Delilah Moreau High School for Automatons @fanbothigh - Tumblr Blog

FH Classic: The Write-up

I think... this is about it. I’m sure I’ve forgotten stuff that I’ll add later, but I think I got all the big stuff. I feel like I should be really emotional, but I’m going to avoid thinking about it for now.

This isn’t all of it, simply because I know some things I made posts about already. This is more trying to collect all the scraps that never got presented anywhere else.

-The Walter and Becile family trees were flipped upside down, so Six was actually the one to discover Blue Matter. He was extremely enigmatic, though, signed shit with a keyhole instead of a name and eventually disappeared, so Peter's relation to him is either unknown or secret. -Speaking of Peter's family, they all blew up. His father (II) had a catastrophic accident in his personal lab and it took out most of the manor. Peter and QWERTY (who acts more like Hatchworth than canon here) were the only survivors, and Peter lost all hearing in one of his ears. After that, he was somehow made a ward of the Cavalcadium itself rather than the state. -The Cavalcadium was bad news, yo, like actual science Illuminati. They secretly directed the evolution of public technology across the world and actively prevented Matter stuff from being used widely. --HENCE their taking in of Peter had more to do with his bloodline and the chance to groom him to be a tool than anything else. ---Spoiler: it doesn't work

-Thadeus grew up in Philadelphia. His father (Norman) died of a brain tumor when he was 8. The only time he met his uncle Ignatius and roughly-same-age cousin Alraune was at the wake.

-I barely came up with a backstory for Delilah. I think her mother was a magazine journalist and she was from the Southwest.

-Cav the university type place for kinds of Matter studies. Thad goes to live with his uncle Igantius, who's a professor there. Meets Peter and QWERTY in the library, I think they met Delilah there too? They definitely shared some classes at least. (Peter is bi and slightly gay for Thad at first, before getting to know him and “realizing that [he's] an asshole") -CUTE IDEALISTIC COLLEGE FRIENDS, photographs of them together bundled up in the winter, sprawling out in each other's apartments with pizza and 1000 books. -Ignatius HOO DAMN he is a hot mess. Green Matter Master/Professor, lost both his left arm and young daughter Alraune in a driving accident, has a wicked bionic arm and is hella skeezy and boozy. -Lowkey creeps on Delilah, mostly to get Thad’s hackles up. He succeeds and gets punched in the jaw for it. (“Heh! Guess you got a spine after all. Alright, alright, I’ll back off.”) -Once he gets to higher level classes, Thad chronically suffering from Green Matter exposure/mutation, nausea and food intolerences, often found being miserable on the couch. Peter and Dee bring him hamburgers because that’s basically the only thing he eats then. spoiler-- he’s becoming an obligate carnivore. --*Has a shitty dark humor joke that everyone side-eyes him for. “What’s the difference between a zombie and a Green scientist? A doctorate.” --Also totally punches dudes for catcalling at Dee, so we get the “‘you're an idiot' while applying ice pack to his face" scene. hell yes. -Dee finds out she has a terminal illness. I can’t remember if I decided what kind, probably cancer or Huntington’s. Both Pete and Thad are very supportive, even as Thad’s mental health gets worse. --Things come to a head when Dee decides to stop her treatments. Goes on a private walk in the park with Thad to tell him in a ‘calm’ setting, backfires when he flips out, basically calls her a quitter, and leaves her there. It’s already fall, Peter ends up having to go pick her up where she’s stranded. --Dee passes away. Peter is at the funeral. Thad isn’t. --He is, though, at the cemetery with a shovel. Peter suspected this (for some reason; Green Matter has a reputation after all), and shows up to stop him. --Peter gets hit in the face with a shovel, and Thad gets Blue Matter tazed in the shoulder. Both have scars from this. -Thad goes to the hospital, probably the psychiatric ward as well, and then immediately takes a plane back to Philly. Gets treated for mental health issues, but is still depressed. They don’t talk again for like, 5 years.

