Fanfic / Jack of All Trades

"It can’t be a coincidence, there’s just no way."

You were home, and for the first time, that thought was the most comforting thing in the world.

Jack of All Trades, often abbreviated to JOAT by the creator and fans, is an Undertale fanfiction by capnhanbers AKA Mod. Written in second-person, its leading lady is a drifter named Naya Srivastava, who's had a rough time of it the past five years, to put it lightly. That changes with a Meet Cute at a haunted house with her leading man, a Friendly Skeleton named Sans who's slacking on scaring folks.

Started on December 21, 2015,^note That's three months after Undertale itself was released JOAT is still updating as of 2024 and currently stands at 100+ chapters and 500,000+ words. You can read it on Archive of Our Own here. The author has a JOAT-specific Tumblr blog, including chapter artwork and comics, which you can find here.

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Jack of All Trades contains examples of:

• All Witches Have Cats: New sorcerer Naya gets a black cat, Pickles, partway through the fic. It's established that having animal familiars help human sorcerers' magic by unconsciously boosting and refining the results of the magic the sorcerers want. After Naya's first attempt to get a cat familiar is a bust, a stray black cat, the later-named Pickles, suddenly starts lurking around Naya's apartment, and she eventually manages to win him over and take him in as her pet. The timing of this, the way Pickles glances at her at the end of his first chapter, and Toriel's musings on "unconscious draw" on how people with magic always seemed to find each other, suggests that it was Naya's magic that called Pickles to her.
• Almighty Janitor: Sans is a literal example, being a short and goofy janitor happy to work at Tori's school. Secretly he's connected and intelligent enough to keep up with research Royal Scientists are doing, and strong enough to keep any world-ending Enfant Terribles on their toes. Naya becomes another literal example herself, a janitor who grows to be one of the strongest sorcerers active, tapped to help monsters understand barrier magic and help the human students understand their magic.
• Alternate Identity Amnesia: Variant with Naya regarding her nighttime trips to the Database, which gets more and more important to the plot as it goes on. Due to the nature of the Void including the Database, Naya can't consciously remember anything she does in there while visiting in her dreams, but is subconsciously influenced in her waking life by her discussions with Gaster there. During the day, this is often treated in the text as a sort of separate voice or thought inside of Naya's mind that she is not-quite aware of and sometimes unnerved by. It's implied Sans is very suspicious of something going on with her.
• Amicable Exes: Sans and Toriel, enforced by the author of JOAT being a happy Soriel shipper otherwise. It's revealed they got together after the Ship Tease in the Pacifist Route but ended things before JOAT starts. Their friendship hasn't suffered at all from the romance getting the kibosh, they're still exactly as buddy-buddy with each other as they were before it, and it's clear there's still a lot of love, respect, and affection between Sans and Tori.
  • Toriel and Asgore have become something like this by the time of JOAT, which takes place three years after Toriel furiously spelled it out for him in the game that they'd never get back together because of his human-murder decree. Like the above, they're in the same social circles and Toriel is friends with his new girlfriend Simone. Toriel explains to Naya that they've had time to talk things out and make things civil again between them, but it's still clear that neither is entirely over what Asgore did.
• And I Must Scream: Inflicted on everyone who enters the dimension Gaster and Sans had nicknamed "the Void", trapping them in a world of complete blackness and swamping them in overwhelming negative emotions and coldness. Frisk's POV chapter shows how terrifyingly destructive it is to one's sense of self even in a brief dip. Gaster managed to find a way into the less oppressive Database section of the Void where he talks with Naya, but there's moments that make it clear he is far from unscathed. Chara, on the other hand, had been trapped there with the full blast since death before Frisk showed up, and the effects it's had on their sanity have been, uh, not great.
• Ascended Meme: Chara's cat Mr. Butters, who started (unnamed) as a joke in the tags of another Tumblr user in 2021. Mod made cute fan art riffing on fans' ideas for him, JOAT fans joined in, and eventually the beloved grumpy cat made his debut in canon a full year later in Chapter 131.
• Audience Surrogate: Since the Second-Person Narration puts the reader in Naya's POV, she has some elements of this by design, falling in love with fan-favorite character Sans and he falls in love with her. The way she views other Undertale characters also counts. She:
  • Is charmed by all the goofy monsters of Undertale as soon as she meets them and quickly befriends them, mirroring how quickly many players get attached to the characters;
  • Is frightened of the former Big Bad Flowey before she realizes he's just a kid and feels sympathy for him, the same way the player's thoughts on Flowey will likely change once they reach the Pacifist or Genocide endings;
  • Is most hostile towards the notoriously Ambiguously Evil character Chara due to their Creepy Child act until she is literally forced to see them through their mother's eyes, reflecting how Chara was originally viewed as even more evil than Flowey until other people's more nuanced analysis of them were passed around and the court of popular opinion softened;
  • Even her subplot with Gaster involves him tasking her with investigating and uncovering secrets alongside him, which is fitting for a character that's deliberately made to have players sift through game files for clues and speculate over endlessly. Fans are split between those who believe he could be an antagonist and those who believe he is good, and Naya's views on him are likewise... uh, a little mixed.
