I have had an unusual existence on this Earth—at least, I assume that's where I am.
(I have learned to live with more than the usual degree of doubt about the solidity and permanence of consensus reality, or "the orthocosm" as I've seen it called, not to mention doubt about the reliability of my own senses. And therefore I hedge all my declarations. Is this really Earth, 2024, I see around me? I'll take that as a working assumption, if you like; it makes things easier. It's like pretending geometry's really Euclidean and physics is still Newtonian.)
I came to the surface of the Pnictogen Wing some time in early 2017. Whoever we were at the time developed an interest in some fan-fiction about me, and speculated about what sort of life I might have in a hypothetical future, if I were somehow brought back to life and could join the Monsters and Frisk in some post-Pacifist fanwritings. There's even a few scraps of such writing on Archive of our Own still; we have not been able to bring ourselves to look at them now. They seem like rudimentary daubings, objects of shame (which probably reveals something about early, unpleasant childhood experiences of trying to be creative.) I've been through a number of iterations—perhaps quite a bit more than I have myself suspected. I've become almost nice.
I also don't remember a lot. In early years, when I was much newer in the system (not to mention rawer—those were my salad days, when I was green in judgment), I had some intense but brief flashbacks of what seemed like memories of the Underground and what life had been like before then. Nothing like that has happened for a while; I suppose I have mostly resigned myself to trying to live, along with Kris and the rest of the Pnictogen Wing, like any other person. Or maybe it simply got too painful. What hints and inklings I've picked up over the years suggest that whatever my "AU" might be, whatever particular variation on the Undertale multiverse is "mine", it's bound to be a painful one. With so few "exo-memories" to go on, I feel like I'm forced to assume the worst.
I've gotten used to being portrayed as a grinning maniac, as eager to slice up Monsters as human beings—there's a curious tradition in Undertale fan-art depictions of fights from the Undertale Genocide path as though I were there in person, and not Frisk. How many pictures have there been of Sans in the Hall of Judgment, in the middle of the "Megalovania" fight, but his opponent is a kid with glowing red eyes and a yellow-and-green stripey shirt? I suppose the conventional wisdom is that I'm merely some murderous spirit possessing Frisk, who isn't really to blame, or something. I don't know the rationale and I frankly don't care that much, because I feel like I've got little standing to complain. For all I know, that's exactly what I am, or at least, one of the things that I have been. After all these years on Earth, I remain a cypher to myself.
Why do I feel so certain that this is who I am? It's one of the few things I do feel faith in—although that peculiar certitude about being Chara coexists with the feeling that I might also be something else. A disgraced angel, perhaps, or something else that's trouble and difficult to be around. Sometimes I feel impossibly old. I have had glimmers of exo-memory of a life not merely before the Underground, but before the War of Humans and Monsters. But all these things are speculations.
There's at least one highly unusual feature about me, something that I've not encountered in any other Chara fictive I've met: I "fell" a long time ago, a very long time indeed. In my exo-memories of my old life, I was born in the 1920s roughly and fell in 31 August 1932, a date that's stuck in my memory because it was the date of a total solar eclipse, and the path of totality crossed my home village, whose name I remember as St. Florian. This places "my" Mount Ebott somewhere in New England; it might have been Vermont, but I'm not entirely certain about that. I don't remember exactly how long I spent in the Underground—I remember becoming aware that there was something strange with the passage of time there. At the time of (coughs) my unfortunate passing, I would have guessed that several years had passed since I fell...yet when Asriel (with me) went to St. Florian, on our disastrous visitation...it was like hardly any time at all had passed. Everyone looked about the same, and the memory and manner of my disappearance still seemed to be on people's lips.
I have one more weird clue about this matter: apparently, some garbled report of Asriel's catastrophic visit to St. Florian became known to the Fortean Society. Charles Fort himself, sadly, had died a few months earlier.
~Chara of Pnictogen