-Peter made Rabbit because he was bored, basically. Like he had been toying with a design for fun, then Iris leaves for a weekend and he just keeps working on it, and then suddenly Rabbit. So she totally walks in, still rolling her suitcase, and there’s Peter looking sheepish and hiding something behind his back. -As such, it took Iris a little while to warm up to Rabbit. Partly jealousy, partly the disruption to her home life. Like, at least with an unplanned pregnancy you have a couple months notice, this one popped up over a weekend. But Rabbit of course is just a sweet little nugget. -Iris was a trans woman. Big bonding moment with little Rabbit when they ‘come out’ as genderqueer. -I think I had Rabbit as bigender, specifically. At the time it seemed like a good... I guess ‘compromise?’ That seems like a shitty way to put it, but I didn’t want to have them struggle with it up through adulthood or eliminate the trans aspect by having them AFAB OR completely cut the male design. -And here’s where Peter’s fatal character flaw comes in: he does things because he can, without a ton of consideration for long-term consequences. So he kept building baby robots with no regard to him (and Iris) being ready to take care of them. -Spine was an experiment in making a highly transferable consciousness. So instead of having one good quality human-like chassis, he had a very generic human chassis and several smaller novelty bodies like dogs and RC type cars. He rejected these more as he got older and ended up with a sort of bodily disassociation/dysphoria (never feeling ‘right’ in his body, like a pretender, sub-human). When he was grown up, he became estranged from his family and started living as a ‘false-skin’-- a shitty placeholder name for a robot trying to pass as a human full-time. I think he was playing guitar on street corners. I made him blonde so he’d look less like David, which is funny now that I think about it, since he dyes his hair. -Jon was Jon, as I typically wrote him. Heavy on the mystical side of things, vaguely spiritual, sorta psychic. --So, at first, when the little giraffes started getting individual personalities, Peter viewed them as undesirable and took them into the shop to wipe them. Once he was old enough, Jon flipped out about this on the other side of the manor, a real waterworks show over the poor things ‘dying.’ After that, Peter just let them develop. ---Kit also came up with a cool additional thing, where the rest of the kids also criticize Peter for doing it. “Why isn’t it acting the same?” “What was wrong with it being funnier?” “Why’d you wipe it?” “Would you wipe us if we started acting weird?” -Hatchy really kinda got the short end of the stick. Peter didn’t spend much time on his design or construction, which is what lead to his Core cracking. Turns out that’s both painful and traumatizing, and he never forgave Peter. He actually became a radical robot terrorist and eschewed his faceplate and other things designed to make humans more comfortable around him. --His most loyal follower is actually The Controller, who had lead a life similar to his canon one, including killing robots and absorbing their memories in an attempt to keep them alive forever. Hatchy found him sobbing in an alley over two dead chassis and took him in, and he quickly became a devout radical utterly devoted to Hatchworth.

-BACK TO THE PAST, 5 YEARS AFTER GETTING THE SHIT TAZED OUTTA HIM -Uncle Ignatius dies, Thad returns to take possession of the house and get Ig's estate in order. -He calls Peter to let him know he's back in town. (Cute scene of Peter running to phone and falling, Iris picking up phone, Thad thinking he has the wrong number, then calling back again and Iris passing the phone down to Peter on the floor, then ”o_o!” and awkward conversation). -Sad shot of Thad sitting on the couch, still in his travelling coat with a single suitcase, alone in this giant house. -Eventually Thad goes over, meets Iris and Rabbit. -Next eventually, he and Pete confront the elephant in the room (lol) and drive out to Delilah's grave, where Thad has a good cathartic cry.

-As it turns out, skeezy uncle Ignatius had jumped off the slippery slope and was “manufacturing” Green Matter crystals IE killing people in his basement. His accomplice, a red-haired man known by the alias “Locke Smith” remains at large. Thadeus finds three usable crystals and GUESS WHO THOSE TURN OUT TO BE. --There were several versions of why Thadeus used those crystals. One was that the ghosts were haunting his house, one was that he felt a need to make amends for what Ignatius had done. Then there were versions where he just straight up kept the crystals as contraband and where he got them back from the Cav. The logic train fell apart around this area so I never finalized it.