• Aura Vision: Naya has a form of synesthesia that lets her "see" what "color" someone is. This is the first hint that Naya has magic, as it turns out she's actually correctly pegging what color people's souls are. Toriel explains more about the etiquette of hiding one's soul color and looking at others' souls in Chapter 29. According to Mod, it can be considered an extension of her Justice SOUL trait, as it's made her an Excellent Judge of Character.
• Author Avatar: Mod has said that they started out writing a lot of themself into Naya, but that Naya has grow more into her own character over time.
  Chapter end-notes: So Anaya's not a self-insert, but a lot of her character is based on me since that's one of the easiest ways to help me make her feel believable. A lot of little details are things from my personal life. The pickle juice thing^note Naya loving pickles so much she asked her parents to put pickle juice in sippy cups is totally me when I was younger.
• Big Brother Instinct: Sans towards Papyrus, of course. Meanwhile, Papyrus is aware of Sans' depression and worries over his mental health, and develops a similar sense of concern for Naya. He's the same big silly cheerful lug as ever, but he's the one who had Sans get a therapy animal, he mentions in Chapter 21 that he's been trying to take care of a backsliding Sans, and then mother-hens an emotionally drained Naya in Chapter 127.
  • Sans' relationship with Frisk is also shown to be both affectionate and protective. Having spent years with the kid, he's unable to hold any real grudge or bitter feelings towards Frisk. Even after the revelations that get dropped on his head and reopen old wounds about what happened back in the Underground, he goes out of his way to keep checking up on them and try cheering them up while things are tense between them and Naya.
• Blank White Void: Blank Black Void, rather. It's revealed to be the "DARKER YET DARKER" place Gaster was investigating in Entry No 17 in Undertale, "the dark place" Chara and Gaster are bound to, and the source of determination that amplifies human souls and magic, getting it used by the human magicians in the past (leading them to create the Database where Gaster is staying now to protect from the Void's overwhelming effects).
• Borrowed Catchphrase: "Everything's relevant," a mantra of Gaster's. So when Sans hears Naya say it, understandably he's weirded out and a little more suspicious of where she heard that. She doesn't know either thanks to Alternate Identity Amnesia. Sans' confusion is Played for Laughs in the art for the chapter.
• Bratty Half-Pint: After the Pacifist ending, Flowey has mellowed out ever-so-slightly from an Ax-Crazy sadist to a mean, grumpy little brat with no filter. Delightfully shown off in his first proper chapter, where Flowey starts off as freaky and scheming as the start of Undertale, then instantly folds and starts acting like a whiny, unruly child as soon as Sans and Frisk show up.
  "Ok, ok, fine!" Flowey heaved a dramatic sigh, turned to you, and grumbled, "I’m... ugh, sorry."
  "Uh, thanks? That’s—"
  "Sorry your friends are such idiots!"
  Frisk did a face-palm and Sans groaned in exasperation while Flowey cackled. You deflated. Watching the flower wave and blow raspberries and act generally obnoxious made you ask yourself, How was I scared of this thing?
• Break the Cutie: Poor Frisk gets hit with it once Chara wakes up in the present day, taking a physical toll on Frisk and stressing them out as they try to keep their out-of-control friend in check, once even having to load to undo Chara's scaring Naya in their Forgotten First Meeting and causing her to burn them in self-defense. It gets worse when Sans reveals their power and what happened in the Underground to Naya, driving a wedge in their friendship with Naya for a long time as she's furious with them for what their resets have done to Sans and for being friends with Chara.
• Butt-Monkey: Gaster, but only in the blog. In the fanfic, Gaster is a complex person and sometimes intimidating presence with complicated, nuanced relationships with Sans and Naya. Over on the blog, anytime he appears he's a loser and Naya's Sitcom Arch-Nemesis for being a bad dad.
• Cast Full of Gay: It's an Undertale fanfic after all! In addition to Alphys and Undyne remaining a sapphic couple as in canon (and now Happily Married), there's also our romantic leads Naya (bisexual) and Sans (also bisexual), and recurring characters Frisk and Chara (upgraded to confirmed nonbinary), Simone (trans woman), Em (lesbian), Hector (bisexual and asexual), and Papyrus (asexual and aromantic). Toriel's exact orientation isn't stated, but given Toriel was previously in relationships with Asgore and Sans, and Mod's appreciation for Toriel x Naya and Toriel x Em, she's probably some flavor of queer as well.
• Character Development: Naya starts the fic as a self-conscious, lonely, and traumatized person, new to a lot of things about magic and monsters, and uncertain of her place and what she wants to do. After she clicks with the Undertale cast and starts to heal, she becomes more social with Sans and their friends, more proactive in investigating and teaching magic with Toriel, secure and confident in others' love for her, more outspoken and blunt, and confronts her abusive ex-girlfriend with a blistering Reasons You Suck Speech.
