Character Select - with AceSential and Phobos
Collab with tf-sential with a story by Phoboswrites of Penn and Zeydaan falling down through the Dark World and ending up touched by its influence.
It had been a downright exhausting day in all the best ways. This was the biggest convention Zeydaan had ever been to. The American event was as exciting as it was imposing. It also afforded them the chance to meet friends they’d only ever spoken to online before. In particular Zeydaan quickly found their fellow artist Penn. The two decided to enjoy the con together and in the process enjoy each other’s company.
Their first day had been full of walking, talking, and enough impulse buying to make a teen with access to their parents’ credit card blush. After the day had come and gone Penn invited Zeydaan to hang out in their hotel room. Zeydaan eagerly obliged, more than willing to keep hanging out with Penn. The two had been hitting it off quite well and Zeydaan saw no reason to split up just yet.
“Y’know, I think my one regret is that I didn’t think of doing a cosplay,” Zeydaan mused as the two walked down the hall to the elevator.
“Oh yeah?” Penn asked, looking up from their phone.
“Yeah! Everyone’s running around in costume, taking pictures, even roleplaying a bit, it seems fun!”
“I reckon so,” Penn mused, “I dunno if it’d be for me though.”
“Ahh, you haven’t tried it though! Maybe you’ll be a natural!”
“Oh hush.”
The elevator seemed perfectly normal when the two first got in. It continued to feel normal as it lurched to life and glided upwards. However once it reached Penn’s floor the elevator kept going without even stopping.
“Ugh, great, don’t tell me the elevator is glitched out,” Zeydaan groaned.
“Can elevators even… glitch?”
“Well obviously this one did, it skipped our floor!”
It stopped being a mild annoyance the moment the elevator reached the top floor and simply kept going. The number continued climbing, floor fifteen, floor sixteen, on and on beyond the fourteen floors the building actually had.
“We didn’t wander into some simulator or escape room, did we?”
“That or we got drugged before heading up here,” Penn grumbled, “at least I hope it’s something like that.”
“How come?” Zeydaan cocked their head.
“Going up in a strange elevator higher than should be possible? Bright lights in said elevator?”
“Psh,” Zeydaan shook their head, “you’re not implying we died and went to heaven, are you? That’s…”
Zeydaan trailed off upon realizing that the elevator stopped. An uneasy silence filled the air. Both Zeydaan and Penn held their breath and waited for the doors to slide open. But time ticked past and the doors remained closed. According to the elevator they were on floor thirty, twice as high up as should have been possible. They were stopped on a floor that simply didn’t exist. Yet they were there.
Penn slowly stepped forward and pressed the emergency button to open the doors. For a moment they felt silly as nothing happened, because why would the emergency button work? Logic clearly didn’t apply on the thirtieth floor of a fourteen floor building. But then a list of names appeared on the screen above the buttons. Each name was numbered, leaving the implication quite obvious.
“So it's a game, huh, didn’t see this advertised anywhere,” Penn said as they selected Noelle from the list because it was the closest to their birth name. “It probably wants you to pick too?”
Zeydaan shrugged and walked over, “what did you pick?”
“Noelle,” answered Penn.
“Then I’ll pick Susie, might as well make our team thematic!”
With a chuckle Zeydaan keyed in the number next to Susie’s name. Then, without warning or sound, the ground beneath their feet vanished. The friends plummeted down into the black abyss below without a second’s delay.
“Okay, hell makes a bit more sense than heaven,” Zeydaan mused. They were only so casual because the scenario was so absurd that rationality went out the window. How could Zeydaan respond normally to a situation so entirely abnormal?
“AAAAGGHHHH FUCK!” Screamed Penn in response, who for their part was not nearly as numb to the situation as their friend.
Eventually Penn’s voice fell quiet as they ran out of steam on the scream. The drop felt infinite, it had been at least a whole minute of freefalling and there was no end in sight. Even if they had been thirty stories in the sky they would have gone splat by then. It seemed that their fall was equally as impossible as the initial climb up in the elevator.