-Idea for the robot school comes about with Peter and Thad having a talk one night with Rabbit conked out on Peter’s lap. He talks about his fears about putting them into a regular school but worries about the downsides to home schooling. Finally culminates in a “well, if a good school for robots doesn’t exist, we’ll just have to make one” -Big part of the school’s funds comes from the Blue and Green reactors located underneath the school. Energy is produced and sold to the city and the profits go toward the school. Thad’s job was more on this maintenence end while Peter was more the Principal Guy.

SURPRISE a good chunk of this AU was just me coming up with Becile fluff -Thadeus was still nervous-stand-offish with Hare for the first month, then one night he’s tucking him in for stasis while over at Peter’s and baby hare is like “night night papa i love you.” Thadeus chokes, goes downstairs, and throws something at Peter “WHY DIDN’T YOU WARN ME?!” because now he’s crying and full of fatherly emotions and he sits down at the table and Peter just pats him on the back while pouring him a drink “Welcome to fatherhood thadeus” “ugh shut up” -When finishing Jack, Hare and Skull hang-clinging to the sides of the workbench looking at him and Skull’s like “.... I dunno know to be an older brother” And Hare’s like “Don’t worry, I’ll teach you” -Baby Hare absolutely did that bit where he slowly descended the curtains, ripping them with his claws while Thad stares in dismay from the kitchen table. Baby Skull also at table helpfully is like “HE’S IN TROUBLE” -Baby Skull getting upset while out with Thad because he forgot to look both ways before they crossed the street, and it's The Rules so he has to go back and do it right. Thad has a Dad Moment where he's like “did anyone get hurt? will you remember next time? then you can let it go." -It’s a dark and stormy night and That is asleep until “pssst pssst papa” It’s lil Hare carrying even littler Jack “Papa Jack’s scared of the storm we have to sleep here tonight” “Hare that robot is in complete stasis” “...Well he WAS so” Thad just grabs him by the collar and hoists him onto the bed. There’s a beat, then we see a nervous Skull’s eyes appear in the room and the tiniest little “um” and Thad doesn’t even say anything before grabbing him and putting him on the bed. -Imagine an entire comic that’s just lil Skull pushing a chair over to the counter, climbing up, and starting the coffee machine. And then Thad comes in and is like “wha” and pauses and pats Skull on the head, “why thank you” ITS SO CUTE -And the bit where they don’t understand coffee grounds =/= ground up coal and make this horrible sludge for Thadeus. I am still laughing about this and I hope I always will be. -Oh also the turning point in Skull’s life where he realizes he can be frikkin scary-- Hare’s getting bullied by some other baby bots, Skull steps in and catches a thrown punch easily. Flashback to Thad explaining that he’s skeleton-themed because “bones are stronger than steel” and that Skull too will be stronger than people expect. So he crushes the kidbot’s hand, gets totally grounded, and that’s the start of Scary Skull. -Ok so Thad’s walking down the hallway and sees a laundry basket wiggling along at the intersection. Inside is Jack, who is like, “Surprise!!” And Thad’s like, “Wow you sure got me. Wait why are you wearing your raincoat.” That’s when Hare and Skull flank him with the super soakers. “Oh. Clever boys.” Cut to after the massacre, Skull is giving Thad a third towel and Thad’s like, “While your execution was admirable, don’t you think this would’ve been a better prank to pull on Peter?” Hare: “Who do ya’ think gave us the super soakers?” -Also bab Hare chasing Rabbit with gross things, or relatively gross idk -I think I made a post about this but Green radiation from Thad’s basement lab causes animals in the surrounding forest to reanimate. Hare gets jumped in the face by a zombie raccoon in their chimney and now hates raccoons.

