For all 30 days of April, we've come up with daily, one-worded prompts as an art and or writing challenge.
Not tied to any specific AU, and instead a challenge you can use any AU you'd like to! Original included. Any characters, any setting, any scenario you come up with—and one prompt—of which are vague enough to work with a range of ideas.
With minor and optional exceptions for days 5, 12 and 19, which we have written separate and three-worded weeklies for. Those weekly prompts could just as well be used for dailies if you prefer them over what the original 5, 12 and 19 are.
The only rule is to enjoy yourself :)
I'd also love to reblog whatever it is you make, so please either ping this page or tag "#undertale aupril 2026" so I'll see it!
[ And if you think I may have missed your post, hit me with a second ping! ]
This event meant so much to me, and I'm so glad everyone was able to enjoy it and find inspiration and to grow as creators.
I still get all smiley whenever I see someone mention loving another blog's AUpril piece. I'm so thankful I got to be a small part in that happiness.
I do, however, regret not having the ability to be as attentive during the second half of the month. And I apologize for not being able to keep up with reblogs.
AUpril was four times the size as what I was expecting it to be, with a total submission count of 284. I wasn't ready for the workload and needed to distance myself. Reading fics and looking at art became a chore, and I stopped enjoying it.
I'm in a much better place, and ready to wrap it all up.
I can't possibly word how thankful I am, and how happy that I got the chance at making others happy.
Couldn't have done this without the support of literally everyone.
I hope to see you next year <3
-kitty 🫶
(definitely gonna recruit a co-host to help next year omg)
"Throughout every bump, every hardship...you still remained unapologetically yourself."
Thank you to @undertale-aupril and everyone involved in creating and hosting this event, I had a lot of fun participating and it helped as a great motivator for me to actually commit to working on something and not dropping it immediately after one or two days from lack of motivation ^_^
Ouroborostale belongs to- me
Auapril prompts by @undertale-aupril
OKAY WAIT WAIT WAIT, I ALSO GOT SOMETHING ELSE IM WORKING ON THAT I PROMISED TO SHARE BY THE END OF APRIL
As of writing this post atm it's almost 4am for me (I wanna give the schedule post feature a big ol kiss) sometime tomorrow there will be a separate post sharing said thing sooooo idk keep an eye out if you're interested.
It’s not unusual to find Color cross-legged on the living room floor, having pushed all the furniture against the walls to make a clear space. You’ve learned to file that behavior away under “reassuringly normal,” a category filled with his unconventional habits for when his needle’s in the green. What gives you pause as you cross through the living room, however, is the lack of activity.
Color is hunched over his lap, his back to you, his flames burning low in a warm shade of violet. His most recent scrapbook is laid out in front of him, opened to a blank spread, a clean slate for the past month’s memories to be abridged between the pages. Strewn around the floor are potential candidates for the composition – Polaroid photographs of landscapes, event tickets, scrap paper, markers, souvenir stickers, and a postcard. A mental image of a bird deciding on nesting material pops into your head, and you abandon your current task to investigate.
“What’s going on here?” you ask, peering over his shoulder.
He startles, flames jumping with a billow of intense yellow. “oh, it’s, uh…”
He’s got his phone in his lap, opened to his gallery of recent pictures. Just from a glance, you see a handful of environments and close-ups of objects, and a few pictures of himself against various backdrops.
Color looks back down at his phone and angles out of the way for you to see. He scrolls back to the top of the gallery and lets out a curt huff. “i’m trying to find a few pictures of myself and us, but the most recent pictures i have are from months ago.”
He swipes through a few pictures as an example. They’re all of him, with the camera assumedly set up on timer. He’s striking the same pose in every shot, a casual stand with his arms either behind his back or clasped at his front. It reeks of camera shyness and an anxious, overthinking penchant for not knowing what to do with your arms when posing for a picture.
You take full credit for saving this man. Had you never snapped him up, his dating profile would be a snooze fest.
“I have a few from last weekend you could look through,” you suggest, pulling your phone from your pocket.
You settle next to him, pulling up your own gallery. Okay, scroll past the few random pictures you’ve taken – the grocery list, that cute painting you saw the other day, the stray cat on the sidewalk, the dumb meme you had to send to Color earlier – Ah, there they are, a set of pictures you had taken at the pier.
The first few are candid shots you had snapped. One is of him returning to you from the nice cream stand, a heaping cone in each hand, a look of deep focus as he had carefully brought them over to the table. Another, Color standing on the boardwalk, pointing out across the ocean to the horizon, where the first winks of night were seeping in and revealing the brightest stars. His mouth is open in the picture, and you recall him rambling about which constellations they’re a part of. The last is his hand in yours as he takes point, glancing over his shoulder with his sockets crinkled at the corners as he leads you down to the beach.
