and Papyrus avoid talking about a lot of things, with patterns of exaggerated naivety or terrible jokes that satisfy Sans that all is well enough and allow Papyrus to believe he's avoided worrying his brother.
With questions of legality, promises, and contracts to others, he sticks to the letter of the agreement, searching for loopholes or appealing to the authorities when he doesn't like what he's supposed to do. As a sentry, he's supposed to report on and attempt to capture any humans that come through, which he does. He calls his boss to notify her of a human passing through Snowdin, he intimidates and entertains them with a variety of monologues and puzzles for them to experience before passing through, and he faces them in a typical monster battle. But it takes very little for him to give up on the attempt to capture - they need only walk through the area and get to the end of his fight, or fail so many times that he stops trying to capture them, for him to decide they're friends now. Even if they've demonstrably killed many people through the area, and will presumably go on to kill more.
He very deliberately and vocally tells himself, it's not really betrayal as long as he avoids certain sorts of actions. Having reported the human's presence, he then tells the human about having reported them, presumably so they can get disguised before moving forward. He calls his boss with suspiciously convenient timing as to interrupt her chase of the human, and even uses her sense of honor against her to manipulate her into hosting and befriending the human in turn. Over and over, if he thinks it's for the best - possibly because a flowery friend convinced him - Papyrus is perfectly willing to dip into the edge of betrayal, clinging to its boundaries by technicalities nobody would fall for.
The answer to both halves of the first question is a yes, if to a degree less intense than I think the question is after.
Mentally is clear from his introduction, when Sans introduces him to us as a "human-hunting fanatic," an exaggeration that prepares us for Papyrus's monologues full of threats of capture and delivery to the king's castle. Papyrus doesn't bother to describe that fate either (death), as it distracts from his more immediate goals in confronting the human. As he tells Sans if the human doesn't play along, the human is "supposed to let me explain [the puzzles]. Then threaten and baffle them with dangerous japes." He's gone to some work to put on a display of danger, with spikes that could kill if one were impaled on them, electrical shocks and biting piranhas, swinging axes and canons and flamethrowers... mostly for show, a mix of intimidation and entertainment.
Physically, too, is clear by the time of his boss battle. Papyrus doesn't really hesitate to risk hurting someone physically - like many monsters, he expresses himself in magic-based combat, and he enjoys showing off cool moves. He sets up a prank with his brother, having Sans warn the human about one type of blue magic, and using it as a feint before hitting them with a different blue magic and laughing about it. His boss fight consists of his giving a rehearsed speech on his hopes and fears, possibly while applying multiple beauty products, and flinging bones and boasts on his turns. There's no hesitation about hurting the human, even when he's divided about befriending them, in part because he is not at risk of seriously injuring them. If they show up to his fight injured, they're healed before he flings the first attack. And if they fight poorly enough for him to win, he doesn't kill them. Unlike nearly every other monsters the human might fight, Papyrus is precise enough with his attacks - possibly due to Sans's poor health - to knock them precisely to 1hp left. Even Toriel, the ancient mother figure who wanted to adopt the human and deliberately aims her attacks away so as to not harm them, can accidentally murder them - and clasp her hands over her mouth in horror, for the short frames before the screen goes black from death. Papyrus can avoid killing and can heal, with which he can avoid the worst consequence of hurting others.
So the answer to the second question seems to be no, he is not afraid of his ability or willingness to (temporarily) hurt anybody mentally or physically. As long as the people involved are alive, he figures they can be better, whether that's better in the sense of choosing to be better people, or recovering from injuries or depression.
That said, he makes some odd comments, and the ambiguity of the skeleton brothers' pasts makes it tricky to know how seriously to take them. Without much prompting, Papyrus reassures the human in a phone call that he is "not a cruel person," but one who strives "to be comforting and pleasant." It's close enough to his advice to the murderer to be odd, especially since in another conversation he says "I don't remember murdering anyone... though I am a pretty brutal kind of guy." It's odder still that he specifies remember, when he's going to such lengths to avoid being forgettable. It could be these are just whimsical tryhard remarks, trying to get attention by saying alarming things out of the blue, or passive aggressive digs at the human for their murders. It could be that he suspects he's done something terrible, and his efforts to be The Great Papyrus now are an attempt to change from his past. Even without incorporating the mysteries of the retconned Royal Scientist, I headcanon that Papyrus was something of a shit as a teenager, and his current friendlier manchild demeanor is in most respects a vast improvement from it. I think the question of fearing his enjoyment of scaring people or fighting is tied to his feelings about forgiveness about doing something wrong - if he can fix things, if he is willing to try to fix things, that's the important part to him.