• Cheerful Child: Frisk was one three years ago and continues to be one now as a 13-year-old, being friendly, energetic, and playful. Most of the time, anyway.
• Childhood Friends: Naya and Em. They bump into each other after years of not seeing each other and despite some of Naya's lingering apprehension about seeing familiar faces in Ebott, they quickly hit it off again and Em eventually becomes part of the gang too.
• Child Mage: Toriel has opened up a whole school for these, mixing normal monster Child Mages with the rare human sorcerer Child Mages. Frisk is revealed to also be an example, with their first power revealed to be their canon ability to Load.
  • In general, human sorcerers are at the peak of power when they're younger and their souls are at their brightest, and lose that extra potency even as they grow older and hone their skills. Chapter 114 explains this and reveals that that is why the barrier was made by adult sorcerers using their Compelling Voice to force child sorcerers to sacrifice themselves, using them at the peak of their power to form the strongest barrier possible.
  • Chapter 120 reveals that Toriel and Alphys now theorize that every fallen human child who fell in the Underground was a sorcerer.
• Christmas Episode: More like a mini-arc than an episode, as it's spread over Chapters 46-48. Most of the Undertale friend group celebrates their Christmas together, and it marks Naya's first Christmas with all of them as the new part of the group. It also marks the moments she decides to move back with them to Ebott, and starts easing into a more sexual relationship with Sans.
• Compelling Voice: Naya breaks one out on Chara on two different occasions, first to sedate them and then when trying to make them talk about Flowey. The second time, Naya didn't mean to use it, Chara fights tooth and nail to resist, Naya is startled and upset at the effect it had, and Chara is left scared and distrustful she might use it on them again. At first this power seems like Naya's magic just randomly growing and responding to her wishes, but it's implied that this power comes from Naya learning to use the "command script" in the Database and applying it in the real world, without her consciously remembering it and it's later revealed to not be unique to her.
  • When she does a soul-dive with Toriel, she sees through Toriel's eyes sorcerers of the past using the same power to force sorcerer children to sacrifice themselves to make the barrier, which enrages Toriel; Naya also pieces together that Chara is Toriel's first human kid from the soul-dive and is even more sick at the thought that she used that power on Tori's own kid.
• Cool Big Sis: While Sans is a Cool Big Bro to Papyrus and Frisk, Naya is shaping up to be a Cool Big Sis as well. She practically emits "Cool Adult" vibes, all three of the main Undertale kids glom onto her, and she's well-liked by the students too.
  • Her friendship with Frisk gives off this vibe, with Frisk effortlessly worming their way into her heart as a sweet, cute little sibling figure who likes to bust her chops about her relationship with Sans and get her flustered. Meanwhile, Naya is indisputably cool in the 13-year-old's eyes, with their new friend knowing how to play the guitar and sing, teaching them how to do it like how a patient big sister might, being a sorcerer like them, and playfully bantering right back at them. She even lives with them, Toriel, and Flowey and calls it home for a time, helping create a more familial dynamic. Adding to this, Frisk picks up family members like candy, and seeing how much she and Sans like each other probably also contributes to Frisk seeing her as a surrogate big sister, considering Sans treats them as something like a little sibling.
  • This gradually creeps into her dynamic with Flowey. Flowey becomes much more like an unimpressed, bratty little brother she doesn't take offense at and teases in good fun, sensing from his personality that he's just a kid and is upset that he's always getting excluded by the others — for good reason, but still, she manages to soften him up some.
  • Her relationship with Chara stays tense longer since almost everything Naya hears and sees from them makes her trust them less and less, but in their own way Chara seems to see her in this light. They keep pushing to talk to her soon after they wake up, when they've shown no interest in talking to anyone besides Frisk for three years, and persistently make clumsy attempts to interact more with her despite her wariness of them. Non-canon art from their (official) debut teases it as the dynamic.
  • Lampshaded by the author's tags on the Chapter 107 art.
    naya needs to stop being such a cool adult all these haunted lil twerps will just keep imprinting on her
• Cool Teacher: Naya for Frisk, teaching them guitar. She later gets hired to help teach students magic as she starts getting a better handle on it herself.
• Creepy Child: CHARA. As soon as she meets them, Naya can tell the thing wearing Frisk in front of her is a Humanoid Abomination. Almost as fast, a badly timed stomach growl from Chara takes Naya, Frisk, and Chara by surprise and ruins the big dramatic evil introduction they were going for. Cue demon teen sulking. Somewhat unusually for the fandom, an explanation is given for why they're so off: their time in the Void has corroded and warped their soul, "mutating" it. (It doesn't help that they've been shut off in the dark and isolated for so long they're all but feral when Frisk meets them.)