-Jack’s accident happens a few months before The School year. He wants to get Hare a bday present, but he’s super grounded for something and Thad’s like no. Jacky’s a bit of a spoiled brat so he steals Thad’s wallet and takes the bus into town. Of course that’s when a huge storm sweeps through town and Jack gets electrocuted when a powerline falls. -He’s actually missing for about two days, with Peter’s family helping to search while Thad orders Hare and Skull to stay home so they won’t disappear either. Hare is especially upset by this. Thad does eventually come home to try and rest, which is when they get a phone call from Peter. (Hare sitting with feet up on couch, forehead on knees. Jumps for the phone but Thad gets there first.) Jack’s at the city impound, offline and in awful shape, water damage ontop of the electrocution. -Peter and Thad run themselves ragged working on him once they bring him back to Thad’s workshop. --Just imagine a lot of trite, sappy shit where Jack’s still mostly offline but can hear them talking, and you’ll have pretty much those scenes. --Eventually when he’s able to boot up, he says “papa?” and manages to barely focus on Thad, who starts crying again and telling him he’ll be alright. -Despite their best efforts, Jack’s left with a lot of glitches. His movements jerk sporadically and unintentionally, his voice will catch and stutter, occasionally he freezes, his brain-to-mouth filter doesn’t always work, he has fits of hyperactivity/recklessness/aggression, and of course there’s the laughing. -Thad and Hare both blame themselves. Skull doesn’t, and kinda thinks he brought it on himself, but smartly doesn’t volunteer his opinion.

-Convenient blue matter wormhole opens between FH!Walter Manor and Box!Spine’s. Awkward emotional “re-union” between Box and “Pappy.” Eventually Peter brings up the school for robot children and Box goes “ding! I have a child! SOCIALIZE HIM” -Introductions with Thadeus go a lot worse. Kind of puts a downer on the fact that this is the first documented trans-dimensional exchange in their universe.

-Boodle is awkward Boodle, welcomed by Peter, Iris, Rabbit, and Jon. Spine and Hatchworth suspiciously absent. -First day of school, certain hooligans are throwing water balloons full of jello from the giraffe/elephant statue. Boodle takes a balloon to the face. Jacky walks up and immediately starts chattering while helping him up, then freezes. Boodle pushes him out of the way of another balloon. FRIENDSHIP CEMENTED --*Hooligans in question include Hare and McCoy (rofl) (and for some reason Skull, even though that doesn’t make sense?) Anyway Hare/Skull ties McCoy’s weird squid head to the top of the statue for throwing a balloon at Jacky, and that’s the last we ever hear from him.

-I sincerely wanted to give every single person’s character a subplot that would occur over the course of the one school year. Heart in the right place, but waaay too ambitious and presumptuous about other people’s involvement.

-Random running joke: people playing pokemon in the middle of a conversation asking “what’s a good name for a Mareep?” -Jacky steals Skull’s DS at one point and is walking out with Boo and Gage, Skull kicks open the door behind them and is like “YOU” and in the next shot Jack is already disappearing into the distance in a dead run and Skull is fucking vaulting over shit to get at him.

-Jacky had a low key crush on The Mouse, oh god. Might’ve been in a large part to awe over her give-no-shits attitude

-Jack can’t always control what he says, and once makes a really insensitive joke about Gage’s last name and his parents being dead. Everyone, even Boo, ends up leaving the table to go check on Gage after he storms off, and Jack sits there and thunks his head on the table and cries -They make up tho, Jack cries on Gage a lot

-Two sets of hall monitors, giraffes and elephants, about 4 and 3 ft tall respectively. Giraffes have names like Kiki, Mimi, Vivi; elephants are named after greek alphabet. There is a rogue giraffe reprogrammed to swear that is hiding out in the courtyard, and one very stern, beat-up elephant that used to babysit the Becile boys.

-Skull has an old (army?) Jeep named Vanessa. Saw her at an old car restoration show and just immediately crawled underneath to get a better look. Had idea that robots would randomly become very attached to inanimate machines (Rabbit-Jenny also example), so he was very protective, Hare was abso-fucking-lutely not allowed to drive it, Jack was never stupid enough to ask.