WRITING SAMPLES.
SAMPLES:
Network example, skeleton brother pranking and banter.
Log example, shenanigans between a new father and skeptical son.
NOTES.
QUESTIONS OR CONCERNS:
I can do without, the whole reason it's a question is because the skeletons are both notorious for deflecting questions they don't want to answer. I can work with the assumption that Papyrus will imitate the stereotypical parents cliches of Santa Rosita (mostly like the dads around town, with some more momly-methods as learned from Toriel), as that fits his tendency to pick up new ways of doing things and working to excel in new situations. But I find it more fun to be able to connect dots and fill out the gaps in characters, especially if other characters offer background info that mine cannot match. If possible, I would like to use a downplayed version of what we've discussed (disappeared science dad, young 20s Sans making ends meet while young teen Papyrus grows up), without making explicit any of the more bizarrely speculative details like retconned realities. If no, we've also discussed a fake backstory that the brothers are making up to tell any NPCs from Santa Rosita, and they could pretend it's a version of their actual backstory (it starts with being half-brothers, to explain the different surnames).
NAME: Swirl
PREFERRED PRONOUNS: They/them
ARE YOU OVER 18? Yep
CONTACT: PM this journal or
CURRENT CHARACTERS: n/a
CHARACTER INFO.
NAME: Papyrus "Knochenmus"
CANON: Undertale
CANON POINT: Neutral ending, exiled queen Toriel / empress Undyne, where Papyrus joins his brother Sans in befriending and frequently visiting the exiled queen
AGE: Unspecified in canon. I estimate he's in his early-mid 20s. Employed, still figuring out what he's doing with his life, young enough that family and acquaintances tend to shelter him, old enough to have some eclectic skills and be voted king.
GENDER: Cool Dude (he/him, presumably male)
HISTORY: Wiki entry here, with the neutral ending we're using here. I think it's missing some things, so I have an outline here - but it is not short.
APPEARANCE: Human!fanart here. Previously a skeleton monster prone to spine-revealing short clothing, Papyrus is now a human with dark curly hair (typically styled), about 6' tall, prone to wearing jackets and scarves. Skin and other fleshy bits get cold easily, and he's not a fan of the sensation.
ABILITIES:
💀 Dramatic Monologues
Quick with theatrical commentary, he boasts about how he practices speeches for various conversational needs.
💀 Puns
Despite the flanderization that Papyrus hates puns, he makes more wordplay - and more puns per word through the game than Sans does. But where his brother makes knock-knock jokes and obvious skeleton puns while posing like a stand-up comedian, Papyrus favors plays on words, from the painfully obvious (a "shocking" electrical maze experience), to the relatively subtle (complaining he's losing a "pupularity" contest against the dogs), to the downright ridiculous (using cardboard and pasta screws to build a terrible sentry station made of "cardboardhydrates"). Bone- and skeleton-related puns aggravate him, probably because he's heard them his entire life, and we only see him make any in retaliation against his brother.
💀 Housework / Cleanliness
Vacuuming, tidying, and other skills of keeping a clean and orderly house.
💀 Ecclectic handyman
Builds mechanical / electrical / magic puzzles in frozen ground, redesigns his kitchen sink to lift it several feet for a doorway underneath.
💀 Visual Arts
Paints a long thin stone bridge to appear to be made of wood, builds a snow skeleton (with top-heavy human musculature but a thin spine), and arranges the pieces of one puzzle to resemble his face.