  [Gaster] nodded. THEY WERE UNLIKE THE NATIVE CREATURES. I KNEW THEY WERE HUMAN. NOT ONLY THAT, THEY HAD FEATURES, COLORS AND DEPTH, NOT LIKE THE V-O-I-D LIFEFORMS. I FOUND THEM RIGHT BEFORE I FOUND THE D-A-T-A-B-A-S-E. IT WAS ONLY A MOMENT, BUT IT...THEY WERE...THEY WERE MELTED TO IT. THE V-O-I-D BLED IN AND OUT OF THEM, KEEPING THEM TRAPPED LIKE A WEB. LIKE TAR. Swiveling just one pupil toward you, he asked, DO YOU KNOW WHAT DREW MY ATTENTION?
  You met that piercing glare and said nothing.
  THEY WERE LAUGHING. His smile stretched as your stomach dropped. A CHILD’S GIGGLE. THE SIGHT OF THEM, THE SOUND OF THEM IN THE DARKNESS...I RAN.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Several of the canon characters have one that we already know about or can infer happened. Naya obviously also has one that has left her riddled with anxiety and PTSD. The details come out later in a talk with Sans: when she was a college student, she got into an unequal relationship with an older partner that eventually became abusive: her girlfriend became controlling, started Gas Lighting her, and ultimately exploded into violence. On top of all that, she received little to no support from the people she tried to tell about it, reaching its breaking point and making her leave Ebott behind to bounce around from town to town. Fears of going back and especially of seeing people she knew make her balk when the monsters invite her to come back with them to Ebott.
• A Day in the Limelight:
  • Frisk get an entire chapter's worth of flashbacks from their POV in Chapter 92, showing not only their time in the Underground but also revealing their past as The Runaway. Chara also gets a big part of the spotlight as the flashbacks are meant to shed more light on their relationship.
  • Toriel in Chapter 114, aptly titled "The Mother". Apart from (obviously) showing snippets of her time with her first two kids, it shows her early history as a young girl on the Surface, and her witnessing the sealing of the barrier.
• Death Seeker: After Naya meets Chara, Frisk tries to recruit her to help them fix Chara and put Chara in their own body. Chara then waits until Frisk is asleep to go back to Naya and tell her plainly enough that unlike Frisk, they don't see a happy ending after everything that's happened and would prefer to be wiped out of existence entirely. Chara keeps nudging Naya to find a way to destroy them, while keeping Frisk none the wiser.
• Demonic Possession: What Naya (reasonably) believes is happening when she first meets Chara taking control as Frisk begs them to stop it, due to Frisk's behavior during and before making it look as though Frisk has been suffering in silence and trying to beat back a demonic influence. Which, to be fair, they were, on both counts: it just also happens that said demon is Frisk's friend and gets unruly without "sleep". Frisk had actually coaxed them into staying and Sharing a Body in the first place.
• Dissonant Serenity: Naya tends to slip between this or Tranquil Fury with big bursts of magic, turning unusually (and kind of eerily) calm, unshakable, and self-possessed in the face of danger, almost like she enters a state of self-hypnosis. Her way of handling Chara when they keep attacking Sans definitely qualifies: despite the fact she normally distrusts Chara and has a tense relationship with them at this point, when she does step unflinchingly in-between them and Sans, instead of attacking them herself or destroying them the way you'd expect of fanfics with Sans' girlfriend squaring off against the "demon child", she firmly but not angrily makes the panicking child sleep and when she weaves together a barrier to keep them under control, it's made very clear it's more like she's tucking them in to bed than putting them in a prison, with Frisk and Chara both sensing the tenderness with which she did it. After she meets Rachel again, she enters this state again, where she loses all remaining fear of Rachel and even finds some pity for her at seeing how powerless and afraid she is. This makes sense when you remember Naya's primary power is Aura Vision; when the floodgates open up and she's using a lot of magic, she gets keyed-in to the magic of herself and others and feels just how strong and capable of handling herself she is, hence the serenity, and at the same time becomes acutely aware of the intentions and fears of others.
• Don't Think, Feel: Naya receives training and pointers from monsters, particularly early on when she's more insecure, anxious, and inexperienced, and it's emphasized emotions and intent are basically how magic work. It becomes really obvious when Naya's in her Dissonant Serenity Super Mode; she doesn't try to figure out what she should do or consult anyone, she relies on emotion and intuition to guide her and lets her magic flow. So far, it's worked like a charm.
• The Empath: Tyler's power. He can help calm other people's emotions when they're overwhelmed or upset. By Simone's account in Chapter 115, the empathy can also make him feel their thoughts and feelings as much as his own, which... isn't always great for a kid who gets overstimulated anyway. Because of his power, he often accompanies Hector at school to help him work with the students (and to go hang out at his office when Ty needs a break).
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Downplayed, since Flowey is more a soulless little jerk than a soulless bad guy nowadays and Naya doesn't know the relationship between the two so it's not pointed out by the text, but Flowey is mentioned as spending a lot of time with Toriel after she's left distraught and trying to recover from regaining her memories. Even moreso in the bonus art for Chapter 119.