“i didn’t even know you took these,” he murmurs, a quiet wonder in his voice.
“Yeah, that’s why they’re called candids,” you chuckle, scrolling past to the more deliberately posed pictures and selfies of you two standing together.
You catch something curious on the third swipe. Color still definitely has the habit of striking the same expression in every picture, but there’s a difference between your pictures and the ones on his phone that’s so obvious you’re surprised it didn’t physically strike you upside the head.
His pictures, while not entirely unflattering, feel… flat. Lifeless. He’s wearing a small, hollow smile that looks exactly like the type of impeccably forced pull that a middle school child’s picture day at school might produce. The tug of his teeth is small, weak, and undeniably put on just for the camera. You can almost imagine the exact timing it would wearily fall away after the aperture sound clicks.
Yours, on the other hand, don’t draw even a scrap of doubt about the inner workings of his consciousness. He’s smiling so wide, so freely, a toothy grin filling out the apples of his cheeks and pushing his sockets to a beaming squint. Where his pictures are dull and neutral, yours are blown out from the infernal mosaic of colors swirling up from his broken crown.
“i look so different.” Color notices it, too. He humbles himself quickly with a self-deprecating laugh, as is his norm. “or maybe i just suck at taking pictures of myself.”
“No, I don’t think that’s it at all.” You bump your shoulder against his. “I think you just needed a different perspective.”
[implied to be a continuation of day 27 from a different Reader's perspective]
Trying to wrap your head around this is like trying to stick a square peg in a round hole. The situation just doesn’t compute in your brain, your synapses firing off dizzying error messages when you try to untangle the logic, all while looking at him like he’s just claimed the sky is a lovely shade of vermilion. It just doesn’t make sense. The Venn diagram between the two factors should be a circle.
When your mind finally allows you to speak, you try to clarify. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No, not at all.” Dream stands by his claim, still trying to regain his composure and wipe the residual amusement off his face at your initial stammering, stuttering reaction to his tactical information nuke.
You know you’re gaping at him, but your lockjaw won’t let up. “That’s– that’s like a baker saying he can’t bake. Do you hear how insane that sounds?”
“I think there’s a difference?” Despite the polite fold of his hands over his front, his jaw is tight from balancing on the cusp of openly laughing at you. “Baking is a baker’s profession. I don’t dance for a living.”
“Yeah, but–! But–!” You grab at the air like the answers will manifest there. “How can you, of all people, not know how to dance? Dancing is happiness and positivity! They made a whole movie about it!”
Dream sets his smile to something more sincere and apologetic, shaking his head. Of course he hasn’t seen Footloose, either. Stars, who raised this guy?
The disbelieving adrenaline raging through your blood translates to a courage you’d never have with blood pressure that wouldn’t make a nurse write for a concerningly long time on your vital chart. You grab Dream’s hands from their infuriatingly placid position and drag him past the long tables to the very edge of the designated flooring, where the mass of wedding guests has already claimed the space. Dream allows this in earnest, his giggly chuffs hardly contained.
You land just outside the crowd, in a pocket of your own space with enough room to move about without bumping into another guest. It’s a wedding reception, the DJ has been playing slow songs for the last half hour, positivity is so thick in the air even you can taste it (or maybe it's just the gratuitous fog machine that’s been blasting every few minutes), you’re going to dance, dammit!
You spin around, taking both of Dream’s hands in yours, and with a squaring of your stance you… don’t do anything. You don’t know how to dance either.
“W-Well, you know, it’s like…” You’re faltering, trying to copy how you’ve seen it done in movies. Kevin Bacon makes it look so easy. “You make it up as you go. Simple.”
As you try to figure out whether your hands should hold his or rest on his shoulders, Dream turns his head to observe the other dancers. A smooth, languid melody seeps from the speakers, and the dance floor is doused in a sleepy shade of blue light. Locking in on one couple that seems to have their shit completely together, Dream takes initiative and moves your bumbling limbs into position, mirroring them as best he can with both your combined minuscule experience.
You let him guide one of your hands to his shoulder and the other to lace with his fingers, a happy compromise on the options you were frozen between. He steps closer to wrap his arm around you, his hand coming to rest on the small of your back, where he traces your spine through your formal attire. He presses down on your back just enough for you to meet him in the middle, just close enough for your chests to brush. With every graze, a zing of energy ricochets down your spine.
“How’s this?” he asks, his voice subdued, a rumble of bass ringing clear over the airy, romantic melody.
You’re going to explode. “It’s alright, I guess. For a beginner.”