☠ Questionable Cooking Skills
Perfectly befitting the era of gelatin experimentation, Papyrus defaults to more of an aesthetic approach to cooking than one focused on edibility. His spaghetti might look ordinary, but with things like seasoning pasta in an oaken cask for an indefinite period of time, it makes for an "indescribable" taste. This has likely improved somewhat with lessons from Toriel - the exiled queen teaching him to be a mom - but only so much.
💀 Sentry
Patrols a section of road to look for intruding humans, reporting any sightings (or lack thereof) to his boss in daily meetings.
💀 Amateur Legalese
Follows discussions of proposed changes to laws - though the Underground's somewhat incoherent infrastructure is probably less convoluted than Santa Rosita's legal system - and seemingly handles the household taxes.
💀 Mostly functional Insomnia
Rarely uses his bed, snoozes only on occasion, always picks up his phone within two rings, and expresses outrage at the thought of eight hours sleep. If it weren't for how strange many characters in Undertale are, I would attribute his sleeplessness to being an explanation for how strange he can be. But no, he's just like that.
💀 Deflection
Avoids unwanted criticism with obstinate positivity, passive aggression, and feigning ignorance of anything and everything.
💀 Optimism
Sincerely believes that "anybody can be a better person if they try," and that they can do so more easily with support, though he knows some refuse to try.
💀 Skeleton Monster
Undertale monsters are made mostly of magic and dust, with little truly physical matter composing them, though most are solid while they're alive. As a skeleton monster, Papyrus looks, sounds, and smells like bones. He claims to be cuddly and soft, but he also claims to smell like the moon.
☠ Vulnerability To Intent
Between their mostly immaterial bodies and relatively fragile souls, monsters are as vulnerable to the intent behind a blow as the force of it, if not more so. A sufficiently murderous child wielding a notebook might slay a monster in a single blow, while a child less aggressive might not in multiple blows with a frying pan.
💀 Monster Magic
Projectiles of various shapes used as primary resort in combat, an aid to day to day life, and a form of expression. Fire magic is used in lighting fireplaces and cooking, lightning magic is used in powering electronics, and so on. Monsters devise attack patterns to play and show off for each other, and their 'bullets' can block each others' attacks and cancel out for a harmless show of force. Sometimes they fade immediately after use, sometimes they persist as long as the creator lives.
💀 White & Blue Attacks
Mostly bone-shaped projectiles, where white bones hit as you'd expect a levitating bone to, while the blue bones only damage creatures actively moving - automatic movement like breathing is fine.
💀 Precise Control
Stops his magical attacks at just the point necessary to knock an opponent out without killing them, a skill almost no monsters in Undertale demonstrate. He also varies the sizes of the bones, arranges them to spell out words, and spams an entire field's worth of bones before letting the human levitate over them.
💀 Healing Magic
Following his claims of wanting to capture the human fairly, Papyrus heals Frisk just prior to their battle. If he successfully knocks them out and captures them, he heals their injuries again - they wake in the shed at full health. If they win, they're left to heal themselves.
(Both of these instances are offscreen, and the former is very easily missed, since most people heal and save before boss fights. Given that we do see Toriel heal from a distance, the simplest explanation is Papyrus can also heal.)
It also makes an interesting contrast with his brother: while Sans can seemingly poison a murderous enemy with the 'Karmic Retribution' lingering damage, Papyrus can seemingly heal.
💀 Blue Soul Magic
A gravity / momentum manipulation that can fling people around in the air, or weight them down to force them into a platformer-style jumping puzzle. Papyrus seems to use this on himself for a few gravity-defying stunts, like sliding around without walking, double-jumping in the air, and leaping unnaturally far from standing
💀 Gaster Blasters (debatable, including for thoroughness)
This is extrapolated, as Papyrus never demonstrates using this attack, but the skeleton brothers largely have the same magic abilities. If Papyrus survives a particularly murderous human, he admits while hanging out that he could have "blasted" them to end the fight quickly, and in any other fight he spends it giving a speech and possibly applying beauty products.
Given that the "blasted" comment was added to Undertale in a revision, I see it as a very intentional clarification from the game's creator.