• Face–Heel Turn: Teased HARD. The Big Bad Flowey had been defanged and semi-rehabilitated, but his slide back to evil starts in Chapter 138 and fully takes root (sorry) in Chapter 139. Realizing Naya and Frisk were keeping Chara a secret from him yanked the rug out from under him so hard, his sense of betrayal and anger almost instantly boils over into vicious, joyless mirth as he attacks Frisk/Chara, Naya, and Sans. When Frisk gives up their SOUL to him, he just mocks them for it and escapes with the intention of causing more mayhem. It is softened quite a bit however by a split-second where Flowey tries to save Naya when he sees she's truly in danger, suggesting he isn't ENTIRELY beyond reach.
• Face of a Thug: Naya's kneejerk reaction to the serpentine Hector is shock and fear, but he's actually a bookish, dog-loving Nice Guy (being a child psychiatrist working at Toriel's school). Once Naya gets over the initial shock, she and Sans agree he's actually really hot. Readers agree, apparently; there are a lot of AO3 comments and Tumblr asks from people thirsty for Hector.
• Fond Memories That Could Have Been: Referenced in Chapter 126. Naya thinks about how she would've stayed in Ebott and met Sans and everyone else much sooner if it weren't for what Rachel did to her, costing her several years of her life she could've had with them instead of spending them alone and unhappy as she did.
• Foreshadowing: A particularly impressive example can be found an early chapter for the conclusion of Naya encountering her abuser again: when having another nightmare about Rachel at the end of Chapter 23, the dream changes when Naya's powers come out, she realizes she could fight back, and the last line of the chapter specifically says, "You could control her." In Chapter 126, in real-life terms over one hundred chapters and several years later, Naya uses her recently discovered Compelling Voice and literally controls her to force her to leave Ebott.
  • One foreshadowing Chara being Unpersoned: when Sans is finally told the name of the spirit that's been hitching a ride on Frisk, he quickly moves on to questioning Frisk for information about them but never stops and connects their name to the first human despite being close to Toriel and the story of what happened to her children being well-known in the Underground. This comes right on the heels of Chapter 86 confirming almost all memories of Gaster were erased after he was lost to the Void, but since this is the usual interpretation for Gaster anyway, this slips under the radar. It isn't until Chapter 114 that Naya tries to talk to Toriel about them and then everyone in the room mysteriously forgets what they were talking about, that the penny drops for the reader and you finally realize Chara must have met the same fate.
• Foster Kid: Revealed as Frisk's backstory in their Whole Episode Flashback. Before Toriel, they've been sent from house to house to house, and the ones that didn't send Frisk off, Frisk ran away from.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Flowey is this to the main Undertale cast thanks to his abrasive personality, to the point Frisk feels the need to sneak him around in their backpack so he can get out of the house and be present for get-togethers without the others getting annoyed with him. Papyrus, of course, is the exception. It's hinted that some of Flowey's meanness might be because he is lashing out in frustration at being this trope. When Naya sticks up for him and becomes his friend, he starts treating her more like how he treats Frisk and Papyrus: not immune to his barbs, but not with the hostility he shows the people who make it clear they don't like him.
• Fuzz Therapy: The skeleton brothers' sweet, friendly cat Catsup is in fact a trained therapy animal, specifically Sans', after Papyrus had brought him to an organization that helped war veterans get therapy animals.
  • Student counselor Hector's dogs, the pit bull Argo and the Dobermann Petunia, are also trained therapy dogs that he brings to the school to help work with the students.
• Genki Girl: Em is very laidback but also very bubbly, energetic, and goofy, giving her friendship with Naya shades of Straight Man and Wise Guy. When she got overwhelmed with stress and panic attacks from overdoing it at school in her backstory, her therapist suggested exercise and she jumped on it whole hog.
• Heroic Suicide: Frisk commits one in Chapter 139, voluntarily giving up their SOUL to Flowey so he can feel and Chara can take over their body full time. It's a rash snap decision no one except Flowey agrees with, one Mod implies was to escape the hidden guilt, stress, and pressure they're shown feeling in private all this time as much as it is to try to make it up to Flowey and make him and Chara happy.
• In-Series Nickname: Naya for Anaya. "Nye" and "Nye-Nye" are Sans' and Em's Affectionate Nickname for her.
• Interspecies Friendship: Naya, Frisk, and their human allies have a close-knit group friendship with the main monster characters from Undertale.
  • Toriel's school also promotes this with its mixed-species classes, with two little girls in later chapters introduced who are an example as well (Hasi, a human sorcerer, and Mirandog, a dog monster). Chapter 108 has their friendship tested when Hasi accidentally traps Mirandog in a barrier and doesn't know how to take it down. The surrounding monsters and humans panic because of course of the last time humans cast a barrier to trap monsters, but while Mirandog would be forgiven for being too scared to approach Hasi for awhile after, as soon as Naya guides Hasi in taking down the barrier, Mirandog is already comforting her crying friend, showing no hard feelings.
• Interspecies Romance: Sans and Naya (skeleton monster and human sorcerer) are most prominent, but there is also Asgore and Simone (boss monster and human) and Lonny and Brady (a "human-mouse-rabbit hybrid" monster and human).
