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“Greetings. I am Chara, and as luck would have it one of my packages arrived on time for once.”
The dog monster reached out to something outside the field of view of the camera, and the view switched to a top down perspective of a cluttered computer desk with a brown cardboard box on it.
“If I’m right, this is the Undercoat Rake I ordered from the Girl With The Dogs merch shop. Going to see how well this works on monster fur.”
A carefully sharpened claw at the end of an index finger stabbed into the tape wrapped along the cardboard flaps, slitting the package open with several practice movements.
“While you were all dating and networking for your future careers, I studied the blade.”
The box flaps were pulled open and paws carefully dug past the insulated plastic bubbles until they pulled out a dog grooming tool with a long handle.
“Alright, looks good, nothing damaged in transit, it’s got the stainless steel tines, rubber grippers on both sides, kind of redundant for anyone who has paw pads,” Chara held one paw up and wiggled their fingers to demonstrate, “and I’ll let you know how it works in my follow up video.”
“Next question is from UnderScoreOverLord33, who asks, ‘Dear Chara, what was the hardest thing about becoming a monster?’ I suppose from a purely practical and bookkeeping angle it would be the part where I died first, but in terms of personal difficulty it was definitely learning to speak again.”
Chara held up one paw and drew a circle in the air around their muzzle.
“The dimensions of this part of my body are dramatically different from what they used to be, but I was using muscle memory from when I had a human shaped skull so about eighty to ninety percent of what came out of my mouth was completely indecipherable. I had to re-learn how to pronounce many different phonemes and I had trouble with the letter S or anything close to it for a couple of months. I still occasionally trip over it but you guys never see it unless it’s on a livestream because I edit those parts out before I upload.”
Chara leaned towards the computer monitor.
“Next question is from Mister_Twister_DelRio12 who asks, ‘Are your feet shaped like human feet or dog feet.’ Uhm.”
The dog monster stared at the camera for a couple of seconds.
“I can’t tell if this is one of those questions or not, but in the interests of good faith, my legs are designed around a plantigrade walk cycle like the human body, which puts me in the minority as far as Caniform monsters go. I can’t run as fast without using magic, but I do have greater control over turning and cornering when I am running compared to dog monsters with digitigrade legs and gaits because of the increased surface area in contact with the ground. Technically, like, Doggo, Dogamy, Dogaressa, they’re running around on tip toe so their whole leg functions like a spring every time they take a step, but if they have to change course those toes can only grab so much ground. I am NOT going to show you my feet on video. I would threaten to kick the ass of the next person who asks me about that but I suspect that might be misinterpreted as motivation instead of discouragement.”
“There’s a reason I don’t answer that kind of question, and it’s the same reason a lot of people freaked out about the proof of the Soul when monsters first emerged from the Underground. Emotions run very high with anything related to religion or faith. Proof that Souls existed was actually worse for a lot of evangelical religions in terms of recruitment and retention simply because it took something that had previously been purely a matter of metaphysics and put it in the physics camp. You could see it, you could touch it, you could-”
Chara stopped talking abruptly, ears flicking. There was a clicking noise, and a pair of muffled voices.
“I think the allergies and the head cold teamed up to pull a heist on my nose, to steal my mucus and sell it on the black market.”
“That is absolutely disgusting.”
“When I start a metaphor I can’t stop and...”
The voices faded out and Chara held up one paw. A blue glow surrounded their fingers and there was a clicking noise before they turned to the camera again.
“My door latch is not working right. Been meaning to ask Frisk to look at it but they are under the weather right now. As you might have heard. Not sure how much the microphone picked up. Anyway! Souls. Once the existence of the Soul was proven, you could test all sorts of different things that used to be exclusive to religion. You didn’t have to rely on faith alone, or for that matter, faith and peer pressure. Nothing in Dr. Alphys’ research papers and monographs specifically disputed any religious conventions or convictions at all, with the exception of the cult that I grew up in and good riddance. But it still did to the social structure that had grown up around many organized religions what a bowling ball does to the pins at the other end of the lane, just because it took things out of their hands. And if I start talking about what it was like to die and come back to life, it’s going to be the same thing all over again, so that’s not going to happen.”
The dog monster stuck their tongue out.
“Unless I decide to write a best selling book and make a metric ton of money.”
“As the old saying goes, history is written by the victors, so nobody actually knew about the Titans until they showed up again. It was one of those puzzles where you could kind of see where the missing piece would go and what it would look like, but to get the rest of the puzzle assembled enough to see the holes where the pieces were missing, you needed the picture on the box in the first place.”
A paw reached across the screen and the angle abruptly changed from a top down view of an old book to show Chara sitting at their desk wearing red robes with glowing trim.
“Now, I was in the unique position of having that big picture, in the sense of my parents having lived before the war and actually knowing some of what the Guardians left out. Asgore was teaching me how to read this language, and for a few weeks after everything settled down I had some real forehead slapper moments. But even then, Asgore and Toriel both considered the Titans to be literal morality tales that explained how Execution Points of Levels of Violence set you apart from the world, and if you got bad enough the powers that be would just remove you because you were practically in a world of your own anyway at that point. Even the most far out apocalyptic predictions I’ve seen don’t claim that Santa Claus is going to show up in the Final Days to separate the worthy souls from the unworthy ones.”