💀 Teleportation (debatable, including for thoroughness)
It's pretty well known that Sans Undertale can teleport, as he blatantly demonstrates a few times through the game, including here. When he teleports, the world goes blank black to obscure what he's doing from any onlookers, and a sound effect happens as the world comes back into sight. In an easily missed easter egg, Papyrus does the same thing, albeit more slowly.
I'm taking this to mean that both brothers know how to change their location in space, and Sans does so frequently to save himself the trouble of walking around, while Papyrus only uses it to get into places he normally couldn't reach - the room depicted here, Sans's room, is ordinarily locked.
It's also feasible that Sans is responsible for teleporting him into the room, as part of another collaborative prank.
💀 GUI Manipulation (very debatable, including for thoroughness)
Papyrus and Sans both demonstrate odd powers of perception and interacting with the 4th wall. Where Sans has uncanny insights into how much the human has killed, how many times they've fought, and the ability to attack in the menu itself, Papyrus watches the human slide by underground or through a phone call. He gives no explanation for how he does this, despite so awkwardly drawing attention to it then changing the subject.
I am not stretching this so far as to theorize that the brothers' banter in the Kickstarter and other trailers, where they seem to be aware of their world as a game, is canon. I do think they have some kind of meta knowledge about the workings of their world, even if it's the magic equivalent of quantum physics. They're not alone in this - Asgore interacts with the menu long enough to break part of it, while Flowey restricts the human to only one option, making an entirely different style of battle.
SUITABILITY:
Papyrus is a skeleton monster from the Kingdom of Monsters, a kingdom that's been sealed within a mountain for untold centuries - with mostly kindly people who've become desperate enough for freedom that their king murders any human that comes their way. Papyrus is briefly tempted to capture the human for fame and fortune, but opts for entertaining and befriending the human through threats and terrible puzzles. He spends his fight monologuing about that indecision and hope, rather than genuinely strive to capture them, and goes on to shelter them from his boss's murderous intentions... while skirting the line between outright betraying either of them.
Prior to the game's beginning, he befriended another time traveling stranger, a soulless flower that visits him with compliments, advice, and predictions. Through the game Papyrus has uncanny knowledge of some things, including the human's cellphone number and how best to befriend a few of the other monsters, likely thanks to the flower's guidance. And in the best possible ending, Papyrus admits that the little yellow flower had advised him on how to get them all there. If faced with another character who pushes him to believe in their advice over his own ideas, and encourages him to seek their approval, he would likely fall into the same pattern of credulity and playing along.
The game also has various 'neutral' endings, with neither the best nor worst outcomes, in which the different major characters take leadership in the wake of the king's death. In some, the captain of the royal guard takes the throne – by force if necessary – and she dedicates them to a renewed war preparation. In those, Papyrus either gets shunted to a position of meaningless importance, or quietly rebels by all but moving in with the queen who would avoid war at all costs. In another, the star celebrity takes ownership and reshapes the kingdom to one celebrating his glory constantly, and disappears anyone who speaks out too openly against him. Papyrus adapts to this by joining his brother in working for the celebrity as one of his agents, with a forced smile and resignation that terrible things just happen sometimes.
In the worst of the timelines, the human outright hunts down every single monster they can fight, in a mission that could lead to some kind of end of the world. They storm through Papyrus' entertaining threats and puzzles to his exasperation and increasing concern, and eventually he confronts them not with any illusion of trying to capture them, but to lecture them into changing their lifepath. He complains about the dust (the remnants of dead monsters) on their hands, encourages them to believe they can change for the better with his help, and stands waiting with his arm open for a hug. He's not one to hunt down a murderer to strike them down without warning, at least not without some drastic changes to his personality, but he can confront one to demand they change their ways.
Between a life of relative confinement and cultural desperation for freedom, the manipulations by a flower, life in a glitter-filled dystopia or a war-driven kingdom, and the examples of his own death, there's plenty to work with for how he might cope in Santa Rosita.
PERSONALITY.
● Your character has a chance to undo a terrible mistake, but in doing so, there could be unintended consequences for everyone they know. Is it worth the risk? Or should the dead stay dead?