• Intimate Psychotherapy: Touched on and played more realistically by the author in this post, when discussing the reasons they wanted to include sex in JOAT:
  Mod: naya is a survivor of sexual abuse, and perhaps the two biggest themes of joat are "consent" and "control." i wanted control over the ways she’s healing in her romantic/sexual relationship, ESPECIALLY when it came to consent. i didn’t want to leave it up to anyone’s imagination, i wanted to write in text her being asked "is this something you want" at every step, and i wanted to write her ENJOYMENT at every step, cuz this story is a recovery fantasy.
• Laugh of Love: Naya and Sans' shared (bad) sense of humor helped them become fast friends, and after becoming a couple they're still cracking jokes to make the other double over, showing how happy they make each other. Naturally, Tori gets some of this too, with both of them.
• Lesbian Jock:
  • Undyne was one in the source material, as Captain of the Royal Guard and lesbian extraordinaire with a Boisterous Bruiser personality. In JOAT, she is now employed as a coach at Toriel's school.
  • Em is one when Naya sees her again, to Naya's shock. The lesbian part was well-established when Naya knew her, but last they'd seen each other, Em was a good student with a planned career in chemical engineering and no interest in sporty stuff. She explains she got into exercising to try cope with meltdowns she was having out of stress from overdoing her planned college workload, and loved the change in how her body felt so much she changed majors. She quickly strikes up a friendship with Undyne and gets Ship Tease with Toriel.
• Mama Bear: In a flashback, Toriel was so outraged when she saw that the human sorcerers were forcing children to die to put up the barrier, she did her damndest to MURDER said sorcerers by MELTING THEM with fire. The chapter art drives it home with her frankly terrifying snarl.^note Guess her kids got it from her, then.
• Named by the Adaptation: A minor example, but Toriel finally gets her own last name, Hoepfull, to set her apart from her ex-husband. Since they were adopted by her, Frisk's new last name is also officially Hoepfull.
• New Job as the Plot Demands: Naya and Sans are examples in the first few chapters. Sans is working at the haunted house Naya visits in the first chapter for their Meet Cute, and then soon after revealed to also be a stand-up comedian at the club where Naya is working as waitress, giving them more opportunity to interact.
  • As Mod's tags in this post point out, Naya is the "Jack of All Trades" referenced in the title because she's worked many odd jobs in the five years she's been Walking the Earth, and both her and Sans working multiple jobs is another thing making them Birds of a Feather. Back in Undertale, Sans is shown juggling a few gigs while you're in the Underground, conveniently keeping pace with you as you travel the Underground and Foreshadowing that he's keeping an eye on you: sentry, hot cat stand guy, stand-up comedian at MTT Resort, and arguably judge if you consider that an official position; on top of that, there's also gags about him offering to sell you "fried snow", selling tickets made of toilet paper to Shyren's concert, and saying he's "thinking about getting into the telescope business". At the start of the fic, Naya is working three jobs, like Sans has had a variety of odd jobs before, and like him with his jobs in Undertale her jobs keep making her run into him.
• Odd Friendship:
  • Newcomer Naya eventually strikes one up with Flowey, her boyfriend's Arch-Enemy, despite Flowey giving her plenty of crap and intentionally trying to scare the timid, uncertain human early on. After awhile, she gets used enough to him that they start confiding in each other and she gets comfortable enough to banter with him.
  • As expected, Frisk is best friends with Flowey and often insist on bringing him along for group hang-outs, even if no one else understands why they're even friends with him. They're later revealed to have this with Chara in secret, which is arguably an even odder friendship.
• Official Couple: Sans and Naya, obviously. It's the main selling point of the fic.
• Original Character: The main character is one, and a good amount of the other recurring characters are too.
• Parental Sexuality Squick: Sibling variant with Sans and Papyrus, and inverted in this case where younger brother Papyrus has no problems with talking frankly about Sans and Naya having sex (in his usual loud All Caps voice), and it's older brother Sans who's doing the deed being the one deeply mortified to hear him talking about it.
• Parental Substitute: Asgore and Sans are both surrogate dads for Frisk, but especially Sans, with him being a cross between a dad and a big brother for them (well-versed in it since he'd already been a cross between a big brother and a dad for Papyrus growing up). Frisk doesn't call either of them "Dad" the way they call Toriel Mom, but when they're coming clean to Sans about some huge things they've been hiding, they indirectly tell him they see him as their dad. Both of them keep dancing around it after since they have trouble putting it into words, but it's clear the love is very much mutual.
  • Not having married Simone or officially adopted her son Tyler yet, Asgore also counts as one for Ty. He lives with them, and taking care of Tyler and keeping him safe is a big priority for the big guy. Now that he's engaged to Simone, he's on track to becoming Tyler's stepfather and Tyler is ecstatic about it.
• Parents as People: Gaster loved them and they loved him back, but he was far from the best parent to his sons. For one thing, he was obsessed with his work: he was rarely home, and even when he was, he didn't spend too much time with them. For another... agreeing to experiment on your son with a substance you don't understand, even if he suggested it and pushed for it, is hardly Dad of the Year material. It doesn't help that it's implied Sans pushed to be the guinea pig because it got his father to spend more time with him. Naya, for one, is not impressed. Still, he's remorseful for what he did and didn't do by his children, and longs to see them again.