“This sucks,” Zeydaan grumbled, “if we’re going to die, can’t we just get it over with?”
Zeydaan’s flippant reaction caught them off guard. Frustration made total sense but Zeydaan felt genuinely angry. The anger was less “anger at the futility of life” and instead more of a “I want to punch the elevator in the dick.” They reasoned that it wasn’t totally fair to assume they’d react even remotely rationally in this position. Still they couldn’t help but feel that this strange shift in attitude was a sign of something even stranger than the fall.
Sure enough Zeydaan felt something burning in their chest. It became hard to breathe, anything Zeydaan tried to say came out in pained gasps. The pain radiated, not like any physical wound but instead as if Zeydaan’s very soul was aflame. Penn seemed to be faring just as poorly, gasping wildly as their face began to slowly push out into a snout. At a glance it looked like Penn hadn’t shaved that morning. But closer examination revealed that it was actually soft brown fur growing on their face. Zeydaan wasn’t even sure how they could see Penn in this black void, but that was among the least of their concerns at that particular moment.
Zeydaan lacked both the strength and time to examine Penn’s changes any closer. They had other concerns like their hair. It whipped wildly in the wind, growing longer by the second as they kept falling. Something about the hair felt familiar, from the dark brown color that almost seemed purple to how it kept getting in Zeydaan’s eyes. It took glancing over and seeing Penn’s new blonde haircut before it really clicked.
“Oh fuck.. Oh fuck! This-”
Zeydaan quickly covered their mouth upon realizing the voice that came out was not their own. The voice sounded completely unfamiliar, somewhat rough but not quite gravely. The voice seemed young too, probably that of a highschooler at the very most. And while Zeydaan never had heard a voice quite like it, it felt perfectly fitting for a certain character. Coupled with the hair, Zeydaan had no doubt that they were turning into Susie from Deltarune of all things.
“Oh jeez,” Penn gasped, wincing as they tugged at their new antlers. “This feels way less fun than I thought it would be…”
Penn’s voice was rather soft and girlish now. Zeydaan sounded young too, but Penn’s voice radiated this cute energy they couldn’t describe in any other way. Zeydaan loved the sound of it, but the voice almost made them feel somewhat angry. Not at Penn but at… themself? They felt angry that they liked Penn’s new voice so much. It was just like how Zeydaan liked Penn’s new buck teeth. It was abundantly clear that Susie’s mind was flooding Zeydaan’s. And just as Susie would do, this new persona asserted itself quite loudly.
The mood between the two during their seemingly eternal descent had shifted from fear to a numb confusion. Both Zeydaan and Penn were dealing with strange new thoughts. Zeydaan struggled to not yell at the void for being a pussy and laming them out instead of just actually killing them. Meanwhile Penn felt as if they were about to faint, and not because of the existential dread of the fall but because Zeydaan almost looked entirely like Susie and it made Penn feel very, very strange.
Even their clothes warped along with them. Penn’s signature red polo swapped out with a subtle yet still slightly gaudy Christmas sweater with a green and red checker pattern. It smelled slightly of gingerbread and reminded Penn of home, despite the fact that Penn’s home rarely, if ever, smelled like gingerbread. Whereas Zeydaan found their clothes were considerably more grungy and monstrous looking. This included a series of vests, that while vibrant, looked older than they did and smelled like concentrated moth balls and a cocktail of three or four cheap colognes mixed together in some attempt to smell as ungirly as physically possible. While thick leather cuffs formed around their swelling muscular arms- dotted with metal spikes.