You move in stilted steps at first, recalling all your wise, secondhand knowledge as you guide Dream in a small square pattern. Step back, to the right, forward, left, and repeat. It feels… not natural. Like you’re trying to walk past each other, but you keep failing to move out of each other’s way.
Dream steps on your foot. “Oh, I’m sorry.”
You stumble over his shoe and fall into him. “Shit, my bad.”
It’s not working out how you intended. This was supposed to be a graceful flaunt, a display of prowess straight out of a bird documentary, but it’s quickly devolved into a clumsy scene you’d expect to see in a coming-of-age movie. The type where the main character and their love interest bungle the dance, yet they still kiss at the end. Dammit, even middle schoolers are catching more game than you…
You clear your throat, set on proving yourself. “Maybe we should just try…”
The steps become smaller until the awkward paces become more comfortable shuffles. Dream follows your lead, the focused tension easing from his frame as the movements become easier. Of course, that focus is now locked on you, his fond smile warming the very air around you as you struggle to breathe it in.
He’s taking great pleasure in watching you try to show off. “You’re enjoying this.”
That blistering grin hikes up, delighted to have been caught. “Of course I am.”
The small steps wane into an easy sway.
“Can I spin you?”
Well shit, that’s like, a level five move. He’s definitely not ready for that yet. But those big sunny disks that peer into your soul, halved by the tender droop of his sockets…
“Slow,” you tell him. For his sake, of course.
Dream drops his hand from his back – the cool air is a shock you want to hide away from – and raises his other arm above your head, lightly grasping your fingers as he takes a step back. Which way are you supposed to spin? Righty-tighty or lefty-loosey? Hopefully it doesn’t matter. You pick a direction and go for it, spinning yourself slowly on the axis of his hand in yours.
Your wrist catches on the edge of its range of motion about halfway through. “I think you have to let go.”
Then, to your surprise, Dream lowers his arm. Your arm is crossed over your body, and he sweeps you astern, bringing your back to his chest. He nuzzles into the side of your head, that playfulness from earlier rearing up again.
“This feels right,” he murmurs into your hair.
Despite his questionable choreographic experience and lack of cinematic culture, you have to agree.
Self-indulgent innuendos for writer's block and what I've been struggling with lately. Took a lot out of me to write this, but I did it.
Undertale AUpril: Day 30, "Growth"
cw: minor theme of self destruction.
'Sometimes things just don't grow, and that's okay.'
Word Count: 1,700
Pairing: Phantom!Dust x Reader
[Phantom!Dust is by @liliallowed]
A blot of ink is left from where I had just written what date it is in the top right corner of my rough, leather-bound notebook.
I fidget and pick off a peel at the spine before I adjust my hold to swipe my thumb over the excess liquid, smearing it. Obnoxiously. And with more aggressive pressure than maturely necessary.
Nothing's grown yet. Still.
…There has to be something I'm doing wrong. I haven't had these issues before, so what's changed in my process?
Is it the new soil? The way I'm watering it? How deep I buried the seed? How hard I pressed the dirt to cover it? This new window location? The feed I'm using? Is it not draining well enough in the new pot? I could be drowning it. Am I drowning it? Does this pot not have a drain?—No, it does, I remember cleaning up a minor spill the other day.
So, what am I doing wrong? And how do I find out?
There are so many things that make up growing something. Do I find out by trail-and-error, changing one thing at a time to see if anything changes? But that'd take months, and I don't want to spend months on something that could be a waste of my time.
Were there some instructional gardening videos I missed while studying?
Th—there's something I'm doing wrong.
"you're bleeding."
…
…Huh?
He—from behind, just over my shoulder—puts his hand atop mine, the one… white-knuckling my pen, and he lightly prods his fingertips beneath mine in a silent prompt for me to let go. I do, and my pen is taken from me.
…In place of the pen is blood coming from where my nails had dug into and through the skin of my palm.
Huh. Well, now I feel it.
It stings badly.
His hands are unnaturally delicate, the way he slots them into the grooves of my waist on either side, and then he just as carefully guides me to turn and face him.
And… there's nothing. Beneath his hood is so dark that it looks like he has no face for me to even face.
Phantom's gaze tilts down just enough to relieve me of my gardening journal, too. The edition with nothing but over sixty days of no growth. Over sixty wasted pages. Over sixty days of tracking progress in this new batch of lilies, and nothing.
I've grown and arranged and sold so many lilies before, so what's wrong? Why won't they sprout?
My attention is pulled with an actual pull on my forearm. Firm—not his typical lazy and loose grip. "yer zoning."
…?
"les'go."