In short, Papyrus will likely see the risk as worth it. Ordinarily he only has the power to make the best of his present circumstances, which he does with a gusto, but he's never really satisfied with his circumstances. In the best ending, he complains about how the human messed it up. In multiple other timelines, he encourages the human to do the seemingly impossible, whether it's coming back to visit him despite the danger they'd be in by returning, or finding some way to bring back his missing or deceased friends - a request that would require something like time travel. The idea of undoing a mistake, even with the risks of how things would change, is one he's pondered before.
If we include the fanon about disappeared Royal Scientist Wingdings Gaster - a character only mentioned in chance conversations or easter egg phone calls, hinted at in data-mining, and assumed to be a skeleton based on the font name and black and white sprite known as 'Mystery Man' - this question gets more direct and poignant. One common theory, thanks to some of Toby's original brainstorming for Papyrus, is that Gaster was the skeleton brothers' father, redacted and largely forgotten by the world after pushing an experiment too far. It gives a context to Papyrus's anxiety about being forgotten, as well as Sans's reluctance to put effort into anything. Sans does have an unexplained past in theoretical science, demonstrated in his familiarity with the idea of time looping and everyone forgetting things, as well as the mysterious broken machine and blueprints kept in the locked room. If Sans had been trying to rescue Gaster from whatever experiment he "fell into," and gave up when the task seemed impossible, Papyrus's scolding about laziness and not sleeping all night may have started with encouragements to keep trying different ways to get him back.
Even without that fanon, Papyrus is open to the praise and encouragements and advice of a secretive flower, and follows recommendations for the sake of longer term gain. He pushes toward positions of importance and potential responsibility, starting with his bossing his brother around (mostly unsuccessfully), to getting close to the leadership of the underground in most endings he lives to see. He doesn't gain effective power, being anything from a figurehead and motivational king while his brother runs the kingdom, to a "Royal Guard" whose main job is gardening, to a "great mom" under the tutelage of an exiled queen, to ambassador of monsterkind to humanity.
● If your character had the option to permanently lose the ability to feel certain negative emotions like fear or grief, or permanently forget certain memories, would they take it? What if they will never know that something has been taken from them? Does loss only matter if it's known what's missing?
Temporarily losing things like fear, or doubt, or grief, Papyrus would almost certain try out. How can he become the best version of the Great Papyrus if he doesn't experiment with who he is and how he goes about things, or learn about ways he's accidentally holding himself back? Going through phases of interests and ways of making himself relevant to others is part of how he functions.
Permanently, though, is a different kind of commitment. It's hard to know which hardships or challenges are fundamental in shaping one's strengths, in shaping one towards who they want to be. Papyrus puts a lot of stock into people's power to choose to be better people and do better things, whether the threshold is as low as not murdering anyone, or as middling as cleaning up one's living space and getting a job to spend time out of house or bar. And a person can't choose to not be something that they can't conceive of being. Cutting out the negative emotions that make success challenging, also cuts out the power to choose to be better than those negative emotions.
There's also the question of, how could they possibly not know it was taken from them? Even if Papyrus no longer remembered his fears specifically, he would remember his past actions and notice the differences in them. If the loss was so extensive as to lose his memories tied to fear too, Even, others who have met him would remember his past behaviors, and could tell him about it. Unless - as with time travel or the fanonical redacted memories - it was removed from everyone simultaneously, the question just doesn't make sense. Permanently maiming himself without an inkling of understanding how it works, preferably with a test temporary period, he would not opt for.
● Could your character ever forgive themselves for something morally wrong that they've done? No matter how much time has passed? No matter how much penitence has been done? Is being sorry enough to be a good person?
Yes, to the point that I had difficulty extending this answer into 200+ words. Papyrus doesn't focus on whether one is a "good person," or even on the terrible things they have done, as much as whether they act on the ability to be a better person than they were. He is canonically the sort of person who would, as a dying decapitated head, continue to encourage his murderer that they can change their ways, that they can do better. While he and his brother have a bantering scolding dynamic where he exaggeratedly chastises Sans over many small infractions, Papyrus's usual emphasis is on learning from mistakes and the possibility to change for the better, no matter what.