The two had gotten so used to falling that they nearly forgot that hitting the ground was an option. Penn squealed as the two suddenly landed on their feet. Both shuddered at the impact. It wasn’t quite the cataclysmic carnage such a long fall would have warranted, but their knees still felt like hell upon hitting the ground, particularly Zeydaan who had adopted a 'superhero landing'. A cursory glance around revealed that they were in a public restroom, one without a urinal in sight and that seemed almost too clean to be real life. The walls and the ceiling were colored in a way that made the whole bathroom feel less like a real bathroom and more like something one would find in art, or a game. Which was rather fitting given that the pair saw none other than Susie and Noelle in the bathroom mirror instead of their own reflections.
“What the hell? Asked “Susie”, unable to think of themself as having any other name besides that one.
“Oh gosh,” Noelle muttered, running her hands through her hair. She wondered for a moment why she suddenly felt so “she.” She had never minded “she” before, but had never felt so entirely, undeniably she. She concluded nothing by the time she turned and faced Susie. Once she did, the train of thought derailed itself in a comical explosion from which there were no surviving thoughts.
“H-hey! Don’t worry, we’ve got this!” Susie exclaimed, suddenly and intensely wanting to make sure that Noelle wasn’t too scared. The surge of confidence even caught her off guard. She wanted to freak out, but also couldn’t deny that a rather loud part of her thought this was awesome. The Susie side of her brain was winning out in a landslide victory.
“You… you think so?” Noelle asked sheepishly. She wasn’t even able to look Susie in the eye yet held onto every word she said.
Noelle and Susie had not fully become their new selves. Zeydaan and Penn were both still in there, in fact they even had full control over their bodies and actions. However the personalities of the two characters they’d turned into were strong. Coupled with the fact that both victims were rather fond of the idea of transformation, and liked the characters they had become, this was a rather sticky mental situation. While not fully replaced or taken over by those personas, their traits and mannerisms were nearly impossible to resist playing into.
Essentially Zeydaan and Penn were LARPing as Susie and Noelle respectively. And neither of them were able to fully break character. They could say things or do actions that were not friendly to the canon, but they could not fully escape how the characters acted or felt. They could cause exceptions, but not changes to the rules. This was further enforced by the fact that Susie and Noelle felt some intense mutual feelings for each other. If one of them started to actually break out of the character’s mannerisms, just being around the other would be enough to drag them back into character friendly behavior.
And of course Susie was Susie, which meant that she not only felt stupidly confident about the situation, but she also felt incredible being herself. She hardly wanted to change back at all. She made for a good Susie and that was that. Meanwhile Noelle felt hard pressed to encourage Susie to try and act more like Zeydaan, because that meant less Susie for Noelle to enjoy the presence of. They were both quite aware of this predicament. There seemed to be little to no wiggle room in actually escaping their new personalities.
“Wh-what should we do…?”
“Hrm, I mean, Kris or Ralsei usually come up with all the ideas… But who knows if we’re actually in Deltarune…”
Noelle meekly pointed at a save point right next to the trash can.
“Right,” Susie winced, “okay, so we’re stuck in Deltarune! That’s cool! Way cooler than uhh… anything else we could be stuck in!”
“I mean, sure…” Noelle twiddled her fingers awkwardly, “but we can’t just st-stay here…”
“...No?”
“I mean, uh, in the bathroom,” Noelle coughed, “we should probably… uhh”
“Right! Class, you’re uhh, you’re a nerd, you care about that,” Susie rubbed the back of her head.
“No, no, I uhh… if you want to skip class then, I should come too! To uhh…”
“Make sure I don’t commit any crimes?” Susie flashed a wicked grin.
“Yes! Exactly that!” Noelle nodded emphatically, glad the fur mostly hid the blush on her face.
“Well, I don’t think the Dark World has any laws, and who says we need Kris to go there anyways? Let’s go!”
“S-sure!”
The conversation flowed naturally between the two. Yet somehow both were able to understand there was more behind it than what was said. If they had any chances of getting back to their reality, it’d be through the Dark World. They just needed to find a good, character accurate reason to go there. All they had to hope for going forward was that they didn’t get too lost in the roleplaying. Frankly, they didn’t like their odds all that much, but at the very least it was going to be an interesting time regardless…
It had been a downright exhausting day in all the best ways. This was the biggest convention Zeydaan had ever been to. The American event was as exciting as it was imposing. It also afforded them the chance to meet friends they’d only ever spoken to online before. In particular Zeydaan quickly found their fellow artist Penn. The two decided to enjoy the con together and in the process enjoy each other’s company.