-Sort of considered a plot point where he crashes Vanessa while driving with Shi and Shi saves his life, but I only got as far as Thad giving him a manly-respected handshake as for the effects of this

-Hare’s name was originally going to be something incredibly pretentious like Prometheus. Thad changed it out of spite because Peter kept making jokes about him being a “Rabbit II” -This may have been the root origin of Hare’s inferiority complex/jealousy issues. He constantly felt the need to fight for people’s attention

-If Tipsy was human in this AU, she and Thad might have gotten together. /trashcan

-Ghost Delilah ‘haunting’ the school but in a totally chill “I just like seeing what they’ve done with the place, its very flattering” kinda way. Only Boodle can see her.

-Rabbit and Boo have a moment sitting with each other on the piano bench and Rabbit plays/sings Vienna Teng’s “Lullaby for a Stormy Night”

Good character songs: Peter, Thad, Dee: Let Her Go- Passenger Jacky and Boodle: One Week- Barenaked Ladies, I Will Wait- Mumford and Sons Good over-arching plot songs: Let’s See How Far We’ve Come- Matchbox 20 Welcome to the Black Parade- MCR

-Oh also Rabbit convinces Peter to let them put on Les Miz as the school play. -Hare steals a flyer for auditions and has a Dilemma about it -At some point I think he has a breakdown of his own and runs away from home, and Rabbit’s the one to find him hiding in a big drain pipe and bring him back. Not entirely sure where that happened in relationship to this, but putting it here. -Finally, at the auditions, Hare shows up looking all cleaned up, in a nice tucked shirt and everything. Rabbit is shocked but plays it cool and lets him do his thing. -Hare ofc gets Jean Valjean, Spoons gets Fantine, and they totally have an adorable “first night opening goes well, excited hugs turns into first kiss” moment D’AWWWW

-So big interdimensional void, crisscrossed with lightning-bolt looking roads that bridged universes. Being there for too long will start to summon other iterations of yourself. This leads to shit, including Boo seeing a Spine there, assuming its Noodle-dad, and starts crying and trying to get to him while Jacky’s like “no dude we gotta go this is really bAD” --the the spine’s like --”404 mercy drive not found” --OHHHHHHHHHHH SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT

-Somewhere in all this, Hatchworth’s terrorist group was supposed to start recruiting students (particularly punks like Hare) and eventually raid the school, planning to blow it up. Hatchy claimed it was because it indoctrinated its students to be human slaves, but it was probably more to do with his grudge with his father. Tipsy gets held at gunpoint by The Controller, and it’s Awkward, because they were A Thing. But Tipsy was a BAMF and wasn’t scared of him.

-Hare’s bullying reaches a breaking point when Boo unintentionally retaliates. Hare’s eye explodes and his jaw is broken in one fell swoop, and he starts to get sporadic flashes of canon!Hare’s memories. Thadeus is furious enough that he got hurt; its the final straw when Hare flinches as if Thad was about to hit him during repairs. -Thad’s like, I sympathize, and if you really need my help I’ll be here, but he CANNOT come anywhere near my sons. -Jacky: D,:

-Supposed to take place sometime before this next part, but I’m not sure when? Link to the It’s gone gone, baby it’s all gone verse in Let’s See How Far We’ve Come --Boodle lost in void, sitting at the end of a road staring off into nothing. --Jacky running up, being like, there you are!! --Boodle just looks at him out of the corner of his eye dully --And behind Jack we see a taller figure, arms bound up in a coat, and grinning --Jack turns --’Slash’ transition --what happens next?? --I don’t know, in my mind it transitioned right to this next scene because Music Video

-Big climatic moment when Boo goes out of control and starts reality warping the whole school. -EVERYTHING IS BLUE AND ON FIRE -Skull gets a Big Damn Heroes moment with his paintball gear, shooting crazy dimension monsters or something -Hare and Spoons caught together, rubble sealing them in. Hare’s claustrophobia kicks in, Spoons helps him stay calm, it’s very sweet. -Peter fortunately is immune? Because of exposure/family heritage? Walks up to catalyst!Boo, hugs him -then shoves a giant hole punch through his chest and takes out his core -Everything stops, Boo slumps, Peter sadly takes him home as everyone else picks themselves back up -Boo then surprises everyone by growing a new Core and going back to ‘normal’ -But I think at this point, he follows the lead his actual canon had and disappears. They have one final meeting in Jack’s dreams, on a stormy playground, where Boo says goodbye. When Jack wakes up, time has rewound to the day before Box appeared and nobody else remembers anything. Boodle never comes back.

