hey im 5 years late to the function but anyway have a DaD!saps hc cause im not over his self deprecation; end of session 7
i know that brewing the cure in minecraft took him like 3 minutes in the video (because it's MINECRAFT) but i'd like to imagine that it took him around 2-3 days. walk with me.
i think that saps was aware he was hallucinating after a while and to each type of hallucination that realization came after two times of experiencing them.
for auditory, it was the two times somebody spoke to him while he was on the roof after being left to die on the ground level by flux closing the water trapdoor on him. this also led to him ignoring agustus ("why are you hiding?") in the building due to thinking he's hallucinating voices out of nowhere again. the same thing happened lower facility ("are you okay?") when he was frustrated and stormed out but saps realized it wasn't a hallucination when agustus called out his name.
for visual, it was seeing a guy with a spyglass and a moon on his shirt he never met, because when he asked others about who that guy was they acted like saps was pointing at thin air. the third time he showed up, saps already knew he was hallucinating him because there's no reason for this guy to be real anymore.
so, while making trial 0-86 saps practically isolated himself in that lower facility room, away from everyone and everything. he hardly slept, focusing only on making the cure because god forbid he does one more thing wrong and fails for the eighty sixth time. during that time, his symptoms became increased in both amount and severity: coughing fits got worse, holes in his memory grew wider, fatigue's grasp was all the more tighter, arm was spasming so badly he had to collect a lot of willpower to move it.
hallucinations appeared more often and felt all the more real, as if those people were actually there and talking to him. he could battle one group: chuck, mike, grayleigh. these people were dead so there's no way they would be standing right behind that glass and watching him or sometimes throwing a few occasional words. he knew what they were and despite wanting to succumb to them so badly, he kept his ground and ignored their existence. chuck and mike stopped coming, but grayleigh always stayed.
and no matter how conscious he was of his hallucinations, there was always this other group of people whose corpses he hadn't directly seen, and as bad as it felt to admit, saps fell for this trap more often than not. he'd hallucinate agustus stopping by, stella talking with him, magic having another episode, rotation, meagon, even flux, who had looked at him with such obvious disgust a couple days ago. they'd behave normal, watching saps clumsily write something in his journal on the floor before tearing out another page and clutching his head in his hands.
they talked with him like normal, and yet there were always a few sentences that weren't the most pleasant. well, not like saps could blame them. it's nothing he hasn't heard before in his thirty-forty-something years of existing, surely, but despite how much he'd try to pay no mind to the hallucinated insults and criticisms, words have a weird way of sliding past any defense he could build for himself and settling inside of him. and deep inside he believed them, he agreed with them, he knew they were telling the truth because he knew that before, too.
eventually, magic's blood finally mixed with the liquid he had in the vial previously, creating a bright green tone. he stared at it for maybe an hour, before turning to the journal, writing his last words and closing the book for the final time today. before administering the cure to himself, he still had a moment of hesitation. what if it really was all meaningless? what if this would never work and the cure was never possible to begin with? what if this is going to make him worse just like it did with magic and he'll become more aggressive and hurt even more people? well, he hoped that in the worst case that this potion didn't work, it would at least to make his end quick.
saps was alone when he drank the vial, the only interruption of the silence of the lower facility being the harsh hacking cough coming from his throat after he downed the liquid.