The more challenging question is in whether he would believe he had done something terribly, truly wrong in the first place. Most of his bragging about his incredible aptitudes and accomplishments are exaggerated, somewhere between sarcasm and saying it for the sake of speaking it into reality. He tends to blame problems on others (like his brother) or rapidly dismiss them from his mind, refusing to dwell for long on fears or regrets except to use as a fuel and motivation for doing better going forward.
It seems likely that his attitude stems from feeling inadequate and forgettable - or perhaps has done something in his unspoken past so wrong that he can't handle acknowledging it for long - and now he deflects negativity even in his own self doubts, in order to avoid the sort of depressive slumps his brother goes through. (The skeletons share the power to make people blue, after all.)
If something happened to change his nature so he couldn't deflect anymore, that could damage his ability to believe the best of himself and others. In a mind control event where an obvious external compulsion made him act, he could blame anything on the compulsion and mostly shove it out of mind. But something more subtle, that skews his sense of morality further towards things he might consider in the right circumstances, that might haunt him. And something that damages his ability to believe in doing better, that could break him.
● Your character has a secret they have been sworn to, but revealing this secret could save the lives of countless others. Is it worth breaking the promise to save others, or is betrayal never justifiable?
Papyrus has varied standards on secrets, privacy, and betrayal. When it comes to his own secrets and privacy, Papyrus keeps many of them pinned up in a way that most people don't know there's secrets being kept. He comes across as a loud and over-the-top personality, very open about a great many of absurdities, with practiced speeches about various topics ranging from complaints about his brother, "insights" about his hometown, to his hopes for advancement and friendship. When people chance upon or pry into things he doesn't want to talk about, he either passive aggressively shames them for the intrusion, or deflects with his bizarreness, sometimes pretending he didn't hear what they said, sometimes outright changing the subject to something he hopes will distract them. It seems to be a long-established habit - Sans and Papyrus avoid talking about a lot of things, with patterns of exaggerated naivety or terrible jokes that satisfy Sans that all is well enough and allow Papyrus to believe he's avoided worrying his brother.
With questions of legality, promises, and contracts to others, he sticks to the letter of the agreement, searching for loopholes or appealing to the authorities when he doesn't like what he's supposed to do. As a sentry, he's supposed to report on and attempt to capture any humans that come through, which he does. He calls his boss to notify her of a human passing through Snowdin, he intimidates and entertains them with a variety of monologues and puzzles for them to experience before passing through, and he faces them in a typical monster battle. But it takes very little for him to give up on the attempt to capture - they need only walk through the area and get to the end of his fight, or fail so many times that he stops trying to capture them, for him to decide they're friends now. Even if they've demonstrably killed many people through the area, and will presumably go on to kill more.
He very deliberately and vocally tells himself, it's not really betrayal as long as he avoids certain sorts of actions. Having reported the human's presence, he then tells the human about having reported them, presumably so they can get disguised before moving forward. He calls his boss with suspiciously convenient timing as to interrupt her chase of the human, and even uses her sense of honor against her to manipulate her into hosting and befriending the human in turn. Over and over, if he thinks it's for the best - possibly because a flowery friend convinced him - Papyrus is perfectly willing to dip into the edge of betrayal, clinging to its boundaries by technicalities nobody would fall for.
● Has your character ever gotten joy out of hurting others, physically or mentally? If they have, does it scare them?
The answer to both halves of the first question is a yes, if to a degree less intense than I think the question is after.
Mentally is clear from his introduction, when Sans introduces him to us as a "human-hunting fanatic," an exaggeration that prepares us for Papyrus's monologues full of threats of capture and delivery to the king's castle. Papyrus doesn't bother to describe that fate either (death), as it distracts from his more immediate goals in confronting the human. As he tells Sans if the human doesn't play along, the human is "supposed to let me explain [the puzzles]. Then threaten and baffle them with dangerous japes." He's gone to some work to put on a display of danger, with spikes that could kill if one were impaled on them, electrical shocks and biting piranhas, swinging axes and canons and flamethrowers... mostly for show, a mix of intimidation and entertainment.