My hand is held in his—cradled, almost? Palm-up and in the center of the bathroom sink's bowl. He turns the faucet on, and the sudden cold water against my cuts makes me flinch hard enough to nearly hit him on reflex.
If he had a brow to quirk at my response to the pain, he would have made that expression.
It… it really didn't process in my head that I should have braced. Wait, is he going to disinfect it, too?
He lets go, "keep it under." And then drifts to the cupboard where I keep medicinals.
I don't really focus on that, though. What I can't help but instead notice and watch is this way his whole entire body is tensed up. Shoulders pushed forward more than usual, tone clipped, and steps purposeful.
He swings the cabinet wide, zeroes in on what he's looking for, and then closes it all the way. Phi never fully shuts cabinets.
Is he mad at me?
Phantom's back to my side, turning the water off and drawing a small washcloth forward to dab at and dry my palm.
The damp rag gets left inside the sink, he tears open a small packet of alcohol wipes, and then takes a semi-slow moment to unravel it. "this gonna hurt. whatever it is you need to brace, you've got five seconds."
What. Wait, so he is mad! Why's he being so mean?!—
OWW.
He keeps my hand held open as he slowly swipes over and over again, thoroughly cleaning the cuts with the isopropyl.
I aim to grab a fistful of my top to clench something in withstanding, but I get a wad of his jacket by mistake.
He tenses differently. His head jerking downward at my grip, and his next rub over my skin was a rough flinch that only makes me pull at him a tug harder in reflex.
…
I let go of him, my hand awkwardly falling to my side where I grab what I originally meant to, and a beat later he returns to fixing me.
He secures the wrapped gauze with a bandage clip—something I didn't even realize was in my drawers, and he backs off a step in a silent tell of 'done.'
I'm given what I can tell is a type of look, despite having no facial expressions to read, and then he turns to clean the minor mess he made of the counter and sink bowl. Dismissing me, I think.
Does he… want me to go? I guess that's fine.
There's already the muffled crash of everything being haphazardly dumped into the small trashcan, and I shift back to see him finger and prod at the blood-dabbed rag. Unraveling its ball to inspect before flipping the hot water on and running it beneath to soak.
The blood is washed away, temporarily staining the porcelain. He squeezes, and the hard drop of water comes out clean. He then gathers more water into the rag, and repeats the motion over the barely-there stains to bully them away.
The flow's turned off, and after wringing the cloth dry, he drapes it over the faucet.
There's a pause. And then he looks at me.
"what happened?"
I… what?
"with the pen."
The pen. The pen? Why is he bringing up the pen? I—Guess I… is he upset I gripped it too hard and cut into myself? That was an accident.
I really didn't mean to make him put down whatever it was he was doing to help me.
…Wait, I didn't make him do anything. What am I talking about?
He takes my good hand in his—when did he get close?—and I watch his straightened posture settle and loosen. His hold is lax, too.
"you good?"
"You're not mad at me?"
…
"i… what?" He almost lets his hand drag and fall from mine, like how you may fawn when you're majorly confused, "why would i be mad at you?"
Uh. I don't… "I don't know."
Why would I default to thinking he'd be mad at me like that? He's never given me an issue like that before, so what was that in my head?
Was some part of me still held up on the lilies? I don't know, I think I'm going blank again. I can't draw the thoughts forward anymore, they're straight-up gone.
God, I HATE when this happens! Every time I have some sort of problem, I automatically suppress it, and it never gets solved because I can't fucking remember what I was just thinking about!
What was—'the pen'? Where did it go, anyway? Did I break it? I hope not, that was the last of my favorite type in the package.
A breath on my cheek—a harsh huff, attention-grabbing.
My gaze back toward him meets darkness. A piece of his overhanging hood brushes against my hair. Wherever his face is, it's only inches from me.
His next purposeful breath is gentler, tickling, a ghost.
Hard hands raise to hover on my elbows, putting the barest of pressure to hold me. I don't feel his breath when he asks if he can kiss me, and I think I effectively lost mine.
I vaguely register how he's doing this to distract me from my thoughts, and although it's working so well and I'm grateful for it, I can't help but playfully detest him for knowing me.
The corner of my mouth is doted on, two slow presses back-to-back, and then a third and more holding one to the center.
My arms are squeezed flatter to my side where he's holding me. And before long, paired with a fourth distracting kiss, his hands glide to my back where they loop over themselves to hug me close to him.
I get a fifth to my cheek, where he had breathed on prior, and he pulls back enough to allow light on my warm face.
"what made you grip the pen like that?"
…
Ah.
"They—uh, the lilies—won't grow."
…Okay, maybe that was a little pathetic of me to get so bent out of shape about. This is actually really embarrassing, now that I'm thinking about it.
