#staged sans

[maladelusio]

Fantasy!verse: Staged (remastered slightly and with a new outfit!) 

There’s no Ink or Error in Fantasy!verse, so what happened to the people who could have been..? 

not an outcode, Staged lives in a complete and complicated au called Understaged which eventually manages to make its way into a permanent happy ending on the surface.

you’d think he’d get sick of stories but he’s always interested in hearing new ones. he’d LOVE to see different universes!

his au probably has a Supremely complicated backstory questioning the meaning of telling stories but for our purposes lets Ignore All That

General notes about Understaged: ‘stories’ work as sort of ritual engaged magic in their world. taking on different 'roles’ can change you and your abilities. wearing particular ‘costumes’ or performing particular norms for a role will enhance the abilities associated with it.

in a check you can always see people’s CHOSEN stories/roles such as 'Papyrus [Royal Guard Aspiree]’ but depending on the situation you might be able to pull up more private or Enforced roles like [Judge] or even something secret or bad they believe about themselves. or even… a metanarrative role, like [final boss] or [protagonist]

A number of people are aware of timeline issues as a form of ‘genre awareness’ and magical sense of ‘what story is playing out’. Staged has never given up quite the way canon Sans does; he has more support, and maybe an extra dose of positivity from an ‘event’ during the creation of his AU…

he keeps turning up in roles like 'the hedge in front of your neighbors house’. even if there wasn’t a role like that in the script. everyone acts, but he likes being able to act out of the spotlight. once you’re on stage, your options get limited.

he’s actually happiest helping with the set design crew. a demon with a paintbrush

staged says he’s writing a play but really its just a collection of notes disguised as puns about timeline shenanigans and what he can perceive of the 'world narrative’ on a magical level. And also a lot of random other jokes. he’s not actually that much of a creative writer himself, but he does like to analyze

kind of low empathy for people he doesn’t know personally (read: hasn’t trauma bonded with over an impossibly long period of ‘time’ :P)

Couldn’t have made him without @candy-cryptid’s help and ideas!

Staged is not meant to represent a canonical backstory/AU for Ink (Ink is canonically from ___tale) and has lived through an actual au story rather than being stuck unfinished and then tearing his soul out. However, a significant amount of inspiration was taken from Ink (who belongs to myebi/comyet)

[maladelusio]

fantasy!verse: staged/terminal (endplay? curtain call?)

-staged thinks terminal is very 'interesting' from the start 

-terminal finds him insincere 

 -slow burn on both ends

-COUCH SWEET COUCH blanket knitted by unde(r)termination papyrus. 

-yes technically this is alt errink i am only a little creacher 

 -staged dislikes the pirate eyepatch. thats why terminal wears it whenever he visits 

-...still soft enough on him to make him a scarf hehe

[maladelusio]

welcome to snowdin.

...

curtain call?

truly an innocent bush you can trust. Staged’s final boss energy is off the charts because he’s kinda been in 100% mode for the past like. what feels like years

justice is blind? in a serious fight, Staged turns off his own eyelights and uses his blasters + Judge perception abilities to get a 'gods eye view' of the battle

more staged

[maladelusio]

oc doodles dumped together

Terminal... sad... he sleeps on the couch bc he can’t stand waking up in a bedroom (again) and being terrified he’s in loops (again). +chaos liar Staged + chaos cat CatMYK

[maladelusio]

Understaged: lab team unite..! 

well, calling sans + mettaton a team is a little much, but anyway here’s the major resistance standing against the force that’s playing around with their world like they’re toys

... it’s underestimating them. they’re ‘actors.’

(alphys is not part of lab team because 1. she doesn’t naturally have metaknowledge so she’d have to be fully read in every loop again and 2. she really can’t take any more stress staged sans tried but once they started getting towards double digits in flowey’s loops she was collapsing)

more understaged

[maladelusio]

Hi I have been reading your fantasy!verse posts and I find it really cool. I have a few questions; 1) Does Stage know Fantasy!Dream's involvement with his AU? If not what would his reaction be if he finds out? 2) Also how does Fantasy!Dream view other AUs and their inhabitants? Does he care more about maintaining the AU narrative or does he care more about the inhabitants?

Hi! Thanks for enjoying fantasy!verse!

1. Staged doesn't really know during his own AU story, although he has some strange half-memories of 'someone' appearing and the world being 'unfinished' (basically some extra meta-knowledge about the world as a story/creation);

after meeting Fantasy properly at some point he probably listens to Fantasy explaining how he helps AUs grow and goes 'sounds great!' and goes off to go have a bit of an existential crisis because haha does THAT put some memories in context

2. Fantasy doesn't make it his responsibility to make people happy, but he definitely doesn't prioritize the AU narrative over any of the inhabitants. He's more of a hands-off helper in creating worlds by supporting Creators and their ideas (good or bad), and then exploring worlds and meeting people. He doesn't abandon people suffering right in front of him, and he'll help out if asked, but he has a bit of an outsider mindset of 'it's better if real people take care of their own problems' - if he helps, it's mostly as a regular monster, not some sort of god.