Their first day had been full of walking, talking, and enough impulse buying to make a teen with access to their parents’ credit card blush. After the day had come and gone Penn invited Zeydaan to hang out in their hotel room. Zeydaan eagerly obliged, more than willing to keep hanging out with Penn. The two had been hitting it off quite well and Zeydaan saw no reason to split up just yet.
“Y’know, I think my one regret is that I didn’t think of doing a cosplay,” Zeydaan mused as the two walked down the hall to the elevator.
“Oh yeah?” Penn asked, looking up from their phone.
“Yeah! Everyone’s running around in costume, taking pictures, even roleplaying a bit, it seems fun!”
“I reckon so,” Penn mused, “I dunno if it’d be for me though.”
“Ahh, you haven’t tried it though! Maybe you’ll be a natural!”
“Oh hush.”
The elevator seemed perfectly normal when the two first got in. It continued to feel normal as it lurched to life and glided upwards. However once it reached Penn’s floor the elevator kept going without even stopping.
“Ugh, great, don’t tell me the elevator is glitched out,” Zeydaan groaned.
“Can elevators even… glitch?”
“Well obviously this one did, it skipped our floor!”
It stopped being a mild annoyance the moment the elevator reached the top floor and simply kept going. The number continued climbing, floor fifteen, floor sixteen, on and on beyond the fourteen floors the building actually had.
“We didn’t wander into some simulator or escape room, did we?”
“That or we got drugged before heading up here,” Penn grumbled, “at least I hope it’s something like that.”
“How come?” Zeydaan cocked their head.
“Going up in a strange elevator higher than should be possible? Bright lights in said elevator?”
“Psh,” Zeydaan shook their head, “you’re not implying we died and went to heaven, are you? That’s…”
Zeydaan trailed off upon realizing that the elevator stopped. An uneasy silence filled the air. Both Zeydaan and Penn held their breath and waited for the doors to slide open. But time ticked past and the doors remained closed. According to the elevator they were on floor thirty, twice as high up as should have been possible. They were stopped on a floor that simply didn’t exist. Yet they were there.
Penn slowly stepped forward and pressed the emergency button to open the doors. For a moment they felt silly as nothing happened, because why would the emergency button work? Logic clearly didn’t apply on the thirtieth floor of a fourteen floor building. But then a list of names appeared on the screen above the buttons. Each name was numbered, leaving the implication quite obvious.
“So it's a game, huh, didn’t see this advertised anywhere,” Penn said as they selected Noelle from the list because it was the closest to their birth name. “It probably wants you to pick too?”
Zeydaan shrugged and walked over, “what did you pick?”
“Noelle,” answered Penn.
“Then I’ll pick Susie, might as well make our team thematic!”
With a chuckle Zeydaan keyed in the number next to Susie’s name. Then, without warning or sound, the ground beneath their feet vanished. The friends plummeted down into the black abyss below without a second’s delay.
“Okay, hell makes a bit more sense than heaven,” Zeydaan mused. They were only so casual because the scenario was so absurd that rationality went out the window. How could Zeydaan respond normally to a situation so entirely abnormal?
“AAAAGGHHHH FUCK!” Screamed Penn in response, who for their part was not nearly as numb to the situation as their friend.
Eventually Penn’s voice fell quiet as they ran out of steam on the scream. The drop felt infinite, it had been at least a whole minute of freefalling and there was no end in sight. Even if they had been thirty stories in the sky they would have gone splat by then. It seemed that their fall was equally as impossible as the initial climb up in the elevator.
“This sucks,” Zeydaan grumbled, “if we’re going to die, can’t we just get it over with?”