Physically, too, is clear by the time of his boss battle. Papyrus doesn't really hesitate to risk hurting someone physically - like many monsters, he expresses himself in magic-based combat, and he enjoys showing off cool moves. He sets up a prank with his brother, having Sans warn the human about one type of blue magic, and using it as a feint before hitting them with a different blue magic and laughing about it. His boss fight consists of his giving a rehearsed speech on his hopes and fears, possibly while applying multiple beauty products, and flinging bones and boasts on his turns. There's no hesitation about hurting the human, even when he's divided about befriending them, in part because he is not at risk of seriously injuring them. If they show up to his fight injured, they're healed before he flings the first attack. And if they fight poorly enough for him to win, he doesn't kill them. Unlike nearly every other monsters the human might fight, Papyrus is precise enough with his attacks - possibly due to Sans's poor health - to knock them precisely to 1hp left. Even Toriel, the ancient mother figure who wanted to adopt the human and deliberately aims her attacks away so as to not harm them, can accidentally murder them - and clasp her hands over her mouth in horror, for the short frames before the screen goes black from death. Papyrus can avoid killing and can heal, with which he can avoid the worst consequence of hurting others.
So the answer to the second question seems to be no, he is not afraid of his ability or willingness to (temporarily) hurt anybody mentally or physically. As long as the people involved are alive, he figures they can be better, whether that's better in the sense of choosing to be better people, or recovering from injuries or depression.
That said, he makes some odd comments, and the ambiguity of the skeleton brothers' pasts makes it tricky to know how seriously to take them. Without much prompting, Papyrus reassures the human in a phone call that he is "not a cruel person," but one who strives "to be comforting and pleasant." It's close enough to his advice to the murderer to be odd, especially since in another conversation he says "I don't remember murdering anyone... though I am a pretty brutal kind of guy." It's odder still that he specifies remember, when he's going to such lengths to avoid being forgettable. It could be these are just whimsical tryhard remarks, trying to get attention by saying alarming things out of the blue, or passive aggressive digs at the human for their murders. It could be that he suspects he's done something terrible, and his efforts to be The Great Papyrus now are an attempt to change from his past. Even without incorporating the mysteries of the retconned Royal Scientist, I headcanon that Papyrus was something of a shit as a teenager, and his current friendlier manchild demeanor is in most respects a vast improvement from it. I think the question of fearing his enjoyment of scaring people or fighting is tied to his feelings about forgiveness about doing something wrong - if he can fix things, if he is willing to try to fix things, that's the important part to him.
WRITING SAMPLES.
SAMPLES:
Network example, skeleton brother pranking and banter.
Log example, shenanigans between a new father and skeptical son.
NOTES.
QUESTIONS OR CONCERNS:
Followup re: headcanon
Mel asked about headcanons after I privately admitted to worries whether the background we'd plotted would be acceptable - being allowed in a game where it's thematically fitting didn't mean it would be here. This is a concern for me because we have little information about Papyrus and Sans's canonical childhoods, and Papyrus's few comments on the topic give a baffling sense of his expectations of how parenting works. Some of that is just that Papyrus is strange, but headcanon lets me take those comments and put them in a more coherent context - a disappeared father during his childhood, an older brother raising him through his teens. That's helpful if cr with other characters reaches a point where such things come up.I can do without, the whole reason it's a question is because the skeletons are both notorious for deflecting questions they don't want to answer. I can work with the assumption that Papyrus will imitate the stereotypical parents cliches of Santa Rosita (mostly like the dads around town, with some more momly-methods as learned from Toriel), as that fits his tendency to pick up new ways of doing things and working to excel in new situations. But I find it more fun to be able to connect dots and fill out the gaps in characters, especially if other characters offer background info that mine cannot match. If possible, I would like to use a downplayed version of what we've discussed (disappeared science dad, young 20s Sans making ends meet while young teen Papyrus grows up), without making explicit any of the more bizarrely speculative details like retconned realities. If no, we've also discussed a fake backstory that the brothers are making up to tell any NPCs from Santa Rosita, and they could pretend it's a version of their actual backstory (it starts with being half-brothers, to explain the different surnames).
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