Things that he might actually interfere with are things like glitches, corruption, hacks, and incompleteness/void areas - which would generally place the inhabitants in danger (unless the inhabitants have decided to BE the danger in which case he might oppose them).

[maladelusio]

Can I request an infodump about Staged?

(fantasy!verse) oh boy. staged. staged, staged, staged. why are you so goddamn hard to write about. i love him. oh boy. i've been writing this all day. long post under the cut:

a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. except all of these are covered up in some excellent masking skills and a face that can switch expressions on a dime. he doesn't lie, but boy howdy does he never tell the truth. well. he'll tell you truths about yourself, if you go looking for them.

I think he actually remembers time loops with pretty good clarity. slightly less quality than a normal memory. this is a 'perception ability' sort of thing.

like Ink, his AU stalled out half-created, with Staged the only one with a full Soul. he doesn't really remember much from before the world was fully created, but someone stumbled into the half-finished world and accidentally let out a burst of positive energy into it, before leaving. and after that... like a miracle, the world started to fill itself in, and everyone became... real.

(... however, the creator lost interest after finishing the setting- so someone/thing else decides to play in this dollhouse)

as a result, he was jarred slightly out of place from his AU, which is why he's able to perceive a lot of meta stuff.

he never fell into the same depression as canon sans- maybe it's a lingering feeling of 'at least we exist and we are living' even if this is a bad story, even if we die... maybe its a lingering bit of extra positivity.

on the surface, now that they've broken free from the story that they were living, he's actually really amazed to think of all the possible stories out there he's never seen before.

he has. perhaps. forgotten that not everyone likes to discuss their (traumatic) life story in terms of narrative and symbolism and character development. (this isn't a time loop thing this is a 'got my PhD in diegetical metaphysics and the critical analysis does not turn off')

Relationships:

uhh dont have much to say about Papyrus (Thespian?). they're very close. thespian knows more than he usually lets on about time stuff, but staged is probably keeping his walls up. thespian does what he can, which is RATHER A LOT AND VERY EFFECTIVE, REALLY,

understaged!frisk (poppet, if interacting with other worlds. yes, they chose it themself for the 'puppet' pun. chara might have helped them pick it out. the first time they told staged he probably started crying laughing like kid are you okay (is anyone? kid you're 10 you're not old enough for those jokes))

anyway poppet is like his kid (they're like. 10?). if he half-raised papyrus, he has been sort of three-quarters raising them. in any case they're his family and he cares a lot about them. they've been through a lot together.

poppet has said that he's their star..... which has several implications in understaged a lot of them around protagonism/celebrity, but maybe more like 'a guiding light'? anyway that's why they asked him if they can put a star on his cheekbone too when they did their first arts-n-crafts body art session on the surface. and now it's a Thing.

he is friends with understaged!mettaton (Artiste? probably prefers to be called Mettaton). i'm imagining them being very catty with each other but also having a lot of fun. the ghosts in understaged don't quite remember time loops, but they do have extrasensory perception that lets them pick up on how the 'world's story' is going. anyway mettaton is probably one of the strongest monsters in this Underground (since its all show business baby), and they interact quite a bit since staged is popping in and out of the lab actively trying to save the world.

life in the time loops got really kind of boring, eventually. he appreciates the kids of Snowdin + their school/theatre a lot because they'd actually come up with new ideas + stories if given the slightest prompting (were they all good? no. but they were creative).

he's very attached to the people of his AU! he's seen them through a lot of situations good and bad. he's only willing to accept flowey if he's guaranteed to be safe though. he might even make a friend with a human (if Papyrus makes friends with them first)...

other people? other worlds?? uh. he'll get back to you on that.

Clothing Notes:

he wears that coat All. The. Time. even on the surface. even though it doesn't blend in to the surface at all, even when it's summer, rain or shine its the coat. no he will not take criticism. (he will take it off when very comfortable or if he wants to flirt :P)

Thespian gifted him his cyan gloves as part of an extended encouragement plan for his sudden intense interest in writing (this was when flowey started his loops, and staged started having a lot of notes to make...) and staged has decided This Is His Favourite Colour Now.

he's been wearing just his judge uniform/vestments for, a long time now (even in regular time, actually!!) and the moment he gets a chance hes switching shirts. he tries to go around shirtless but is very quickly disabused from that notion by his brother.

he goes through a couple old shirts of his own, probably a crop top borrowed from thespian, etc. before he finds his leotard. he promptly refuses to ever change out of it.