#3ish months since the last lawful joke post

[arkos404]

lawful joke au: lil bug

the obligatory 'lawful joke, a personality swap, by @chaosaliien', these have been sitting on my drafts for like 4 months so i figured its abt time to share them, i present to you all the lil bug

a silly scenario/arc where scrabby gets hurt and somehow one of his lil bug parts end up in the timecube to be found by prism, who, having no idea that its a part of/is scrabby, adopts it to be his pet bug. he names it scarab as an inside joke/lack of creativity lol

the lil bug pretty much works on og scrabby's instincts/subcouncious/inner thoughts, at the start lil bug tried to leave and go back to scrabby, but after being showered in prism's attention it quickly changed course and decided to stay

prism had been developing an interest in bugs, at this point he was crushing on scrabby but justified his interest as a cientific curiosity, so he was happy when the opportunity to have a bug himself was presented to him.

scrabby has mixed feelings on the situation, lil bug is still a part of him so he can hear what the lil bug does and feel phantom touches, and prism has a lot of free time to now spend with his pet bug and is a bug person apparently because he never stops cooing at it.

scrabby enjoys the attention but has no idea how to cope with the sheer amount of attention prism is freely giving him/lil bug especially when normally he would never say those things to him

sometimes he's talking with someone and will pause mid sentence and blush furiously because of something prism just said, leaving the other person very confused. he visits the timecube less and less because he's too flustered to look prism in the eyes, he starts to lose sleep, not being able to clear his head with prism's voice constantly on his ear.

he tries to go to the timecube himself to get the lil bug but its insistent on staying with prism and he doesnt want to explain the situation to prism because itll be embarassing for both of them. he resents the lil bug both because of jealousy ("it shouldve been me!" <- its literally a part of him lmao) and because he's been put in this weird situation by it chosing to stay with prism instead of coming back to him

prism's cooing is usually the regular pet owner babytalk, but it often comes out sounding weird, especially for scrabby who already has a crush on prism and has nothing but phantom touches and hearing to give him context abt whats happening

these occurances are the biggest reason for scrabby's lack of sleep, when he's working or just focusing on something else he can tune it out, but when he's trying to sleep and has no distractions it all comes flooding in

lil bug and jake/nightm hate each other, mostly because me and jules thought itd be funny if the two characters who had a lot in common, both being little shits who were the personification of their counterpart's inner subcouncious and constantly fucked them over, absolutely despised each other

nightm tries to get rid of lil bug many times (all of them foiled by lil bug or prism) and to out it to prism as the little menace it is, though it never works, for prism lil bug is a little angel who can do no wrong (in prism's defense lil bug is only a menace to jake and scrabby lmao)

the arc would end with prism realizing that scrabby was visiting the timecube less and getting restless/on edge whenever he dropped by and he thought it was some kind of territory thing between bugs. not wanting to risk scrabby to stop coming, he lets the lil bug go saying something about while he loves lil bug he's not prism's bug, and that that space is reserved for someone else.

prism is bummed for a while but the next day scrabby comes over and is back to his normal self and even more enlivened (he heard what prism said and was super giddy) so prism knows it was worth it

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this idea started w me and jules talking about prism adopting a pet bug (inspired by @/xanderindisguis's business bug au) and scrabby, jealous of the attention this random bug was getting, got one of his little forms to infiltrate prism's terrarium. but it evolved to what we have now, here's some doodles of the outdated concept

also tagging @garbashedump bc she helped develop it

putting these under read more lol