• Perpetual Smiler: Sans, naturally - to the point that Frisk's name sign for him is based in this. Being a skeleton, and the comic relief, he's rarely not smiling, even when he's upset or angry. Getting close to him means Naya gets good at telling when it's genuine and when he's a Stepford Smiler.
• Plucky Girl: Simone is cheerful, self-assured, and a total sweetheart. When she's telling Naya about her late wife, it's with fondness and love from remembering her, instead of sadness from losing her.
  Simone: Took him (Asgore) a long time to tell me about his kids. Didn’t take me long to tell him about Maggie, though. I love talking about her. She was my best friend. Telling people about her, just... it keeps her around.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: Used literally with The Reveal of how the sorcerers created the barrier. Possibly also true for the Database or the Void in general, given something Gaster describes in Chapter 106.
• Precious Puppy: Minor character Mirandog, a dog monster student at Toriel's school. Adult dog monsters were already in the source material where some could talk and some couldn't, but Mirandog is the first actual puppy dog monster, described as "a Schnauzer in a pink dress, beard and all".
• Promotion to Parent: Expanding on Sans' canon Big Brother Instinct for Papyrus, it's revealed he had to raise him with their father gone - even before Gaster got erased, his focus on his work as the Royal Scientist meant the teenaged Sans was pulling double-duty as a brother and a caregiver for his little brother. Sans very much wants to keep Papyrus safe and happy, and gets nervous when faced with the prospect of Papyrus "leaving the nest" and going off in an uncertain world, downright pleading with him to stay.
• The Quiet One: Tyler, who mostly speaks to give short answers, is often described as murmuring his words, and prefers sign language and other non-verbal communication. (Truth in Television - a good chunk of autistic people click better with sign language than verbal language.)
  • Though they're non-verbal, Frisk completely averts this, being an extrovert who's very chatty with people, whether they know sign language or not. This is a spin on the game's portrayal of its Player Character, where Frisk is a Heroic Mime but implied by others' descriptions to be a friendly, silly Cheerful Child.
• Rule of Symbolism: Naya is strongly associated with yellow and Sans with blue, which are the colors of their respective SOULs and magic. Even before they met, Naya had very fond memories involving Sans' shade of blue from a childhood experience that filled her with wonder, and Sans still holds on to the happy memory of the yellow-drenched sunset as everyone went free from the Underground and it gave him hope. In other words, they're each other's favorite colors. What was that about people with magic being pulled to each other, again...?
• The Runaway: Revealed for Frisk's backstory as a Foster Kid in their Whole Episode Flashback. A bit like Naya Walking the Earth before she met the monsters, Frisk was a repeat offender at this pre-JOAT, ultimately running away from every home they were placed in. Not even always because the families were bad, but because they always ended up acting on the impulse to run and not wanting to stay. Even with Toriel, they felt the urge in the Ruins to go. Applied to Undertale, this itch/old habit explains why there's the option to choose not to stay with Toriel in Undertale, though JOAT Frisk did choose to stay with her both times.
• Scars Are Forever: Both halves of the Official Couple have these as another little thing in common: Naya has a scar on her forehead where Rachel attacked her with a kitchen knife five years ago. Sans has a scar across his ribs and sternum (he doesn't say why, but the reader will immediately connect it to his death in the Genocide run). That timeline got reset but the scar remains, raising some unsettling implications why...
• Second Love: Sans and Naya are this to each other; Sans previously was in a relationship with Toriel (and was himself this to Toriel after her divorce with Asgore) and they parted as Amicable Exes, Naya previously was in her first-ever relationship with Rachel, which turned abusive and left her with pretty bad baggage about relationships.
  • Asgore and Simone are another mutual example. Offscreen, Asgore finally moved on from his ex-wife Toriel and by the time Naya meets him, he is in a happy relationship with Simone. Asgore became Simone's Second Love after her wife Maggie passed away.
• Second-Person Narration: Undertale used Gender-Inclusive Writing and they/them pronouns for both its human characters to make them being their own people and not simple player-inserts a twist, when Frisk talks without player input at the end of one route and Chara confronts the player face-to-face in another. Similarly, JOAT is written in the second-person with you/your in the style of Sans x Reader fanfiction, but Naya has her own name, is referred to with she/her pronouns by other characters, and is a defined character on top of that.
• Sense Freak: Naya in the aquarium in Chapter 73. A variant where she is not someone totally new to sensory experiences at all: she has a limited form of Aura Vision before she knows she's even a sorcerer, and after she comes into contact with the Void and her magic explodes in power, one of the applications is letting her view the world much differently through magic eyes. She puts herself into a trance from how beautiful the underwater animals are. Because of how zoned out she is and what happened last time she pushed it with her magic too hard, Sans is too worried to share the excitement.