Zeydaan’s flippant reaction caught them off guard. Frustration made total sense but Zeydaan felt genuinely angry. The anger was less “anger at the futility of life” and instead more of a “I want to punch the elevator in the dick.” They reasoned that it wasn’t totally fair to assume they’d react even remotely rationally in this position. Still they couldn’t help but feel that this strange shift in attitude was a sign of something even stranger than the fall.
Sure enough Zeydaan felt something burning in their chest. It became hard to breathe, anything Zeydaan tried to say came out in pained gasps. The pain radiated, not like any physical wound but instead as if Zeydaan’s very soul was aflame. Penn seemed to be faring just as poorly, gasping wildly as their face began to slowly push out into a snout. At a glance it looked like Penn hadn’t shaved that morning. But closer examination revealed that it was actually soft brown fur growing on their face. Zeydaan wasn’t even sure how they could see Penn in this black void, but that was among the least of their concerns at that particular moment.
Zeydaan lacked both the strength and time to examine Penn’s changes any closer. They had other concerns like their hair. It whipped wildly in the wind, growing longer by the second as they kept falling. Something about the hair felt familiar, from the dark brown color that almost seemed purple to how it kept getting in Zeydaan’s eyes. It took glancing over and seeing Penn’s new blonde haircut before it really clicked.
“Oh fuck.. Oh fuck! This-”
Zeydaan quickly covered their mouth upon realizing the voice that came out was not their own. The voice sounded completely unfamiliar, somewhat rough but not quite gravely. The voice seemed young too, probably that of a highschooler at the very most. And while Zeydaan never had heard a voice quite like it, it felt perfectly fitting for a certain character. Coupled with the hair, Zeydaan had no doubt that they were turning into Susie from Deltarune of all things.
“Oh jeez,” Penn gasped, wincing as they tugged at their new antlers. “This feels way less fun than I thought it would be…”
Penn’s voice was rather soft and girlish now. Zeydaan sounded young too, but Penn’s voice radiated this cute energy they couldn’t describe in any other way. Zeydaan loved the sound of it, but the voice almost made them feel somewhat angry. Not at Penn but at… themself? They felt angry that they liked Penn’s new voice so much. It was just like how Zeydaan liked Penn’s new buck teeth. It was abundantly clear that Susie’s mind was flooding Zeydaan’s. And just as Susie would do, this new persona asserted itself quite loudly.
The mood between the two during their seemingly eternal descent had shifted from fear to a numb confusion. Both Zeydaan and Penn were dealing with strange new thoughts. Zeydaan struggled to not yell at the void for being a pussy and laming them out instead of just actually killing them. Meanwhile Penn felt as if they were about to faint, and not because of the existential dread of the fall but because Zeydaan almost looked entirely like Susie and it made Penn feel very, very strange.
Even their clothes warped along with them. Penn’s signature red polo swapped out with a subtle yet still slightly gaudy Christmas sweater with a green and red checker pattern. It smelled slightly of gingerbread and reminded Penn of home, despite the fact that Penn’s home rarely, if ever, smelled like gingerbread. Whereas Zeydaan found their clothes were considerably more grungy and monstrous looking. This included a series of vests, that while vibrant, looked older than they did and smelled like concentrated moth balls and a cocktail of three or four cheap colognes mixed together in some attempt to smell as ungirly as physically possible. While thick leather cuffs formed around their swelling muscular arms- dotted with metal spikes.
The two had gotten so used to falling that they nearly forgot that hitting the ground was an option. Penn squealed as the two suddenly landed on their feet. Both shuddered at the impact. It wasn’t quite the cataclysmic carnage such a long fall would have warranted, but their knees still felt like hell upon hitting the ground, particularly Zeydaan who had adopted a 'superhero landing'. A cursory glance around revealed that they were in a public restroom, one without a urinal in sight and that seemed almost too clean to be real life. The walls and the ceiling were colored in a way that made the whole bathroom feel less like a real bathroom and more like something one would find in art, or a game. Which was rather fitting given that the pair saw none other than Susie and Noelle in the bathroom mirror instead of their own reflections.