-Some five years later, we see a transdimensional ferry taking on passengers. It actually mostly looks like a normal steamboat ferry, except it's extra whimsical and it paddles through a foggy white void. -We see a tall-ish, slim robot in line. He's a shiny bronze, wearing a nice jacket and his long blonde wig is tied back with a red bow. He hands over his passport, and the ferryman looks it over before passing it back with a, “Welcome aboard, Mr. Becile." -Jacky gets onboard, taking a railing seat. He still has tics but they're more contained now, less dramatic, and he doesn't try to hide them in embarrassment. His knee bounces as the ship pulls out into the space in between places. -About halfway through the trip, Jack gets up. A kid comments on his jacket. “You like it? You can have it if you want. I probably won't need it." He takes off his jacket, tosses it to the kid, and climbs up on the railing. When people freak and try to get him down, he says, “Don't worry. Just tell them ‘he was crazy.'" -And he jumps off the boat.

-He doesn’t die, but he does fall a long ways, or what looks like a long ways. The boat is out of sight. -Something begins holding him back, slowing his fall until he can just sit in the void as if it were the ground. - “You... idiot. What were you thinking?” -Boodle looks something akin to an angel, now, made of titanium and Blue Matter, glowing with electric blue between the joints, impossible arrangements of gears and struts jutting from his back like wings. He’s no longer trying to fit the mismatched pieces of two forms together. He can flow, and it doesn’t hurt. -Jacky laughs softly, and shrugs. “Thinkin’ I had a 50-50 shot.” -”Seriously? You could have died or worse. And what, just to get my attention? This still doesn’t change anything.” -Jacky is quiet. He leans his elbows on his knees. “I had to know if you were real. That you weren’t... that it all wasn’t some immensely glitched memory file.” - Now Boodle is quiet. “I never knew if I did the right thing, letting you remember. It must have caused you a lot of problems-- especially at the beginning.” -”Yeah. It... was really hard.” -”I’m sorry.” -”It’s ok. The crappy parts were worth it. ... I missed you.” -”... I missed you, too.” -Quiet. -”You gotta go before things start getting weird.” -”Yeah, I know. But I’ll see you again, this time, right?” -Boodle hesitates. “I really can’t...” -”Come onnn, who’s gonna care?” -”There are other people here...” -”Pbthhh. You’re some kinda crazy angel thing, you should just do what you want.” -”I’m not crazy, and I’m not an angel.” His pouty tone is so childlike that neither of them can keep a straight face. Still grinning, Boodle holds out his hand a helps Jack to his feet. -”Bye, Jack.” -”Bye, Boo. I’ll seeya later.” -”Seeya.”

-In a flash of light about a foot off the ground, Jack reappears in his own world. He hits the ground aft first, with a clatter and a whoompf. He looks around. He’s on the hillside next to the school, overlooking the unchanged building. He smiles. -Then he checks his phone. It’s been three days since he left, and he has thirty missed calls, half of them from Hare. -"Oops.” -He thinks about his brothers. Hare’s slowly carving a name for himself in the music business. He has enough of a cult following that he can say he has fans and has signed pictures of himself. Jacky has a picture of him with his arm around Pops’ shoulders, wearing a proud toothy smile. Skully is still on the road. He got all of his general education done at college and has been working and road-tripping ever since, in what most people would call “trying to find himself” but he just says he’s “lookin’ around.” He comes home for holidays and feels happy. -Everyone is happy. -You know the good ole days weren't always good, and tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems. -Jack turns off his phone for a little while longer. -Credits roll over Jacky looking out over the school, Billy Joel’s ‘Keeping the Faith’ plays, I cry a whole lot.

-A WHOLE LOT

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Delilah Moreau High School for Automatons