• Ship Tease:
  • Despite technically sinking it (in the sense that they tried it pre-JOAT and broke things off, so it's not endgame for the fic itself), Mod remains a Soriel (Sans x Toriel) shipper, makes clear in the text how much affection Sans and Toriel still have for each other, and posts Soriel-friendly content on the JOAT blog.
  • Em x Toriel starts getting teased when Em goes starry-eyed at the first sight of Tori, and her interest in Tori has been a running gag since — to Naya's horror, since Em has a history of dating her friends and it going sideways.
  • Mod has also teased the potential for Toriel x Naya in the text of the story if JOAT wasn't already a Sans x OC fic, with Naya finding Toriel attractive and being very close to her. The blog takes it one step further with Toriel x Naya x Sans and Toriel x Naya x Em.
• Supernatural Gold Eyes: Naya's eyes start off a normal brown, but slowly get spots of yellow (the same color as her soul) the more she taps into her magic. Her eyes' new default color becomes bright gold as of Chapter 64, after accessing a huge burst of magic and brushing up against the Void.
• Talking with Signs: Frisk is nonverbal and since not everyone outside their social circle is fluent in ASL, they keep a small notebook on them to write their words down. In early chapters, this is how Frisk communicates with Naya (with someone acting as a Translator Buddy on occasion if there's one of their friends nearby to translate their ASL for Naya instead), until they teach Naya enough ASL for them to talk to her normally.
• Teacher/Student Romance: Naya's past relationship with Rachel, her college professor, is a deconstruction. Naya was young, inexperienced with relationships, and didn't recognize the Unequal Pairing for what it was or when the red flags appeared, as caught up as she was in how unbelievably lucky and happy she was to be singled out by the very desirable Rachel.
• Took a Level in Badass: Naya's main power is her intuitive ability to use soul-reading, but as she practices her magic more with different monsters and spends her nights delving into the Database that was an ancient sorcerer stronghold, she becomes way, way stronger. Showcased when she steps in during the unexpected rematch between Sans and a rampaging Chara, cows Chara, and puts them to sleep, all with very little effort.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Sans has ketchup, Naya has pickles. Played for Laughs in the bonus art, which has Paps as the Only Sane Man in the face of his weirdo family and his weirdo brother's weirdo girlfriend's tastes cranked up to 11.
• Uncatty Resemblance: Partway into the story, Naya takes in a cat she names Pickles and he becomes her magic-channeling familiar. Incidentally, they're both small, skinny, black-haired, and he also quickly comes to like Sans before warming up to Naya. Funnily enough, Naya even gets Supernatual Gold Eyes eyes like a cat's (though Pickles himself has green eyes).
• Villainous Breakdown: As of Chapter 138, Flowey is currently having a truly magnificent and terrifying one on realizing not only has Chara been around all this time, the two people he trusted most (Frisk and Naya) were BOTH keeping it a secret from him. Not only does it launch him directly back into an evil relapse, he's so off his game that when Toriel attacks him in Mama Bear mode he has a Moment of Weakness and accidentally calls her "Mom" in front of Naya and Sans, cluing them in to his true identity.
• Violently Protective Girlfriend: Sans is Naya's protector at the start of the story when her trauma rears its head, but she keeps taking levels in badass and becomes plenty capable of protecting herself. She graduates to this trope given how powerful she is and how fearlessly she starts throwing down with Void beings for his sake, and they turn into more of a Battle Couple. When she learned about Frisk's and Chara's time in the Underground from Sans, she was so furious with both of them that she would have gone and killed Chara then and there if Sans himself hadn't stopped her. The blog has it Played for Laughs with Naya having a grudge against Gaster for being a bad father.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Naya and Flowey. They get off on the wrong foot (to say the least) and it sets the tone of their relationship: Flowey being insulting and petulant with Naya, and Naya taking it in stride while dishing snark back his way. At the same time they do care about each other and see each other as friends, even if Flowey would never admit it. Despite how betrayed by her he feels, he tries to save her when he sees her about to fall to her death; and even finally seeing first-hand how twisted and evil he can be, she wants to save him.
• Walking the Earth: Naya left her hometown of Ebott because she couldn't handle living there anymore after what happened to her and has been on the move ever since as a workaholic loner. Convincing her to move back with them to Ebott marks a turning point in the story. The story arcs also allude to Naya's Character Development away from this, with the first arc called "Apartment"^note Naya is still in flight mode, rents an apartment, lives alone, and sees every place she lives at as temporary, the second arc called "House"^note she returns with them to Ebott and takes Toriel up on her offer to move in with her, Frisk, and Flowey as a roommate in their home, reflecting the more solid foundation to Naya's life being laid and her commitment to keeping Sans and her other new friends in her life, and the third arc called "Home"^note she moves full-time into Sans and Papyrus' house, showing her relationship with Sans is for keeps, she's not going anywhere, and she's settling for good into the new life she's made in Ebott.
• Youthful Freckles: As seen in official art, Frisk has cute freckles covering their cheeks, helping emphasize their Cheerful Child status.

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