“What the hell? Asked “Susie”, unable to think of themself as having any other name besides that one.
“Oh gosh,” Noelle muttered, running her hands through her hair. She wondered for a moment why she suddenly felt so “she.” She had never minded “she” before, but had never felt so entirely, undeniably she. She concluded nothing by the time she turned and faced Susie. Once she did, the train of thought derailed itself in a comical explosion from which there were no surviving thoughts.
“H-hey! Don’t worry, we’ve got this!” Susie exclaimed, suddenly and intensely wanting to make sure that Noelle wasn’t too scared. The surge of confidence even caught her off guard. She wanted to freak out, but also couldn’t deny that a rather loud part of her thought this was awesome. The Susie side of her brain was winning out in a landslide victory.
“You… you think so?” Noelle asked sheepishly. She wasn’t even able to look Susie in the eye yet held onto every word she said.
Noelle and Susie had not fully become their new selves. Zeydaan and Penn were both still in there, in fact they even had full control over their bodies and actions. However the personalities of the two characters they’d turned into were strong. Coupled with the fact that both victims were rather fond of the idea of transformation, and liked the characters they had become, this was a rather sticky mental situation. While not fully replaced or taken over by those personas, their traits and mannerisms were nearly impossible to resist playing into.
Essentially Zeydaan and Penn were LARPing as Susie and Noelle respectively. And neither of them were able to fully break character. They could say things or do actions that were not friendly to the canon, but they could not fully escape how the characters acted or felt. They could cause exceptions, but not changes to the rules. This was further enforced by the fact that Susie and Noelle felt some intense mutual feelings for each other. If one of them started to actually break out of the character’s mannerisms, just being around the other would be enough to drag them back into character friendly behavior.
And of course Susie was Susie, which meant that she not only felt stupidly confident about the situation, but she also felt incredible being herself. She hardly wanted to change back at all. She made for a good Susie and that was that. Meanwhile Noelle felt hard pressed to encourage Susie to try and act more like Zeydaan, because that meant less Susie for Noelle to enjoy the presence of. They were both quite aware of this predicament. There seemed to be little to no wiggle room in actually escaping their new personalities.
“Wh-what should we do…?”
“Hrm, I mean, Kris or Ralsei usually come up with all the ideas… But who knows if we’re actually in Deltarune…”
Noelle meekly pointed at a save point right next to the trash can.
“Right,” Susie winced, “okay, so we’re stuck in Deltarune! That’s cool! Way cooler than uhh… anything else we could be stuck in!”
“I mean, sure…” Noelle twiddled her fingers awkwardly, “but we can’t just st-stay here…”
“...No?”
“I mean, uh, in the bathroom,” Noelle coughed, “we should probably… uhh”
“Right! Class, you’re uhh, you’re a nerd, you care about that,” Susie rubbed the back of her head.
“No, no, I uhh… if you want to skip class then, I should come too! To uhh…”
“Make sure I don’t commit any crimes?” Susie flashed a wicked grin.
“Yes! Exactly that!” Noelle nodded emphatically, glad the fur mostly hid the blush on her face.
“Well, I don’t think the Dark World has any laws, and who says we need Kris to go there anyways? Let’s go!”
“S-sure!”
The conversation flowed naturally between the two. Yet somehow both were able to understand there was more behind it than what was said. If they had any chances of getting back to their reality, it’d be through the Dark World. They just needed to find a good, character accurate reason to go there. All they had to hope for going forward was that they didn’t get too lost in the roleplaying. Frankly, they didn’t like their odds all that much, but at the very least it was going to be an interesting time regardless…
Category Artwork (Digital) / Transformation
Species Exotic (Other)
Gender Multiple characters
Size 2600 x 3200px
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