Chara paused for a moment, finger reaching up to scratch their chin.
“Except Futurama, with the Robot Santa.”
“Ugh. Short video today because I’m sick.”
A dog monster slumped in a chair, wrapped in a quilt, ears flat against their head and eyes narrowed to almost slits.
“So there was. Huhm. A whole thing last night. Power is back on now. Nice. I am. Immune to Chills. Ice magic affinity. So I was okay. Until I wasn’t. There’s like three other pandemics aside from Covid in this town. Because everyone and his neighbor. And his neighbor’s brother in law, was like, oh if I get sick I will just eat some Nice Cream and be fine. And that is only half true. Healing magic fixes the tissue and organ damage but the virus is still inside you until destroyed by immune response. Or drugs. Also the Nice Cream company was running full tilt just to keep up demand before every sixth person in Lost Eagle County was sick. Because nobody wears a mask. I am. I just realized. Drifting off the point. Sort of. Tangents and all that. That is because. I have caught Confusion. I should not even be on the computer right now. In case I type or say something that freaks the FBI out even more than they already are.”
Chara stared at nothing for some time, until the quilt slowly unwrapped and one paw reached out beneath the fabric to grab a mechanical pencil and bring it up to the dog monster’s muzzle. A pink tongue snaked out and licked the yellow plastic.
“Pork chop flavor. As foretold in the ancient scrolls.”
“Next question if from AnnieOkay113, who asks, ‘Chara, you have survived so many different dangers and upheavals and I was wondering if you had any advice in general for dealing with stressful situations. I had to cut contact with my family because of boundary issues and I am having serious doubts about whether or not I have done the right thing. Do you have any words of wisdom for me and people in similar straits?’ Uh….”
Chara glanced at the camera, looked back at the monitor, and reached up to scratch their head, causing a few black and white hairs to come loose.
“First of all thank you for your question. I would say the most important part is to keep going forward. That sounds like a meaningless platitude but it isn’t, and I will explain in more detail. When I was growing up in the Guardian compound, I was basically in a high pressure environment, and even when I rejected the philosophy of the Guardians I had still full absorbed their… ethos? Tone? Semantics? Not entirely certain what to call it, but as a practical matter I was perfectionist to the point of self destruction. Any mistake, however small, seemed much larger to me than it did to anyone around me, including those who were directly hurt or inconvenienced by the mistake itself. To put it another way, there are a lot of different things you can believe in, but there are also different ways that you can believe in it.”
The dog monster on the screen waved their paws around, including a rather convincing imitation of a balance scale with different options on each side.
“Now, I said to keep going, and I happen to be an a position where I can say that because I did not follow my own advice and things didn’t work out well. My perfectionism got resurrected with me later, which made learning to talk again even more surreal and unpleasant than it might otherwise have been. This despite the fact that I had changed families, environments, and bodies. I had made the choice to say “No, I don’t believe what you have to say about monsters or about humanity” but that was much easier than saying “No, I don’t believe what you have to say about what I am and what I must be to be worthy of being loved” and despite thinking about it a lot, there’s no easy shortcut to doing that. But, if I had stopped climbing Mt. Ebott, gone back to Bastion Circle, my life would never have improved.”
The dog monster’s ears slowly flattened against their head, and some of their fur started to stand up.
“I would have been in the same toxic environment and I would never have known what it was like to have parents who appreciated me for who I was, instead of parents who were constantly disappointed in me for what I could not do for them. In a very real way, I did exactly what you did, I cut all contact with my family. I had doubts, as you are having now. But the worst things that happened to me were directly as a result of backsliding into old ways of thinking. And unfortunately it is very easy to backslide. So that is why you have to keep trying to move forward, so when you do backslide two steps you’ve taken a few more steps forward. At the very least, you break even and stand your ground.”
Chara shook their head, hairs flying around and ears pointing up again.
“Part of moving forward is to create new social circles, new friends, maybe new families. Not everybody has my luck of falling into a cavern with a civilization of magic people, but there are online communities, there are people who gather together for common interests, and then there are just people in the same general area who learn about each other through repeated exposure. Small towns are well known for that, so again, I have a bit of an unfair advantage there. You said you had to cut loose because of boundary issues, so definitely keep those in mind, and don’t make the mistake of compromising on those boundaries if that feels like the only way to establish a connection with another person or group. It’s like in the stop motion cartoon with Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. You can be independent together.”
Claws tapped on the desk, and the dog monster attached to them stared off at something off screen, hackles raised. After a minute or so, Chara’s head turned to look at the camera.
“They delayed the launch again.”
Tap tap tap tap.
Tap tap tap tap.
“I don’t blame them. I know what happened to Apollo One. To the Challenger. To the Columbia. Gotta be careful.”
Tap tap tap tap.
“Still angry. Just. Getting it out. Feeling my feelings.”
Chara looked off to one side again, lips curled back to reveal sharp teeth clenched together. As their nose wrinkled, a deep growl made it’s way out of their throat, only to fade as they looked at the camera again.
“Actually I was feeling really mad until I realized that at this rate Temmie is going to get to the moon before the Artemis program, and that’s going to be really cool to watch. If slightly hard to understand. I mean even with Bob translating, it's a whole thing.”