He hums in a type of contemplating noise, flexing his hands against my back like he's restless to touch and cuddle, and his tone remains soft, "and that's upsetting you?"
An understatement, I guess.
I curl the fingers of my injured hand, pressing into the wrappings to agitate the cuts in a physical reminder. I guess it did upset me a lot, yeah.
"why?"
Because I'm failing at something that used to come naturally. Because I've done this dozens of times before with no issue, and all the sudden I can't anymore.
"They're not growing."
…
There's a silence between us. I can tell he's looking into me, and I'm looking… well, I assume it's almost through him.
He lets go to hold my arms again, giving me some breathing space with a half-step backward. There's another quiet beat before, "plants do that sometimes."
…
Huh?
"sometimes plants just don't grow. don't obsess over it so much."
…Huh.
I—guess so, yeah… Yeah. Yeah, I really do guess so.
He lightly tugs my arms before I could get lost in my thoughts again, "wanna go lay down?"
God, the way he keeps clocking me…
I don't have my journal with me this time, and I lost the days.
Nothing has changed in the lilies, still no growth, and I think that's fine. Plants do that, sometimes.
AUPRIL DAY 28 - BLANKET [ft. UNDERSWAP!PAPYRUS (STRETCH)]
[cw: several weed jokes]
“LISTEN. YOU KNOW THAT I LOVE BOTH OF YOU, RIGHT? AND THAT YOU BOTH TAKE UP THE NUMBER ONE AND TWO PLACES IN MY SOUL? THAT I’D DO ANYTHING IN THE WORLD TO MAKE YOU BOTH HAPPY? YEAH, UM, IT’S JUST… I REALLY APPRECIATE YOUR COMPANY, BUT… IS THIS REALLY NECESSARY?”
“sorry, bro, but it really is. i dunno if you noticed, but they don’t have arms at the moment.”
“Yeah, Blue. I don’t have arms. Have some respect, jeez.”
Blue taps his boot impatiently against the laminate, his mind warring with saying more or just letting it go. You’re both clearly not in the mood to be reasoned with, he supposes with a heavy, resigned sigh, so he’ll have to relent and just… do his best to ignore it. Which is turning out to be a task wearing thin at his usually fortified patience.
“That one.” You nod your head at the plate set out in front of you, laden with a neat row of enchiladas.
Stretch plucks your chosen treat off the plate and brings it to your mouth, his other hand tightening around your waist so you don’t accidentally slip out of his lap. You take a large bite and give him a sweet, muffled thank you through your full mouth.
Swallowing, you tilt your head all the way back, looking at Stretch upside down. “Does this count as cannibalism?”
He shrugs, taking the other half for himself. “nah. you’re more of a burrito.”
You look down at yourself, rolled up fully in the largest quilt he could find in the house. Your arms are plastered to your sides, and your legs are wrapped together beneath the blanket, caught in a cozy cocoon that you honestly don’t ever feel like leaving. Especially when Stretch has been carrying you around and bending to your every whim all day.
You thought he was making a stupid joke when you complained about having to get out of bed, and he offered to let you bring the bed with you. You had given him an unimpressed look, thinking he was about to suggest something stupid, when he promptly stood up, walked to the closet, and dragged out a massive hand-knit blanket that Blue had made for him – clearly from the early phase of his knitting journey, when he didn’t have any sort of grasp on proportion yet.
You have to give Blue credit – he chose the most plush yarn you’d ever felt in your life, all soft and fuzzy and warm. He always felt that the higher the quality of the supplies, the better the craft would turn out. In this case, despite the loose, inexperienced loops and knots, he was right.
You also have to hand some credit to Stretch, because he is an expert at rolling things up. Which is something you definitely already knew. You were just surprised to see that it extended to rolling people in blankets.
You were only going to let this go on for an hour or two, letting Stretch lug you around in a princess carry, having him hold a cup for you while you drank, and watching him cater to you as you wriggle around worm-style… but you found out you quite like being spoiled like this.
Plus, it’s been giving you an excuse to annoy the hell out of his brother. He was already a little terse when he got home from work to a sink full of dishes and an unmopped floor, but your “no arms” excuse still had charm then. It’s evidently starting to get a little old, as Blue has been making faces at the two of you from across the table.
Stretch pats your leg, bringing you out of your thoughts. “do you wanna be an enchilada? i can make ya an enchilada.”
“How? What’s even the difference?”
Blue lets out an indignant noise, a “really?” like he already knows exactly what his brother is about to say. Like he’s already heard this joke a million times.
Stretch’s grin just grows. “enchiladas are baked.”
